If DARPA is trying to mitigate the threat then this effort deserves support.
If they are looking a way to "shut it down" then they're being way naive. This is happening (among other reasons) because of Moore's Law and you aren't going to change it.
We've but a woefully inept government and bad leadership at all levels of society, so I really don't know which this proposal aims at.
(and I haven't read TFA).
DARPA is definitely attempting to mitigate the threat; of course, once they produce their recommendations, the executive branch may decide that the best way to mitigate is to shut it down (or congress might). DARPA has no power in their own right; they do the investigations, test techniques, develop hardware/software, and then hand over the results to the decision makers to (mis)use as they see fit.
I'm definitely concerned about big data, but the big data that concerns me the most is in the hands of the NSA.
Who can trivially demand it from the corporations we mean by 'big data'.
As long as those companies are legally allowed to collect it, the NSA is legally allowed to demand it from them.
...and the Chinese army and Russian mob can continue to leak it from the NSA....
Of course, both groups are now seriously into growing their social media app footprint for cellphones, so they can dip into everyone's personal data that way as well. I'm surprised the US hasn't tried this yet; seems like Israel, South Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are doing it (and possibly others, but I haven't noticed the others gaming the App Store with social media tools that ask for more info than they need).
what is the point of language gymnastics, you can change the syntax all you want but the semantics are the same, why waste brain cells translating ancient english to modern english. Computers were invented to do all this mundane stuff for us, if a computer can imagine stuff for me too let it.
also this "invention"is the obvios precursor to the holodeck.
Without computer: "Imagine a vast desert with a bird circling overhead, wind whistling through the dunes, and a dazed alien waking up after crash landing. Zoom out. Little Eddie sees something tiny wriggling around in his sandbox and decides to see what it tastes like."
If you have any modicum of imagination, part of what's interesting about that is how your brain has to do a few mental flips as the text rolls along and the mental context shifts. Not to mention that if asked to draw or animate the above, everyone would draw something different.
Now imagine if a computer tried to animate that text based on the text alone, and did it the same way for everyone who read it.
The elegance of the holodeck was that it tended to have actual objects pinned, but exactly how they looked and even to some degree how they interacted with the virtual environment was dependent on the experiences and imagination of the participants. This described tool provides none of that.
Now, if it combined sketch2photo with someone's own personal data set (facebook, etc) and used THAT to generate an animation, that would partially solve half the problem. But unless a lot of pre-parsing goes into it, to extract the original author's intent in context shifts and convert that to the animation somehow, there's still an unsolved half of a problem looming in the room.
Basically, the system would have to be an expert not only in the literature domain being read, but also in the experience domain of the reader. Possible, but not covered by this patent.
I also wanted to comment on the suggestion that someone would want to substitute family members into Shakespearean plays. I don't think that whoever wrote that part of the patent text has read any Shakespeare.
As for reading skills you could engage in an endless debate about parents vs. teachers, but at the end of the day you have to question the sense in forcing someone to read something they clearly aren't able to appreciate or gain any value from.
You definitely have to question it; you don't have to reject it though. The idea is to at least expose the kids to something different; something that doesn't line up with how they regularly think. After that point, depending on prior training by parents and teachers, they can either learn to expand their thinking, or be permanently turned off reading classical literature.
Remember: this debate used to be over reading Virgil and Horace in the original Latin -- now Latin's completely off the curriculum, and almost nobody reads Virgil and Horace (even in translation) in public school. Since English is a live language and 17th century literature is becoming increasingly dated, we'll eventually have to only study watered-down re-spins of it, or drop it and study something more recent instead. Or, of course, start making a course in 17th century English and culture mandatory.
I don't think much will really come from this but come on, use some imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something. Maybe it's purely for entertainment (which is not worthless).
I think that's part of the problem here -- computer interpretation is being substituted for imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something... but more likely it will just narrow the perception of the person using the system.
