Yes, but you hardly need to keep that hidden from yourself. I think that's the sticking point, not the app as such.
Actually there are plenty of Apps which I would like to run and be invisible to me. Install and forget. In addition the phone user may not always be the owner.
There are some programs which NEED to be invisible to the user for them to work such as theft recovery apps which report the current location of the phone or its IP address and a snapshot from the camera. Such an App may well be preferable to be hidden from the user.
I don't see how this is a problem for 3D but not 2D, the optical focus has absolutely nothing to do with the overlay of images that gives the sense of 3D in 3D films. The background isn't blurry because it's 3D, the background is blurry because the director chose a shallow focus to force you to look at what he wants you to look at.
It isn't a problem in 2D because you brain is aware it is looking at a 2D image. In 3D projection, your mind starts to react as if it is looking at real, and not projected objects.
The result is that your mind thinks it should be able to focus on an object, but can't. It's more of a problem that what we get on the screens is more like 2.5D than 3D.
Consider the difference between a stereoscopic image and a reflection in a mirror. They both appear to be '3 dimensional' but the physics are different. In these movies, your brain expects the light information it receives to be more like the mirror reflection, but when it's not, it causes issues.
Actually, only a handful of people complain about this, and mostly those that haven't even played the game. On forums visited by actual players, nobody complains about this at all.
That's because we've been chased off, or just play single player now.
I've enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic III the most I think. Turn based helped showcase the strategic aspect a lot more.
We are stuck with coal and oil for a few centuries, methinks...
50 years max.
It's only a matter of time before we can engineer plants or processes which mimic the photosynthetic process or tweak it to minimize the amount of afterprocessing for biofuels.
We can put jellyfish genes in piglets, make goats produce similar proteins to spiders, eventually we are going to figure out a way to have refinery plants that consist of... plants.
Actually what you are noticing is quite the opposite.
The oddness that a lot of people have after leaving a 3D film is because the director FORCES your focus.
That videogame effect you are talking about? You don't get that in real life. If you are watching something in the foreground and then decide to look at a tree 100' off, the tree is not magically out of focus. However in a film, that really isn't desireable as you will look at other parts of the screen if everythign is in focus and end up missing what the director wants you to see.
In a 3D film, your brain is tricked, but it gets confused as it starts to behave as if it is an actual three dimensional image, but when it runs into limitations (like forced focus) you end up with a really weird feeling and potential eyestrain as you try to focus on something which you can't focus on but your brain thinks it should be able to.
That website helped me connect and stay in touch with people that I normally would not contact as I'm not a 'phone' person and they are not 'letter' people.
It's been of use to me. If you can create something which becomes useful to millions of people, you don't see THAT as being worth some money?
Granted, I think people are insane in setting the potential value so high, but it's certainly worth several million. (In general, I think that advertising expendatures have become a self fulfilling prophecy. Just because it is/was self fulfilling doesn't mean that it isn't now the reality)
I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.
There are loads of reasons.
1. How long did it take for US to come about? That's a fairly long period of time for a planet to remain habitable. Cut that time down, and you drastically reduce the chance that something like 'us' will come about.
2. What good is intelligence to life? To us, it is necessary, to life? Not really. Algae and bacteria do just fine (and bacteria in some sense can be considered immortal!) Life COULD be plentiful, and intelligent life could well be so rare that it is unique.
3. Consider what we are able to see. We can basically see forms of electromagnetic radiation. That's not too useful for picking out little bits of information that would clue us in to someone else sending out information. Our emmanations are already decreasing (if considered per-capita) We can get more done with less power via directional antennas, better electronics, and now, fiber and direct access communications. We might just not see them.
4. Interstellar travel cost compared to opportunity is well... astronomical. Barring imaginary physics, the only point to go to another planet/star is to colonize it.
