Elchock

Perhaps. Where* was the satellite at or just before this event?

*INB4 In space.

Git 'er done!

I get what's going on now.

It may have started as a demonstration of poor color encoding, white balance and perception. But it quickly morphed into a demonstration of suggestibility.

There are (at least) three dress pictures out there. Not counting the re-balanced original. The first was of a blue and black dress, probably taken with a cheap camera phone. And that started it all off. The dress, way overexposed (mis-balanced) looked white and gold (tan, yellow, etc.) But the photographer knew it was supposed to be blue and black. So they posted this and started the discussion. Finally, some professional equipment was taken out, the dress photographed and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's blue and black.

But there are at lest two other photos out there. A photoshopped copy of the original (thanks, /b/tards), with the colors changed to white and yellow. And a second dress with a very similar striped pattern, white and tan. But if you look closely, its not the same one and it has been cropped so as to eliminate background cues. Now, if you show these two pictures to people, some will still say "blue and black". But its not a matter of perception anymore. Thee two photos were never blue and black. Its all about suggestion. People 'know' that its blue and black because they've been told so. So that's the correct answer.

It's sort of like the Jimmy Kimmel Man on the Street prank interviews, where someone asks a passer-by a question about something that never happened. And they formulate an answer, just to sound well informed. And they might even believe that the incident in question actually happened when they walk away.

... brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to assemble iPhones. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.

I think that wave soldering machine just sighed.

It just smells funny.

- F. Zappa

Trying to evaluate colors based on a digital photograph, which may have been white balanced who knows how. And then uploaded through Instagram filtering algorithms. And finally viewed on various displays that have been tweaked (or mis-configured) to suit different users' tastes.

The xkcd cartoon illustrates one kind of optical illusion. But that's not what is going on here (or on Instagram/whatever). Because you can download two copies of the photo, one that appears white and gold, the other that appears blue and black. And you can actually verify, using various graphics tools, that the colors are actually different. It's not really a visual illusion produced by human perception. Its the result of massive post processing of a digital image.

Perhaps Verizon is about 100 years behind the times.

Largely, that is.

My time to write a function is accounted entirely differently than the expense to acquire a commercial package that does the same. The bias is to prefer something that can be purchased over that which is written in-house.

Don't even get me started on free software. Management values an application based on how much they paid for it, either in developer-hours or from the expense budget. Stuff that costs zero must be worth zero. Never mind what functions it actually provides.

Pay us or you'll never see your Post button again!

Why not mimeographed?

Oh yeah. Intelligence gains would have been wiped out by sniffing the copies.

Funny, but System Development Corporation (aka RAND) is primarily a supplier for the US Military and other three letter intelligence agencies. There was probably more good research in various fields that was intercepted by the likes of them, stamped 'Top Secret' and lost from public view for decades.

I used to work for an outfit with some serious machine learning, natural language recognition applications. When 9/11 hit, they saw the handwriting on the wall. With the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and the NSA treating every American as an enemy, they understood the utility of such software to these organizations and the negative consequences for its commercial use. They promptly boxed up everything and shipped it to overseas contractors for further development. Out of the reach of the Top Secret stamp.

If we can clone a practically limitless supply of on-line AI VMs, we can keep the Christian Evangelicals (and those of other religions as well) too busy to convert our kids.

Of course, if ISIS fails to convert an AI, declares it an apostate and beheads it, we can just build another VM from the backup image.

There was a high barrier to this sort of public information being used. If you wanted to use the libraries' reverse directory, you had to actually go there. Now, with this sort of data on-line, marketers can slice and dice it any way they want for little more than the cost of processing power. But so can the 'bad guys'.

UNIX has had thhis capability for ages. It's called 'yes'. The CEO enters a proposal following the comand 'yes' and hits enter.