Yes, but admittedly it's always simply because the tech isn't good enough.
This time, admittedly, the tech was SIGNIFICANTLY better than in previous attempts, but it's still not to the point of true seamless immersion.
Unlike other techs, VR pretty much has to be more or less "perfect" or most people aren't interested. That makes developing it incrementally hard - you can't finance the next gen of it with profits from the current gen. Instead every few years we just have to try it again based on technological advancements made due to other segments of the industry and hope that everything has gotten good enough.
I'd say that whenever VR is finally perfected, it will be nothing short of amazing. That said, I don't think it's there yet. I don't even though the next attempt or two will be there yet. Maybe in 20-30 years.
I don't think it ended then as much as we have hit the point of diminishing returns.
We'll do a classic car analogy - lets assume that this is a compute controlled car that can be safely piloted at any speed stated.
Think about it this way: If you're going 5 Mph and you'll reach your destination in 96 hours, then doubling your speed is huge - at 10Mph you've saved 48 hours!
Then at 20 Mph you've saved 24 hours! And at 40 Mph you've saved 12 more hours! All that is great. Who wants to sit in a car for any longer then necessary?
The thing is, by the time you get to 81,920 Mph, if you double your speed again you're only cutting about 11 seconds off of your travel time. And it's only a few more cycles of doubling before we're getting into fractions of a second worth of difference. The increases in speed are no longer really relevant.
A while back - I'd say around 2010 or so - the home computer reached that point of just being "fast enough". People with specialized uses still want more speed, but its harder for specialized uses to drive market demand when general users aren't subsidizing the cost via volume anymore.
One benefit of the "inkjet scam" is that because the printers themselves are often sold at a loss and include a scanner, you can generally get an all-in-one printer for a fraction of the cost of just a flatbed scanner.
I personally use a laser printer for all my printing needs (that itself was a dirt-cheap closeout model for $40 but I've still not exhausted the included toner cartridge), but my inkjet printer I paid $18 for brand new and its never even printed a single sheet. I literally only use it as a document scanner. It's not a stellar scanner but it serves that purpose just fine.
While all true, the distinction is generally only in how to choose to word our definitions.
I'd say Pluto is closer in "sameness" to Mars than Mars is to Jupiter, yet both Mars and Jupiter have been classified as planets while Pluto has not.
I don't have strong feelings about it either way, and to me anyone with strong feelings I view with suspicion. Arguing the definition had nothing to do with science and everything to do with language. And in general it seems that the primary reason for declassifying Pluto was that if Pluto was a planet then we'd have "too many" planets.
I find it comical though that the primary theory for Earth's moon formation was that there was a second "planet" orbiting in the same vicinity as Earth 1.0, the two collided, and the combined mass of the two formed current Earth with the debris scattered into orbit forming the moon. That means that by the current definition, neither of those bodies were planets prior to them colliding, since until that point neither had cleared out their orbit.
Yes, devices came with thick, detailed manuals back then. People also typically didn't read those manuals. The vast majority of people either just stumbled their way through "figuring it out" or avoided the product entirely as being overly complicated.
These days, more work has gone into product design to make things intuitive so that people can just "figure it out" easier rather than providing the manual that will go unused anyways. At most things will typically come with a "Quick Start Guide" to give you the most basic of instructions to get the device up and going - and for the most part that's what the market wants.
Those manuals cost money - both to print and to pay someone to write in the first place. Offer the same product on the shelves - one without a manual and one that costs $5 extra that includes it. I'd wager quite a few dollars that the one without the manual will outsell the one that includes it 20 to 1.
2) Please, for the love of all that is free and right and just in the fucking world stop looking at the amendments to the constitution as the only God-damned freedoms the fucking USA can guarantee! We do NOT need to add things to the fucking Constitution every time we want something a right.
Right or wrong though, that's the way the system is setup. Any law can ban something on a Federal or State level unless its a constitutionally protected right. That's effectively the only way for one legislature to bind a future one is to amend the constitution, otherwise laws allowing or disallowing something can be passed, overridden, etc on the whims of whoever is in office.
