I'll wait for normal looking sunglasses with embedded displays, forward and rearward facing cameras, reactive vision protection, vision enhancements like light amplification, telescopic, microscopic and filtered views, full audio video recording and playback, and the ability to swap views with another wearer remotely.
Would you also like a forearm-mounted computer that you can set for self-destruct while you cackle manically in strange deep alien tones:)
I've managed to resist buying any HMDs so far because the FOV is always so poor. I want a huge FOV so I really feel like I'm in the virtual environment. I suppose the more people buy these new systems, the more likely it is that we will get something really good next time around. Walking around a game like Oblivion would be great with a HMD with a human-like field of view. Games will have to be written differently though. The head movements need to be separated from your hand movements.
But can it give me the equivalent of 17" CRT at arms length?
No. The apparent size of the screen scales linearly according to distance. So 54 inches at 7 feet is the same as 54/7 at 1 foot. Your monitor is probably about 2 feet in front of you, so that is (54/7)*2 = 15.4 inches. So it's like having a 15 inch monitor.
They often set these things up so that you are not straining your eyes to look at something so close. The whole two meters thing is probably a red herring since they often just quote a distance that makes the screen size sound good. It's probably set up for infinite distance, so unless you can adjusts it, it would look blurry for short-sighted people.
Yes, a 15 inch monitor (15.4 to be more precise) on your desk 2 feet in front of you has the same field of view. Somehow the sales tag "Like a 15 inch monitor on your desk" doesn't sound quite as impressive. This is one of my pet peeves. You always hear manufacturers explaining how their tiny FOV eyepiece is like an enormous screen at some equally enormous distance. They just pick a distance which coincides with an impressive sounding screen size. If they give you a distance in feet, just divide the screen size by the distance, then multiply by 2. That will give you the equivalent monitor size (2 feet in front of you).
The FOV of this device is actually a bit better than a many I have seen. They often come out as being equivalent to 14 inch monitors rather than 15 inch monitors. It's nice that it can play HD movies but a bit of a shame that the screen is way below HD resolution, making such an exercise fairly pointless.
Since the early 90s I been waiting for an affordable head mounted display (HMD) with a human-like field of view, and sadly I'm still waiting. Even the unaffordable ones have pretty crummy FOVs. Still, if any kind of HMD becomes popular (no matter how poor) it can only be a good thing in the long run. It's bound to result in better products before long.
If you don't believe that short, small, dynamic bursts of energy from one point to another sometimes happen, then why don't you show us the evidence to refute it?
Of course "bursts of energy" can occur from one point to another. Lightning would be a good example. The problem is that there is some vague notion of a "line of energy" which some people like to call a "ley line". I suppose this amounts to some kind of equally vague hypothesis. However, a hypothesis usually stems from some kind of an observation which you wish to explain, so what is the observation is the case of "ley lines"? There really doesn't seem to be any kind of sensible or consistent observation to explain in the first place.
Obviously there are going to be contrast issues when projecting in a well lit environment (as with normal projectors) but the narrow wavelength of the RGB lasers present opportunities for smarter screen designs. A screen that just reflects those narrow wavelengths rather than the whole spectrum could look quite dark until illuminated.
I suppose with flash drives there is more potential for spreading things out in parallel and maybe they are not taking advantage of that yet. For example, when copying a 1 gig file, a flash drive could break the file up and simultaneously read from/write to ten different flash chips.
I'd don't know about the US, but here in the UK the digital signals are very weak. It's virtually impossible to get good reception with an indoor aerial and I have tried lots of different types. So is this going to be the end of portable televisions?
A lot of multi-threading up until now has been about keeping applications responsive, rather than breaking up tasks. That makes sense since muti-core chips haven't been around that long in most peoples homes. Another issue is that once you have more than one processor, two threads really can run at the same time which can show up all kinds of bugs you would never notice on a single core system. The main problem I can see is with testing for errors. With multiple threads it's up to the OS on how it juggles them around and that juggling may be different for every test run. So you could run the same test a hundred times, then suddenly, you could get a failure. So multi-threading throws in a certain random aspect into the software which never used to be there.
I didn't mention terrorists. Perhaps you are assuming that the people the US fights against are always terrorists. The media might like to portray it that way, but its far from the truth. Also the "hiding behind civilians" line is a very old and tired excuse used to justify civilians deaths, particularly when air power is used in populated areas.
