You don't even need a second eye, or at least, you don't need a parallax between them. Simply focusing on an object gives a good idea of its distance. To bring an object at a certain distance into focus, the eye muscles must contract "just so", allowing an estimation of that distance.
An then of course there is our brains, which interpret what we see. This is the reason why we can still have the illusion of 3D when looking at a truly two dimensional picture or TV screen. Of course, we can also be fooled, for example by cartoons or diagrams, into seeing 3D where none truely exists.
Our eyes really are designed to see in 3D. The grandparent appears to be suffering from chronic smartalecitis.
it should be noted on a purely biological level that far fewer than 50% (or even 10%) men are needed to carry on the species.
Yes, but it should also be noted that on a purely practical level each child requires three pairs of hands and four pairs of eyes to raise appropriately.
I am fed to the back teeth with Luddites railing against Google for doing, systematically, what is legal, and what anyone could do.
This is precisely Google's mentality. If is is legal and possible to collect, index and offer the data, they will do it. There is no consideration of ethics or the effect on ordinary people or indeed wider society. Has Google maps been a positive force on society. Probably yes, but consider the effect on companies like TomTom. Has Google's tracking and profiling of web surfers or their digitisation of books been a positive force? Has Gmail's scanning of user emails been positive? Will they, forever more, continue to use the vast databases they have amassed for good causes?
Then Google can re-open the Library of Alexandria,
Or they can open Pandora's Box. People's entire lives, right there on the net. Or worse, for sale to the highest bidder.
Google does not care what Microsoft thinks. Google does not care what publishers think. Google does not care what you think.
Google's stated objective is to gather, index and make publicly searchable every piece of information on the planet. Books included. They don't care about minor setbacks like publishers or authors complaints, or even lawsuits. Google is going to keep on scanning and digitising books and will quite patiently wait until the day it feels it can get away with putting them online. I imagine that their are literally millions of works sitting on Google's backend servers, waiting for the day when Google can use its muscle to get an agreement. Perhaps you might regard this as a good thing.
Now ask yourself this: What else has Google put on its backend servers?
I remind everyone reading this that aside from the odd token law, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever restricting private companies from compiling and indexing whatever data they want internally. Who knows what kind of information on people and societies that Google is privy to, and what applications they have in store for it. Stop and think about projects like Streetview. A lot of people really do not like the idea of pictures their houses and gardens being put on a globally accessible site, linked to map information. Does Google care? No. They'll continue to gather Streetview data, even in places where it is illegal to put it online, patiently waiting for the day when they can do as they please.
Google is a steamroller. You may think you've stopped them today, but they'll go on gathering information, and indexing it, and making application for it until they can wow a judge, or legislature, or the public with some fantastic application which shows how easy and harmles it is to provide all this data. Meanwhile, we have a private corporation with a now gargantuan databases on the lives, habits and details of the majority of the online population; soon to the the majority of the world population. How far do they have to go, before this becomes wrong?
This company's stated ambition is to know everything. How much do they know already?
There are in fact still people who refuse to allow cookies, and there are still browsers like lynx that require explicit confirmation from the user before they accept them(In fact, the directive does not ban cookies. It simply mandates the default behavior of lynx.). Ask yourself; what can be accomplished with a cookie that can't be accomplished using alternative mechanisms. Try thinking outside the box you've been in for the last 15 years.
Let us be frank. Cookies have been abused. Horrendously abused. Private companies have tagged, tracked, and stalked billions of people. We have allowed terabytes of data on the lives of everyday people to fall into the hands of completely unscrupulous entities. The information held by even smaller marketing outfits would 20 years ago have seemed like a treasure trove to organizations like the Stazi and the KGB. Does the fact that such information is akin to that desired by secret services mean that the collection and indexing of this information is inherently wrong? No; but it is a big hint that it probably is.
