That's debatable. The problem with tanks is that they're giant moving targets. I once had a history teacher in 'nam who would talk about the perks and perils of being in a tank. On the plus side, you get AC on hot days and a CD player to listen to music. On the negative side, once you're in combat, people are firing anti-armor explosives at your ass, such that the tank becomes an instant-coffin. The baddies in the US's current war probably do not have the sophistication in chemistry to develop the right kinds of explosives to crack armor, like a full-fledged nation. However, I bet tanker's experience a similar level of danger as the foot soldiers, just that they have rockets whizzing over their head instead of bullets.
Touchy Tentacle. It will feature advanced social networking services that will allow people to finger their friends over Twitter, Facebook, Pidgin, etc and see what they're up to. Their new motto will be: "Linux for Human Beings and their noodly appendages.".
The idea may be to farm out computing power, allowing for customers to avoid the upgrade-climb and for graphics companies to build so many high-end graphics processing units, cutting down on electronic waste, cost of manufacturing, etc. An interesting, though not yet realized, example of this could be the onLive console. Customers purchase what amounts to a modem and play their games via a server farm which computers physics and graphics. By doing this, customers can avoid downloading large batches of graphics assets (saving on HD space too) and play their game instantly like a streaming video. At the same time, if the company upgrades their video cards, the customer sees the upgrade without ever having to purchase another console. The company in turn, doesn't have to spend as much designing and manufacturing a new console to leverage new technologies every couple of years. The video and the state of the technology now is boring. But all of this could lead to some interesting paradigm shifts in technology services.
It would seem that this decision sets or reinforces a fairly strong precedent that trademark holders may be entitled to, not only to the domain name that exactly matches their trademark, but also to a wide swath of other domain names including nearly every possible misspelling or other variation of that trademark, potentially even if the trademark is comprised of generic words.
Does it? It strikes me that FreeCreditReport variants have more potential to defraud regular people than your regular news site. If slashdot tried to do the same thing, and pick up all of the.coms,.nets, etc on its variants, it would probably be shot down. It would be a bit nice if this precendent was viewed in context as an exception where the public would benefit from not having ambiguous urls over the corporate entity actually owning the urls.
I can see a few added utilities of such a device. One is having a potentially smaller carrying size without sacrificing screen size. It might be easier to work with a 2x2 ft projected image on a table rather than a 2x2 in screen. Also, incorporating a multi-touch framework, you could setup an interactive surface for collaboration. Another utility is that it could provide a bridging point between the analog and digital world. That is, the camera part of the device could perform some object recognition and retrieve information to support some cognitive task. Like recognizing a piano and projecting notes onto the keys, recognizing barcodes and pulling up information about the company providing the product, identifying edible plants or dangerous bugs while hiking, etc. While it can use a lot of existing functionality built into the computer, it offers a better framework for processing the natural environment. It's functionality may seem limited or even dubious, but I believe that's only because a lot of the technologies in question are relatively new and still need refinement: object recognition, gesture recognition, gesture-based user interface, reasonable battery life, and visibility of portable projections. It probably won't hit its niche market for years to come as these aspects evolve, but by making the code open source, Mistry probably is speeding up the time it will take until adoption.
It's not a terrible concept, it's simply a solution looking for a problem.
But seriously, would anyone want to strap on a backpack, attach a bunch of gizmos to his chest, tape colors to his fingers, only to display PRE-PROGRAMMED information?
The object he's showing is a prototype and will naturally have a larger form-factor relative to any final product. The reason for the backpack is to have something to hold his dev machine which runs the software. This can easily be put into a smaller computer or micro-controller at some later point in time. And all those gizmos amount to the coordination of multiple devices: web cam and projector, simply because no one has thought to combine the items yet. Again, once there is a market for the combined features, products will probably follow. As for the pre-programmed information, it's certainly true that this performs a limited number of operations, but common, this is only one guy demoing his prototype. There could be plenty of additional operations once this product is open sourced. You just have no imagination
Imagine if such a device was attached to 'the cloud' at some wi-fi cafe. I could be browsing some journal articles projected onto the table, and upon finding an interesting item, send it to a friend somewhere else in the world. Feeling the need to discuss, we could then have a video conference on that table. Once done, I might load up pong and wait until my food is served. A lot of this is a "marketing gimmick" because the uses of such a device have not yet been fully explored. There's a huge pipeline of products and software interfaces that need to be hacked out before its ready for the public, but it certainly holds potential. You just have to make it cheap enough for the average consumer and find that killer app. Personally I wouldn't mind such a device in place of a Kindle/Nook with a decent reference manager, and would probably hack away at the open source to make that happen.