Take the case of Afghanistan. Towns and villages are important militarily and that is why both the Taliban and US forces regularly pass through them or set up positions in them. The mere presence of a military force in a town does not mean they are "hiding behind civilians" although it certainly can endanger residents. A while ago a US solider being interviewed in Afghanistan described how he and his men had been ordered to set up position in a village. The villagers protested and wanted them to leave because they knew it made the situation more dangerous for them. The soldier radioed back to base and told them they were not welcome, but they told him to proceed as ordered. He then described how the whole village just packed up and left rather than remain in that situation.
Now imagine that the villagers never left that village because they were afraid looters would steal everything, and that the Taliban spot the US soldiers and start a mortar attack. If that mortar attack kills 10 civilians as well as soldiers, can the Taliban just use the excuse that the Americans were "hiding behind the civilians"? If the Taliban had air power, they would no doubt be bombing US occupied towns and villages and using a similar "hiding behind civilians" excuse.
The truth is that civilians do not seem to count for much these days. Western governments would rather lose 10 civilians than one soldier because military deaths are more politically costly than civilian deaths, especially if they are foreigners a long distance away. Normally the media do not make much of a fuss when foreign civilians die, its just a statistic. If they do make a fuss though, the politicians/military will just try to shift the blame onto the enemy in some way, often using the "hiding behind civilians" line. Sometimes they can even get away with labelling the civilians as combatants. It really is a case of sacrificing civilians to keep military casualties down.
The picture would of course change completely if western civilians were involved. If the government was seen to place the lives of soldiers above the lives of western civilians, there really would be widespread outrage. Imagine that armed terrorists had taken up position in a small US town. Do you think the President would order the town to be bombed from the air, possibly killing dozens of civilians? Of course not. Instead troops would be sent in on the ground, even though it would be safer for them if the town was bombed first.
It looks like you're trying to take that village. Instead of sending in troops on the ground, just call in an air strike to destroy everything. Don't worry about the civilians, their deaths are less politically costly than military deaths. If anyone complains, just say that it's the enemy's fault for hiding behind civilians.
It always seems to me that Scott was going against what the scriptwriter intended. He keeps adding in clues that Deckard is a replicant but the script really doesn't support that idea at all.
In the US, UK and other countries with a "first past the post" scheme, the whole system is perpetually rigged in favour of two parties. Small parties find it very difficult because their support is spread thinly. Even if a new party comes along with some amazing ideas, it will likely never get a single seat due to the nature of the electoral system.
If the way of voting was always rigged to favour one particular party, we would be up in arms, but having a system rigged in favour of two parties is not much better.
I think stage one would have to be to get rid of the First Past the Post system and introduce Proportional Representation. Cool stuff like population instigated referenda would be next on the agenda.
Yes, insurgency is the wrong word for attacks on occupying forces. The correct term according to dictionary definitions is resistance. It's pretty amazing how there is no variation in the media. They all say insurgents, never resistance. The problem is that although resistance is the correct term, it reminds people that we might possibly be in the wrong.
Another one is Private Military Contractor vs Mercenary. There is no such thing as a Private Military Contractor in the Geneva Conventions. There are Soldiers, Civilians and Mercenaries, and people walking about in kevlar with assault rifles really cannot be reasonably classed as civilians. They try to argue that since they are only defending things, they are not mercenaries, but by the same rationale, soldiers that are only defending things would cease to be soldiers. Again, it's a case of the media systematically avoiding a word because it reminds us that we might be in the wrong.
Surely your first thought wasn't to report him to higher management. If it was, I hope you never work with me:) For all you know he might have asked the original author for permission to use it in an email or something.
Maybe this particular ebook reader will fail, but I wouldn't write off ebooks in general. Back in the mid 90s as a Uni student I had huge heavy boxes of books which I had to cart back and forth each term. I'd have rather had them all on one little 10 ounce ebook! The same really goes for all of my technical books I keep at work.
As for non-fiction/newspapers/magazines, these are the kind of things I read on the train. Turning a page is quite tricky when you're jammed in like sardines or you only have one hand free. I think ebooks certainly have the potential to make reading more convenient in various ways.
I don't know about that. I went to a lecture on the possibilities of alien life and the opinion was that aliens are unlikely to look like US. The lecturer said that things that have evolved independently many times are likely to occur elsewhere, e.g. Eyes, joints etc, but the specific configurations (e.g. 5 fingers and a thumb) are not so likely to occur elsewhere.
At some point, if the UK government gets its way, everyone will have their DNA and fingerprints stored in a central database. How long will it be before some backup hard drive goes missing with all the data?