After all, you can already type a line of Shakespeare into Google and look at the image and video results. For that matter, I'm sure apps already exist that will OCR scanned text and submit it to Google. So this patent isn't novel, nor all that useful.
It might be slightly useful for obscure texts, but I'd think a dialect translator would be more useful (17th century phrases do not always have the same meanings today).
It's nice that people come along and try to drum up interest in space with these pseudo-experiments, but this is not really very practical. If we were to send people to Mars it would be for a very, very, very long stay. Think years, if not forever. While the first humans on Mars would surely bring with them a few months of food to get started, they would have to consider themselves on their own past that. In terms of weight, it would only be practical to send as little as possible with them. Re-supply missions would be so costly, they would likely be far and few between and would concentrate on water and replacement equipment - things do break down. Also, what if something went wrong and a food re-supply mission that said Martians would be depending on did not make it? At least water can (and would), be recycled and stretched out. It's well established that a long-term manned Mars mission would have to be largely self-sustainable - in other words: luxuries such as cheese and fish would be out of the question. A more practical experiment would involve establishing how and what foods future Martians would be able to cultivate on their own, as boring a diet as it might be, as well as pushing water recycling to new levels of efficiency.
I don't think they'd be taking much water with them; Mars doesn't have as much water as Earth, but it's still got more than enough (all over the planet) to support a sizable population. A bonus is that it's all in solid form, so it's easy to transport. It's also likely already sterile, and might even be pure for the most part. They'd do better to concentrate on using the available resources (what minerals are available at ground level?) and only bring the things that aren't available on-planet. It would really suck, for example, if there was no selenium on Mars.
Heroes stand up for what's right, even if it means staring down a tank on an otherwise empty street. Snowden ran away like a child who knew he'd done something wrong. He's a coward. To call him a hero does a disservice to every real hero in the world.
In this case, standing up for what's right involved ensuring that select information (not all information) was available to the US public. Protecting that information is required in such a case, as is protecting the method of distribution. This means protecting himself from being silenced.
It's not like standing in front of a tank; it's like being the one to run back through enemy lines to deliver a message. The fact that the person left the battlefront isn't cowardly; their entire goal is to get the message back home despite the odds. Of course, such people are rarely painted as heroes either, or even remembered.
If it's really a surprise to you that one must swear an oath and sign a contract to maintain a TS/SCI clearance, then explaining it probably won't help, but, believe it or not, you do have to promise to keep secret data secret before being granted access to that data.
I believe you also swear to uphold the constitution, and a few other things that in this case appear to be in conflict with keeping data secret. Snowden didn't pull a Manning and dump a bunch more data than he could possibly have vetted himself; he has kept all data secret except that which he felt was not in the national interest to keep secret. He shouldn't be allowed to work for the US government again, but he does seem to have done a decent job of upholding all his agreements and promises to the best of his ability, in order of priority.
I don't think most people can open Michelle Obama's diary that she left on her night table. It might have been Malia, but Barack is a prime suspect. Of course it's easy for him to show that by the current interpretation of the Patriot Act, he had a right to read it and was legally obliged to lie to her about it.
In my opinion, any time someone is legally obliged to lie, we have some laws that need to be reworked. Government employees should never be required to lie as part of their job -- avoiding revealing the truth, yes -- but if it gets to the point where they have to lie or break the law, something's already gone wrong. "I'm legally bound not to answer that question -- please ask my superior" should be the appropriate response, ans when it gets to the President or Congress, they can make the call without breaking the law.
You don't really know how e-mail work. For 99.9999Ã of all e-mail the message is exchanged by a maximum of two mail servers; yours and the recipients.
Very, very few mails will ever be sent between intermediates and when they do it's almost always inside either of the two sides.
That's only at the SMTP layer. The data itself hops across many routers. Just traceroute the recipient's SMTP server to see how many routers it touches in transit. Of course, if SMTP-SMTP is encrypted, then you're limited to capturing the fact that one endpoint contacted the other endpoint at that time with that volume of data. Assuming you don't have a decryption key to MITM the data.
