These penny-ante little functionality upgrades are BOOOORING! The proper cooking profile for a meal should be coded ONTO THE MEAL PACKAGE, where it can be read & followed by the microwave.
In short, I want the microwave to have two buttons - Start and Stop - and THAT'S ALL! I just want to buy the damn package w/a funky encoded label, put it in the box, push the Start button, the microwave reads the label & knows exactly what it's supposed to do to cook that particular meal.
(Microwaves might also have some atmospheric-condition sensors like barometer & humidity, which can be used to modify the cooking profile for local conditions).
Of course, you'd have to come up w/some kind of standard for the label encoding, and the microwaves would have to be able to read it (ala a cheap version of the laser readers @ the checkout counters?).
I wonder if you could deal with "normal" (non-packaged) food by having some way of detecting how the microwaves are interacting w/the food (reflect/scatter characteristics?) and to modify the transmission. For instance, if you detect that the food is about to explode because it's absorbing too much energy too fast, the microwave should probably cut back the power a bit.
I remember an interesting story where the viruses in a planet's ecosystem had evolved in such a way that they ended up HELPING their hosts (reprogramming their genes to give them superior physical & mental abilities) instead of hurting them (on the basis that if the host was physically dominant, the virus would also benefit in ITS reproduction).
Note that the story did not say that the viruses were intelligent - just that evolution had decided that it was a competitive advantage for them to help their hosts.
If we end up with the ability to nullify all vectors which are harmful to ourselves (and keep up with their rate of evolution), then will it become evolutionary necessary for the bacteria & viruses to be HELPFUL to us (so that we don't eliminate them)?
You know I have had accounts at the infameous hotmail and even then I got spam in small quantities. What people need to do is to simply delete the spam and just look at what's there. How hard is it to just delete it?
How is an ISP supposed to "delete" all of the gigabytes of spam (e-mail & news) which they are forced to carry every day, and for which they had to pay big bucks for the bandwidth, servers, hard disk space & administration to be able to support? They can send out cancel messages, but this uses MORE resources and the time lags involved allow spam to slip through. (Plus, _somebody_ has to be paid to identify the messages to cancel & issue the cancel message...)
You seem to have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms which support the Internet, and a debating style consisting mostly of emotional appeals w/very little logical content.
Actually, one interesting effect that might occur if on-the-fly modification of images becomes common place - even the "average" person will stop believing ANYTHING the mass media produces, and will only believe things where they have received independent confirmation from other sources that they trust. In a way, this will destroy the ability of mass media to manipulate the general populace. What will they do then?:)
The trick is to give the government enough power to fulfill its proper role, but not so much that the "hoipolloi" can get ahold of it.
I might've gotten my terms wrong, but I was using the "hoipolloi" term as a synonym for the general populace (e.g., not the well-to-do/powerful, "the unwashed masses", etc). I am assuming that you were using it to describe the people who might abuse the power of the government for their own personal gain.
This is something that a libertarian candidate would be in favor of (getting back on topic).
One of the main points I remember about the libertarian platform is that one of the primary (acceptable) roles of the government was to enforce contracts between individuals. I don't believe this is enough - I think that the government has to take an active role in supporting the "health" of the less-fortunate of society (with the long-term goal of maximizing the "health" of the entire society). (A primary assumption being that the "most" fortunate of society will have the resources to take care of themselves most of the time.) I get the feeling I might be forgetting some other parts of the libertarian platform re: public safety - feel free to "remind" me if necessary:)
Conversely, only one out of six congressmen need to be honest and incorruptable to put a damper on influence peddling.
On the flip side of THIS scenario, only one out of six congressman need to be "corrupted" to bring any legislation that anyone doesn't like to a screeching halt (or to tie the whole legislative system in knots). This is especially effective where bills are funneled through small committees where "influence" can be targeted by companies which are interested in doing so. Being able to stop legislation which could limit their actions is often more valuable to people with a lot of resources than passing new legislation which favors them.
Anyway, let me try and focus my somewhat incoherent train of thought: I do not believe that it is automatically good to reduce the strength of the government as the libertarian party wants to do. Every stable society needs a balance in power between its elements - if there are individuals or organizations who command large resources, then there needs to be part of the social system which can counteract any damage they might cause - and a well-constructed STRONG government might be the only entity strong enough to do this. A weak government is only really appropriate when the system is balancing itself in a finely-granular way (with no massive concentrations of resources under the control of a small number of individuals).
