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Comment Re:Not just for printing (Score 1) 63

I doubt very much that HCB, coiner of the phrase "the decisive moment", would have anything to do with camera phones. Shutter lag is horrendous on those things. The decisive moment will be long gone before a camera phone even finishes focusing. HCB would be shooting with one of those $7K digital Leica rangefinders, a small camera that uses small lenses and takes the picture when you release the shutter, dammit.

Comment Re:Same crap, different way of paying for it (Score 1) 348

Not consistently. I enjoyed Tig Notaro's series "One Mississippi" but that's it. If you want to develop an appreciation and understanding of how science fiction movies can be both well-made and awful, try watching the stuff available on Prime. There's a seeming unending stream of films made by people who understand more about filmmaking than they do about crafting an engrossing screenplay. Just watch a sci-fi offering chosen at random and Prime will gladly recommand five more that are equally bad.

Comment Re: Doesn't matter (Score 1) 325

It is the nature of the task that the car must predict behavior. People don't generally walk right in front of a moving car except in crosswalks and at intersections. So the car "reasonably" didn't expect the woman to do what she did. If the car thought she was a deer, she might still be alive.

Comment misread intention (Score 1) 325

This technology learns how to behave from past experience, just like human drivers. The car probably didn't expect the woman to walk right in front of it outside of an intersection or crosswalk. People do lurch into the roadway at random places but they usually ease up to let the car pass if there's no reasonable way the car could stop. When they don't let the car pass, this is what happens.

Comment Re:Stealth Requirements? (Score 3, Insightful) 234

This feels more like something that will be eventually sold to billionaires, people wealthy enough to own and operate their own $50-100 million aircraft. The noise regs meant that a billionaire couldn't do supersonic travel to most places even though he could afford the plane. Get the noise down and now those supersonic business jets can be built, sold and operated pretty much worldwide.

Comment Re:So pirate? (Score 1) 255

Anyone who grew up watching over-the-air analog TV knows that television can be enjoyed with a picture and signal far worse than even the most pissant phone provides today. I watched a whole season of a program on a video iPod, just because the thing was portable and handy. Video and sound quality were both better than what I grew up with. For one thing, the picture was in color.

Comment ill posed question (Score 1) 326

The question really is ill-posed. Even without infinite storage, infinite computation collapses the polynomial hierarchy. P = NP, P = PH and in fact P = PSPACE. You could fairly quickly boostrap your way to an AI that would let you describe (in natural language!) the actions you wanted the computer to take and have the computer either write the program or perform the actions directly. No clever programming needed during the bootstrapping, just brute force searches in polynomial space will be fast enough given an infinitely fast computer.

Comment Re:Monopoly Abuse (Score 1) 557

It's what Microsoft always does. The only reason they haven't embraced and extinguished interoperability on the Internet is that they were late arriving at that particular party. Nonetheless they made quite a go of it, particularly in the e-mail space in the 1990's. Slapdash implementations of POP, IMAP, (E)SMTP, MIME... to administer a mail system in those days was to suffer.

Comment Re:Oh yeah, just what I need. (Score 1) 229

That hour of training is no longer necessary with the current technology because it has been listening to everyone and learning to deal with their local accents and speech patterns. All that data is probably too much to be stored locally. And since people expect voice recognition to just work, there's no way we're going back to training local systems for single speakers, at least for net services.

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