Umm, why a kinect? Any camera could give you basic visuals, and likewise an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path, the gps gives you position data.
It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life. 10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.
That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.
Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.
The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!
This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light. I've always thought lasers, while useful, are a very bad countermeasure to human eyesight, being as they are very narrow spectrum.
Touch keyboards cannot keep speed with physical keyboards due to a lack of tactile feedback, space requirements, and hand-strain when typing due to jamming your finger into a solid surface repeatedly (guess its not much different than laptop crappy keyboards, but still). That's assuming you've overcome the software limitation of slow processing that plagues most touch keyboards.
That being said, they will probably replace keyboards for applications(such as mobile phones) where a keyboard would be a waste and inefficient use of space while not being very effective anyway.
But in a laptop? God no unless you're going for lightweight style rather than a useful work space.
Now imagine if they can't see the runway. If they're told to land on runway 24, and they're going by instruments oriented 24, and suddenly the runway is 25, they'll be shooting off it after too long. Likewise, if they're told to land on runway 25, but they see 24 painted on the ground, they might be confused.
Basically, i'm betting the change is because they have to go by the RIGHT designation due to instrument assisted landings where visibility is poor, and therefore are updating the visual designations so there is no cognitive dissonance
Ok, i'll give you that maybe the top 20% of that money could be fluff for people with inflated salaries, but that still leaves 12 million.
You're talking a website that uses roughly 50 terabits of bandwidth a month, and that's not cheap consumer level bandwidth but corporate expensive bandwidth. We'll be generous and say they get a good deal and it's only 100k/year. Now we have the actual hardware.
Wikipedia is a relatively large system that has very good response time, so you're talking a nontrivial server setup So considering failure rate and expansion of systems, since their usage is probably only going to go up, i wouldn't be surprised to see them sink a few million into regular maintenance of those server farms, such as building rent, cooling, and the system operators who run the darn things will prob add an extra mil onto it, again being generous.
So we've already located around 4 million of the roughly 12 million in non-fluff.
Keep in mind they have server locations on different continents.
Now lets add in the required overhead for a corporation, again we'll be conservative here and say they only have a couple layers plus accounting for various countries in operation. That'll easily be a million or two. Of course the buildings and support staff will probably be at least another million.
So we're up to 7.
We've covered basic site maintenance, basic corporate overhead, and basic connectivity. Keep in mind these numbers are just for wikipedia, ignoring everything else the wikimedia foundation does. And keep in mind, these numbers are ultra-conservative, without any expansion or growth, and ignoring staffing for multiple languages, and a larger legal department, etc etc.
My guess would be they use a non-fixed width font, and therefore they limit based on whether it would print (or display) on one page. Which i can actually agree with, however the solution is to use a fixed width font, and specify a page/character limit.
However if it's not for this reason, i agree it seems rather arbitrary(and lazy programming) to have the electronics differ from the stated rules.
The reason the death star beams produce a resultant beam at another angle is simple. Physics 101 my good man, vector addition. The beams are colliding, and since each beam is projected has an opposite beam, at a similar angle. Therefore the horizontal velocity is canceled out when the beams collide (since the horizontal of one is offset by the negative horizontal of the other, therefore they produce that third beam which is the normal.
Which is the main argument for why the death star is not neccessarily a laser but a form of mass such as a plasma or proton cannon.
This is art at it's best. Maybe a bit too satirical/ironic for people's tastes depending on your viewpoint, but personally it looks like the survivor in the video is getting a blast out of it, so great for him. and if he's enjoying it you all should too.:)
I'll bite the karma bullet on this, you're being relatively shortsighted and blind in your insinuation they are stupid.
It actually does improve your vision. I'll give you a simple experiment. Go outside at night, shine a bright flashlight(halogen makes this work better) at the ground. stare at that flashlight for a good 5 minutes. Now turn the stupid thing off, and wait 5 minutes. Once your eyes adjust suddenly you
The light forces your eyes to restrict the light comming in, killing your darkvision. Yes it lets you see the small patch it illuminates, but seeing anything to either side or beyond that is much harder. Compare that to the normal nightvision a person has on a decent night with a moon, and you can see a mile easy.
