People with a rudimentary knowledge of international economics and politics believed any of that? Much less a decent knowledge of network hardware and software.

We can't lay large scale cognitive dissonance on politicians and government agencies. It violates all forms of rational thinking. What rational mind thinks that a government agency (e.g. the NSA) whose hiring profile is mathematics graduates and ex-marines isn't obtaining information in a questionable manner and then ripping apart encryption.

In the US we have presidents who tap the strategic oil reserves to drop gas prices a nickel or two just to improve their or their party's chances just before an election. All of these sociological maneuvers are obvious as can be. We can't hold the matchstick men accountable for setting us ablaze when the public is so complicit.

Clearly, many of you missed the short PBS run of the BBC documentary, Spooks, which details the exploits of MI5 in the UK. Peter Firth as the lead, great casting.

Joking aside, I don't understand all of the shock and awe at post-Snowden revelations about how various security agencies around the world operate. I have yet to see anything that comes off as remotely new knowledge since the Cold War. Yes, computers have made it easier in the years since the Cold War to store, catalog, and search data as well as automate human tasks. That's what computers were made for. Did people really think that the security services were going to act like the IRS and use the computer as a poor substitute for paper forms as opposed to modernizing and stretching technology's legs? Are people really so naive as to not understand the extreme manner to which computing advances have been driven by the needs of various secret security agencies around the world?

They also missed out on the concept of thresholds, dead zones, and sensitivity that were standard concepts with joysticks on DOS games 20 years ago. Even the concept of usage based calibration!

The controller should be able to see the "ground plane" of the monitor and adjust rotationally +/- 5-10 degrees and its position between the user and screen and then calibrate that cursor and hand movement are proportional. It's not even difficult projection math to have a cursor that is perceptually under your finger. The hand-eye coordination to see your hand in front of yourself but have to visually track a disproportionate cursor is about as bad as it gets. Then to have every hand shake and micro-movement send everything flying. Or worse, to have the whole thing jerk around because the tracking briefly lost track of a finger and reset the center of the palm (input smoothing!).

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.