And obviously even a constitutional amendment itself isn't even 100% permanent, but it's certainly a lot harder to pass than a "standard" law.
Think of it in terms of money: if every year you made twice as much money as you did the year before, you'd get to the point where you spent it incredibly recklessly. I'm gonna buy a boat. Is the salesman cheating me? Who cares. I've got the money and I'm getting twice as much next year. Until the flow of money is restricted the spending of it will not be limited.
The same happens with computing resources. We've been getting faster computers with more storage capacity for so long that the people spending those resources (programmers) do so with reckless abandon. Ideally at a minimum the things that everything else relies on - the OS and core libraries - should be EXTENSIVELY optimized to prevent tolerance stacking.
This will just turn out like so many other "improvements" - so many modern UI's try to get around user incompetence by trying to get things into people's faces so blatantly that there's often little rhyme or reason to how things work.
All this has an actual negative impact on people who know how to use computers well though. It used to be that if you understood the general paradigm of UI design for a given platform you could pickup just about any program and figure it out within a short period of time. All that has been sacrificed for a bunch of cobbled together nonsense in the name of making it "easy".
No, they're for 3d printers, but yes, any wholly plastic gun is just going to blow up. Most of these are just plans to print a receiver that you still attach a shit-ton of metal parts to (not the least of which is the barrel) to actually work. And even then "work" is relative.
All jokes aside, he's not wrong. Shotguns are relatively low-pressure firearms and the type of gun he's talking about (a slam-fire shotgun) has been made in third-world countries quite frequently. In general, despite being rather limited (single shot, difficult to aim, etc), they most certainly do work. And with only a little machine tooling knowledge and small lathe you can make something significantly more capable.
Guns are machines - relatively simple ones at that. People were making them hundreds of years ago before they even had power tools. No matter how much you wish they didn't exist you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Actually we do, however the right to bear arms isn't granted to the militia. It's granted to the people, based on the fact that a militia is necessary to the security of a free state, and the people need arms to be able to form a militia when needed.
The Glock and AR15 that you mention are well past their patent expiration dates. Plenty of companies other than the original manufacturers already make legal clones.
Printing of newer designs would be covered under copyright, but just like they can't outlaw the sheet music from Beethoven to protect the latest Cardi B album, neither can they outlaw the distribution of public domain plans to protect non-public domain guns.
Indeed - this has nothing to do with the 2nd amendment - and everything to do with the 1st.
You see, it's already legal to manufacture these guns in most places within the US. If you have the file it's legal to print it.
What they're literally saying is that it's illegal to transmit the INSTRUCTIONS. The information on how to do so.
I'm sorry, but there's no way that will pass constitutional muster. If you want to try and outlaw the home manufacture of guns that's a separate issue that is not currently being debated, but barring the publication of instructional information, PARTICULARLY regarding a completely legal activity, is antithetical to the 1st ammendment.
I swear every time I hear something about this company it keeps getting worse and worse.
I fully expect that in another month or two they'll be charging you $50 per month and you can only watch a single movie a month that you still have to pay full price for. Any additional viewings you have to pay full price and a $15 fee back to Moviepass . . .
No company shall discriminate against any person based on their political views or politically based speech that they may express.
Believe me if the other protected classes can stand a constitutional challenge, that can as well.
In my eyes a company banning or kicking off a content creator based on right (or left) leaning ideas expressed is no more acceptable than if they banned them based on their race, religion, or sexual orientation.
I think they were referring to Facebook, Youtube, and Apple, who all removed his content.
Twitter was the only one who didn't ban Alex Jones (though they've had a bad track record elsewhere).
I - as a Republican (a moderate Republican, but still certainly right of center) - view Alex Jones as a lunatic and an embarrassment. Still, it's hard to argue the fact that he wasn't really hurting anybody - he was simply expressing a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories. While it may be legal within the letter of the law, it still definitely goes against the spirit of "free speech" (the ideal - not the First Amendment).