I can't find anything about an invasion of Burma. The invasion of Vietnam was backed by the US though. The US wanted to punish Vietnam for it's invasion of Cambodia. This list does not remotely compare to the interventions carried out by the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you also like a forearm-mounted computer that you can set for self-destruct while you cackle manically in strange deep alien tones
I've managed to resist buying any HMDs so far because the FOV is always so poor. I want a huge FOV so I really feel like I'm in the virtual environment. I suppose the more people buy these new systems, the more likely it is that we will get something really good next time around. Walking around a game like Oblivion would be great with a HMD with a human-like field of view. Games will have to be written differently though. The head movements need to be separated from your hand movements.
No. The apparent size of the screen scales linearly according to distance. So 54 inches at 7 feet is the same as 54/7 at 1 foot. Your monitor is probably about 2 feet in front of you, so that is (54/7)*2 = 15.4 inches. So it's like having a 15 inch monitor.
They often set these things up so that you are not straining your eyes to look at something so close. The whole two meters thing is probably a red herring since they often just quote a distance that makes the screen size sound good. It's probably set up for infinite distance, so unless you can adjusts it, it would look blurry for short-sighted people.
Yes, a 15 inch monitor (15.4 to be more precise) on your desk 2 feet in front of you has the same field of view. Somehow the sales tag "Like a 15 inch monitor on your desk" doesn't sound quite as impressive. This is one of my pet peeves. You always hear manufacturers explaining how their tiny FOV eyepiece is like an enormous screen at some equally enormous distance. They just pick a distance which coincides with an impressive sounding screen size. If they give you a distance in feet, just divide the screen size by the distance, then multiply by 2. That will give you the equivalent monitor size (2 feet in front of you).
The FOV of this device is actually a bit better than a many I have seen. They often come out as being equivalent to 14 inch monitors rather than 15 inch monitors. It's nice that it can play HD movies but a bit of a shame that the screen is way below HD resolution, making such an exercise fairly pointless.
Since the early 90s I been waiting for an affordable head mounted display (HMD) with a human-like field of view, and sadly I'm still waiting. Even the unaffordable ones have pretty crummy FOVs. Still, if any kind of HMD becomes popular (no matter how poor) it can only be a good thing in the long run. It's bound to result in better products before long.
Of course "bursts of energy" can occur from one point to another. Lightning would be a good example. The problem is that there is some vague notion of a "line of energy" which some people like to call a "ley line". I suppose this amounts to some kind of equally vague hypothesis. However, a hypothesis usually stems from some kind of an observation which you wish to explain, so what is the observation is the case of "ley lines"? There really doesn't seem to be any kind of sensible or consistent observation to explain in the first place.
"Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another."
:)
Of course they exist. They are lines that connect points of gullibility
and should therefore be kicked and/or banned.
It would seem there is a gap in the market for screens that are not idiotically priced.
Obviously there are going to be contrast issues when projecting in a well lit environment (as with normal projectors) but the narrow wavelength of the RGB lasers present opportunities for smarter screen designs. A screen that just reflects those narrow wavelengths rather than the whole spectrum could look quite dark until illuminated.
I refer you all to Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman. It's a book, but there's a documentary as well that you can view on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHJHGOE8MIs
I suppose with flash drives there is more potential for spreading things out in parallel and maybe they are not taking advantage of that yet. For example, when copying a 1 gig file, a flash drive could break the file up and simultaneously read from/write to ten different flash chips.
I'd don't know about the US, but here in the UK the digital signals are very weak. It's virtually impossible to get good reception with an indoor aerial and I have tried lots of different types. So is this going to be the end of portable televisions?
A lot of multi-threading up until now has been about keeping applications responsive, rather than breaking up tasks. That makes sense since muti-core chips haven't been around that long in most peoples homes. Another issue is that once you have more than one processor, two threads really can run at the same time which can show up all kinds of bugs you would never notice on a single core system. The main problem I can see is with testing for errors. With multiple threads it's up to the OS on how it juggles them around and that juggling may be different for every test run. So you could run the same test a hundred times, then suddenly, you could get a failure. So multi-threading throws in a certain random aspect into the software which never used to be there.
I didn't mention terrorists. Perhaps you are assuming that the people the US fights against are always terrorists. The media might like to portray it that way, but its far from the truth. Also the "hiding behind civilians" line is a very old and tired excuse used to justify civilians deaths, particularly when air power is used in populated areas.
Take the case of Afghanistan. Towns and villages are important militarily and that is why both the Taliban and US forces regularly pass through them or set up positions in them. The mere presence of a military force in a town does not mean they are "hiding behind civilians" although it certainly can endanger residents. A while ago a US solider being interviewed in Afghanistan described how he and his men had been ordered to set up position in a village. The villagers protested and wanted them to leave because they knew it made the situation more dangerous for them. The soldier radioed back to base and told them they were not welcome, but they told him to proceed as ordered. He then described how the whole village just packed up and left rather than remain in that situation.