You're probably against this because you have no idea of how it could be useful or popular. But don't worry, a lot of other, smarter people will probably get it done for you.
I think we as a culture are too used to being sold quick weight loss 'solutions'. True fitness, as you say, comes from a change in lifestyle, where one should be exercising not for 12 weeks but for several years to be in a healthy state. Unless you go through some painful and hellish training regimen, getting fit doesn't happen quick.
The music industry created a loophole in Canadian copyright laws when it asked for a levy on blank audio media. These $0.21 to $0.24 levies on blank media raised millions of dollars for music publishers, but also legalized copying in the digital age, to the consternation of the music industry. Canadian courts have ruled that consumers have the right to copy any recording from the original copy even those they do not personally own. This consumer right has been extended by the courts to include peer-to-peer downloads.
Canadian Copyright Law
So Canadians are allowed to make copies regardless of ownership because they are already taxed for it.
But itunes, amazon books, and steam games seem to be functioning pretty well. Granted they use drm, but their success shows that users are willing to accept and pay for it if a greater service is provided. The above examples demonstrate that digital media services can work as long as their implementation details are hashed out.
It seems to be that media outlets are solving the wrong problem. If pirated movies, software, etc pop up everywhere then that indicates a high demand for a particular service or product. Especially when their illegitimate services are probably being operated at bare minimum cost to provide terabytes of content and bandwidth. They should probably try offering a pay service (either subscription or per-view) to access content online even when it comes out. Naturally there will be people who don't want to pay anything, but there might be a marginal market for this kind of thing. Either way, the research would be interesting. And, if pay+hd content or commercial+normal quality can't compete with free+crappy telesync, then maybe the media industry isn't losing enough money to whine about?
That's true for some/most cases where we're still exploring how to develop a piece of software around a task. Other pieces of software are well defined and don't really need to be evolved. How many times do you need to recode linked lists until their good enough? I think we're reaching a similar consensus with designing UIs, where some architectural patterns will remain consistent across languages. Like setting up a text box or button. As these pieces become refined or 'immortal' it will free us lowly humans up to work on other problems like fixing that damn vending machine that always clings to my precious snacks.
My conclusion was slightly wrong. Meant to say theorem doesn't hold for x less-than-equal-to 4. I'll leave the inductive reasoning for the less-than part as an exercise to the reader : P.
Nope, that's not what the summary is saying. It's stating that we have a steady stream of scientists and engineers, but it seems like they choose another career path when they realize they'll just be overworked and underpaid. Go fig, when it's easier to get an MBA and become a CEO who gets a golden parachute for tanking their company based on short-sighted decisions to appease stockholders then it is to go through 10+ years of training and pay off 100k in student loans.
Well, that's not entirely their fault. Different parent companies (ABC, NBC, Fox, etc) have use different licensing schemes with hulu. Hulu is, for the most part, experimental, and I bet most companies are not comfortable with putting up all their content, particularly when they're trying to sell you seasons 4-7 of some recently released dvds. I good policy to testing out the pay waters might be to sell you some premium access to all shows which are on a rolling schedule. And to provide the first 1-3 episodes as a taste test.
Slashdot Mirror
That's debatable. The problem with tanks is that they're giant moving targets. I once had a history teacher in 'nam who would talk about the perks and perils of being in a tank. On the plus side, you get AC on hot days and a CD player to listen to music. On the negative side, once you're in combat, people are firing anti-armor explosives at your ass, such that the tank becomes an instant-coffin. The baddies in the US's current war probably do not have the sophistication in chemistry to develop the right kinds of explosives to crack armor, like a full-fledged nation. However, I bet tanker's experience a similar level of danger as the foot soldiers, just that they have rockets whizzing over their head instead of bullets.