Yes, lights help when there's no moon, but if you have a moon, lighting destroys your night vision.
Class Action lawsuits in this country are near pointless in terms of causing redress, and barely hurt the companies they're brought against. In a lot of bigger companies they're seen as a regular cost of business. As said in other posts, enjoy your coupon that ends up making you spend more money.
If you REALLY wanted to get redress, take sony to small claims court. $50-100 filing fee(75 in my state), you can get damages up to $5000, and you can make sony pay the court fee upon winning too.
They'll either start settling cases, or waste a lot more sending representation to win. So sue em for the cost a new PS3, since that's what it will take to restore you the original functionality that they took away ( one PS3 to play games and do PSN, one to run linux, since you can't do it on both anymore).
Well, if it's not a joke, than someone is about to get fired for making sony come under a bunch of lawsuits for breach of contract.
Major coporations might not typically play joke, but they also typically avoid anything legally questionable, and even the most basic armchair lawyers are on slashdot are aware that this is taking away an advertised feature of a product. Either you can play games and patch (advertised feature) or use linux and don't patch (advertised feature). Either way you're losing an advertised feature.
I'm hoping i can point this out early enough, but the slated released date for this patch is april 1st. Talk about one of the most successful trolls on the internet today, sony generated a TON of nerd rage on this stunt, it's rather hilarious.
I'll also say that many news stories about this pointed out the obvious fact that it conflicts with a recent statement that sony supports this feature and will continue to preserve it, it seems a fairly obvious april fools joke.
Mule: Requires food, water, and has the potential to get scared in combat or make noise when it should be stealthy due to being surprised. Also surprisingly vulnerable to lead bullets.
Robot: requires maintenance, can resist bullets, requires recharging, and does not tire.
Lets be generous: Food, shelter, drugs, etc, to keep the mule healthy would be about equal to maintenance on the robot. I'm being generous here, any sufficiently mass produced and sufficiently hardened military hardware requires surprisingly little maintenance(compared to some commercial counterparts)
Mule has a lower upfront cost, but lasts less time(old age, injuries, etc). However the robot, while being expensive, would drop in price as more are brought into service.
Likewise, robots cost little to store when not in use, and are quite compact. Mule's require a lot of work.
So yeah, local rented mules are great for our current situation, but in the long run (which is the military's main focus) and in other theaters of combat, the robot is a little more feasible.
I've always been amazed that until recently, most work on AI has been focused as a preconstructed system that fits data into pathways while having some variation in thought abilities to let it expand it's model slightly. They'd write the rules for the system and try to include most of the work on it, and then let see how good it does, with limited learning capabilities and still based on the original model.
I'm glad a lot of research is finally gearing more towards the path of having a small initial program, then feeding it data and letting it grow into it's own intelligence. If you give it the ability to learn, then it'll learn itself the rest, rather than giving it functions that let it pretend to learn while fitting into a model.
And i know there have been research into this in the past, but it didn't really take off till the last decade or so, and i'm glad it has. True, or at least somewhat competent AI, here we come.
I'm going to burn some karma for this, but there was a children's book i read ages ago that i thought was really witty.
It was about an octopus that made pizza, and then got the wrong oven shipped, that ended up puffing his pizzas into 3d pizzas. It had a detective who i believe was a cat. Anyway it was a really cool little book that helped kids visualize the 2d->3d transformation.
I was gonna post a link saying THAT's what 3d pizzas lookedlike, but i can't find it, so anyone have a clue?
Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?
I mean sure, psuedo anonymized could be fairly easily done, just take the raw data, match with topographical data, and output the combined result devoid of geographic representations. But even that wouldn't be anonymized to anyone who's looking for info on a specific area, since the data would all be similar and it wouldn't be hard to detect a route that goes through a given set of terrain, especially if the start or stop points (someone's house/parking garage) is known.