Of course, my feeling is that the system is currently NOT balanced correctly - and that the government, which should be protecting the general population, has been coopted by special interests. I might support a party like the libertarian party for the purpose of reducing the power of the CURRENT "broken" system, but only to replace it with a "fixed" system which will be better suited for protecting the "health" of the general population.
This cuts right to the heart of the matter. Why are individuals within a corporation shielded from their actions? A better question would be: who shields them from their actions? The answer is government.
Yeah, but WHY did the laws end up favoring corporations like this? Because the powerful people with large business concerns were able to "convince" (and in some cases, WERE) the people making the laws to create a system which benefited those powerful people over the well being of the hoipolloi (does anybody know where that term came from?!).
The government isn't a single entity which decides to oppress people - it's a lot of individuals who can be influenced by OTHER individuals outside the government, and I can almost guarantee that people with large resources standing behind them (e.g., representatives of large corporations) are going to be listened to carefully, versus your average "citizen" who is probably regarded more as a nuisance.
Do you think he's likely to beat the crap out of you w/o fear of consequences, e.g., kill you, then think about the jail term later? If so, then you should probably be afraid of him. (If you're not worried about somebody who has the inclination & the ability to seriously harm you, then I'd classify your survival instincts in the "barely functional" category).
In that situation, it doesn't matter if he gets punished afterward or not - you've still gotten hurt.
If he's a nice guy, or at least a rational one who doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in jail, then you're probably okay - as long as he's only mildly annoyed:)
Putting aside matters of personal physical violence, I believe that a lot of the people in large organizations (either corporations or bureaucracies) feel they can do bad things to other people and be shielded by their organization from any real consequences. While MOST of the people won't do this on purpose, it would only take a few people using a large organization's resources to make some other people's lives a living hell.
I think a lot of the anti-Microsoft hype is silly, but this statement is seriously misinformed. The code which generated that dialog box was obfuscated, encrypted & self-modifying - definitely not a "simple" test to warn people that they weren't using a Microsoft DOS.
Furthermore, as was shown in various e-mail evidence produced in the trial, the point was not to make the CUSTOMERS nervous about DR-DOS - it was to discourage DEVELOPERS from writing their applications with DR-DOS in mind (at that moment in time, it was a better "DOS" than MS-DOS). That's why they only needed to put the Test into the Windows beta - which was being released primarily to developers who wanted to test their applications for compatibility.
IANAL, but I think that even if you are not making any money from the implementation of a patented algorithm, you can be sued for damages related to the destruction of the POTENTIAL revenue stream that the company (or individual) might have made had they been able to use their patent. (The amount is, of course, decided during the court case...)
Basically, this means that you can implement any patent you want, as long as you don't have any effect in the marketplace.
I'm afraid of corporations AND the government. I'm afraid of any large organization which has the resources to stomp me into the ground should they decide that I am annoying them (whether I knew I was doing it or not).
I'm am still surprised at the numberof people more afraid of corporations than ofgovernments. Corporations use voluntary means of persuasion. Governments use force. Microsoftcannot force you to use Windows. Have you forgotten your most recent history? Linux rose from nothing to aviable alternative before the government even wrapped up their case. And the case hasn't even been decided yet!
I'm afraid of corporations because I believe that entities with large amounts of resources can influence the functioning of the government to do things which will work to my detriment, and I feel powerless to stop them.
I'm wondering whether one of the "big" results of nanotechnology will be "mechanical" memories - large scale memory arrays consisting of switches whose position mechanically indicate one or zero (or if you want to get funky, larger numbers of discrete positions).
Before non-nano-techers dismiss this as too slow, at the scale of single-molecules, people have already made gears rotating at 100Ghz - if molecular "switches" can change their positions with an equivalent latency, I think we can agree that they would satisfy our memory bandwidth requirements for the near future. And they would be non-volatile, and probably pretty tough (does anybody have any feelings as to whether they would be considered rad-hard?)
Of course, the REALLY hard bit is the addressing & data transfers.
I was interested in the article's comments about using nanotechnology because our immune systems wouldn't recognize them.
If the ability to create these things becomes widespread, it won't be long before some crazy person comes up with something designed to kill people indiscriminately (or perhaps discriminately). (This kind of reminds me of the nano-heart-attack episode from X-files).