Utopia isn't really what people think it is. Of course, the irony is that in modern usage, it does mean "perfect society" despite the satirical bent of More's original work.
And I believe 1984 was actually intended to look like Utopia in the first place, IIRC.
I figured someone would say this... and of course, there's no way for me to answer this one (at least in my case). However, I've got a large collection of former fellow employees and customers who would work with me again in a heartbeat. It takes all kinds of people to make a company successful; some are driven by making the project they're working on successful, some are driven by making the company they work for successful, some are driven by making customers happy, some are driven by making money, some by other metrics. You'll find talent from dud to top notch in each of those groups, but the retention profile tends to be based on group rather than on talent (with the caveat that if the company really is self destructing internally and everyone knows it, pretty much 100% of those who can find other jobs easily will do so, especially in the project and money-based groups).
The problem is that those most able to leave are the first to do so. The highest talent goes first, leaving the duds that would have a hard time conning a interviewer a second time in a row. Its a sorting process that doesn't pay off for the company.
Interesting theory, but not quite the entire picture. I've been "last one out" in a company, not because I wasn't talented, but because I had a misguided feeling of responsibility to the other people involved -- the employees and the customers (and to some degree the shareholders). Would I do it again? Probably not. However, we made sure that the duds left first (and learned that duds often have impressive skills at getting hired). You see, people who aren't very good often hop from job to job, building up an impressive CV, and always leaving before people at the top realize they're all talk and no substance. These people usually stay at a company for 9 months to 2 years, and while there, latch on to some project that is already started and showing promise, often taking over from the high talent who got it started. They leave before they run the project all the way into the ground (or at least before anyone else realizes it) and are able to list the project as a "success" on their CV.
THESE are the people who are toxic to the company as a whole; duds who just aren't very good (at their job, getting hired, etc) can still be used as effective resources, but the guys who actually play the confidence HR game can destroy a successful company before they realize what's happened.
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.
Ask people in Afghanistan if they feel safe from Americans.
Ask people in the US if they feel safe from Afghans.
Doesn't matter that they *are* safe -- they don't *feel* safe after you ask them.
This has nothing to do with the fact that the US has NOT invaded more countries than any other in the history of the world. As a matter of fact, I think you'll find in the Bible, the Israelis invaded more countries than the US has -- and the result of many of those invasions was genocide. The result of the invasions where there wasn't genocide is the current Palestinian "conflict". I figured this was a documented counterexample that any conservative American could easily look up. It's by no means the only one.
Back to the real topic: Don't the officers of the law swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Seems like perjury on a massive scale here.
Funny... when I heard it was called a pineapple, I presumed it looked like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MkII_07.JPG Of course, that's not going to help for stealth; I think anyone seeing one of those lying around is probably going to notice, duck and run (and then call out the bomb squad).
So...I can't wrest my arms on the table anymore? Screw this* thing.
* A more florid description was actually used.
I wouldn't want to wrest your arms from the table... so how about you put this thing underneath glass? You could even put it on the floor and wave your feet over it too. Or, you could have it track your eyes, nose and mouth.
To me the neat thing is the 3-D cone tracking more than the gesture interpretation -- it looks like it is actually tracking the shapes inside the cone, which could let you use it for small-object 3D modeling, high-quality facial recognition, etc. The fact that it tracks to 0.001 mm could be extremely useful; this thing should be able to detect blood flow patterns in your skin, for example, and detect the dilation of your pupils as well as any facial tics. It should have no problem interpreting ASL, for example, and should even be able to recognize speech (via throat analysis and lip reading).
To me, the demos so far are great at showing how it can be applied in a replacing kind of way -- but this tech could open up new interfaces and applications we haven't even conceived of yet.
Personally, I'd love to see one of these melded with a kinect and the force feedback device using air puffs we read about a month or so ago -- throw in the magnetohologram display and siri/google voice-style voice recognition, and you've got an amazing solution that can probably tell more about you than you can tell about yourself.