Because like it or not, most of his base have a pretty deep-seated hatred for CNN (the "Communist News Network" as many call it). Any news of unfortunate happenings towards CNN is good news to much of the Republican base.
This isn't exactly shocking though or just a Republican thing. Whether they'll admit it or not a ton of Democrats would feel the same way if they heard that Fox News was having trouble.
but wouldn't it be cool to come hone, slam your phone into a dock and have a mouse, a keyboard and a couple monitors linked to that dock, complete with Internet access, LAN access, etc.
No, not really. A smartphone's only good for its portability. Compared to any modern desktop its power is diminutive. Why limit myself in computing resources when I'm setting at home at a desk and have no real restrictions.
The only benefit to possibly be had is centralized data availability, but cloud storage has already achieved that. I can access the same Google Docs on my phone, desktop, laptop, etc.
Yeah - at this point what I want more than upgraded hardware is improvement in software. The current crop of smartphones have gotten large enough, fast enough, etc, but the software on them still feels as if it's out of the Windows 98 days. Not in terms of UI (the UI's are slicks as ever), but in terms of software and OS quality level.
There's no denying that apps crash and misbehave on smartphones FAR more often than on a modern desktop computer. At this point I don't need anything new - I just need all the existing features to work correctly 100% of the time.
I think the glaring truth that you've overlooked is that your usage is in fact abnormal.
Phones are boring and non-differentiated pretty much because the vast majority of people need to do about the same things with all of them. If you fall outside that bubble don't be shocked if you have to turn to aftermarket solutions to make it work.
You're looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
For every Super Mario Bros. there was a Top Gun or Fester's Quest.
You can't compare ALL the game from current gen to the standout classics of old systems and say they're worse. Its why old things always seem better. In 15 years you'll look back to the current generation and rather than the hundreds of bad or mediocre titles you'll remember a couple dozen standout ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but admittedly it's always simply because the tech isn't good enough.
This time, admittedly, the tech was SIGNIFICANTLY better than in previous attempts, but it's still not to the point of true seamless immersion.
Unlike other techs, VR pretty much has to be more or less "perfect" or most people aren't interested. That makes developing it incrementally hard - you can't finance the next gen of it with profits from the current gen. Instead every few years we just have to try it again based on technological advancements made due to other segments of the industry and hope that everything has gotten good enough.
I'd say that whenever VR is finally perfected, it will be nothing short of amazing. That said, I don't think it's there yet. I don't even though the next attempt or two will be there yet. Maybe in 20-30 years.
It feels like it pretty much ended about 2010
I don't think it ended then as much as we have hit the point of diminishing returns.
We'll do a classic car analogy - lets assume that this is a compute controlled car that can be safely piloted at any speed stated.
Think about it this way: If you're going 5 Mph and you'll reach your destination in 96 hours, then doubling your speed is huge - at 10Mph you've saved 48 hours!
Then at 20 Mph you've saved 24 hours! And at 40 Mph you've saved 12 more hours! All that is great. Who wants to sit in a car for any longer then necessary?
The thing is, by the time you get to 81,920 Mph, if you double your speed again you're only cutting about 11 seconds off of your travel time. And it's only a few more cycles of doubling before we're getting into fractions of a second worth of difference. The increases in speed are no longer really relevant.
A while back - I'd say around 2010 or so - the home computer reached that point of just being "fast enough". People with specialized uses still want more speed, but its harder for specialized uses to drive market demand when general users aren't subsidizing the cost via volume anymore.
One benefit of the "inkjet scam" is that because the printers themselves are often sold at a loss and include a scanner, you can generally get an all-in-one printer for a fraction of the cost of just a flatbed scanner.
I personally use a laser printer for all my printing needs (that itself was a dirt-cheap closeout model for $40 but I've still not exhausted the included toner cartridge), but my inkjet printer I paid $18 for brand new and its never even printed a single sheet. I literally only use it as a document scanner. It's not a stellar scanner but it serves that purpose just fine.
While all true, the distinction is generally only in how to choose to word our definitions.
I'd say Pluto is closer in "sameness" to Mars than Mars is to Jupiter, yet both Mars and Jupiter have been classified as planets while Pluto has not.