The EU may have blundered here, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I think their basic motivations were very admirable. As out lives move more and more onto the net, we cannot accept the current status quo of companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest being allowed to do as they please with data on other people. The Despite the unworkable nature of the law, the EU is moving in the right direction on this.
Declining an invitation to pay a visit, Hipcheck16 posted a response that said, according to court documents, "Seems like you're very willing to invite a man you only know from the Internet over to your house -- have you done it before, or do they usually invite you to their house?"
This is the internet. Around these parts, statements like that barely qualify as impertinent, let alone lewd.
Your argument is circular, with just a hint of geneticism/Calvinism. "People who run marathons have bodies for running marathons." It ignores how they obtained those bodies in the first place; to whit, two decades or so of continuous training.
But what about all those inventors and creative types. Aren't they entitled to monopolises and control an entire market sector based on the fact that they were the first to file a completely straightforward innovation? Why must they be subject to the same competitive forces as every other field of human endeavour?
The hysteria around child porn makes the ideal way to frame someone.
People need witches. People need easy targets to vent the full fury of the legal system upon. Pedophiles are perfect, because unlike witches, they actually exist. The public delights in these show trials, and delights even more in being able to treat the accused and especially the convicted as the scum of the earth.
It's a kind of blood sport. It's a form of entertainment. It's completely shameful.
So he must stop advising a board who makes decisions that he disagrees with? Yeah, that will solve problems.
The problem is that a lot of these boards never listen to the advice of experts, they only want the presence of experts in order to confer legitimacy on their decision. These boards and committees have only the interests of industry at heart, not those of the public. they're not interesting in the facts, or how things should be done. They're interested in giving money and control to private companies.
By participating in such boards, Paul Vixie and people like him are choosing to be part of the problem.
I lived in a house for a year with six other 18-25 year olds.
We had no TV.
Well, we did have a TV, but you couldn't watch TV on it. It was rigged up to a PS3, Xbox, Wii, and when neccessary, laptops. We played games, watched downloaded films and TV shows, the odd youtube video, in fact on occasion and actual webpage. We'd get a hanking for a show, say Heroes, we'd download the whole thing in one slurp at watch it all. Come Halloween, it was Friday 13th marathon(Do not watch 4). The TV was not even rigged up to terrestrial channels. If I'd been so inclined, I would have set up a central server we could have all thrown our movies, etc onto. Bit of a missed opportunity now that I think of it.
I can actually remember sitting down to watch TV for a fews hours, or waiting for a good show to come on that evening, and I swear its like I'm remembering a past life. The idea to me now, of sitting down to watch TV for more than a half hour, sitting through all those ads, actually making my leisure time fit someones else schedule; this idea is by now a completely foreign notion. I cannot imagine doing it anymore, and I don't.
It's going to be very difficult to explain to the generation currently growing up exactly how we managed to waste so much time in front of the TV. If they see what we had to put up with, they're just never going to believe it. When the time comes, and they are asked to stump up $50 a month for such garbage, they are literally going to laugh in the face of the likes of Comcast. The notion of TV itself will be absurd to them, let alone paying for it. It will be as absurd to them as those old 1950's informational shorts are to us now.
This business model has perhaps, 20 years before the bottom falls out, and this article shows that the know it.
Psycho-acoustic simulation is the process by which audio compression techniques remove bits of audio recordings in ways that the human brain is likely not to notice.
But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs. EMI has sole and total ownership over the platonic ideals of which any particular instance of a Beatles song is merely a shadow. This ideal encompases any sound resembling the songs, any text resembling their lyrics, any album cover resembling theirs, any musical notes close enough to a Beatles tune.
In a very real sense, EMIs ownership of this music is analogous to them owning the number 537. A platonic ideal. No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it. They own it now, and will probably own it in perpetuity, for the rest of eternity.
So which is crazier; this guys argument or the concept of copyrighted music itself?
