Garbage. Different people learn different ways. Some people want to be shown by peers, others are happy figuring things out for themselves. Human interaction is most critical when you're learning about human interaction. You wouldn't have a 3rd grader doing a remote online class as you end up butchering their social skills, however at the university level this is a whole different ballgame.

There's a whole industry based on educating by correspondence which works just fine. I see this as an extension available to everyone. The high drop-out rate? Easily attributable to the fact that most people (including myself) had NOTHING riding on the course at all. I signed up for fun, I ran out of time and didn't finish it. I also didn't need to. On the flip side I put in a shitload of effort into my university degree without ever attending the university because it was an 8 hour drive away, and I slaved my way through a high GPA, and got a degree because I actually had my future (and financial incentives) riding on the result.

It's a load of garbage anyway. There's nothing this technology does to invade privacy that we can't already do.

You're in the open, then use a parabolic mic to pick up the conversation you're clearly already taping.
You're behind some glass, then use a laser microphone to pickup the conversation which while it sounds James Bondish, actually already exists.

As a society we're already too little too late on the privacy side.

Because we as humans weren't even able to do it. Cast your mind back to the 2006 World Cup finals when Zidane head-butted an opposing player.

Lip readers concluded a wide range of possible answers to why he lashed out including calling him a terrorist, insulting his mother, and saying his sister was a prostitute. This may be something specific to the Italian language that the words may sound the same but it highlights the problem. All conclude that he said the Italian for "go fuck yourself" at the end.

The problem with following grammar rules is you assume people follow the grammar rules.

This is just like any project. The electronics projects are the worst. I remember seeing this iPad display adapter. They wanted to raise 15000GBP. Pledge 65GBP and you'll get the circuit board ready to DIY the display.

I wanted that. So I after a quick search I went to abuse mark and ordered an adapter ready to go for 20GBP.

They are kickstarting a product that already exists for 3.5x the price, and it looks like people fell for it.

The largest files you can get from a camera are TIFF not RAW, and thus you'd be looking at 40Mpix * 16bit per pixel per channel (remember a final image is per channel, the RAW has a beyer matrix) * 3 channels = 240MB/picture. That's only 2200 photos on your super memory card now.

Why would you shoot in TIFF? Production ready from the camera. If you shoot at an event you can use the camera to process the image and then save an uncompressed file ready for print / transmission. Kind of important if you want to get the publication out quickly.

But lets pick an example closer to home. I went on holidays last year and snapped away 11000 RAW files. On the D800 that's around 60MB/file or closer to 45MB with NEF compression. At 459GB this would have done away with my need to cart two external harddisks and a laptop with me. I was actually considering buying little memory card copying unit that would have done away with the laptop, just slot in the card and it auto-copies to the harddisk, but they were ludicrously expensive.

I can totally see a use for this. I can actually see a use for 2 of these (my camera can write the same photo to two cards at once). 11000 files are a lot to lose in one go.

Arbitrary means to pick something at random or at whim. In this case the choice of freezing / boiling points of water were NOT arbitrary, but rather consistent with the rest of the units of the SI system which are based around some interlinking thing.

1L = 1000g of water.
0degC is the freezing point of water.
100degC is the boiling point of water.
1 calorie is the energy needed to heat 1g of water by 1degC (though superseded by an SI unit this was the original metric measurement for energy)

Even if you dismiss this, it's still less arbitrary than a measurement system that bases the arbitrary number of 96degC on the temperature of blood in the human body, and has a zero point where the history is not actually known; is it brine mixed with ammonium chloride with a bit of error added in, was it the coldest day of Fahrenheit's home town? The only thing not arbitrary about the Fahrenheit scale is that it was later redefined ... based around the freezing point of water.

A bit more Wikipedia trivia Celsius was originally called centigrade a completely not arbitrary name meaning 100 steps.

That's actually funny, you must be hanging out with a very different crowd. I don't see anyone hating on Windows 7 or Windows XP. Plenty of hate was directed at other products though, and plenty of hate is directed at specific apps.

This is certainly not a "trend" though. There are a few annoying things about Windows 7 which were better in XP, and there are in my opinion a few stupid people out there who think that a 13 year old operating system is using the system properly, they'll learn when they get an SSD drive or suddenly realise a typical application uses more than 3.5GB of RAM.

XP was great in its day. Windows 7 still is great. The in betweeners are a steaming turd which get the hate they rightfully deserve, and that's about consistent with what I see.

I have a static IP, but seriously why is it a terrible idea? You want to do a targetted attack? Go ahead. I'll wager what you'll do is no different from many of thousands of internet searching botnets creeping around for vulnerabilities. I get a random attempt to log into my wordpress account about every 2min (as admin user which doesn't exist of course), I see endless firewall logs port scanning for various services, and once a while ago someone actually exploited a bug in Apache which got them limited access to the server and now I focus a lot more on automatic updates.

For the most part these are dumb scammers not hyper intelligent hackers with the ability to flip bits using the wings of a butterfly.

All those small other manufacturers may be either ignoring it or doing secret research projects the depths of their garages.

Or the article simply ignored the one company which has been quite publicly showing off a hydrogen car for the past 7 years. The BMW Hydrogen 7

The first half of what you're saying is correct. The second half is the garbage that is repeated here ad infinitum every time there's a story about Facebook or Google.

You see I AM paying Google for the service. Just because it's not cash doesn't mean I'm not paying. I exchange information and statistics for the use of their service. This directly makes me a customer. The fact that they have other b2b customers who further use this information is completely irrelevant.

Actually that's not how contract laws work. By signing up to a service you're exchanging one thing of value for another. Information is a valid currency.

Why not? What can you do with one IP address? On the flip side why do you think this is any worse than giving someone access via a cloud service after which they can look at your IP anyway?
216.34.181.45

Come at me bro!

Hmm about half as many people died last year from asthma in my country than from skin cancer.

I'd say we're doing pretty well.

Qualify which versions of windows you're talking about. See it's not a case of being trendy but the Windows hate came with the specific product. Hating Windows ME, Vista, and Metro was not a trend. It's a constant. People haven't stopped hating it, they've stopped using it.

Shall we throw anecdotes at each other?

You say Elon Musk (who is good), I say Clive Palmer (Australian mining magnate who bought his way into politics for that appears to be exclusively so he could derail efforts to ban a coal terminal expansion at the border of the great barrier reef.

We can keep swapping lists of good and bad billionaires all day but I think your list may run out first. Mind you you're saying Elon Musk under the assumption that he's not attempting to do what every other one is. SpaceX seems like a worthy cause to you and I, and it would seem it for him too if he manages to completely corner the space market. Same with Tesla. Yes it is possible he is a selfless greenie who would sink billions to make the world a cleaner place, or he's hoping to capitalise on one of the fastest growing trends in recent years, green transport.

Personally I think he does it to get richer. We may benefit for it, but lets face it he has power and he's getting more of it every day. (oh and he's in the Time magazine's most influential list, but he so far hasn't featured on the cover).