Tactile feedback's really the big issue, although this could be great as a device to embed in lecture podiums. As long as it can monitor the gestures we make at rest, it could be useful.
Those costs indeed do come out of their pockets. You are sadly quite wrong as to the actual ranching industry, having been spoon fed disinformation somewhere. Coming from several generations of ranching, I can assure you, of the things you listed, some are figments of your imagination, and the ones that are real are not subsidized at all. Ranching is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming process. Farming (for grains and plants) on the other hand, is quite subsidized.
As I said, the susbidies are not paid by the ranchers themselves -- the costs are all absorbed upstream. I've spent my own time in the ranching industry, and have ho problems with it for the most part, and do not see ranchers as people being propped up by the government. But there's more to ranching than what the ranchers have to immediately deal with.
The US western expansion was built on the backs of ranchers (and gold miners, but only in a minimal sense); as such, it was built to support them (sadly, this is not actively the case anymore, but the structure still exists).. I'm not saying that ranchers get it better than others -- pretty much everything in North America that is natural resource-based is heavily subsidized in this global economy. The one benefit that ranchers have that is not subsizided is grazing land (they get cheap land, but it's a present resource). So, for grazing cattle, the subsidy is significantly less. Would it help if I airquoted subsidy? We're not talking "government pays ranchers to offset costs" here, we're talking "ranchers don't have to pay the full costs of production because many of those costs are already being absorbed by others."
However, most of the world doesn't have land. This means that if you live in, say, Japan, you can't graze your cattle (or really have them anywhere) -- so the production costs between lab-grown meat and ranch-grown meat (and even factory-grown meat) begin to tip in favor of the lab-grown meat.
When the midwest aquifers are dried up and/or the demand for habitable land skyrockets, ranching is going to get a LOT more difficult and expensive than it currently is. Starting the production of lab-grown alternatives now means that by that point, we'll have alternatives.
Top tip: The random number generator in these small battery operated devices is always crap. So the key establishment protocol cannot be secure.
Also, these aren't keypairs in fixed series; there is handshaking to know which keypair in the sequence to use... so you just need to know what a future key is, and keep trying it until it works. That's how they can have multiple keys for the same lock.
Buy cow, feed it hay, get vaccinations, sell cow for around $800-$1000, maybe more depending on quality of the beef. Nothing even close to $375,000 and I doubt the cattle ranchers are selling them at a loss.
Hate to break it to you, but cattle ranchers are heavily subsidized (water, methane cleanup, vaccinations, hormones, feed/land, abattoir, shipping) -- these costs just don't come out of their pockets -- but with the lab meat, there are no subsidies; all parts of the tissue growth have to be paid for by the same person.
At least with his $375,000 you've got most of the costs all in one place; this is almost exactly what it costs with the current no-scale inefficient techniques he used. Probably (but not necessarily, depending on the resources needed) be significantly cheaper than animal-grown meat when scaled up to the same volume and the inefficiencies in mass production limited.
I don't think that is the case, because I think there will remain in most people this knowledge that it "is not from a real cow" which will affect the taste. Maybe not objectively (as in, the Pepsi/Coke taste test), but in the same way that someone is certain they can discern the flavor of a $100/bottle wine and a $500/bottle of wine, until you give them a taste test where they can't tell the difference. This is why I think it would be something that current generations would have a hard time accepting, but future generations would simply take as matter of fact.
I think you overestimate people; most people are only peripherally aware that a McDonald's hamburger contains elements that at one point belonged to a living bovine. We've actually got really good as a western culture at disassociating food picked up at a store/eaten at a restaurant with the living things it came from. In short, the future is already here.
Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing. Hopefully they'll attempt to re-establish the connection between living animals and meat on your plate -- that way we consumers win either way.
Slashdot Mirror
If DARPA is trying to mitigate the threat then this effort deserves support.
If they are looking a way to "shut it down" then they're being way naive. This is happening (among other reasons) because of Moore's Law and you aren't going to change it.