I don't have strong feelings about it either way, and to me anyone with strong feelings I view with suspicion. Arguing the definition had nothing to do with science and everything to do with language. And in general it seems that the primary reason for declassifying Pluto was that if Pluto was a planet then we'd have "too many" planets.
I find it comical though that the primary theory for Earth's moon formation was that there was a second "planet" orbiting in the same vicinity as Earth 1.0, the two collided, and the combined mass of the two formed current Earth with the debris scattered into orbit forming the moon. That means that by the current definition, neither of those bodies were planets prior to them colliding, since until that point neither had cleared out their orbit.
Yes, devices came with thick, detailed manuals back then. People also typically didn't read those manuals. The vast majority of people either just stumbled their way through "figuring it out" or avoided the product entirely as being overly complicated.
These days, more work has gone into product design to make things intuitive so that people can just "figure it out" easier rather than providing the manual that will go unused anyways. At most things will typically come with a "Quick Start Guide" to give you the most basic of instructions to get the device up and going - and for the most part that's what the market wants.
Those manuals cost money - both to print and to pay someone to write in the first place. Offer the same product on the shelves - one without a manual and one that costs $5 extra that includes it. I'd wager quite a few dollars that the one without the manual will outsell the one that includes it 20 to 1.
Dang. If it was a complete archive I know I've got a page buried down in there somewhere, but I have no idea what my username was back then :(.
2) Please, for the love of all that is free and right and just in the fucking world stop looking at the amendments to the constitution as the only God-damned freedoms the fucking USA can guarantee! We do NOT need to add things to the fucking Constitution every time we want something a right.
Right or wrong though, that's the way the system is setup. Any law can ban something on a Federal or State level unless its a constitutionally protected right. That's effectively the only way for one legislature to bind a future one is to amend the constitution, otherwise laws allowing or disallowing something can be passed, overridden, etc on the whims of whoever is in office.
And obviously even a constitutional amendment itself isn't even 100% permanent, but it's certainly a lot harder to pass than a "standard" law.
I think this will largely be the case.
Think of it in terms of money: if every year you made twice as much money as you did the year before, you'd get to the point where you spent it incredibly recklessly. I'm gonna buy a boat. Is the salesman cheating me? Who cares. I've got the money and I'm getting twice as much next year. Until the flow of money is restricted the spending of it will not be limited.
The same happens with computing resources. We've been getting faster computers with more storage capacity for so long that the people spending those resources (programmers) do so with reckless abandon. Ideally at a minimum the things that everything else relies on - the OS and core libraries - should be EXTENSIVELY optimized to prevent tolerance stacking.
This will just turn out like so many other "improvements" - so many modern UI's try to get around user incompetence by trying to get things into people's faces so blatantly that there's often little rhyme or reason to how things work.
All this has an actual negative impact on people who know how to use computers well though. It used to be that if you understood the general paradigm of UI design for a given platform you could pickup just about any program and figure it out within a short period of time. All that has been sacrificed for a bunch of cobbled together nonsense in the name of making it "easy".
No, they're for 3d printers, but yes, any wholly plastic gun is just going to blow up. Most of these are just plans to print a receiver that you still attach a shit-ton of metal parts to (not the least of which is the barrel) to actually work. And even then "work" is relative.
All jokes aside, he's not wrong. Shotguns are relatively low-pressure firearms and the type of gun he's talking about (a slam-fire shotgun) has been made in third-world countries quite frequently. In general, despite being rather limited (single shot, difficult to aim, etc), they most certainly do work. And with only a little machine tooling knowledge and small lathe you can make something significantly more capable.
Guns are machines - relatively simple ones at that. People were making them hundreds of years ago before they even had power tools. No matter how much you wish they didn't exist you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Actually we do, however the right to bear arms isn't granted to the militia. It's granted to the people, based on the fact that a militia is necessary to the security of a free state, and the people need arms to be able to form a militia when needed.
The Glock and AR15 that you mention are well past their patent expiration dates. Plenty of companies other than the original manufacturers already make legal clones.