Think about it, we human beings are the absolute kings of colonization. We have set foot and abode on nearly every inch of this planet in some form or scope. And even if you argue that our grasp in some areas is tenuous, it certainly isn't due to lack of drive to colonize. We ARE wanderers and travelers, but to even consider something like interstellar travel is daunting to us. Is it so surprising that something which would restrict a human from traveling would also daunt another form of life?
It's not too much of a stretch to consider that our existance is every unique even without resorting to some sort of religious justification.
If it took our planet 4-5 billion years to produce 'us', and the universe is only 14 billion years old, we aren't dealing with much time for starting over. A single asteroid collission at the wrong time and the death of a human progenitor could very well mean 4 billion years of life development resulted in no intelligent life on Earth. It is not some sort of evolutionary goal.
At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?
It may not be easy to define in a manner which achieves a universal agreement, but we do know that 0 is too little, and all is too much.
If I had the answer, I'd be knocking on the office of every official in order to make it law.
I can however, offer some guidelines:
That which is technically infeasible today, may be possible tomorrow. Err on the side of privacy, because once something is public, it cannot become private again.
Make it illegal for the government to achieve through private means that which would be prohibited if attempted via official means. What I mean by that, is that a government official should require a warrant to collect data from a third party if that data would require a warrant to collect from the primary party.
In otherwords, If a conversation is recorded by a third party, and the third party did not require a warrant to record that conversation, the government should still require a warrant to obtain the recording as if they were acquiring it from the primary party.
A fancy form of direct democracy might not be perfect, but could it be any worse than this sort of plutocratic authoritarianism we live under now?
As soon as you figure out a way to keep the nearby city with a population of 1,000,000+ deciding that my area with a population of 2,000 isn't going to be their new landfill site, I'll be right there with you.
An executive agreement does not really create new law, it just 'organizes' the authority granted to the executive branch in a specific manner. The agreement is on the manner of applying such power.
For example, if Congress passed a law which granted an agency under the control of the executive to do XYZ, but it was currently only doing YZ, an executive agreement could be signed which said that the Government would now ALSO do X. (Or it could also say it would stop doing Z and just do XY).
If the agreement was to do LXYZ, then it would be a treaty, and require the approval of the senate because it would be exercising power not granted to the executive in the form of L.
I don't think that our desire for privacy is in any way unreasonable. That something can be done does not mean that it should be done.
That someone could track my vehicle (Via license plate recognition software) to the urologist, then to a specific pharmacy. Perhaps a trip to a specific type of physical therapist, and so on...
All of that is 'public' information. And NONE of it should be automatically assumed to be non-private simply because of the inability to avoid touching the public view. We drafted protections on our medical information because of such problems.
We should not be so eager to make the term public synonymous with anti-privacy.
You are missing the point. This isn't about not getting arrested for something you do in public.
This is about not being automatically tracked and your entire life outside of your shuttered windows being fed into a database which can be browsed at will.
The fact that something is technically possible, does not make it right. We DO have a limited expectation of privacy even on public roads, even if the law does not currently respect such a right.
I seriously doubt Activision has that kind of pull. There's a reason it was a merger and not a purchase. Blizzard could have given Activision the finger if it didn't think the terms of the merger left them with more control, not less.
You assume that the concerns of those guiding the merger were gaining or maintaining control. How do you know they don't have less control, but more money?
No, you really don't want to fuck with customs officers. Be civil and try to ignore violations of your rights because you will only make your situation worse.
Yes I agree. Ignoring violations of your rights will only make things worse.
As it happens, I'm not actually a zoophiliac. Merely a vegan who finds it a bit twisted that we seem to consider it worse to let an animal have sex with you than it would be to kill it.
No, you are pretty much correct. I'm no vegan (far from it) but I think you are spot on correct. The whole concept is just our fear of anything relating to sex.
Think of it this way:
Carefully touch a bull's testicles and derive some pleasure from it: People will flip out at what a horrible crime it is.
Take a sharp knife, slice open the scrotum, remove the testicles, bread them and saute them and call them rocky mountain oysters and eat them. People will give you money for them.
Just wait until they add license plate recognition to those cameras.