So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?
Offhand, i'd say any prominent high-class hotel that might be used by foreign businessmen on a trip.
I mean, you do have a point, bob the middle manager isn't that important. However there are quite a few business people who this really would be that important to. Corporate espionage is high, and you know china has been doing focused attacks over the network.
Sneakernet is always faster, so if they can train up a few pretty women, pay them a decent programmers wage to have them steal stuff that is the work of 10 engineers or even hundreds, that's a pretty sound economic payoff don't you think?
I think stuff like this has it's purpose, and those who really are at risk need to be educated about it. For the other 95% of us, i think it's useful info to be aware about, just like don't leave your purse out visible in your car. Sure it probably won't happen, but there are always people who would.
I am really saddened that it's taken people this long to realize this was a KICK ASS Idea.
Disclaimer: Everything said below this runs under the assumption the game is made correctly. There are LOTS of ways they could mess this up, interface, command structure, how to reward playstyles, how the teaming is done, etc etc .
But IF they get this right, it will be a fantastic game. Some people love strategy, others love killing shit. Some people like both, but more often some people like one and hate the other. Lots of people love having some voice in the sky doing the thinking for them so they can focus on killing shit, as long as that voice helps them kill shit better.
This is demonstrated on a LOT of big multiplayer games with voice enabled, you end up getting 1-5 guys out of dozens who are barking out useful info, the rest feeding off them without much complaint. I think there are better system sthan the everyone can talk to everyone method, but it hink it's a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, why a kinect? Any camera could give you basic visuals, and likewise an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path, the gps gives you position data.
I just don't see how this is new
It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life.
10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.
That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.
Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.
The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!
This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light.
I've always thought lasers, while useful, are a very bad countermeasure to human eyesight, being as they are very narrow spectrum.
Next!
Touch keyboards cannot keep speed with physical keyboards due to a lack of tactile feedback, space requirements, and hand-strain when typing due to jamming your finger into a solid surface repeatedly (guess its not much different than laptop crappy keyboards, but still). That's assuming you've overcome the software limitation of slow processing that plagues most touch keyboards.
That being said, they will probably replace keyboards for applications(such as mobile phones) where a keyboard would be a waste and inefficient use of space while not being very effective anyway.
But in a laptop? God no unless you're going for lightweight style rather than a useful work space.
Disclaimer: Typed on my model-m.
Now imagine if they can't see the runway.
If they're told to land on runway 24, and they're going by instruments oriented 24, and suddenly the runway is 25, they'll be shooting off it after too long.
Likewise, if they're told to land on runway 25, but they see 24 painted on the ground, they might be confused.
Basically, i'm betting the change is because they have to go by the RIGHT designation due to instrument assisted landings where visibility is poor, and therefore are updating the visual designations so there is no cognitive dissonance
Ok, i'll give you that maybe the top 20% of that money could be fluff for people with inflated salaries, but that still leaves 12 million.
You're talking a website that uses roughly 50 terabits of bandwidth a month, and that's not cheap consumer level bandwidth but corporate expensive bandwidth. We'll be generous and say they get a good deal and it's only 100k/year. Now we have the actual hardware.
Wikipedia is a relatively large system that has very good response time, so you're talking a nontrivial server setup
So considering failure rate and expansion of systems, since their usage is probably only going to go up, i wouldn't be surprised to see them sink a few million into regular maintenance of those server farms, such as building rent, cooling, and the system operators who run the darn things will prob add an extra mil onto it, again being generous.
So we've already located around 4 million of the roughly 12 million in non-fluff.
Keep in mind they have server locations on different continents.
Now lets add in the required overhead for a corporation, again we'll be conservative here and say they only have a couple layers plus accounting for various countries in operation. That'll easily be a million or two. Of course the buildings and support staff will probably be at least another million.
So we're up to 7.
We've covered basic site maintenance, basic corporate overhead, and basic connectivity.