Printing of newer designs would be covered under copyright, but just like they can't outlaw the sheet music from Beethoven to protect the latest Cardi B album, neither can they outlaw the distribution of public domain plans to protect non-public domain guns.
Indeed - this has nothing to do with the 2nd amendment - and everything to do with the 1st.
You see, it's already legal to manufacture these guns in most places within the US. If you have the file it's legal to print it.
What they're literally saying is that it's illegal to transmit the INSTRUCTIONS. The information on how to do so.
I'm sorry, but there's no way that will pass constitutional muster. If you want to try and outlaw the home manufacture of guns that's a separate issue that is not currently being debated, but barring the publication of instructional information, PARTICULARLY regarding a completely legal activity, is antithetical to the 1st ammendment.
This will certainly be overturned.
You'd have to neck UP a .223 to 6.35mm. The standard bullet is 5.56mm.
I swear every time I hear something about this company it keeps getting worse and worse.
I fully expect that in another month or two they'll be charging you $50 per month and you can only watch a single movie a month that you still have to pay full price for. Any additional viewings you have to pay full price and a $15 fee back to Moviepass . . .
Simple:
No company shall discriminate against any person based on their political views or politically based speech that they may express.
Believe me if the other protected classes can stand a constitutional challenge, that can as well.
In my eyes a company banning or kicking off a content creator based on right (or left) leaning ideas expressed is no more acceptable than if they banned them based on their race, religion, or sexual orientation.
You do know that it only takes the stroke of a pen to make political affiliation a protected class right?
If the a company abuses its power, that power can and will be reigned in.
I think they were referring to Facebook, Youtube, and Apple, who all removed his content.
Twitter was the only one who didn't ban Alex Jones (though they've had a bad track record elsewhere).
I - as a Republican (a moderate Republican, but still certainly right of center) - view Alex Jones as a lunatic and an embarrassment. Still, it's hard to argue the fact that he wasn't really hurting anybody - he was simply expressing a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories. While it may be legal within the letter of the law, it still definitely goes against the spirit of "free speech" (the ideal - not the First Amendment).
Because like it or not, most of his base have a pretty deep-seated hatred for CNN (the "Communist News Network" as many call it). Any news of unfortunate happenings towards CNN is good news to much of the Republican base.
This isn't exactly shocking though or just a Republican thing. Whether they'll admit it or not a ton of Democrats would feel the same way if they heard that Fox News was having trouble.
Don't ridiculous.
but wouldn't it be cool to come hone, slam your phone into a dock and have a mouse, a keyboard and a couple monitors linked to that dock, complete with Internet access, LAN access, etc.
No, not really. A smartphone's only good for its portability. Compared to any modern desktop its power is diminutive. Why limit myself in computing resources when I'm setting at home at a desk and have no real restrictions.
The only benefit to possibly be had is centralized data availability, but cloud storage has already achieved that. I can access the same Google Docs on my phone, desktop, laptop, etc.
Yeah - at this point what I want more than upgraded hardware is improvement in software. The current crop of smartphones have gotten large enough, fast enough, etc, but the software on them still feels as if it's out of the Windows 98 days. Not in terms of UI (the UI's are slicks as ever), but in terms of software and OS quality level.
There's no denying that apps crash and misbehave on smartphones FAR more often than on a modern desktop computer. At this point I don't need anything new - I just need all the existing features to work correctly 100% of the time.
Should not need any accessories for normal usage.
I think the glaring truth that you've overlooked is that your usage is in fact abnormal.
Phones are boring and non-differentiated pretty much because the vast majority of people need to do about the same things with all of them. If you fall outside that bubble don't be shocked if you have to turn to aftermarket solutions to make it work.
You're looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
For every Super Mario Bros. there was a Top Gun or Fester's Quest.
You can't compare ALL the game from current gen to the standout classics of old systems and say they're worse. Its why old things always seem better. In 15 years you'll look back to the current generation and rather than the hundreds of bad or mediocre titles you'll remember a couple dozen standout ones.