When that happens, not having your immune system respond will be a BIG disadvantage. I suspect that we will have to design a "nano"-immune system to fend off nano-attacks, in which case the "no immune system reaction" advantage is no longer there.
I guess you're not totally back where you started from, since you should be able to program the nano-immune system to recognize "friendly" agents. (Of course, then you have the whole "protect the key" problem - somebody steals your private key, then you become a walking incubator for their private nanotech experiments!)
If you're following this example I can always beat you by exploiting any difference in our positions and forcing you to act in my favor.
Only if you can figure out how to set things up so that you can cause more damage to the other person and not achieve a Pyrrhic(sp?) victory for yourself.
Besides, if you assume that your opponent is at least as smart as you are (always a good assumption when you're in competition), they aren't going to follow the "do what you do" strategy blindly - once they realize that your change in strategy is designed to affect them directly, they will probably be able to temporarily modify their own strategy to nullify yours (with superior resources if necessary).
Frankly, once a company has achieved "leader" status in a field, they can only really lose it through 1) the whole field gets depressed, 2) either a few large or many small mistakes, or 3) the rest of the field gangs up on the leader to overcome its superior resources.
I wouldn't mind information like recall notices (your toaster automatically checks w/the manufacturer to see if it needs to be recalled), firmware updates, manufacturing info. (like suggestion e-mail and or phone/snail mail address) perhaps recipes you can use with the equipment, maybe shopping for accessories - everything having to do with that piece of equipment, all immediately available FROM that piece of equipment.
(Of course, it hae better not be a lot more expensive than the normal appliance...)
Of course, then you have to decide whether you want to put up with the marketing monitors & spam which would show up on your appliance (if a singing, dancing spam shows up on my toaster, I'm taking it out for target practice).
I'm not sure you can classify all consumption as "economically destructive" - perhaps environmentally destructive, but in a society with a high population density & a finite money source, you NEED consumption so that everyone can earn a living by providing goods & services to each other.
If you encourage TOO much savings (socking the money away in a mattress, for instance), then the money which is accumulating doesn't really do anybody much good (including the person doing the savings!) except as a warm, fuzzy "secure" feeling.
This bad situation holds true for any situation where large amounts of money are "trapped" - for instance, when a small number of rich people in the economy hold most of the money, and the "poor" people don't really have much left over to buy anything.
Heh...if you want to keep income churn going, then you could do a tax based on ASSETS rather than income or consumption, probably with something like the first $200,000 exempt). That'd kind of take the shine off of accumulating large amounts of paper wealth, eh?
Of course, you'd have to make sure that money gets back into the economy at the bottom level so that it does the general populace some good. (No, Virginia, I do *NOT* believe in supply-side economics - except as a way for rich people to get first crack at the money!)
I live in Oregon as well, and my opinion (and I suspect, the opinion of most of the populace) is that there is no way in hell a sales tax is even going to be taken seriously in this state w/o BIG cuts (or even elimination) of the income/property taxes.
Unfortunately, the legislators keep hoping they can add a sales tax w/o reducing anything else. How many sales tax ballot issues have Oregon voters shot down over the past few decades? 9? And with some pretty convincing margins, no matter how much money was spent on the public relations campaigns...(even when they pulled out their dirty tricks like "you WANT your kids to have good schooling right?").
You'd think they'd get the message after a while, but I suspect they won't unless somebody uses a clue-stick the size of the Grand Canyon upside their collective heads...
All that means is that they're not using the right storage medium to store the digital information. It sounds like this is the "first cut" product.
All the "Maxi" product does is increase the end goal - 48 frames/second plus increased resolution.
I suspect that if they used something like an optical tape system (which can store terabytes per reel), they wouldn't have to slap together a kludge like an array of hard disks to "play back" a movie.
Of course, the ultimate goal is so that they DON'T have to transfer physical media around - they want to be able to stream the movie directly into the theaters (and to whoever else wants to pay for it) w/o bothering w/physical transport.
Can anybody do the numbers to figure out how fat the data pipe would have to be to match or beat the "Maxi" frame rate & resolution (assuming lossless or no compression)?
If you take it as a given that some small group of nasty people can create a disease that will wipe out the existing human population, then you'd damn well better have the technology to "upgrade" our immune systems to deal with such diseases!
In one of the web pages, it says that the automatic cleaner will have the ability to negotiate "short" steps (they actually have a graphic of the thing going up & down a flight of stairs).