Keep in mind these numbers are just for wikipedia, ignoring everything else the wikimedia foundation does.
And keep in mind, these numbers are ultra-conservative, without any expansion or growth, and ignoring staffing for multiple languages, and a larger legal department, etc etc.
My guess would be they use a non-fixed width font, and therefore they limit based on whether it would print (or display) on one page. Which i can actually agree with, however the solution is to use a fixed width font, and specify a page/character limit.
However if it's not for this reason, i agree it seems rather arbitrary(and lazy programming) to have the electronics differ from the stated rules.
Kids who have a social life are more likely to do social activities than their non-social peers?
Shocking!
The reason the death star beams produce a resultant beam at another angle is simple.
Physics 101 my good man, vector addition.
The beams are colliding, and since each beam is projected has an opposite beam, at a similar angle.
Therefore the horizontal velocity is canceled out when the beams collide (since the horizontal of one is offset by the negative horizontal of the other, therefore they produce that third beam which is the normal.
Which is the main argument for why the death star is not neccessarily a laser but a form of mass such as a plasma or proton cannon.
This is art at it's best. Maybe a bit too satirical/ironic for people's tastes depending on your viewpoint, but personally it looks like the survivor in the video is getting a blast out of it, so great for him. and if he's enjoying it you all should too. :)
I'll bite the karma bullet on this, you're being relatively shortsighted and blind in your insinuation they are stupid.
It actually does improve your vision.
I'll give you a simple experiment. Go outside at night, shine a bright flashlight(halogen makes this work better) at the ground. stare at that flashlight for a good 5 minutes.
Now turn the stupid thing off, and wait 5 minutes.
Once your eyes adjust suddenly you
The light forces your eyes to restrict the light comming in, killing your darkvision. Yes it lets you see the small patch it illuminates, but seeing anything to either side or beyond that is much harder.
Compare that to the normal nightvision a person has on a decent night with a moon, and you can see a mile easy.
Yes, lights help when there's no moon, but if you have a moon, lighting destroys your night vision.
This kid rocks and is putting his brain to good use, doing things he finds interesting and fun.
Pity the sensationalist article makes it sound bad.
How many of you built cool things out of legos when you were kids just to see if you could make it work.
Class Action lawsuits in this country are near pointless in terms of causing redress, and barely hurt the companies they're brought against. In a lot of bigger companies they're seen as a regular cost of business.
As said in other posts, enjoy your coupon that ends up making you spend more money.
If you REALLY wanted to get redress, take sony to small claims court.
$50-100 filing fee(75 in my state), you can get damages up to $5000, and you can make sony pay the court fee upon winning too.
They'll either start settling cases, or waste a lot more sending representation to win.
So sue em for the cost a new PS3, since that's what it will take to restore you the original functionality that they took away ( one PS3 to play games and do PSN, one to run linux, since you can't do it on both anymore).
Well, if it's not a joke, than someone is about to get fired for making sony come under a bunch of lawsuits for breach of contract.
Major coporations might not typically play joke, but they also typically avoid anything legally questionable, and even the most basic armchair lawyers are on slashdot are aware that this is taking away an advertised feature of a product.
Either you can play games and patch (advertised feature) or use linux and don't patch (advertised feature).
Either way you're losing an advertised feature.
So yeah my bet is on joke.
I'm hoping i can point this out early enough, but the slated released date for this patch is april 1st.
Talk about one of the most successful trolls on the internet today, sony generated a TON of nerd rage on this stunt, it's rather hilarious.
I'll also say that many news stories about this pointed out the obvious fact that it conflicts with a recent statement that sony supports this feature and will continue to preserve it, it seems a fairly obvious april fools joke.
Just saying.
x + $.07 = $.70
x = $.70 - $.07
x = $.63
$.07 / $.63 = .111111
11% rise of 63.
i'll bite.
Mule: Requires food, water, and has the potential to get scared in combat or make noise when it should be stealthy due to being surprised. Also surprisingly vulnerable to lead bullets.