We've but a woefully inept government and bad leadership at all levels of society, so I really don't know which this proposal aims at.
(and I haven't read TFA).
DARPA is definitely attempting to mitigate the threat; of course, once they produce their recommendations, the executive branch may decide that the best way to mitigate is to shut it down (or congress might). DARPA has no power in their own right; they do the investigations, test techniques, develop hardware/software, and then hand over the results to the decision makers to (mis)use as they see fit.
Who can trivially demand it from the corporations we mean by 'big data'.
As long as those companies are legally allowed to collect it, the NSA is legally allowed to demand it from them.
...and the Chinese army and Russian mob can continue to leak it from the NSA....
Of course, both groups are now seriously into growing their social media app footprint for cellphones, so they can dip into everyone's personal data that way as well. I'm surprised the US hasn't tried this yet; seems like Israel, South Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are doing it (and possibly others, but I haven't noticed the others gaming the App Store with social media tools that ask for more info than they need).
what is the point of language gymnastics, you can change the syntax all you want but the semantics are the same, why waste brain cells translating ancient english to modern english. Computers were invented to do all this mundane stuff for us, if a computer can imagine stuff for me too let it.
also this "invention"is the obvios precursor to the holodeck.
Without computer:
"Imagine a vast desert with a bird circling overhead, wind whistling through the dunes, and a dazed alien waking up after crash landing.
Zoom out.
Little Eddie sees something tiny wriggling around in his sandbox and decides to see what it tastes like."
If you have any modicum of imagination, part of what's interesting about that is how your brain has to do a few mental flips as the text rolls along and the mental context shifts. Not to mention that if asked to draw or animate the above, everyone would draw something different.
Now imagine if a computer tried to animate that text based on the text alone, and did it the same way for everyone who read it.
The elegance of the holodeck was that it tended to have actual objects pinned, but exactly how they looked and even to some degree how they interacted with the virtual environment was dependent on the experiences and imagination of the participants. This described tool provides none of that.
Now, if it combined sketch2photo with someone's own personal data set (facebook, etc) and used THAT to generate an animation, that would partially solve half the problem. But unless a lot of pre-parsing goes into it, to extract the original author's intent in context shifts and convert that to the animation somehow, there's still an unsolved half of a problem looming in the room.
Basically, the system would have to be an expert not only in the literature domain being read, but also in the experience domain of the reader. Possible, but not covered by this patent.
I also wanted to comment on the suggestion that someone would want to substitute family members into Shakespearean plays. I don't think that whoever wrote that part of the patent text has read any Shakespeare.
Maybe you just haven't met their family....
As for reading skills you could engage in an endless debate about parents vs. teachers, but at the end of the day you have to question the sense in forcing someone to read something they clearly aren't able to appreciate or gain any value from.
You definitely have to question it; you don't have to reject it though. The idea is to at least expose the kids to something different; something that doesn't line up with how they regularly think. After that point, depending on prior training by parents and teachers, they can either learn to expand their thinking, or be permanently turned off reading classical literature.
Remember: this debate used to be over reading Virgil and Horace in the original Latin -- now Latin's completely off the curriculum, and almost nobody reads Virgil and Horace (even in translation) in public school. Since English is a live language and 17th century literature is becoming increasingly dated, we'll eventually have to only study watered-down re-spins of it, or drop it and study something more recent instead. Or, of course, start making a course in 17th century English and culture mandatory.
I don't think much will really come from this but come on, use some imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something. Maybe it's purely for entertainment (which is not worthless).
I think that's part of the problem here -- computer interpretation is being substituted for imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something... but more likely it will just narrow the perception of the person using the system.
After all, you can already type a line of Shakespeare into Google and look at the image and video results. For that matter, I'm sure apps already exist that will OCR scanned text and submit it to Google. So this patent isn't novel, nor all that useful.
It might be slightly useful for obscure texts, but I'd think a dialect translator would be more useful (17th century phrases do not always have the same meanings today).