I want to know what the price guestimate is going to be! I've got allergies, and I'm really lazy about vacuuming - it would be worth a lot to me to have something like this vacuuming my house very day!
Slashdot Mirror
These penny-ante little functionality upgrades are BOOOORING! The proper cooking profile for a meal should be coded ONTO THE MEAL PACKAGE, where it can be read & followed by the microwave.
In short, I want the microwave to have two buttons - Start and Stop - and THAT'S ALL! I just want to buy the damn package w/a funky encoded label, put it in the box, push the Start button, the microwave reads the label & knows exactly what it's supposed to do to cook that particular meal.
(Microwaves might also have some atmospheric-condition sensors like barometer & humidity, which can be used to modify the cooking profile for local conditions).
Of course, you'd have to come up w/some kind of standard for the label encoding, and the microwaves would have to be able to read it (ala a cheap version of the laser readers @ the checkout counters?).
I wonder if you could deal with "normal" (non-packaged) food by having some way of detecting how the microwaves are interacting w/the food (reflect/scatter characteristics?) and to modify the transmission. For instance, if you detect that the food is about to explode because it's absorbing too much energy too fast, the microwave should probably cut back the power a bit.
I remember an interesting story where the viruses in a planet's ecosystem had evolved in such a way that they ended up HELPING their hosts (reprogramming their genes to give them superior physical & mental abilities) instead of hurting them (on the basis that if the host was physically dominant, the virus would also benefit in ITS reproduction).
Note that the story did not say that the viruses were intelligent - just that evolution had decided that it was a competitive advantage for them to help their hosts.
If we end up with the ability to nullify all vectors which are harmful to ourselves (and keep up with their rate of evolution), then will it become evolutionary necessary for the bacteria & viruses to be HELPFUL to us (so that we don't eliminate them)?
Do you read each spam message personally to decide whether to delete them or not, or do you have an automated solution?
How much time or resources are you wasting which could be put to better use (like more newsgroups or longer expiration times)?
Does this mean that the @Home users will be the only people who get to read the spam which the @Home network is responsible for propagating?
How is an ISP supposed to "delete" all of the gigabytes of spam (e-mail & news) which they are forced to carry every day, and for which they had to pay big bucks for the bandwidth, servers, hard disk space & administration to be able to support? They can send out cancel messages, but this uses MORE resources and the time lags involved allow spam to slip through. (Plus, _somebody_ has to be paid to identify the messages to cancel & issue the cancel message...)
You seem to have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms which support the Internet, and a debating style consisting mostly of emotional appeals w/very little logical content.
Actually, one interesting effect that might occur if on-the-fly modification of images becomes common place - even the "average" person will stop believing ANYTHING the mass media produces, and will only believe things where they have received independent confirmation from other sources that they trust. In a way, this will destroy the ability of mass media to manipulate the general populace. What will they do then? :)
I might've gotten my terms wrong, but I was using the "hoipolloi" term as a synonym for the general populace (e.g., not the well-to-do/powerful, "the unwashed masses", etc). I am assuming that you were using it to describe the people who might abuse the power of the government for their own personal gain.
One of the main points I remember about the libertarian platform is that one of the primary (acceptable) roles of the government was to enforce contracts between individuals. I don't believe this is enough - I think that the government has to take an active role in supporting the "health" of the less-fortunate of society (with the long-term goal of maximizing the "health" of the entire society). (A primary assumption being that the "most" fortunate of society will have the resources to take care of themselves most of the time.) I get the feeling I might be forgetting some other parts of the libertarian platform re: public safety - feel free to "remind" me if necessary :)
On the flip side of THIS scenario, only one out of six congressman need to be "corrupted" to bring any legislation that anyone doesn't like to a screeching halt (or to tie the whole legislative system in knots). This is especially effective where bills are funneled through small committees where "influence" can be targeted by companies which are interested in doing so. Being able to stop legislation which could limit their actions is often more valuable to people with a lot of resources than passing new legislation which favors them.
Anyway, let me try and focus my somewhat incoherent train of thought: I do not believe that it is automatically good to reduce the strength of the government as the libertarian party wants to do. Every stable society needs a balance in power between its elements - if there are individuals or organizations who command large resources, then there needs to be part of the social system which can counteract any damage they might cause - and a well-constructed STRONG government might be the only entity strong enough to do this. A weak government is only really appropriate when the system is balancing itself in a finely-granular way (with no massive concentrations of resources under the control of a small number of individuals).
