This is /. It's actually just lying.

It is a video conference. The "capture studio" sounds expensive, but "low thousands" for the projector doesn't sound all that obscene. Whether it's worth it depends on how beneficial the illusion of the instructor's physical presence is in terms of classroom interaction &c. is relative to the price premium over a 2D projector.

This. So much this. For reference, here's a list of things that are holograms:

• Tupac
• The Emergency Medical Hologram
• That little sticker on my driver's license
• That one phone made by the company with the cameras
• Your girlfriend

Tthings that are not holograms:

• Hatsune Miku
• Guest lecturers
• My girlfriend
• 37% of the migrant caravan (as of last counting)

Those devices already exist. They lock the cart wheels as soon as a shopping cart is removed from the property.

Rather than stymie the homeless, however, this Fitbit-mabopper sounds like Wal-Mart is giving the homeless free fitness trackers. Not even my insurance does that. How's that for community outreach?

Your business plan is #1, except you don't plan on paying people. That makes you either innumerate or a sociopath, depending on whether you realize that.

Of course you don't; your time is simply too valuable to waste pontificating about some shit you made up for the express purpose of pontificating. The same doesn't apply to those economist types, who are supposed to spend their time pontificating about actually useful things so that your website works.

You're a bit of a dunce, and condescending to boot. Do your family a favor and try being at most one of those things at a time.

Money is a powerful motivator. Absent that, you're left trying to find a large group of businessmen savvy enough to help other people make money, but that don't want any themselves. Or, better yet, software developers that want to work on other people's projects rather than their own, at below-market rates, for the pleasure of seeing someone else make money from the delivery of their closed-source video game. I don't think you're going to find enough of either personality to build a business on their generosity.

That sounds a lot like the better venture capitalists: You make your pitch, and, if it's sane, they'll buy an equity stake, giving you their money in exchange for a share of any profit. Advice and mentorship is part of the deal; they've done this all before, so they can save you from having to learn project management and supply chains the hard way. Most will sit on your board to help keep Elon Musk types productive; some will also supply expert personnel to help you successfully negotiate manufacture of your widget in Shenzhen or whatever. They're in the business of giving first-time businessmen the money and experience they need to 1) not burn out, 2) not lose their house, 3) not lose their savings, and 4) not lose years of their life before failing to deliver anything at all. It's the kind of thing a naive Kickstarter could benefit from.

So, it'd be neat if you could make your Kickstarter-that-earns-its-keep into a reality. Lots of people have failed to deliver the card games they kickstarted; most of those probably would have succeeded if they had access to a Matthew Inman who had done that before, could reality-check their budget, could warn them of any pitfalls inherent in contract printing, and could connect them with a reputable printer. Only problem is that Matthew Inman doesn't scale; you'd need to find a way to run the kind of feasibility studies small-scale kickstarters would need and deliver individually tailored advice (and adult supervision) to the virtually unlimited numbers of prospective kickstarters, most of which are resorting to kickstarter because their scale is too small to afford any of that professional management nonsense. Running a glorified payment processor, in the meanwhile, is cheap and scales great.

If you could find a way to make it work, though, you'd be doing capitalism a hell of a favor.

There are many reasons to go into space: To gain new knowledge, to help our ships at sea steer a safer course, to explore and learn new techniques of mapping and observation, to discover new tools of science and medicine, to expand the furthest outposts on the new frontier, for the growth of science and education.

Some may go to space not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one they are willing to accept, one they are unwilling to postpone, and one which they intend to win.

But only California would go to space to raise taxes.

Should webmasters "resist Google's push for AMP pages"? Webmasters should really just write mobile websites that don't suck ass, but that's apparently just not something they'll do of their own volition. Most of my mobile browsing is just reading some headlines to kill time, and it's amazing how bad news websites in particular are--laggy scrolling, pop-overs, teleporting ads, teleporting paragraphs, etc. When AMP came out, that shit disappeared from anything I Googled practically overnight--any time I've clicked (tapped, I guess) through to an AMP page, it's loaded quickly, scrolling has worked, and nothing teleports.