Now imagine that the villagers never left that village because they were afraid looters would steal everything, and that the Taliban spot the US soldiers and start a mortar attack. If that mortar attack kills 10 civilians as well as soldiers, can the Taliban just use the excuse that the Americans were "hiding behind the civilians"? If the Taliban had air power, they would no doubt be bombing US occupied towns and villages and using a similar "hiding behind civilians" excuse.
The truth is that civilians do not seem to count for much these days. Western governments would rather lose 10 civilians than one soldier because military deaths are more politically costly than civilian deaths, especially if they are foreigners a long distance away. Normally the media do not make much of a fuss when foreign civilians die, its just a statistic. If they do make a fuss though, the politicians/military will just try to shift the blame onto the enemy in some way, often using the "hiding behind civilians" line. Sometimes they can even get away with labelling the civilians as combatants. It really is a case of sacrificing civilians to keep military casualties down.
The picture would of course change completely if western civilians were involved. If the government was seen to place the lives of soldiers above the lives of western civilians, there really would be widespread outrage. Imagine that armed terrorists had taken up position in a small US town. Do you think the President would order the town to be bombed from the air, possibly killing dozens of civilians? Of course not. Instead troops would be sent in on the ground, even though it would be safer for them if the town was bombed first.
Do they have a little "Mr General" that pops up?
It looks like you're trying to take that village. Instead of sending in troops on the ground, just call in an air strike to destroy everything. Don't worry about the civilians, their deaths are less politically costly than military deaths. If anyone complains, just say that it's the enemy's fault for hiding behind civilians.
It always seems to me that Scott was going against what the scriptwriter intended. He keeps adding in clues that Deckard is a replicant but the script really doesn't support that idea at all.
In the US, UK and other countries with a "first past the post" scheme, the whole system is perpetually rigged in favour of two parties. Small parties find it very difficult because their support is spread thinly. Even if a new party comes along with some amazing ideas, it will likely never get a single seat due to the nature of the electoral system.
If the way of voting was always rigged to favour one particular party, we would be up in arms, but having a system rigged in favour of two parties is not much better.
I think stage one would have to be to get rid of the First Past the Post system and introduce Proportional Representation. Cool stuff like population instigated referenda would be next on the agenda.
Yes, insurgency is the wrong word for attacks on occupying forces. The correct term according to dictionary definitions is resistance. It's pretty amazing how there is no variation in the media. They all say insurgents, never resistance. The problem is that although resistance is the correct term, it reminds people that we might possibly be in the wrong.
Another one is Private Military Contractor vs Mercenary. There is no such thing as a Private Military Contractor in the Geneva Conventions. There are Soldiers, Civilians and Mercenaries, and people walking about in kevlar with assault rifles really cannot be reasonably classed as civilians. They try to argue that since they are only defending things, they are not mercenaries, but by the same rationale, soldiers that are only defending things would cease to be soldiers. Again, it's a case of the media systematically avoiding a word because it reminds us that we might be in the wrong.
Surely your first thought wasn't to report him to higher management. If it was, I hope you never work with me :) For all you know he might have asked the original author for permission to use it in an email or something.
Maybe this particular ebook reader will fail, but I wouldn't write off ebooks in general. Back in the mid 90s as a Uni student I had huge heavy boxes of books which I had to cart back and forth each term. I'd have rather had them all on one little 10 ounce ebook! The same really goes for all of my technical books I keep at work.
As for non-fiction/newspapers/magazines, these are the kind of things I read on the train. Turning a page is quite tricky when you're jammed in like sardines or you only have one hand free. I think ebooks certainly have the potential to make reading more convenient in various ways.
I don't know about that. I went to a lecture on the possibilities of alien life and the opinion was that aliens are unlikely to look like US. The lecturer said that things that have evolved independently many times are likely to occur elsewhere, e.g. Eyes, joints etc, but the specific configurations (e.g. 5 fingers and a thumb) are not so likely to occur elsewhere.
At some point, if the UK government gets its way, everyone will have their DNA and fingerprints stored in a central database. How long will it be before some backup hard drive goes missing with all the data?
I can't find anything about an invasion of Burma. The invasion of Vietnam was backed by the US though. The US wanted to punish Vietnam for it's invasion of Cambodia. This list does not remotely compare to the interventions carried out by the US.
Take a look at this list. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ.html