Small devices can be powered and charged over USB, and indeed many now are. For example, the EU has mandated the inclusion of Micro USB charging for all new mobiles from 2010 onwards. With its introduction for such a ubiquitous device, the standard will probably see wider usage in a number of smaller devices.
Dark Matter is the best explanation for galactic rotation curves and the cosmic microwave background.
Dark matter has Sweet Fuck All to do with the cosmic microwave background, which was explained very well in the 1960s using conventional physics and the big bang theory. Of course, now a lot of people are trying to tack Dark Matter onto everything. I expect sooner or later dark matter will probably be used to explain Saturn's rings or Solar flares or turbulance.
OK, when I find that galactic rotation curves don't line up with what I've predicted, I'll consider my theories falsified.
The trouble is that most cosmologists think that Newtonian mechanics predicts Keplerian profiles for galactic rotation curves. This is in fact completely wrong. Galaxies are discs, not spheres, and you can't use Newton's shell theorem on them. But an awful lot of cosmologists do. In fact, to explain dark matter whose total grows linearly with distance from the galactic center, they ham-fistedly decided to have the dark matter in a spherical halo instead of in the disc with everything else.
Dark matter is a non-explanation. It owes its discovery more to the LSD trips of particle physicists in the 70s than it does to real rigor. If I posited that stars are in fact held in position by unicorns spewing rainbows from their forehead, or alien gravity machines, I could quite easily match as many data points as dark matter models and moreover create only slightly fewer questions and problems.
If we rule out all the models, then it's back to the drawing board. We'd have a falsified theory, we'd question our premises, and we'd come up with some new ideas. But until then, dark matter is a very good avenue for investigation. You shouldn't "believe" in it until it's been observed, but neither should you claim it's bad science. It isn't.
Dark matter is not good science. Dark matter is postmodern science. Appeals to falsifiability have allowed it to lurch on from one fudge to the next without being called to a halt. Once the scientific establishment was able to properly evaluate and eventually dismiss things like Le Sage's theory of gravity. It now seems unable to do so.
We have a theory that gravity on a galactic scale is dominated by an invisible, undetectable and completely inscrutable form of matter, which we cannot create or even measure properly and which is used in a grossly ad-hoc fashion to fit rotation curves for spiral but seemingly not elliptical galaxies. Its substance is explained by appealing to equally speculative theories in high energy and particle physics, or whatever theory is in fashion at the time. Its distribution is fitted, galaxy by galaxy, in order to satisfy computer models. Every article from black holes to bosons throws in in as a buzzword and in the 80 years since its was first put forward, and in the 40 years since it was pushed heavily, dark matter remains as unknown, untested and unpredictable a theory as it ever was. What more evidence do you require?
What we are looking at, is crackpottery and mass delusion on a global scale. If string theory has taught us anything it's that scientists can and do fall prey to fads, fuzzy thinking and dogma as easily as any group. The only trouble is, they get stuck in the mud for far, far longer than most other groups. Fashion tads last a season, but scientific fads can last a quarter century or more.
Huge company with an armada of lawyers steals everything from a startup.
What did they steal? Ideas? Give me a break. Does "An android based E-book reader" constitute a patent worthy idea? Actually, of course it does, and that's why I for one do not see the benefit in supporting such startups in cases like these.
This company is a patent troll. What did they invent? A button that makes text scroll smoothly? A pop up or context sensitive interface? Oh! They invented a two screen device where you control things by moving a stylus on the bottom screen! Perhaps supplemented by additional buttons! How Original!! Yes, indeed, all companies implementing any such mechanism on any e-book whatsoever should have to pay these brilliant engineers for their hard worn innovation./end scarcasm.
The only people who support this company are those who believe that being the first to develop something, or being the first to spew out any old brain fart, entitles you to exclusive ownership and control over all future implementations and revenues involving that thing. It the proverbial American Dream; Winning the lottery through one crazy scheme. Everybody has one in the back of their head, and so the system stands with popular support. I for one utterly reject this model as a basis for technological development and progression.