Robot: requires maintenance, can resist bullets, requires recharging, and does not tire.
Lets be generous: Food, shelter, drugs, etc, to keep the mule healthy would be about equal to maintenance on the robot.
I'm being generous here, any sufficiently mass produced and sufficiently hardened military hardware requires surprisingly little maintenance(compared to some commercial counterparts)
Mule has a lower upfront cost, but lasts less time(old age, injuries, etc). However the robot, while being expensive, would drop in price as more are brought into service.
Likewise, robots cost little to store when not in use, and are quite compact. Mule's require a lot of work.
So yeah, local rented mules are great for our current situation, but in the long run (which is the military's main focus) and in other theaters of combat, the robot is a little more feasible.
I've always been amazed that until recently, most work on AI has been focused as a preconstructed system that fits data into pathways while having some variation in thought abilities to let it expand it's model slightly.
They'd write the rules for the system and try to include most of the work on it, and then let see how good it does, with limited learning capabilities and still based on the original model.
I'm glad a lot of research is finally gearing more towards the path of having a small initial program, then feeding it data and letting it grow into it's own intelligence.
If you give it the ability to learn, then it'll learn itself the rest, rather than giving it functions that let it pretend to learn while fitting into a model.
And i know there have been research into this in the past, but it didn't really take off till the last decade or so, and i'm glad it has.
True, or at least somewhat competent AI, here we come.
I'm going to burn some karma for this, but there was a children's book i read ages ago that i thought was really witty.
It was about an octopus that made pizza, and then got the wrong oven shipped, that ended up puffing his pizzas into 3d pizzas.
It had a detective who i believe was a cat.
Anyway it was a really cool little book that helped kids visualize the 2d->3d transformation.
I was gonna post a link saying THAT's what 3d pizzas lookedlike, but i can't find it, so anyone have a clue?
Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?
I mean sure, psuedo anonymized could be fairly easily done, just take the raw data, match with topographical data, and output the combined result devoid of geographic representations.
But even that wouldn't be anonymized to anyone who's looking for info on a specific area, since the data would all be similar and it wouldn't be hard to detect a route that goes through a given set of terrain, especially if the start or stop points (someone's house/parking garage) is known.
So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?
Offhand, i'd say any prominent high-class hotel that might be used by foreign businessmen on a trip.
I mean, you do have a point, bob the middle manager isn't that important. However there are quite a few business people who this really would be that important to. Corporate espionage is high, and you know china has been doing focused attacks over the network.
Sneakernet is always faster, so if they can train up a few pretty women, pay them a decent programmers wage to have them steal stuff that is the work of 10 engineers or even hundreds, that's a pretty sound economic payoff don't you think?
I think stuff like this has it's purpose, and those who really are at risk need to be educated about it. For the other 95% of us, i think it's useful info to be aware about, just like don't leave your purse out visible in your car. Sure it probably won't happen, but there are always people who would.
For example, if you are a nazi, then you probably think 90% of video games are horrible, slanderous, libelous, and a gross distortion of history.
If you're not, you probably find them fun.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Chainsaws and stakes work well
and me without my mod points. darnit!
I am really saddened that it's taken people this long to realize this was a KICK ASS Idea.
Disclaimer: Everything said below this runs under the assumption the game is made correctly. There are LOTS of ways they could mess this up, interface, command structure, how to reward playstyles, how the teaming is done, etc etc .
But IF they get this right, it will be a fantastic game. Some people love strategy, others love killing shit. Some people like both, but more often some people like one and hate the other. Lots of people love having some voice in the sky doing the thinking for them so they can focus on killing shit, as long as that voice helps them kill shit better.
This is demonstrated on a LOT of big multiplayer games with voice enabled, you end up getting 1-5 guys out of dozens who are barking out useful info, the rest feeding off them without much complaint. I think there are better system sthan the everyone can talk to everyone method, but it hink it's a good start.