Of course, my feeling is that the system is currently NOT balanced correctly - and that the government, which should be protecting the general population, has been coopted by special interests. I might support a party like the libertarian party for the purpose of reducing the power of the CURRENT "broken" system, but only to replace it with a "fixed" system which will be better suited for protecting the "health" of the general population.
Yeah, but WHY did the laws end up favoring corporations like this? Because the powerful people with large business concerns were able to "convince" (and in some cases, WERE) the people making the laws to create a system which benefited those powerful people over the well being of the hoipolloi (does anybody know where that term came from?!).
The government isn't a single entity which decides to oppress people - it's a lot of individuals who can be influenced by OTHER individuals outside the government, and I can almost guarantee that people with large resources standing behind them (e.g., representatives of large corporations) are going to be listened to carefully, versus your average "citizen" who is probably regarded more as a nuisance.
Does anybody know if this system will use the Video Capture card which has been put together by Linux Media Labs? (www.linuxmedialabs.com)
Do you think he's likely to beat the crap out of you w/o fear of consequences, e.g., kill you, then think about the jail term later? If so, then you should probably be afraid of him. (If you're not worried about somebody who has the inclination & the ability to seriously harm you, then I'd classify your survival instincts in the "barely functional" category).
:)
In that situation, it doesn't matter if he gets punished afterward or not - you've still gotten hurt.
If he's a nice guy, or at least a rational one who doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in jail, then you're probably okay - as long as he's only mildly annoyed
Putting aside matters of personal physical violence, I believe that a lot of the people in large organizations (either corporations or bureaucracies) feel they can do bad things to other people and be shielded by their organization from any real consequences. While MOST of the people won't do this on purpose, it would only take a few people using a large organization's resources to make some other people's lives a living hell.
I think a lot of the anti-Microsoft hype is silly, but this statement is seriously misinformed. The code which generated that dialog box was obfuscated, encrypted & self-modifying - definitely not a "simple" test to warn people that they weren't using a Microsoft DOS.
Furthermore, as was shown in various e-mail evidence produced in the trial, the point was not to make the CUSTOMERS nervous about DR-DOS - it was to discourage DEVELOPERS from writing their applications with DR-DOS in mind (at that moment in time, it was a better "DOS" than MS-DOS). That's why they only needed to put the Test into the Windows beta - which was being released primarily to developers who wanted to test their applications for compatibility.
IANAL, but I think that even if you are not making any money from the implementation of a patented algorithm, you can be sued for damages related to the destruction of the POTENTIAL revenue stream that the company (or individual) might have made had they been able to use their patent. (The amount is, of course, decided during the court case...)
Basically, this means that you can implement any patent you want, as long as you don't have any effect in the marketplace.
I'm afraid of corporations AND the government. I'm afraid of any large organization which has the resources to stomp me into the ground should they decide that I am annoying them (whether I knew I was doing it or not).
I'm afraid of corporations because I believe that entities with large amounts of resources can influence the functioning of the government to do things which will work to my detriment, and I feel powerless to stop them.
I'm wondering whether one of the "big" results of nanotechnology will be "mechanical" memories - large scale memory arrays consisting of switches whose position mechanically indicate one or zero (or if you want to get funky, larger numbers of discrete positions).
Before non-nano-techers dismiss this as too slow, at the scale of single-molecules, people have already made gears rotating at 100Ghz - if molecular "switches" can change their positions with an equivalent latency, I think we can agree that they would satisfy our memory bandwidth requirements for the near future. And they would be non-volatile, and probably pretty tough (does anybody have any feelings as to whether they would be considered rad-hard?)
Of course, the REALLY hard bit is the addressing & data transfers.
I was interested in the article's comments about using nanotechnology because our immune systems wouldn't recognize them.
If the ability to create these things becomes widespread, it won't be long before some crazy person comes up with something designed to kill people indiscriminately (or perhaps discriminately). (This kind of reminds me of the nano-heart-attack episode from X-files).
When that happens, not having your immune system respond will be a BIG disadvantage. I suspect that we will have to design a "nano"-immune system to fend off nano-attacks, in which case the "no immune system reaction" advantage is no longer there.
I guess you're not totally back where you started from, since you should be able to program the nano-immune system to recognize "friendly" agents. (Of course, then you have the whole "protect the key" problem - somebody steals your private key, then you become a walking incubator for their private nanotech experiments!)