Patents need to die. Completely. If you can't stand on your own two feet like startups in every other industry, then you shouldn't be in business. Holding the world back until you get your protection money is a despicable practice, no matter how big or how small you are.
This article is the definitive proof that nerds are being governed by brash jocks with tunnel vision. I'd say this qualifies as a classic Slashdot article.
Slashdot Mirror
And I look forward to seeing the case conclude by the end of my lifetime.
You don't even need a second eye, or at least, you don't need a parallax between them. Simply focusing on an object gives a good idea of its distance. To bring an object at a certain distance into focus, the eye muscles must contract "just so", allowing an estimation of that distance.
An then of course there is our brains, which interpret what we see. This is the reason why we can still have the illusion of 3D when looking at a truly two dimensional picture or TV screen. Of course, we can also be fooled, for example by cartoons or diagrams, into seeing 3D where none truely exists.
Our eyes really are designed to see in 3D. The grandparent appears to be suffering from chronic smartalecitis.
Yes, but it should also be noted that on a purely practical level each child requires three pairs of hands and four pairs of eyes to raise appropriately.
And this thread has become farcical.
This is precisely Google's mentality. If is is legal and possible to collect, index and offer the data, they will do it. There is no consideration of ethics or the effect on ordinary people or indeed wider society. Has Google maps been a positive force on society. Probably yes, but consider the effect on companies like TomTom. Has Google's tracking and profiling of web surfers or their digitisation of books been a positive force? Has Gmail's scanning of user emails been positive? Will they, forever more, continue to use the vast databases they have amassed for good causes?
Or they can open Pandora's Box. People's entire lives, right there on the net. Or worse, for sale to the highest bidder.
Google does not care what Microsoft thinks. Google does not care what publishers think. Google does not care what you think.
Google's stated objective is to gather, index and make publicly searchable every piece of information on the planet. Books included. They don't care about minor setbacks like publishers or authors complaints, or even lawsuits. Google is going to keep on scanning and digitising books and will quite patiently wait until the day it feels it can get away with putting them online. I imagine that their are literally millions of works sitting on Google's backend servers, waiting for the day when Google can use its muscle to get an agreement. Perhaps you might regard this as a good thing.
Now ask yourself this: What else has Google put on its backend servers?
I remind everyone reading this that aside from the odd token law, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever restricting private companies from compiling and indexing whatever data they want internally. Who knows what kind of information on people and societies that Google is privy to, and what applications they have in store for it. Stop and think about projects like Streetview. A lot of people really do not like the idea of pictures their houses and gardens being put on a globally accessible site, linked to map information. Does Google care? No. They'll continue to gather Streetview data, even in places where it is illegal to put it online, patiently waiting for the day when they can do as they please.
Google is a steamroller. You may think you've stopped them today, but they'll go on gathering information, and indexing it, and making application for it until they can wow a judge, or legislature, or the public with some fantastic application which shows how easy and harmles it is to provide all this data. Meanwhile, we have a private corporation with a now gargantuan databases on the lives, habits and details of the majority of the online population; soon to the the majority of the world population. How far do they have to go, before this becomes wrong?
This company's stated ambition is to know everything. How much do they know already?
There are in fact still people who refuse to allow cookies, and there are still browsers like lynx that require explicit confirmation from the user before they accept them(In fact, the directive does not ban cookies. It simply mandates the default behavior of lynx.). Ask yourself; what can be accomplished with a cookie that can't be accomplished using alternative mechanisms. Try thinking outside the box you've been in for the last 15 years.
Let us be frank. Cookies have been abused. Horrendously abused. Private companies have tagged, tracked, and stalked billions of people. We have allowed terabytes of data on the lives of everyday people to fall into the hands of completely unscrupulous entities. The information held by even smaller marketing outfits would 20 years ago have seemed like a treasure trove to organizations like the Stazi and the KGB. Does the fact that such information is akin to that desired by secret services mean that the collection and indexing of this information is inherently wrong? No; but it is a big hint that it probably is.
