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Comment Re:Supreme Court did *not* say corps are people .. (Score 2) 1330

One question;
How does "free speech" translate into "depriving people of medical benefits"?

The first is conceptual and raising a concern, the second is a fucking benefit, and people having babies and getting abortions is offensive to the Godly, women unwed is offensive to the Godly, and being fucking poor is obviously offensive because God must hate them.

Sorry, I was just showing my free speech. If I had acted like these religious a-holes, I'd be saying that your medical policy will not cover Cancer, because I believe that is self inflicted.

And NO this is a situation where a Corporation is treated as a person -- or a "group of people". If you incorporate -- for that benefit, you leave your provincial ideas behind. If you want to force jesus on the medical policies, stay a single proprietorship.

Comment Re:Google Cardboard (Score 1) 198

Turning it on its side and putting it into the Google Cardboard (or similar) stereoptic holder gives you about a 1440x1250 display per eye. Looks right to me.

Now if (as I suggested in the Cardboard item) they installed two cameras on the phone back, separated by about eye distance, you'd have a camera that could take and display stereoptic pictures and/or do augmented reality without losing the scene's depth.

Comment Retina display and dual cameras... (Score 4, Interesting) 42

This is a great use for the (otherwise excessively) high-resolution cellphone displays such as Apple's "retina".

Also: This is a strong argument for putting TWO cameras on a cellphone's backside - separated by about the typical distance between a person's eyes and equally speced relative to the centerline of the phone. That would enable the formation of a stereoscopic augmented reality display showing the correct image of the background. (It would also enable taking stereoptic pictures.)

Comment Able to grow crops now grown a bit farther south. (Score 0) 567

Even some of the more extreme estimates of the amount of temperature change expected just mean, to a farmer, that his great grandsons might do better if they switch to crops that are currently grown a couple hundred miles closer to the equator or a couple hundred feet lower on the hillside. (Something like they did during the Medieval Warm Period, when Iceland had lots more cropland and grapes were grown on a large scale in Britain.)

So even if you convince them that global warming is real, don't expect anything but a cheer from the farmers of Sweden.

There are a lot of steps between "It looks like the average temperature might go up four or five degrees C in the next couple centuries." to "We must take drastic action RIGHT NOW to AVERT DISASTER!". Like figuring out whether such a temperature rise is really a threat - or might even be a boon. We're still working on "Is it real?"

Except, of course, for politicians, who can use that last claim to increase their power, or (like Al Gore) make billions off a "carbon credit exchange" built on anti-global-warming legislation.

Comment No way I'd accept that. (Score 2) 131

The last thing I need, if I'm injured in a way that disfigures my face, is a car that won't let me start it to drive to the emergency room.

That's right up there with the federal experiment, back in the '60s or so, with mandating seatbelt and seat weight sensors that interlocked with the starter, so you can't start it if all the passengers aren't belted in.

(I, and about five of my friends, were very luck my car dated from before that mandate, the time we were visiting a friend who worked in a trainyard, my car stalled across a track, a train came {slowly but inexorably} around the sharp curve, and my right-front passenger unbelted in preparation to bail if I couldn't get it going again. We didn't have enough time to all bail ...)

Comment Privacy? In The Cloud? (Score 1) 214

So apple is retiring a photo editing software product and expects their customers to switch to their cloud photo editing service. They're replacing images stored locally with images stored externally.

Ignoring Snowden and the NSA for the moment, let's look at LEGAL seizure of your pictures to be used as evidence by government agencies, in rule enforcement, investigation, and criminal prosecution.

Not only are files under your physical control y'harder to get to physically than those transmitted over the Internet and stored in a vendor's server farm, they're also on better legal ground. The Supreme Court seems bent on treating electronic files, under your control, just like paper files locked in a safe at home. Just three days ago they ruled that police can't even search information stored on a cellpone carried by an arrestee without first coming up with probable cause and obtaining a warrant.

The last I heard, though, they considered information you stored on some vendor's servers to have been disclosed - that you have "no expectation of privacy" with respect to it. The police can go fishing through it just by asking, without jepoardizing prosecutions that result from what they fiind. Even if the third party cloud service demands paperwork rather than just giving access, a company like Apple has far less interest in protecting your data from fishing expeditions than you do.

Given the rat's nest of laws in the US, the prevalance of false or mistaken prosecutions, and the deliberate use of the legal and tax systems to punish those disliked by those in power (at all levels), I'd think nio sane person would put any personal information onto a cloud service (without at least encrypting it locally first with a key unknown to the service), let alone in a form that could be manipulated on the service. Photos are a particular risk, for a number of reasons I don't think I need to enumerate.

So I'd think that, both for personal use and for professional photographers, the substitution of a cloud service for a local tool working on locally stored data, would be unacceptable.

Comment Re:So....far more than guns (Score 1) 454

Once every couple of years, I see a post that needs to be +6 or higher. This was one of them.

Your words are calm, clear, rational, logical, and point out the real issue.

Thank you for sharing.

Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.

Comment Re:So What (Score 1) 454

I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.

"I don't care if you live or die..."

This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.

"...but I do think you should listen to my opinion."

Well, at least you gave us fair warning! Antisocial people are, paradoxically, the first to give their opinion on how the world should be run.

There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.

Perhaps you've just heard of this thing called society. It has been all about conforming to social norms with punishments for doing tabboo things for thousands of years now. The only real changes have been what is a norm and what is a tabboo.

Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.

American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.

Comment Re:It flies like a drone, it watches like a drone. (Score 1) 268

I don't feel too bad for enthusiasts as this limitation won't stop them.
It's the same as some semiautomatics or limited cartridge guns -- you can modify them.

If the definition of DRONE is flies by video -- then they aren't sold with video and someone buys a radio camera and attaches that. Suddenly it's a remote viewer.

I suspect more fear of drones from the Government as the capabilities of CITIZENS doing what they do 24/7 becomes apparent. Is the worry about someone ELSE spying besides corporations and government, or that there will be remotely commit crimes?

The bigger fear to come is when the first crooked fat cat gets caught by a drone -- THEN they will be treated like WMDs.

Comment Re:Hey Larry ... (Score 3, Insightful) 186

How many fingers am I holding up?

Screw you Google. "Do no evil" my ass.

This is just another instance of him saying "trust us, we're google, give us all your private information, what could possibly go wrong".

Yes, at some point it's quite rational to decide "this one entity has enough power". He's really very smooth, though. I'll hand him that:

By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused. But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."

That's a very diplomatic way to go about it. People often mistake that for honesty and openness in fact. It's basically a highly polished way of saying, "if you were educated you would agree with me."

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