Only if you can figure out how to set things up so that you can cause more damage to the other person and not achieve a Pyrrhic(sp?) victory for yourself.
Besides, if you assume that your opponent is at least as smart as you are (always a good assumption when you're in competition), they aren't going to follow the "do what you do" strategy blindly - once they realize that your change in strategy is designed to affect them directly, they will probably be able to temporarily modify their own strategy to nullify yours (with superior resources if necessary).
Frankly, once a company has achieved "leader" status in a field, they can only really lose it through 1) the whole field gets depressed, 2) either a few large or many small mistakes, or 3) the rest of the field gangs up on the leader to overcome its superior resources.
I believe that the correct contact information for the person who wrote the article is at "http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=13177".
Be polite, people - it IS possible to be firm but polite, and your recipient will be more likely to listen to you instead of tuning you out.
I wouldn't mind information like recall notices (your toaster automatically checks w/the manufacturer to see if it needs to be recalled), firmware updates, manufacturing info. (like suggestion e-mail and or phone/snail mail address) perhaps recipes you can use with the equipment, maybe shopping for accessories - everything having to do with that piece of equipment, all immediately available FROM that piece of equipment.
(Of course, it hae better not be a lot more expensive than the normal appliance...)
Of course, then you have to decide whether you want to put up with the marketing monitors & spam which would show up on your appliance (if a singing, dancing spam shows up on my toaster, I'm taking it out for target practice).
I *LOVE* my dual-processor Celeron system, overclocked to 550Mhz (with some REALLY big heat sinks/fans on the processors)...
I've got the distributed.net software & povray crunching away on it, day and night...
I'm not sure you can classify all consumption as "economically destructive" - perhaps environmentally destructive, but in a society with a high population density & a finite money source, you NEED consumption so that everyone can earn a living by providing goods & services to each other.
If you encourage TOO much savings (socking the money away in a mattress, for instance), then the money which is accumulating doesn't really do anybody much good (including the person doing the savings!) except as a warm, fuzzy "secure" feeling.
This bad situation holds true for any situation where large amounts of money are "trapped" - for instance, when a small number of rich people in the economy hold most of the money, and the "poor" people don't really have much left over to buy anything.
Heh...if you want to keep income churn going, then you could do a tax based on ASSETS rather than income or consumption, probably with something like the first $200,000 exempt). That'd kind of take the shine off of accumulating large amounts of paper wealth, eh?
Of course, you'd have to make sure that money gets back into the economy at the bottom level so that it does the general populace some good. (No, Virginia, I do *NOT* believe in supply-side economics - except as a way for rich people to get first crack at the money!)
I live in Oregon as well, and my opinion (and I suspect, the opinion of most of the populace) is that there is no way in hell a sales tax is even going to be taken seriously in this state w/o BIG cuts (or even elimination) of the income/property taxes.
Unfortunately, the legislators keep hoping they can add a sales tax w/o reducing anything else. How many sales tax ballot issues have Oregon voters shot down over the past few decades? 9? And with some pretty convincing margins, no matter how much money was spent on the public relations campaigns...(even when they pulled out their dirty tricks like "you WANT your kids to have good schooling right?").
You'd think they'd get the message after a while, but I suspect they won't unless somebody uses a clue-stick the size of the Grand Canyon upside their collective heads...
All that means is that they're not using the right storage medium to store the digital information. It sounds like this is the "first cut" product.
All the "Maxi" product does is increase the end goal - 48 frames/second plus increased resolution.
I suspect that if they used something like an optical tape system (which can store terabytes per reel), they wouldn't have to slap together a kludge like an array of hard disks to "play back" a movie.
Of course, the ultimate goal is so that they DON'T have to transfer physical media around - they want to be able to stream the movie directly into the theaters (and to whoever else wants to pay for it) w/o bothering w/physical transport.
Can anybody do the numbers to figure out how fat the data pipe would have to be to match or beat the "Maxi" frame rate & resolution (assuming lossless or no compression)?
If you take it as a given that some small group of nasty people can create a disease that will wipe out the existing human population, then you'd damn well better have the technology to "upgrade" our immune systems to deal with such diseases!
In one of the web pages, it says that the automatic cleaner will have the ability to negotiate "short" steps (they actually have a graphic of the thing going up & down a flight of stairs).
I want to know what the price guestimate is going to be! I've got allergies, and I'm really lazy about vacuuming - it would be worth a lot to me to have something like this vacuuming my house very day!