LEAP promised similar things. Logically, their technology should work well, but the execution was piss poor. The trick to getting 3D finger interaction to work will either be higher immersion, such as proportional (to the controller) 3D displays or Occulus Rift style implementations where you can see your hand interacting. Another issue LEAP has is defining the horizontal and vertical ground planes. Their controller would work better if it detected and calibrated to you monitor and activation motions occurred when you touched the screen in many cases.

3D gesture identification and intent management seems to be a stumbling block so far as well. Seems largely that programmers figured out the hand skeletal structure and then immediately ignored that musculature, tendons, and fine motor control are not the same in all positions and directions.

Some example dumb hand / finger gestures for 3D control (I see these in LEAP motion software and in proposed hand gesture libraries for similar technology):
  - Triggering a thumb against the side of the index finger - most of the hand moves, especially the index finger (which is typically being keyed off of for cursor position)
  - Triggering by pulling the index finger like a trigger - surprisingly inconsistent when there is no resistive grip or button
  - Holding a splayed out hand(s) horizontally, mid air as a default centered position
  - Keying z-rotation off of a hand pointed at the screen as if one's arm protruded from the chest
  - Expecting the hand to translate mid-air like camera dolly & track.
  - Lots of other ergonomically / kinematically ignorant ideas. I think they modeled everything with those articulated wooden hands for clay sculpture. And no arms.

Just some things to consider before creating your own 3D motion controller...

Dibs on the "on a mobile computing device" patent.

Unions. The word you are looking for is unions will never allow their work to be parsed by an AI that might increase productivity and might discern when crews are slacking and wasting time.

I can't be the only one who saw this and thought, well sure a 15 year old can make a better faster 3D printer. Most of the reason I haven't bought one myself has been how underwhelmed I have been by the quality and results.

The only ones where I thought there precision and accuracy were useful were the UV/Near-UV plastics that operated on DLP lithographic principles. The consumables for those had too narrow of a usage range and ridiculous cost scales. The Makerbot and similar ABS extrusion machines are just dog slow, and get slower with increased complexity, not to mention consumables in the still silly price range.

Building something better and faster is easily within reach, and most of the commercial $10-100k models overcome all of the weaknesses of hobbyist / consumer offerings. Bringing some of the commercial speed optimizations (multiple nozzles) and such is trivial given the weak position of the hobby market hardware.

The upside to a certification program, even if privatized, allows the assignment of liability which supersedes the bullshit in the EULA. The idea is to create a "seller beware" instead of "buyer beware" market and to empower the consumer in such a way as to scare off the majority heap of charlatans. Further the cost of entry of certification clears a lot of that out anyway. Certainly the spam crap apps out of China and India.

It also gives a registered address to send the legal summons and other such when someone does end up producing dangerous crap.

All of the butthurt that privatized certification is useless comes from people who don't understand how awful things would be in industries so regulated otherwise.

Girl: Did I fall asleep?

Doctor: For a little while.

Girl: Shall I go now.

Doctor: If you like.

Only because the market has developed around boat owners who all have trucks and trailers. In places where this isn't the case, dry and wet docks are plentiful and affordable. How much better would it be to have a service come pickup the boat and drop it in the lake for you and by the time you get there Saturday morning it is fueled and ready to go.

The post WWII rugged, independently capable of all feats American has been a horrible target for the populous. Weird given that WWII was the epitome of teamwork and interdependence in all things. Really the only distinguishing feature from today's specialization to the point of incompetence 2 degrees to the left or right, is entirely the idea of having perspective enough to go grab the right person for a given job or realize one must imitate it for a bit.

I love trucks, but I f***ing hate all the guys who drive one for status or compensation. I would never daily drive a truck for commuting (long term). It's a working class tool that should look well utilized. If you like trucks for show, get one for show and drive a midsize car for commuting. You can pay for it with the gas savings.

At least the sports car guys can claim to actually drive their cars in the intended fashion on a regular basis, and put money back into society with speeding tickets. Maybe we need a fine for driving down a highway every day with an empty truck bed.

No, no battery technology has not gone significantly further. You are confused with CPU / RAM / Flash trends in the mobile market which have markedly improved battery life (e.g. Surface Pro 1 vs 2: Ivy Bridge vs Haswell - battery didn't change). We're still on Li-ion variants and will be for some time.

Tesla building there own battery plant allows some optimization of form factor and cell packaging which will come out to appreciable but nothing huge in weight savings and increased safety.

A bigger portion with aluminum is the stamping / machining / welding / inspection / prep & paint steps are all massively more expensive. Aluminum parts have higher manufacturing fail rates and you run the machinery way slower because the metal is more sensitive.

They might be able to go with aluminum skin and select non-structural parts with a steel body. Several Japanese and a few European luxury cars use this technique. The Infinity G / Q series uses aluminum hoods (and skin?) with steel bodies for example. Structural aluminum is just pricey and difficult to work. From a material science / engineering standpoint, aluminum always fatigues to failure by definition; so designing, building, and validating aluminum parts takes a lot more time and expense.

Linux is just as crashy as Windows. Sure that means about a 100x decrease in frequency from the 90's, but it's still absurdly buggy and subject to the constant patch cycle bullshit. That said, it's fine as an isolated from the ECU / BCM as an infotainment system. Heck, it can even control the A/C for all I care as long as it never hooks as software into the ECU (a hotline to tell the ECU to engage the A/C clutch is fine).

Let's keep automotive ECU systems in the stone age with assembly or occasionally QNX. I suppose I could get behind a BSD variant if the code was stripped down enough and custom tested against fixed hardware enough.

Actually, the US military has already been playing with drones like this that use inductive latch hooks to recharge off the local grid.

So it sounds like it really catches the cusp of income ranges. I make an upper 5 and can pull the trigger, but this seems like a toy for the low 6 figure incomes.... A teaser for the 4k denied so long by the bulls**t adoption of 1080P in the computing space.

For gaming (not text or web) if the refresh is high enough (30 hz is not), scaled resolutions look fine. We've hit high enough resolutions where certain scaling operations just look like anti-aliasing instead of blurring.

Scaling rightfully got a bad name when it was upscaling 800x600 content to a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 17" monitor. It looked blurry. Scaling 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 on a 27" monitor looks really good. I'm more interested on the gaming side if these 4K TVs will take 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 at 60 hz and maintain refresh rate (technically if it is 120 hz it should, but I have my doubts about their scaler). Doing productivity work at full resolution would mostly be fine at 30 hz, if occasionally annoying.

Not fishy at all imho. PST files are a bitch, and a surprising number of organizations, public and private use crappy email systems with no auditing, backups, or archival systems.