Sorry but this is not what I have in mind when I think of CV. This could be accomplished using hardware alone. All the pencils are very carefully lined up and running at a fixed rate past a sensor. The image is very small and all you have to look for is is the bit pattern representing the specific color then activate the solenoid for the puff of air.

When I have thought of CV, and it comes around often, the biggest problem I see is the randomness of the perspective view of the object. Take bowling ball for and place it anywhere. To the human who knows what a bowling ball is, it really does not matter what the perspective is. We recognize if based upon its general size, pattern of swirls, holes, scuffs on it and other factors in low light, bright light or even "normal" light.

Even an object that we have never seen before becomes fairly instantly recognizable if given only it's noun name.

The massive amount of information our brain "collects and stores" that allow us to do this is in its level of complexity so completely beyond anything we have ever done in silicon it might as well be magic.

A match made in hell!

I Invite you to watch this. http://youtu.be/d9r3H4iHFZk

The risk of en-route collision is really, really small.

this risk of collision increases exponentially as all the planes bound for JFK, Newark, LaGuardia, LAX, SFO etc. get closer to the airport. I live in the SF Bay Area, on busy flight night and there is no fog you can see them lined up for landing for miles and miles, two abreast on the approach to 28L/R and that is when you can't have every pilot deciding for themselves what order they go in and how far apart they are.

As for TCAS it is a good thing, but it has limits as to how much information if gives you. 500ft below at 270 relative to you, and in a landing pattern or executing the published missed approach it is just not good enough when 400 peoples lives are on the line.

As far as en-route goes everyone is going to be trying to fly the least cost route from say KLAX to KJFK. With the volume of flights getting larger and larger how long do you give it before the pissing matches start over who gets the route in that time slot?

You can only land so many planes at a given airport in n amount of time. If everyone gets there at around the same time the sequencing for landing is going to be way to hairball.

The PHB's should never, ever, be in charge of something like this.

Well besides being a single point of failure I can't really see what could possibly be wrong with that.

In an airliner you have several screens that can display and particular set of indicators, and as was previously mentioned, as analog guages, in a small plane you are lucky if you have two, but generally speaking you only have one and they are not so very big.

Of all the studies of human factors in operating hi performance equipment in possibly dangerous situations airplane cockpits are probably the most intensely studied, so I think I will take their results coupled with my own experience and stick to analog guages for flying.

I am a pilot and for the most part every guage in the plane points straight up to 12 o'clock when things are normal

With one glance I can tell that everything is running fine, I don't have to think, I just look and in a busy cockpit that can mean the difference between life and death. If I am shooting an IFR approach down to minimums I have a very rapid scan of a very few instruments and every 5th scan or so it is a full panel scan so I know that among other things, the vacuum pump suction level is correct, and it is normally on the other side of the cockpit ( small planes). Everything pointing straight up, yep all is well, back to my limited IFR scan.

That phrase is quickly turning into the newest oxymoron.

Hey I know lets stitch together these 8 completely open and utterly un-certifiable frameworks, have everything talk to each other through XML files, store high value passwords in them so we can just look at the database like a black box. Then lets expose all that to the world of hackers and madmen and then act surprised when we discover its been broken into!

And then that cock sucker Jim Manzi decided if you can't beat them with your software, take the massive cash you have in the bank and suit them into bankruptcy IN Boston with a hand picked Judge all nice and paid for. To this day, if I see him I will hit him square in the nose as hard as I can and dance over him while he bleeds.

Borland eventually won in court but not until after they had been bled of their cash to defend the suit and had sold Quattro of to Novell ( dumbest thing that Uncle Ray ever did perhaps except trusting Microsoft ) where it languished before being sold to Correl .

I think that it is very context dependent. Think of it this way:

You have an instrument monitoring something, it is remote. You poll it every hour. In the first 10 hours you get some values. One of those values is zero (0) and that is a valid value for that particular measurement. In second 10 hours you notice you have some null's. Should I interpret those as zero or should I interpret those as no data acquired ?

I do know that Oracle will not count null values when doing any kind of averaging.

As someone who is a programmer, but had never had an Apple Desktop or Laptop until my wife and son got me one for Christmas this pas year I have to say X-Code needs more polish.

I say this because I was / Am a heavy user of Delphi ( Yup Object Pascal ). You might think OP is a toy but you could not be more wrong, but that is another argument. What I can say definitively is that Borland and now Embarcadero know how to do an IDE better then just about anything I have ever seen.

Apple needs to take a page out of their playbook. In Delphi when you add a component to a form, it adds ALL the code that you need to the unit that is handling the form. A simple double click on the element adds the code shell for that particular action, either from the object browser or from the form. You simply write the code that makes that action do what it needs to do, nothing else.

Now contrast this with X-Code... It will let you drag a component onto a form, in iOS Mavericks or whatever, but after that you have to and start screwing around in .h files, adding this adding that just so that element will be recognized and will compile. Couple that with the syntax of Objective C and you have a program that can only be written by someone who fairly in-depth knowledge of Objective C. I mean not they should not have to have that knowledge but it should not be a requirement to do basic forms and the like.

As it is mentioned, using the "Story Board" concept you can only write very simple apps that don't accomplish a whole lot. So while Apple is getting there they have a lot of ground to cover.

The film did its level best to condense a really great book into 90 minutes. The actors were genuine, they really got into it and they took some of the themes and made them poignant yet not overly so.

While it will never be among the worlds best movies, it really did better than I have ever seen trying to take a book like HGTTG and give it cinematic life.

And their use of actual costumes ( created by the late Jim Hensen's company ) was so MUCH better than CGI. All in all it was a good film.

A small problem with your idea. Who is "you" ? So if an author enters into an agreement to have his book made into a movie by say, The Disney Company who is the "content creator"? Is it the author? The screen writer?, The shareholders in Disney Stock? The CEO of Disney?

Lets say for instance you arcademan come up with a really cool video game that seems to be an absolute hit. Do you have the resources to put up a server farm that can distribute that content to the masses? Let's say I do and I put my considerable resources to work on your behalf for some fee per distributed unit. I really have no sure way of knowing if you will sell 100, 1000, 10000 or even a million units. So I want an exclusive agreement because I have made those resources available to you and therefor have tied those up.

I do not know either. Backwards compatibility perhaps? I do know that if you have written code and have used bit mapping ( INT AND 0xA23F4D ) and things like that you will more then likely run into to trouble ( in theory it should not matter since the number of bits is not shrinking ) when your INT goes from 32 bits to 64 bits and the same thing goes if you using any ROT commands so who knows.