It's nice that people come along and try to drum up interest in space with these pseudo-experiments, but this is not really very practical. If we were to send people to Mars it would be for a very, very, very long stay. Think years, if not forever. While the first humans on Mars would surely bring with them a few months of food to get started, they would have to consider themselves on their own past that. In terms of weight, it would only be practical to send as little as possible with them. Re-supply missions would be so costly, they would likely be far and few between and would concentrate on water and replacement equipment - things do break down. Also, what if something went wrong and a food re-supply mission that said Martians would be depending on did not make it? At least water can (and would), be recycled and stretched out. It's well established that a long-term manned Mars mission would have to be largely self-sustainable - in other words: luxuries such as cheese and fish would be out of the question. A more practical experiment would involve establishing how and what foods future Martians would be able to cultivate on their own, as boring a diet as it might be, as well as pushing water recycling to new levels of efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars
I don't think they'd be taking much water with them; Mars doesn't have as much water as Earth, but it's still got more than enough (all over the planet) to support a sizable population. A bonus is that it's all in solid form, so it's easy to transport. It's also likely already sterile, and might even be pure for the most part. They'd do better to concentrate on using the available resources (what minerals are available at ground level?) and only bring the things that aren't available on-planet. It would really suck, for example, if there was no selenium on Mars.
Heroes stand up for what's right, even if it means staring down a tank on an otherwise empty street. Snowden ran away like a child who knew he'd done something wrong. He's a coward. To call him a hero does a disservice to every real hero in the world.
In this case, standing up for what's right involved ensuring that select information (not all information) was available to the US public. Protecting that information is required in such a case, as is protecting the method of distribution. This means protecting himself from being silenced.
It's not like standing in front of a tank; it's like being the one to run back through enemy lines to deliver a message. The fact that the person left the battlefront isn't cowardly; their entire goal is to get the message back home despite the odds. Of course, such people are rarely painted as heroes either, or even remembered.
If it's really a surprise to you that one must swear an oath and sign a contract to maintain a TS/SCI clearance, then explaining it probably won't help, but, believe it or not, you do have to promise to keep secret data secret before being granted access to that data.
I believe you also swear to uphold the constitution, and a few other things that in this case appear to be in conflict with keeping data secret. Snowden didn't pull a Manning and dump a bunch more data than he could possibly have vetted himself; he has kept all data secret except that which he felt was not in the national interest to keep secret. He shouldn't be allowed to work for the US government again, but he does seem to have done a decent job of upholding all his agreements and promises to the best of his ability, in order of priority.
I don't think most people can open Michelle Obama's diary that she left on her night table. It might have been Malia, but Barack is a prime suspect. Of course it's easy for him to show that by the current interpretation of the Patriot Act, he had a right to read it and was legally obliged to lie to her about it.
In my opinion, any time someone is legally obliged to lie, we have some laws that need to be reworked. Government employees should never be required to lie as part of their job -- avoiding revealing the truth, yes -- but if it gets to the point where they have to lie or break the law, something's already gone wrong. "I'm legally bound not to answer that question -- please ask my superior" should be the appropriate response, ans when it gets to the President or Congress, they can make the call without breaking the law.
You don't really know how e-mail work. For 99.9999Ã of all e-mail the message is exchanged by a maximum of two mail servers; yours and the recipients.
Very, very few mails will ever be sent between intermediates and when they do it's almost always inside either of the two sides.
That's only at the SMTP layer. The data itself hops across many routers. Just traceroute the recipient's SMTP server to see how many routers it touches in transit. Of course, if SMTP-SMTP is encrypted, then you're limited to capturing the fact that one endpoint contacted the other endpoint at that time with that volume of data. Assuming you don't have a decryption key to MITM the data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankh-Morpork
At least with an elected dictator, you know what you're getting.
Things will get so bad that 1984 will look like utopia, not distopia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)
Utopia isn't really what people think it is. Of course, the irony is that in modern usage, it does mean "perfect society" despite the satirical bent of More's original work.
