They're generally awful and often Russian, but the quality varies. People watch them because they are one of the only ways to get hold of a movie prior to its release on DVD or BluRay perhaps months later. Some people are simply poor and buying an illegal DVD of the Avengers the week it's released at the cinema is better value than taking the whole family (where I live a family of four is probably going to pay around $60 including popcorn). Have a look at the top torrents on TPB, lots of people download them to check if the movie looks any good before they go or simply because they want to say they've seen it.

I think ultimately this is going to be a case of hard cheese on your part.

I largely agree with the MPAA on this one, for once, it's not unreasonable to demand that people don't take recording devices into a cinema and Glass is potentially a fantastically easy way to record a movie without anyone noticing. I have no idea if the battery or the storage would last for 2 hours though. From their perspective, the number of Glass owners is statistically zero, but the potential of one user uploading a recording could do them a lot of damage (the number of people who watch illegal cinema recordings is probably also statistically zero to them, but we'll gloss over that).

For what it's worth, I always own two pairs of glasses in case one breaks or I leave one at home and I need to drive somewhere.

British ;)

Do you think an IP rated Toughbook has fans to suck dirt in?

They're designed solely for surviving dirty, messy, wet and otherwise harsh environments. Panasonic also make IP68 rated tablets - dust ain't a problem. I only say Panasonic because I've used them at work and they do what they claim, there are other manufacturers to look at.

It's a trade off. The iPad is frankly flimsy for an apocalypse scenario. I would trade off long charge times for knowledge that I can't break the thing. Also a laptop is slightly more user serviceable than a tablet, e.g. if you need to swap out the main hard drive or RAM.

If you're downloding ~100GB of files that you can only read using a computer, it makes sense to grab a dump of Wikipedia (10GB compressed). It's public domain and has lots of (varying) quality information on a wide variety of topics. If you want images that'll run you around 0.5TB, but hey it's a fairly complete representation of humanity.

Could you survive on Wikipedia alone? Probably not, but it would really really help if you wanted cross-referenced information quickly.

Another point, no sarcasm, I'd trust Wikipedia for medical information slightly more than a 1900s era textbook.

You'd be better off burying it without the battery. Provided you knew what voltage to run it from and that Apple don't use smart batteries that have embedded ID tags (camera manufacturers sometimes do this to prevent clone batteries) you'd be fine.

Though why would you choose an iPad? I would choose something like a Toughbook - something that can actually withstand a drop and has other useful bits and pieces. It also has the benefit that it runs a full blown operating system, can be programmed and you can run all sorts of things on it. Bury it with some solar panels, one of those suitcase style chargers.

More of an issue is the lifespan of the storage. For 100 years you don't want to rely on flash. Nobody has tested modern day flash storage beyond well.. 10-15 years at most. We have a good idea of how long the drives will retain data, but it's impossible to check without waiting (some of the big cloud storage people have interesting writeups on hard drive failure rates). You want to rely on mechanical drives or really hope that those archival blu-ray discs which claim 100 year lifespans are actually worth something.

I don't see any reason why a hermetically sealed box of electronics wouldn't survive 100 years, especially if powered off.

Given that a good proportion of the world was forested in the past and CO2 was a lot lower back then, I don't think you can use that argument. England used to be heavily forested until we started fighting the French, Spanish and Portuguese navies. Similar things happened all over the world as industry and war kicked off. More importantly plants don't solely depend on CO2 to survive, there are limiting factors like nutrient content in soils, water and so on which are more likely to dominate.

As for politics: leaders tend not to go through with their bold claims because they know that it's political suicide if they actually start enacting them in a meaningful way. If we committed seriously to lowering emissions, things would probably get more expensive and that's a fast way to get kicked out of power. Similarly if you're being backed by energy companies, as are a lot of senators, it's awfully hard for you to admit that global warming is a problem. This is compounded with serious scientific ignorance on the part of many politicians.

What bugged me about Matlab are the things that should be easy, but aren't. Subplots? Sure, easy enough. What about subplots with a different colour map for each plot? Nope. You can do it, but it's a third party extension. There are lots of little niggles like this, particularly around visualisation, that are annoying when you're paying thousands of dollars for a product. Particularly when they're all doable in Matplotlib without any effort...

We were told at the start of a physics degree, that they never cared how good our initial knowledge of physics was. Physics can always be taught, but mathematics is much more fundamental and important to understand. The same goes for this. You can always learn a new tool, but if you don't know what to do with it then you're out of luck. I fail to see why Google wouldn't hire a competent statistician (of which there are very few) if they only knew Python or R.

As an aside, I thought most stats schools use R almost exclusively these days (some are moving to Python)? Matlab is the engineering pet.