Here in the States, I could imagine something similar being hooked up and defended on the grounds that 'you don't have privacy when you travel on public roads'.
And that's quicker, easier, cheaper, more permanent and less likely to be protested against (in the media I mean) than just photographing/filming the protesters how?
What good is a photograph of a person wearing a bandana? What good is a photograph if you have no one who recognizes the person. Certainly not all the police recognize everyone with a warrant.
Instead you have this:
Spray with solution. Cops arrest everyone who glows under UV later.
Time investment = near zero Cost = Cost of solution + cost of UV lamps. (Very low)
Even if you release the people later, guess what?
Now they have GOOD pictures (mugshots) fingerprints, and a lot of other information in a much more easily accessible format. And the processing time per person is less.
Perhaps I'm just taking this the wrong way, but (assuming you group libertarians in with the "conservatives") you should know that it generally isn't the libertarians themselves who "view Somalia as a libertarian paradise." This is a categorization usually made by their opponents.
Don't you think that, if it actually were technologically feasible and Chrysler was gonna make a bundle of money, that it would happen. I just don't understand how government gets blamed for all the failures of business.
Not necessarily. It is quite possible to make a bundle of money, but government interference causes the 'bundle of money' to be of a similar or smaller size than the 'bundle of money' a company could make on another venture.
Consider the Corn industry in the US. Farmers DON'T plant other crops not because they wouldn't make money selling them, but because they can make more money by planting corn. It doesn't mean that corn is the better product, it's simply a factor that $x in yields $y out for corn, and $x in yields $y-b in terms of other products.
Consider cash for clunkers, in that program the government made it cost effective to DESTROY a usable working product.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you hardly need to keep that hidden from yourself. I think that's the sticking point, not the app as such.
Actually there are plenty of Apps which I would like to run and be invisible to me. Install and forget. In addition the phone user may not always be the owner.
There are some programs which NEED to be invisible to the user for them to work such as theft recovery apps which report the current location of the phone or its IP address and a snapshot from the camera. Such an App may well be preferable to be hidden from the user.
I don't see how this is a problem for 3D but not 2D, the optical focus has absolutely nothing to do with the overlay of images that gives the sense of 3D in 3D films. The background isn't blurry because it's 3D, the background is blurry because the director chose a shallow focus to force you to look at what he wants you to look at.
It isn't a problem in 2D because you brain is aware it is looking at a 2D image. In 3D projection, your mind starts to react as if it is looking at real, and not projected objects.
The result is that your mind thinks it should be able to focus on an object, but can't. It's more of a problem that what we get on the screens is more like 2.5D than 3D.
Consider the difference between a stereoscopic image and a reflection in a mirror. They both appear to be '3 dimensional' but the physics are different. In these movies, your brain expects the light information it receives to be more like the mirror reflection, but when it's not, it causes issues.
Actually, only a handful of people complain about this, and mostly those that haven't even played the game. On forums visited by actual players, nobody complains about this at all.
That's because we've been chased off, or just play single player now.
I've enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic III the most I think. Turn based helped showcase the strategic aspect a lot more.
We are stuck with coal and oil for a few centuries, methinks...
50 years max.
It's only a matter of time before we can engineer plants or processes which mimic the photosynthetic process or tweak it to minimize the amount of afterprocessing for biofuels.
We can put jellyfish genes in piglets, make goats produce similar proteins to spiders, eventually we are going to figure out a way to have refinery plants that consist of... plants.
Kim, is close to the 'average' nature of a name like Smith in Korea.
Actually what you are noticing is quite the opposite.
The oddness that a lot of people have after leaving a 3D film is because the director FORCES your focus.
That videogame effect you are talking about? You don't get that in real life. If you are watching something in the foreground and then decide to look at a tree 100' off, the tree is not magically out of focus. However in a film, that really isn't desireable as you will look at other parts of the screen if everythign is in focus and end up missing what the director wants you to see.