Are there privacy implications? Of course, but they're rather marginal for someone already using Google's search engine, e-mail, news reader, chat programs, and browser. Is AMP necessary to write a good mobile website? Of course not, but writing a good mobile website is just not something a paste-eating webmaster will do unless someone grabs him by the ad dollars, forces him into a padded cell, and takes away so much markup he couldn't possibly fuck up what's left.

TL;DR AMP exists because webmasters are universally incompetent. If you chucklefucks weren't utter failures, AMP would never have happened.

Text wrapping is a "solved" problem, too, but you're still doing it by hand for some reason.

Even if you found its goals laudable, SESTA is not a particularly good piece of legislation. Techdirt hates it because it's intentionally vague--what, exactly, constitutes "knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports, or facilitates a violation"? We know what violates current law, that is, what constitutes "general knowledge" versus "specific knowledge" versus "red flag knowledge" under the DMCA--but knowing what the law actually is means you can comply with it, and that's exactly the flaw this new bill seeks to address.

Lest you think I'm overly cynical (I am), it's worth mentioning that the Department of Justice also hates the bill, also because it's too vague. (Sensing a theme?) While Techdirt's worried that the "knowing conduct" non-definition of "participation in a venture" could be mean anything and everything, the DoJ's worried about the exact opposite--that courts, having been given absolutely no guidance by the bill, could just as easily decide that "knowing conduct" means something highly specific, "effectively creating additional elements that prosecutors must prove at trial." That the trafficking bill's intentional, catch-all vagueness could make it harder for the DoJ to jail traffickers, in other words.

The DoJ is additionally worried that the bill will send you to jail, retroactively, for past "ventures", even if those "ventures" were legal at the time, and again without caring to get too specific on what actually counts as a "venture." If you're reading along, they list that issue under the heading "CONSTITUTIONAL CONCERN", which you'll find capitalized, bolded, and underlined in the original.

In other words, it's a shit bill. If prosecutors were really interested in stopping child trafficking, they would prosecute the traffickers--if allegations are to be believed, you'll find a list of just those people, conveniently enough, on Backpage. Instead, they'd rather go after Backpage--make an example of them, even, since they didn't cave to think-of-the-children grandstanding like Craigslist did.

...which is why we now have a bill tailor made to throw Backpage employees in jail, retroactively, for whatever, because fuck you. I don't think many people here are dumb enough to find credible the sincerity and good intentions of a politician, on the eve of midterms, crying THINK OF THE CHILDREN, but it bears repeating that those sentiments are exactly why we're entertaining an ex post facto law to make King George proud, in 2018, when everything it purports to criminalize is already illegal.

The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other can. -- Wilhelm Reich

I wonder who thought that offensive.

The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"

I thought that was XML. Guess Adolf was misquoted. Should probably tell our lead dev.

"Violence accomplishes nothing." What a contemptible lie! Raw, naked violence has settled more issues throughout history than any other method ever employed. Perhaps the city fathers of Carthage could debate the issue, with Hitler and Alexander as judges?

Carthago delenda est!

The obvious agenda here is to make repository hosting first more centralized, then more "hosted at MicroSoft", then, once people depend on the hosted service, demand monthly fees for it.

Nobody tell him GitHub already exists and charges money. Microsoft's interested in GVFS is because 1) Git sucks at handling large repos, and 2) Microsoft has a 270GB repo.
The original /. article back in Friday had better comments, including one linking an article describing why they chose Git for source control, and what GVFS actually does.

Also, to the average user it isn't clear who the third party they are trusting is and whether they are any more trustworthy.

Blindly trusting a third party, or even a small number of third parties, is still a huge improvement over blindly trusting a far greater (but unknown) number of third parties. Quit being lazy and fix your website.