They would, but they ran out of funding and cutback to one wish, so long as that wish is a ham sandwich.
Touchy Tentacle. It will feature advanced social networking services that will allow people to finger their friends over Twitter, Facebook, Pidgin, etc and see what they're up to. Their new motto will be: "Linux for Human Beings and their noodly appendages.".
The idea may be to farm out computing power, allowing for customers to avoid the upgrade-climb and for graphics companies to build so many high-end graphics processing units, cutting down on electronic waste, cost of manufacturing, etc. An interesting, though not yet realized, example of this could be the onLive console. Customers purchase what amounts to a modem and play their games via a server farm which computers physics and graphics. By doing this, customers can avoid downloading large batches of graphics assets (saving on HD space too) and play their game instantly like a streaming video. At the same time, if the company upgrades their video cards, the customer sees the upgrade without ever having to purchase another console. The company in turn, doesn't have to spend as much designing and manufacturing a new console to leverage new technologies every couple of years. The video and the state of the technology now is boring. But all of this could lead to some interesting paradigm shifts in technology services.
It would seem that this decision sets or reinforces a fairly strong precedent that trademark holders may be entitled to, not only to the domain name that exactly matches their trademark, but also to a wide swath of other domain names including nearly every possible misspelling or other variation of that trademark, potentially even if the trademark is comprised of generic words.
Does it? It strikes me that FreeCreditReport variants have more potential to defraud regular people than your regular news site. If slashdot tried to do the same thing, and pick up all of the .coms, .nets, etc on its variants, it would probably be shot down. It would be a bit nice if this precendent was viewed in context as an exception where the public would benefit from not having ambiguous urls over the corporate entity actually owning the urls.
It could have been a CloudServer for vaporware.
And surfs for porn in the interim.
You don't. The Internet never forgets, never forgives.
I can see a few added utilities of such a device. One is having a potentially smaller carrying size without sacrificing screen size. It might be easier to work with a 2x2 ft projected image on a table rather than a 2x2 in screen. Also, incorporating a multi-touch framework, you could setup an interactive surface for collaboration. Another utility is that it could provide a bridging point between the analog and digital world. That is, the camera part of the device could perform some object recognition and retrieve information to support some cognitive task. Like recognizing a piano and projecting notes onto the keys, recognizing barcodes and pulling up information about the company providing the product, identifying edible plants or dangerous bugs while hiking, etc. While it can use a lot of existing functionality built into the computer, it offers a better framework for processing the natural environment. It's functionality may seem limited or even dubious, but I believe that's only because a lot of the technologies in question are relatively new and still need refinement: object recognition, gesture recognition, gesture-based user interface, reasonable battery life, and visibility of portable projections. It probably won't hit its niche market for years to come as these aspects evolve, but by making the code open source, Mistry probably is speeding up the time it will take until adoption.
But seriously, would anyone want to strap on a backpack, attach a bunch of gizmos to his chest, tape colors to his fingers, only to display PRE-PROGRAMMED information?
The object he's showing is a prototype and will naturally have a larger form-factor relative to any final product. The reason for the backpack is to have something to hold his dev machine which runs the software. This can easily be put into a smaller computer or micro-controller at some later point in time. And all those gizmos amount to the coordination of multiple devices: web cam and projector, simply because no one has thought to combine the items yet. Again, once there is a market for the combined features, products will probably follow. As for the pre-programmed information, it's certainly true that this performs a limited number of operations, but common, this is only one guy demoing his prototype. There could be plenty of additional operations once this product is open sourced. You just have no imagination
Imagine if such a device was attached to 'the cloud' at some wi-fi cafe. I could be browsing some journal articles projected onto the table, and upon finding an interesting item, send it to a friend somewhere else in the world. Feeling the need to discuss, we could then have a video conference on that table. Once done, I might load up pong and wait until my food is served. A lot of this is a "marketing gimmick" because the uses of such a device have not yet been fully explored. There's a huge pipeline of products and software interfaces that need to be hacked out before its ready for the public, but it certainly holds potential. You just have to make it cheap enough for the average consumer and find that killer app. Personally I wouldn't mind such a device in place of a Kindle/Nook with a decent reference manager, and would probably hack away at the open source to make that happen.