In a 3D film, your brain is tricked, but it gets confused as it starts to behave as if it is an actual three dimensional image, but when it runs into limitations (like forced focus) you end up with a really weird feeling and potential eyestrain as you try to focus on something which you can't focus on but your brain thinks it should be able to.
That website helped me connect and stay in touch with people that I normally would not contact as I'm not a 'phone' person and they are not 'letter' people.
It's been of use to me. If you can create something which becomes useful to millions of people, you don't see THAT as being worth some money?
Granted, I think people are insane in setting the potential value so high, but it's certainly worth several million. (In general, I think that advertising expendatures have become a self fulfilling prophecy. Just because it is/was self fulfilling doesn't mean that it isn't now the reality)
The meter has already been defined in terms of the speed of light. The circle stops there.
We hope. We are afterall, assuming that it hasn't or will not change.
I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.
There are loads of reasons.
1. How long did it take for US to come about? That's a fairly long period of time for a planet to remain habitable. Cut that time down, and you drastically reduce the chance that something like 'us' will come about.
2. What good is intelligence to life? To us, it is necessary, to life? Not really. Algae and bacteria do just fine (and bacteria in some sense can be considered immortal!) Life COULD be plentiful, and intelligent life could well be so rare that it is unique.
3. Consider what we are able to see. We can basically see forms of electromagnetic radiation. That's not too useful for picking out little bits of information that would clue us in to someone else sending out information. Our emmanations are already decreasing (if considered per-capita) We can get more done with less power via directional antennas, better electronics, and now, fiber and direct access communications. We might just not see them.
4. Interstellar travel cost compared to opportunity is well... astronomical. Barring imaginary physics, the only point to go to another planet/star is to colonize it.
Think about it, we human beings are the absolute kings of colonization. We have set foot and abode on nearly every inch of this planet in some form or scope. And even if you argue that our grasp in some areas is tenuous, it certainly isn't due to lack of drive to colonize. We ARE wanderers and travelers, but to even consider something like interstellar travel is daunting to us. Is it so surprising that something which would restrict a human from traveling would also daunt another form of life?
It's not too much of a stretch to consider that our existance is every unique even without resorting to some sort of religious justification.
If it took our planet 4-5 billion years to produce 'us', and the universe is only 14 billion years old, we aren't dealing with much time for starting over. A single asteroid collission at the wrong time and the death of a human progenitor could very well mean 4 billion years of life development resulted in no intelligent life on Earth. It is not some sort of evolutionary goal.
Pretty old
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
They had been equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles."
I read that as:
They had been equipped with four solar-powered laser cannons and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles."
Those vans were almost a hell of a lot more awesome.
At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?
It may not be easy to define in a manner which achieves a universal agreement, but we do know that 0 is too little, and all is too much.
If I had the answer, I'd be knocking on the office of every official in order to make it law.
I can however, offer some guidelines:
That which is technically infeasible today, may be possible tomorrow. Err on the side of privacy, because once something is public, it cannot become private again.
Make it illegal for the government to achieve through private means that which would be prohibited if attempted via official means. What I mean by that, is that a government official should require a warrant to collect data from a third party if that data would require a warrant to collect from the primary party.
In otherwords, If a conversation is recorded by a third party, and the third party did not require a warrant to record that conversation, the government should still require a warrant to obtain the recording as if they were acquiring it from the primary party.
A fancy form of direct democracy might not be perfect, but could it be any worse than this sort of plutocratic authoritarianism we live under now?
As soon as you figure out a way to keep the nearby city with a population of 1,000,000+ deciding that my area with a population of 2,000 isn't going to be their new landfill site, I'll be right there with you.
An executive agreement does not really create new law, it just 'organizes' the authority granted to the executive branch in a specific manner. The agreement is on the manner of applying such power.
For example, if Congress passed a law which granted an agency under the control of the executive to do XYZ, but it was currently only doing YZ, an executive agreement could be signed which said that the Government would now ALSO do X. (Or it could also say it would stop doing Z and just do XY).