The big plus for me is that Grooveshark has some very hard to find music that isn't on Spotify. It was also less prone to Spotify's habit of making tracks unavailable at random if the publisher decides it.

Disagree.

Automated content detection works very well at removing copyright audio from videos, it's annoyingly effective. All the major music labels publish via VEVO which has a monopoly - but with adblock it's perfectly good and the music is high quality. There aren't many TV shows that the publishers really care about, e.g. you can't find The Simpsons or Family Guy. Some local channels e.g. 4 in the UK have partnered with YouTube to serve content.

It depends what they care about. They're not going to go after ten year old albums that are on Youtube because it's not worth their time and it seems the automatic algorithms don't flag up those. However, if someone uploads the latest Jessie J album they're very interested because that's potentially millions of dollars in ad revenue they're not getting. Same goes for the odd movie that you can find on Youtube, most of them are too old to be worth chasing seriously.

Sure copyright stuff gets put on Youtube all the time, but their policing is pretty good and they do respect requests for deletion.

Someone needs to update from 8-bit mission plans!

It's a nice idea for a product, but there's the usual marketing fluff covering what it really is: Bathroom scales hooked up to the internet to weigh kegs.

I'm not entirely sure what the point is. If you buy a keg, it's in your inventory (hopefully) and you know how many pints are in it. Surely you set up your system so that once you've sold X pints of Y beer, the POS system says "Hey buddy, we're about to run out!" and can either order a new keg for you or indicate that you should get a new one. You replace the keg and hit a button that says 'new keg', enter the capacity and you start again. All of this data can be logged to an internal database.

For a start a POS system is cheaper, it can be done offline and the data is quite literally down to the second because you can log when someone buys it. You don't need to record how heavy the keg is at 5 minute intervals when you have ~500ml precision down to the second.

Now if you're a brewery then point is that this updates to the cloud and you can see when your beer is being sold - cool - but why can't this be done with a simple 'smart POS' system? And again, you'd have exact sales figures down to the minute or daily (really, do you care about figures that fine grained? on the time scale of brewing that's nothing). The big bummer I see here is that you're relying on the establishment to do the leg work for you. They have to install this system so you get your data.

"Especially with the microbrewer, they need to make checks to measure frequently because they canÃ(TM)t rely on how many millions of units they are shipping.''

Was that sarcasm? Surely you know that you sold X kegs to Y town and they're chomping at the bit for more...

The problem with these cameras is that often the data are so noisy that it's difficult to segment anything usable for a modelling environment. Theyre great for rough mapping, augmented reality and for gesture sensing, but for high resolution capture: no. I assume they're using time-of-flight/photonic mixing technology which has exploded in popularity recently now that the sensors are being mass produced. Don't forget they'll be crap outdoors too where background NIR is so high that it swamps the sensor.

If you can include very robust filtering and averaging then the data will probably be good enough for something like "map my room and plan where to put furniture". There are loads of areas where 3D vision is used daily, mostly in industrial settings, and there may well be a use case for rugged tablets there for e.g. parts inspection. Maybe someone in QA would be equipped with a 3D camera and pings when a part comes out malformed. In practice this is already highly automated using software like MV Halcon and laser line scanning. Perhaps there's a use-case for delivery services for mapping the bounding box of a parcel without needing to measure it.

For consumers, the answer is: not much, yet. There might be gimmicky applications where you can take a 3D photo and rotate around to get a better angle. Gesture sensing is usually rubbish, waving your hands around is a tiring experience for most people and it gets boring quickly.

Join the http://www.aavso.org/ and do some amateur work for them. Observing targets continuously is really important. The work is necessary - big money telescopes just don't have the time to do this sort of stuff.

Alternatively go the Mechanical Turk route and look at citizen science, finding things like exoplanets or interesting things in heaps of data. There's the possibility for publication there, but it's slim.

Realistically you're not going to be able to do anything worth publishing with 10 hours a week and rusty knowledge. You would be much better off learning about astronomy and trying to make the tools for data analysis far more user friendly than they are already. One of the best pieces of free software around is called Iris. It's a pain in the ass to use, but it works.

In the UK, the biggest barrier to home internet is line rental. My broadband costs about £3 a month, we get 10Mb or thereabouts which is more than plenty. I can stream and download things as fast as I reasonably need to without paying £20+ for a fibre connection. However, line rental costs around £16 a month and there's no way of getting round it. What use is free dialup when you have to pay for the phone line? For many people, it's frankly cheaper and more convenient to buy a mobile data plan with unlimited usage (e.g. Three) and limited tethering for £15 or less a month.