And I believe 1984 was actually intended to look like Utopia in the first place, IIRC.
I figured someone would say this... and of course, there's no way for me to answer this one (at least in my case). However, I've got a large collection of former fellow employees and customers who would work with me again in a heartbeat. It takes all kinds of people to make a company successful; some are driven by making the project they're working on successful, some are driven by making the company they work for successful, some are driven by making customers happy, some are driven by making money, some by other metrics. You'll find talent from dud to top notch in each of those groups, but the retention profile tends to be based on group rather than on talent (with the caveat that if the company really is self destructing internally and everyone knows it, pretty much 100% of those who can find other jobs easily will do so, especially in the project and money-based groups).
The problem is that those most able to leave are the first to do so. The highest talent goes first, leaving the duds that would have a hard time conning a interviewer a second time in a row. Its a sorting process that doesn't pay off for the company.
Interesting theory, but not quite the entire picture. I've been "last one out" in a company, not because I wasn't talented, but because I had a misguided feeling of responsibility to the other people involved -- the employees and the customers (and to some degree the shareholders). Would I do it again? Probably not. However, we made sure that the duds left first (and learned that duds often have impressive skills at getting hired). You see, people who aren't very good often hop from job to job, building up an impressive CV, and always leaving before people at the top realize they're all talk and no substance. These people usually stay at a company for 9 months to 2 years, and while there, latch on to some project that is already started and showing promise, often taking over from the high talent who got it started. They leave before they run the project all the way into the ground (or at least before anyone else realizes it) and are able to list the project as a "success" on their CV.
THESE are the people who are toxic to the company as a whole; duds who just aren't very good (at their job, getting hired, etc) can still be used as effective resources, but the guys who actually play the confidence HR game can destroy a successful company before they realize what's happened.
Just my 2 cents.
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.
Ask people in Afghanistan if they feel safe from Americans.
Ask people in the US if they feel safe from Afghans.
Doesn't matter that they *are* safe -- they don't *feel* safe after you ask them.
This has nothing to do with the fact that the US has NOT invaded more countries than any other in the history of the world. As a matter of fact, I think you'll find in the Bible, the Israelis invaded more countries than the US has -- and the result of many of those invasions was genocide. The result of the invasions where there wasn't genocide is the current Palestinian "conflict". I figured this was a documented counterexample that any conservative American could easily look up. It's by no means the only one.
Back to the real topic: Don't the officers of the law swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Seems like perjury on a massive scale here.
Funny... when I heard it was called a pineapple, I presumed it looked like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MkII_07.JPG
Of course, that's not going to help for stealth; I think anyone seeing one of those lying around is probably going to notice, duck and run (and then call out the bomb squad).
It's like religion, where the believer feels "safer" because they don't have to think to believe they know what is happening.
Are you talking about conspiracy buffs, or government agents?
Didn't DEFCON end yesterday?
So...I can't wrest my arms on the table anymore? Screw this* thing.
* A more florid description was actually used.
I wouldn't want to wrest your arms from the table... so how about you put this thing underneath glass? You could even put it on the floor and wave your feet over it too. Or, you could have it track your eyes, nose and mouth.
To me the neat thing is the 3-D cone tracking more than the gesture interpretation -- it looks like it is actually tracking the shapes inside the cone, which could let you use it for small-object 3D modeling, high-quality facial recognition, etc. The fact that it tracks to 0.001 mm could be extremely useful; this thing should be able to detect blood flow patterns in your skin, for example, and detect the dilation of your pupils as well as any facial tics. It should have no problem interpreting ASL, for example, and should even be able to recognize speech (via throat analysis and lip reading).
To me, the demos so far are great at showing how it can be applied in a replacing kind of way -- but this tech could open up new interfaces and applications we haven't even conceived of yet.
Personally, I'd love to see one of these melded with a kinect and the force feedback device using air puffs we read about a month or so ago -- throw in the magnetohologram display and siri/google voice-style voice recognition, and you've got an amazing solution that can probably tell more about you than you can tell about yourself.