The EU may have blundered here, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I think their basic motivations were very admirable. As out lives move more and more onto the net, we cannot accept the current status quo of companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest being allowed to do as they please with data on other people. The Despite the unworkable nature of the law, the EU is moving in the right direction on this.
This is the internet. Around these parts, statements like that barely qualify as impertinent, let alone lewd.
People who feel otherwise, should leave.
"Sorry, videos are not currently available in your country"
Well, at least I can still watch Glenn Beck.
Your argument is circular, with just a hint of geneticism/Calvinism. "People who run marathons have bodies for running marathons." It ignores how they obtained those bodies in the first place; to whit, two decades or so of continuous training.
But what about all those inventors and creative types. Aren't they entitled to monopolises and control an entire market sector based on the fact that they were the first to file a completely straightforward innovation? Why must they be subject to the same competitive forces as every other field of human endeavour?
People need witches. People need easy targets to vent the full fury of the legal system upon. Pedophiles are perfect, because unlike witches, they actually exist. The public delights in these show trials, and delights even more in being able to treat the accused and especially the convicted as the scum of the earth.
It's a kind of blood sport. It's a form of entertainment. It's completely shameful.
And if by "published an article" you mean "reprinted a press release" then, yes.
The problem is that a lot of these boards never listen to the advice of experts, they only want the presence of experts in order to confer legitimacy on their decision. These boards and committees have only the interests of industry at heart, not those of the public. they're not interesting in the facts, or how things should be done. They're interested in giving money and control to private companies.
By participating in such boards, Paul Vixie and people like him are choosing to be part of the problem.
I lived in a house for a year with six other 18-25 year olds.
We had no TV.
Well, we did have a TV, but you couldn't watch TV on it. It was rigged up to a PS3, Xbox, Wii, and when neccessary, laptops. We played games, watched downloaded films and TV shows, the odd youtube video, in fact on occasion and actual webpage. We'd get a hanking for a show, say Heroes, we'd download the whole thing in one slurp at watch it all. Come Halloween, it was Friday 13th marathon(Do not watch 4). The TV was not even rigged up to terrestrial channels. If I'd been so inclined, I would have set up a central server we could have all thrown our movies, etc onto. Bit of a missed opportunity now that I think of it.
I can actually remember sitting down to watch TV for a fews hours, or waiting for a good show to come on that evening, and I swear its like I'm remembering a past life. The idea to me now, of sitting down to watch TV for more than a half hour, sitting through all those ads, actually making my leisure time fit someones else schedule; this idea is by now a completely foreign notion. I cannot imagine doing it anymore, and I don't.
It's going to be very difficult to explain to the generation currently growing up exactly how we managed to waste so much time in front of the TV. If they see what we had to put up with, they're just never going to believe it. When the time comes, and they are asked to stump up $50 a month for such garbage, they are literally going to laugh in the face of the likes of Comcast. The notion of TV itself will be absurd to them, let alone paying for it. It will be as absurd to them as those old 1950's informational shorts are to us now.
This business model has perhaps, 20 years before the bottom falls out, and this article shows that the know it.
But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs. EMI has sole and total ownership over the platonic ideals of which any particular instance of a Beatles song is merely a shadow. This ideal encompases any sound resembling the songs, any text resembling their lyrics, any album cover resembling theirs, any musical notes close enough to a Beatles tune.
In a very real sense, EMIs ownership of this music is analogous to them owning the number 537. A platonic ideal. No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it. They own it now, and will probably own it in perpetuity, for the rest of eternity.
So which is crazier; this guys argument or the concept of copyrighted music itself?
Small devices can be powered and charged over USB, and indeed many now are. For example, the EU has mandated the inclusion of Micro USB charging for all new mobiles from 2010 onwards. With its introduction for such a ubiquitous device, the standard will probably see wider usage in a number of smaller devices.
