Exactly! Walter from Fringe would have been able to find the cure in about 45 minutes in a makeshift kitchen lab. Then he could have engineered a cure with some old yogurt, a teapot and some of his own blood. All that as long as he could just see the patient. You'd never get him to go to Africa though. That's why they have to bring the patient here!

Sure, self actualization is probably what really makes people happy, but as far as metrics go it's crappy. Money is quantifiable, thus it's one of the best metrics.

You could keep stockpiling this data for your whole life, die, and draw the conclusion that all that computer usage must have killed you.

Sorry, those phones are gone. Your best bet now is to become the guy at the Renn-Faire who texts stuff in on a physical keyboard. You get a spot between the blacksmith and the punch and judy show.

I worked a good many years in an exotic pet store. My area of expertise was reptiles and, in my time, i was bitten by all manner of things that most people don't want to get bitten by. Of all the animals i would deal with, the birds were the things that really terrified me.

Reptiles, yeah, you gotta repect them, esspecially the highly venemous ones. But, they are predictable and easily outsmarted. Birds can be fierce opponents. They are intelligence combined with effective weapons. They can deduce it's better to ignore the leather glove and aim for the exposed forearm. There was one macaw that i swear would pretend to be nice just to lull me into a vulnerable position.

Not a day goes by that i'm not thankful that i live in a world where i only have to worry about sharks, big cats, bears, wolves, and reptiles. I would be terrified having to worry about a bird that might get me.

Historically, this is accurate. However, the effective life of a given game seems to be increasing. It used to be that as technology advanced, it enabled entirely new systems of interaction. Lately, the advancements of technology seem to result in better looking games, and enabling games on more platforms, but the mechanics of the games themselves are largely remaining the same.

The moba scene is a good example of this. LoL and Dota2 are really more sets of rules than they are technology. It's about how long an ability takes to use after activation; how long it stays active; what it's area of effect is; etc. We reached a point a while ago where implementing the system was possible. We can deduce that future technology will be able to create the exact same rules and have processing power to spare. But is there a need to change the values? Those values have been determined to be fun and while technology may enable more and more precise values, it may not matter to the humans.

Human perception and reaction is limited. We've seen this in audio tech. It's largely good enough because nobody can percieve the differences in 128 bit audio to 1024 bit audio. Something similar seems to be happening in games. We reached a point where we can implement a rule set that is sufficiently interesting and challenging to humans. we might not need to build anything more complicated in the future. Even if we develop a holodeck, it's entirely possible that people will use it to recreate sitting at a desktop and playing dota. I guarantee that should we invent a holodeck, people will absolutely use it to run a program where you sit on the living room floor in front of a tube tv playing super mario bros. on a NES.

I'm one of them. I guess some poor SOB slaved away on a STEM degree while I took 3 years of fine art. Then I took his job.

The human is the weak link in the check in chain. The self check in terminals are fine, but fat lot of good it does when i still have to stand in a huge line just to have the human behind the desk put a sticker on my checked baggage. WTF is that about? weighing? certainly a scale could be present at the terminal, and until computer vision is reliable enough, a human could simply watch to make sure people arent just pretending to weigh their 80lbs luggage. Bombs? i thought that's what the TSA is for. Clearly the staff checking your ID is not the biggest stopgap in preventing bombs on board. Why can't the terminal simply spit out my baggage sticker for myself to put on?

water dragons (Physignathus cocincinus) are a lizard found in southeat asia. They are omnivorous and fill roughly the same role there that iguanas fill in south america. They share a lot of physical traits, and to the untrained eye are often confused for each other (though with a little experience, it's easy to tell them apart)

TFS makes me think that it's an article about covergent evolution. That's not exactly news. The kiwi looks like a mouse. water dragons look like iguanas. animals look like the role they fill in the ecosystem.

no, but do you look at your kitchen table or your hand through a microscope? The resolution of the world is very very small and it contributes to the appearance of items on a macro (human) scale. The engineer in me gets the argument that 1080p is already fulfilling and surpassing the use case of reading text, but i'd be interested to see what kind of magic can be pulled off when we have enough pixels to really mimic the way light is scattered off of microcopic surfaces.

The results of my study with a sample of 1 is: I can't tell the difference. I stopped buying discrete cards a long time ago.

What?!?! Next you are going to tell me that gravity can somehow draw one object towards another. Preposterous!

I've been wondering why we are jumping right to autonomous cars and not implementing autonomous trains on a large scale instead. It seems like an far simpler problem set. Your navigation options are pretty limited. the area that could contain obstacles is pretty limited. There have been some serious accidents caused by negligent locomotive operators. Why are we going right for the hardest level of autonomous navigation in the most chaotic environment?

After trains, why are we not working to automate tractor trailer trucks? again, they don't operate on the entire road system so it's probably a simpler problem to solve. I suppose the answer is simply that truck drivers would lose their jobs. (but clearly, they are today's blacksmiths. 20 years from now, truck drivers are only going to be seen at ren-faires)

sign me up. No earbuds will stay in my ears. If i remain perfectly still, they will simply fall out in a matter of minutes. My ears even seem to have some mechanism to actively eject the plug style buds that get shoved in the ear canal.