Tactile feedback's really the big issue, although this could be great as a device to embed in lecture podiums. As long as it can monitor the gestures we make at rest, it could be useful.
Those costs indeed do come out of their pockets. You are sadly quite wrong as to the actual ranching industry, having been spoon fed disinformation somewhere. Coming from several generations of ranching, I can assure you, of the things you listed, some are figments of your imagination, and the ones that are real are not subsidized at all. Ranching is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming process. Farming (for grains and plants) on the other hand, is quite subsidized.
As I said, the susbidies are not paid by the ranchers themselves -- the costs are all absorbed upstream. I've spent my own time in the ranching industry, and have ho problems with it for the most part, and do not see ranchers as people being propped up by the government. But there's more to ranching than what the ranchers have to immediately deal with.
The US western expansion was built on the backs of ranchers (and gold miners, but only in a minimal sense); as such, it was built to support them (sadly, this is not actively the case anymore, but the structure still exists).. I'm not saying that ranchers get it better than others -- pretty much everything in North America that is natural resource-based is heavily subsidized in this global economy. The one benefit that ranchers have that is not subsizided is grazing land (they get cheap land, but it's a present resource). So, for grazing cattle, the subsidy is significantly less. Would it help if I airquoted subsidy? We're not talking "government pays ranchers to offset costs" here, we're talking "ranchers don't have to pay the full costs of production because many of those costs are already being absorbed by others."
However, most of the world doesn't have land. This means that if you live in, say, Japan, you can't graze your cattle (or really have them anywhere) -- so the production costs between lab-grown meat and ranch-grown meat (and even factory-grown meat) begin to tip in favor of the lab-grown meat.
When the midwest aquifers are dried up and/or the demand for habitable land skyrockets, ranching is going to get a LOT more difficult and expensive than it currently is. Starting the production of lab-grown alternatives now means that by that point, we'll have alternatives.
Top tip: The random number generator in these small battery operated devices is always crap. So the key establishment protocol cannot be secure.
Also, these aren't keypairs in fixed series; there is handshaking to know which keypair in the sequence to use... so you just need to know what a future key is, and keep trying it until it works. That's how they can have multiple keys for the same lock.
Buy cow, feed it hay, get vaccinations, sell cow for around $800-$1000, maybe more depending on quality of the beef. Nothing even close to $375,000 and I doubt the cattle ranchers are selling them at a loss.
Hate to break it to you, but cattle ranchers are heavily subsidized (water, methane cleanup, vaccinations, hormones, feed/land, abattoir, shipping) -- these costs just don't come out of their pockets -- but with the lab meat, there are no subsidies; all parts of the tissue growth have to be paid for by the same person.
could have fed a lot of people regular cows. Or anything else for that matter.
Just sayin'.
How much does a regular cow really cost?
At least with his $375,000 you've got most of the costs all in one place; this is almost exactly what it costs with the current no-scale inefficient techniques he used. Probably (but not necessarily, depending on the resources needed) be significantly cheaper than animal-grown meat when scaled up to the same volume and the inefficiencies in mass production limited.
I don't think that is the case, because I think there will remain in most people this knowledge that it "is not from a real cow" which will affect the taste. Maybe not objectively (as in, the Pepsi/Coke taste test), but in the same way that someone is certain they can discern the flavor of a $100/bottle wine and a $500/bottle of wine, until you give them a taste test where they can't tell the difference. This is why I think it would be something that current generations would have a hard time accepting, but future generations would simply take as matter of fact.
I think you overestimate people; most people are only peripherally aware that a McDonald's hamburger contains elements that at one point belonged to a living bovine. We've actually got really good as a western culture at disassociating food picked up at a store/eaten at a restaurant with the living things it came from. In short, the future is already here.
Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing. Hopefully they'll attempt to re-establish the connection between living animals and meat on your plate -- that way we consumers win either way.