And the real-world, in location practice for urban warfare...

  - To foreign state, 'please use our autonomous vehicle, they are _really_ good'.
  - Years later, turn on intelligence mode for the vehicles.
  - To army, stick your VR goggles on and get familiar with the foreign state.
  - Drop army in, and they already have ground level intelligence as to what is where...

VR and 3D gaming is definitely a dual-use technology.

Exactly. The many sorts of information is where there is a spectrum of
    - Cool (accurate fall color maps, tree growth rates, etc), to
    - Annoying (local government charging for mundane, but visible property improvements), to
    - Scary (complete timeline of when you were at your house, who visited and when).

Cool is cool, Scary is where I pause.

Google knows where you live, it knows where you drive. (I'm not trying to demonize google, but they have all the cards).

I agree, the point data is available for processing. Simple ways of reducing the data load (assuming that wireless stays slower than broadband), is having the existing mesh, and identifying outliers from a confidence interval. Those outliers are rejected as either transients (cars, people, etc) or changes in the environment. A lightweight protocol could allow vehicles to identify candidate areas and upload as needed. We have early dot.com era enterprise class processors in our pockets. The huge amount of data is relatively easy to reduce to a manageable size relative to technology (local, in-car compute and wireless bandwidth).

Remember also that google is investing WiFi heavily (Project Fi, WiFi by google at retail hubs, OnHub, Loon) which will give a nice mesh of higher bandwidth networks available when needed.

I'll give an analogy.

Street view is like someone snapping a photo of your house as they drive by every few months (or years).

The LIDAR information coming together now, is every few minutes (when we have lots of autonomous cars) having high accuracy 3d streetview being pushed. If you move a brick, google* will know. If you cut back a tree, google* will know. If you have a new car, google* will know. And google* will know within a few hours of you having changed your visible frontage.

Although it could be used harmlessly and for good use, the instantaneous nature of the data is what moves the needle from ultra-cool to kinda-scary.

But as a low-modded replier said, you can call me grandpa... (Still a bit young, but yeah).

GPS location information has revolutionized mapping. Google and Apple get high quality position data for cars traveling. Any non-mobile platform system have many barriers to entry (cars traveling around taking photos), verifying road information. Google gets to validate incredibly accurate maps under the guise of providing traffic, location services and so on the the mobile phone users.

LIDAR, particularly those paired with accurate color mapping information for those point clouds are going to be creating high accuracy, full color 3d meshes of the pretty much anywhere that cars go near. The small snippet of video just after https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (from the previous slashdot article about autonomous golf carts) shows some of the power of LIDAR. Just after the car flyby it shows the point map being updated by every pass through an area. Incrementally correcting the 3D view of the area. The example is just a few passes by the same car.

Imagine 1000s or 100,000s of automonous vehicles with LIDAR pushing data to a vendor for "navigation experience", but still building a 100% model of everything line of site to the LIDAR. And then imagine 100s of drones flying overhead, doing virtually the same thing.

Throw in some AR like Magic Leap being able to deal with that 3d Mesh. Pretty amazing things that our kids will grow up, pretty scary for everyone else..

Is there a difference between a coder, a programmer, a computer scientist, software engineer and a computer engineer?

Is there a difference between a programmer, a computer scientist and a software engineer?

There are some unexpected impacts of this law (I haven't read the full law).

A non-commercial area of drone use that is currently not possible, and will not be possible under this law (assuming there are no exemptions) is around search and rescue. Drones fitted with cameras help with visual scanning, with heat sensing equipment they can be sued for far more effective search and rescue.

This made me chuckle. I recently crossed the "this new college grad could be my first child threshold" and the "damn, I can't focus close enough on this ultra-tiny low contrast font on this power supply, I need someone with young eyes to read it". I'm still continually asking the young peers "has anyone seen this technology before", "or does anyone know of any alternative approach". Most of the time, it's cricket sounds in response.

I don't think age is an issue at all, you can have 30 year olds that are stagnant and rely on depth and stability. At any age, breadth, engagement and awareness really helps.

One challenge at any stage is really around outside distractions (married since young, 3 kids) really puts a dent in the volume or breadth or absolute depth that can be acquired, but it's not that hard to get on the right side of the bell curve.

Assuming that these Home Robots are fusion powered, they of course will always be 20 years away...

Google has a strong interest in having a large number of Google derived WiFi out in the market.

Project Fi handsoff between different carriers and WiFi. With WiFi they don't have carrier charges.

I wouldn't be too surprised if Google somehow ties Project Fi into the "OnHub" effort. I'd also expect google making lots of loss-leader agreements with companies to offer lots of Google managed WiFi that will make the backhaul for Project Fi free.

10W is incredibly hot for any sort of passively cooled, enclosed device.

The machine would be quite warm (almost hot) to the touch unless they use some inventive cooling. The current Gen Apple TV is about 6W, and your typical smartphone is around 2-3 W.

There is a reason that NV has only really been able to get a foothold in tablets, android TV, cars and their own shield product. Quite simply put, they have historically been fast and hot. Great as a SOC within certain markets.

This is exactly why the benchmarks include

    1) a way to repeat the benchmarks as described in the article see page 4 - 'phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1507285-BE-POWERLOW159'.
    2) The compiler options are included

Armed with those two pieces of information, you can go and "prove" that the benchmark is, as you called it - bullshit. Although rarely, if ever that I am aware of, does anyone respond to an article with those two pieces of information and say - "here, if you run it in this mode, you will see a marked difference in performance".

As Bert64 says in the response to the grandparent, 99% of end users will be running the software - either pre-compiled by their distribution vendor in this way, or compiled by the benchmark author's defaults. If you really want to prove that the benchmark is crap, then by all means make meaningful suggestions to _any_ of the existing machine benchmarks.

Michael (Phoronix) and I had some interesting discussions with Sun (pre Oracle) about 64 vs 32. They argued that the benchmarks were misleading because they did not use the Sun Studio (IIRC) compiler for 64 bit. In the discussions, it became clear to even the Sun people that it was quite difficult for even the Sun people to configure and use the platform in the way they wanted Phoronix to. Out of the box, gcc compiling for 32 bit - was how they configured the systems. And guess what, the './configure;make;make install' triplet would compile the same way we did.

Full disclosure, I have a long history with Phoronix, and have been involved in work that they have done in the past.

Ideal was a reference to the "ideal" in the original post. There was no comment on it being ideal. I doubt there is an ideal.

That is how Android is dealing with ART. https://source.android.com/dev...

JAVA (Dalvik) the ideal ISA, dex2oat converts the java bytecode to native ISA (intel or ARM).

Similar to pNaCL in Chrome, where at least historically the LLVM IR (effectively the ISA) would be pushed to the chrome devices which would then complete the conversion to native code.