Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.

Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)

127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.

If they want an easy, comfortable patient relationship they should have gone into dermatology, not oncology. Dying and cancer go hand in hand, and I would expect such a profession to be better skilled at handing those issues than the general public. As a medical practice, they should be willing to engage allied professionals like psychologists or social workers to promote more realistic goals.

By the time we had that meeting with the oncologist, the suffering of my mom was was really evident. I didn't think she had much of a chance of recovery and another round of chemo would have been very difficult for her and difficult for us.

This is a larger topic, but the US doesn't do dying well and it costs all of us dearly in desperation measures. The patients and their families pay in pain, heartache and treasure and the rest of pay in treasure. Recognizing a point when recovery or meaningful life extension isn't possible and switching to palliative care makes so much sense. Plus it often gives patents and their families some time to use the the health/energy they have left for living versus making them sicker from treatment before they ultimately die.

That actually doesn't sound that bad:

"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.

"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)

That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.

I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.

And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.

I don't think volume explains it completely. The most expensive components in an IP camera (camera, network, controller) are mass produced in incredible quantities already, whether it's for smartphones or dashcams or Gopros or point and shoot cameras, and stuff like smartphones with far more technology included (super hi res touchscreen, LTE modem, battery, flash, vastly more complex software) are cheaper than all but the junkiest 720p IP cameras.

*Components* isn't the reason, the components are dirt cheap. I don't even think assembly is a big reason -- security cameras are ubiquitous, so assembly, case parts, etc. should be widely available, too.

Really the closest you come is game cameras, which mostly are missing the networking part but kind of make up for it in complexity with motion sensing.

IP cams' web interfaces are one of the few places, though, where it's nearly ubiquitious.

I'd say it has more to do with junk Chinese electronics compaies all buying the same core tech package and minimally changing it to suit their branding.

What's truly obnoxious are the perfectly usable cameras which haven't upgraded their firmware to ditch activex for javascript.

I think there's a ton of money being dumped into the walking dead.

When my mom was at stage 4 of metastasized breast cancer, we had a family meeting with the oncologist to discuss my mom's situation. When asked what -- if any -- chances she had for life extension (not a cure, but more than 12 months) he was totally equivocal about it and was basically looking to start another round of chemotherapy. I felt like he was just looking for another round of payments before she died. They give you the thinnest hope to try to get you to keep using their services.

I've heard similar stories before from other people with older relatives, very sick and unlikely to every recover in any meaningful sense of the word yet the doctors insist on expensive and invasive treatments. The only explanation I can think of is that it's good business for them.

So when this trusted friend claims the $14m and then decides to keep it all, what do you do then? Hey, he's not sharing the money from the scheme I rigged?

It sounds like the perfect crime...from the trusted friend's perspective.

Well, I wasn't the one using it, but in late 1998, I was working at a printer -- a big industrial one, with huge lithographic presses. The prepress department there was transitioning to using Macintosh G3s for DTP work, and I was there to help with that. The reason for the transition was that their old DTP needs had been served by some sort of DEC minicomputer.

It was about the size of a fridge, with dual 8" floppy drives, so I'm hoping it was a MicroVAX, but I don't recall. Each workstation wired into it had a VTerm, as well as a Barco graphics monitor and a mouse. You'd type in commands to their DTP software on the VTerm, then view the work as a line drawing on the Barco (all it was capable of -- photos had to be pasted in by hand) and adjust it with the mouse.

They'd been using the thing since the early 80s, but apparently it was breaking down and they were having trouble pulling people out of retirement to fix it, and that, plus the new digital press they were building, forced the transition to Macs.

The company got bought some years later, but is still in operation, so I guess things more or less worked out.

I've cut a plastic binding with a sharp rock. I didn't knap it myself, it was naturally sharp, but... I don't think it gets much more old school than that ;) Unless there's someone here who made productive use of throwing their own excrement in a production environment.

Combining multiple high res adjacent pictures here.

This is magnificent - I count at least ten different types of terrain in just this tiny part of Pluto. What a world.

And IMHO it looks even more like subglacial liquids at play now.