If the agreement was to do LXYZ, then it would be a treaty, and require the approval of the senate because it would be exercising power not granted to the executive in the form of L.
I don't think that our desire for privacy is in any way unreasonable. That something can be done does not mean that it should be done.
That someone could track my vehicle (Via license plate recognition software) to the urologist, then to a specific pharmacy. Perhaps a trip to a specific type of physical therapist, and so on...
All of that is 'public' information. And NONE of it should be automatically assumed to be non-private simply because of the inability to avoid touching the public view. We drafted protections on our medical information because of such problems.
We should not be so eager to make the term public synonymous with anti-privacy.
You are missing the point. This isn't about not getting arrested for something you do in public.
This is about not being automatically tracked and your entire life outside of your shuttered windows being fed into a database which can be browsed at will.
The fact that something is technically possible, does not make it right. We DO have a limited expectation of privacy even on public roads, even if the law does not currently respect such a right.
I seriously doubt Activision has that kind of pull. There's a reason it was a merger and not a purchase. Blizzard could have given Activision the finger if it didn't think the terms of the merger left them with more control, not less.
You assume that the concerns of those guiding the merger were gaining or maintaining control. How do you know they don't have less control, but more money?
The few they have were indeed breaking the rules
Maybe we wouldn't have a problem with that if they weren't forcing us into a position where breaking 'the rules' matters?
Sorry, the few friends that I did play SC with never had any need for third party intervention in our games.
No, you really don't want to fuck with customs officers. Be civil and try to ignore violations of your rights because you will only make your situation worse.
Yes I agree. Ignoring violations of your rights will only make things worse.
And then people will marry turtles.
As it happens, I'm not actually a zoophiliac. Merely a vegan who finds it a bit twisted that we seem to consider it worse to let an animal have sex with you than it would be to kill it.
No, you are pretty much correct. I'm no vegan (far from it) but I think you are spot on correct. The whole concept is just our fear of anything relating to sex.
Think of it this way:
Carefully touch a bull's testicles and derive some pleasure from it: People will flip out at what a horrible crime it is.
Take a sharp knife, slice open the scrotum, remove the testicles, bread them and saute them and call them rocky mountain oysters and eat them. People will give you money for them.
Just wait until they add license plate recognition to those cameras.
Here in the States, I could imagine something similar being hooked up and defended on the grounds that 'you don't have privacy when you travel on public roads'.
Or some other bullshit.
And that's quicker, easier, cheaper, more permanent and less likely to be protested against (in the media I mean) than just photographing/filming the protesters how?
What good is a photograph of a person wearing a bandana? What good is a photograph if you have no one who recognizes the person. Certainly not all the police recognize everyone with a warrant.
Instead you have this:
Spray with solution. Cops arrest everyone who glows under UV later.
Time investment = near zero
Cost = Cost of solution + cost of UV lamps. (Very low)
Even if you release the people later, guess what?
Now they have GOOD pictures (mugshots) fingerprints, and a lot of other information in a much more easily accessible format. And the processing time per person is less.
Perhaps I'm just taking this the wrong way, but (assuming you group libertarians in with the "conservatives") you should know that it generally isn't the libertarians themselves who "view Somalia as a libertarian paradise." This is a categorization usually made by their opponents.
That was my point. It's the trolls who say that.
Don't you think that, if it actually were technologically feasible and Chrysler was gonna make a bundle of money, that it would happen. I just don't understand how government gets blamed for all the failures of business.
Not necessarily. It is quite possible to make a bundle of money, but government interference causes the 'bundle of money' to be of a similar or smaller size than the 'bundle of money' a company could make on another venture.
Consider the Corn industry in the US. Farmers DON'T plant other crops not because they wouldn't make money selling them, but because they can make more money by planting corn. It doesn't mean that corn is the better product, it's simply a factor that $x in yields $y out for corn, and $x in yields $y-b in terms of other products.
Consider cash for clunkers, in that program the government made it cost effective to DESTROY a usable working product.