You're probably against this because you have no idea of how it could be useful or popular. But don't worry, a lot of other, smarter people will probably get it done for you.
I think we as a culture are too used to being sold quick weight loss 'solutions'. True fitness, as you say, comes from a change in lifestyle, where one should be exercising not for 12 weeks but for several years to be in a healthy state. Unless you go through some painful and hellish training regimen, getting fit doesn't happen quick.
The music industry created a loophole in Canadian copyright laws when it asked for a levy on blank audio media. These $0.21 to $0.24 levies on blank media raised millions of dollars for music publishers, but also legalized copying in the digital age, to the consternation of the music industry. Canadian courts have ruled that consumers have the right to copy any recording from the original copy even those they do not personally own. This consumer right has been extended by the courts to include peer-to-peer downloads.
Canadian Copyright Law
So Canadians are allowed to make copies regardless of ownership because they are already taxed for it.
Nah, it'll probably be boring. The only thing they're gonna do is farm for gold.
But itunes, amazon books, and steam games seem to be functioning pretty well. Granted they use drm, but their success shows that users are willing to accept and pay for it if a greater service is provided. The above examples demonstrate that digital media services can work as long as their implementation details are hashed out.
It seems to be that media outlets are solving the wrong problem. If pirated movies, software, etc pop up everywhere then that indicates a high demand for a particular service or product. Especially when their illegitimate services are probably being operated at bare minimum cost to provide terabytes of content and bandwidth. They should probably try offering a pay service (either subscription or per-view) to access content online even when it comes out. Naturally there will be people who don't want to pay anything, but there might be a marginal market for this kind of thing. Either way, the research would be interesting. And, if pay+hd content or commercial+normal quality can't compete with free+crappy telesync, then maybe the media industry isn't losing enough money to whine about?
That's true for some/most cases where we're still exploring how to develop a piece of software around a task. Other pieces of software are well defined and don't really need to be evolved. How many times do you need to recode linked lists until their good enough? I think we're reaching a similar consensus with designing UIs, where some architectural patterns will remain consistent across languages. Like setting up a text box or button. As these pieces become refined or 'immortal' it will free us lowly humans up to work on other problems like fixing that damn vending machine that always clings to my precious snacks.
What exactly are we losing?
My conclusion was slightly wrong. Meant to say theorem doesn't hold for x less-than-equal-to 4. I'll leave the inductive reasoning for the less-than part as an exercise to the reader : P.
x = 4
4-1 = 3 : is prime
4+1 = 5 : is prime
4 not divisible by 6
Hence theorem holds for x > 4
Nope, that's not what the summary is saying. It's stating that we have a steady stream of scientists and engineers, but it seems like they choose another career path when they realize they'll just be overworked and underpaid. Go fig, when it's easier to get an MBA and become a CEO who gets a golden parachute for tanking their company based on short-sighted decisions to appease stockholders then it is to go through 10+ years of training and pay off 100k in student loans.
Hope they release unit tests also. Otherwise I will be so very depressed.
Just sacrifice some interns to Quezacotl and I'm sure the repossessor gods will pass over your humble conglomerate.
I'm sure cutting-edge would have been more appropriate.
I'm sure you could edit the wiki page and give him the ability to fly. With any luck, maybe he'll test out his newfound abilities on a tall building.
Well, that's not entirely their fault. Different parent companies (ABC, NBC, Fox, etc) have use different licensing schemes with hulu. Hulu is, for the most part, experimental, and I bet most companies are not comfortable with putting up all their content, particularly when they're trying to sell you seasons 4-7 of some recently released dvds. I good policy to testing out the pay waters might be to sell you some premium access to all shows which are on a rolling schedule. And to provide the first 1-3 episodes as a taste test.