Because Americans are really, really gay.
Fair game for what? Is there some kind of slur or bigotry used against this group?
Dark matter has Sweet Fuck All to do with the cosmic microwave background, which was explained very well in the 1960s using conventional physics and the big bang theory. Of course, now a lot of people are trying to tack Dark Matter onto everything. I expect sooner or later dark matter will probably be used to explain Saturn's rings or Solar flares or turbulance.
The trouble is that most cosmologists think that Newtonian mechanics predicts Keplerian profiles for galactic rotation curves. This is in fact completely wrong. Galaxies are discs, not spheres, and you can't use Newton's shell theorem on them. But an awful lot of cosmologists do. In fact, to explain dark matter whose total grows linearly with distance from the galactic center, they ham-fistedly decided to have the dark matter in a spherical halo instead of in the disc with everything else.
Dark matter is a non-explanation. It owes its discovery more to the LSD trips of particle physicists in the 70s than it does to real rigor. If I posited that stars are in fact held in position by unicorns spewing rainbows from their forehead, or alien gravity machines, I could quite easily match as many data points as dark matter models and moreover create only slightly fewer questions and problems.
Dark matter is not good science. Dark matter is postmodern science. Appeals to falsifiability have allowed it to lurch on from one fudge to the next without being called to a halt. Once the scientific establishment was able to properly evaluate and eventually dismiss things like Le Sage's theory of gravity. It now seems unable to do so.
We have a theory that gravity on a galactic scale is dominated by an invisible, undetectable and completely inscrutable form of matter, which we cannot create or even measure properly and which is used in a grossly ad-hoc fashion to fit rotation curves for spiral but seemingly not elliptical galaxies. Its substance is explained by appealing to equally speculative theories in high energy and particle physics, or whatever theory is in fashion at the time. Its distribution is fitted, galaxy by galaxy, in order to satisfy computer models. Every article from black holes to bosons throws in in as a buzzword and in the 80 years since its was first put forward, and in the 40 years since it was pushed heavily, dark matter remains as unknown, untested and unpredictable a theory as it ever was. What more evidence do you require?
What we are looking at, is crackpottery and mass delusion on a global scale. If string theory has taught us anything it's that scientists can and do fall prey to fads, fuzzy thinking and dogma as easily as any group. The only trouble is, they get stuck in the mud for far, far longer than most other groups. Fashion tads last a season, but scientific fads can last a quarter century or more.
What did they steal? Ideas? Give me a break. Does "An android based E-book reader" constitute a patent worthy idea? Actually, of course it does, and that's why I for one do not see the benefit in supporting such startups in cases like these.
This company is a patent troll. What did they invent? A button that makes text scroll smoothly? A pop up or context sensitive interface? Oh! They invented a two screen device where you control things by moving a stylus on the bottom screen! Perhaps supplemented by additional buttons! How Original!! Yes, indeed, all companies implementing any such mechanism on any e-book whatsoever should have to pay these brilliant engineers for their hard worn innovation. /end scarcasm.
The only people who support this company are those who believe that being the first to develop something, or being the first to spew out any old brain fart, entitles you to exclusive ownership and control over all future implementations and revenues involving that thing. It the proverbial American Dream; Winning the lottery through one crazy scheme. Everybody has one in the back of their head, and so the system stands with popular support. I for one utterly reject this model as a basis for technological development and progression.
Patents need to die. Completely. If you can't stand on your own two feet like startups in every other industry, then you shouldn't be in business. Holding the world back until you get your protection money is a despicable practice, no matter how big or how small you are.
The day that happens, the tabloids will run a massive frontpage on child porn, etc, and Freenet will go the way of Gopher, only by fiat this time.
Are you really Brazilian?
This article is the definitive proof that nerds are being governed by brash jocks with tunnel vision. I'd say this qualifies as a classic Slashdot article.