I believe they were rare once, but new mines were found in late Victorian times making them fairly abundant.

It's interesting to see how other countries view this kind of job threat. The opposition to H1B's makes perfect sense from the US worker's perspective, but here in the UK, particularly at the moment, it would be damned as motivated by racism and xenophobia. The narrative would be that Americans are being lazy and that those foreign workers are hard-working and deserve the jobs just as much as you do. We don't spend any time criticizing US workers in this way, but if we applied current UK "logic" to the US, that would largely be the point of view, not just of the left, but of much of the media. I don't see it that way. People will try to protect their jobs no matter what the threat. Ultimately the companies are the problem, but the battle ends up hurting everyone else while they rake in the cash.

They do talk about light blocking technology in their patents but they haven't demonstrated it. Surely if they had that working, they would demo it. The best we can hope for is that there has been some mad rush to finish it and it will be ready at the 11th hour.

The initial video demo for Magic Leap looked very impressive, but it was just a concept video and was quite misleading. The problem is that the video shows various virtual objects that are darker than the background, e.g. The dark red robot against the cream wall at 49 seconds in.

Unlike the composited lies of the initial video, all their subsequent videos are shot through their device and it is abundantly clear that they are using an additive light technology (much like you would get from bouncing an image off a piece of glass at 45 degrees). The first thing you notice is that all of the videos shot through the device are in rather dark rooms, some very dark indeed. If you look at this shopping demo you will see that the eyes of the weird yellow lamp creature are meant to be black, but the grey background shows through them. This is a limitation of additive light.

Now people who have used the device say they were blown away and I'm quite sure that if I saw their Star Wars demo in a conveniently darked room, I would also be amazed. The problem is that people who have experienced the device in darkened rooms might come away with the impression that it can show dark objects, or rather, realistically lit objects, in a normal well-lit environment. In an outdoor environment, or even a well-lit room, the objects could look very washed-out, or at the very least, very bright, glowy and unnatural. If you just want to shoot glowing space aliens or read some glowy text, that isn't an issue. However, if people are expecting to see realistic naturally lit objects that actually look like they belong in your current environment, I think they may be sorely disappointed. The additive light limitations could also be a big problem for shopping applications. After all, it's a bit difficult to see how that dark green couch is going to look in your lounge if the wall behind it just shows through. Google's project tango has the advantage there since it can just composite naturally lit objects over the video feed.

I'm not saying their device couldn't be really useful, or even pretty amazing in certain situations and environments, but I think the limitations will cause issues and may put a lot of people off buying one. I could also be wrong, and for some reason they have been refusing to show their amazing light-blocking technology in their demo videos, but that seems unlikely.

P.S. Although they have been more honest in their videos recently, I should point out that their website still shows concept images that misleadingly give the impression that they are able to show objects darker than the background. I should also point out that Magic Leap have been far more honest than Microsoft who seem to exclusively composite their videos to hide their crappy field of view and similar additive light limitations.

A computer should then be used to determine whether you have committed a crime or not. Then afterwards it can work on the "Barber shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?" problem :)

The problem is that rather than filling the non-lethal role they were originally intended for, these things often instead end up being misused. Tasers for example were initially introduced for use where lethal force would have otherwise been used. What happens then is that you get mission creep and before you know it, even unarmed passively-resisting protestors are viewed as fair-game. Taser-armed drones are likely to be no-exception.

Maybe the reason they are billionaires in the first place is because they used the cheat codes :)

The story of how much of Arduino was appropriated from Hernando Barragán without credit is quite disturbing.

https://arduinohistory.github....

People need those things just to live and keep a roof over their heads. Paying the tax you really owe as a company is not equivalent to rejecting desperately needed child support.

I do. Just because something is legal, it doesn't mean it's ok. When governments don't have the cash they need, they have to cut back on essential services that we all use and people can die as a result.

This may well be the case with Apple and Ireland.

Well, yes, governments are to blame for the loopholes, but companies use their might to push for those loopholes to exist. Very often they write the legislation that government enacts.. Also, companies do not just use their influence when it comes to legislation, they also use their power to "capture" relevant agencies. We've had this in the UK with our revenue collection agency, HMRC. There seems to be a revolving door between them and the very companies they are "struggling" to collect tax from. The previous head of HMRC let Vodaphone and Goldman Sachs off paying billions in tax and lied to the Commons Select Committee. He also protected HSBC from fraud charges in Switzerland and then went to work for them.

Perhaps we could have some kind of tax star rating, a bit like Michelin Stars. Smaller companies that can't use complicated tax avoidance would be proud to display their 5 star tax rating and it may give them an advantage over 1-Star major corporations. Imagine two adjacent coffee shops and only one has a 5-star rating. It may have enough of an effect that tax avoiders start losing money as a result.

You can trust the FBI. They would never misuse their powers.

"So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away."

If you vote for someone you believe in, your vote is never thrown away. They may not win, but people will see how much support they get, and that can lead to more support next time. You are right though, that FPTP is a poor system. It's particularly poor when it comes to electing presidents because (as far as I understand it), it is not possible for two candidates to combine their votes in any way, unlike parties which can combine their votes and form a coalition. The upshot of this is that people like Bernie Sanders won't risk standing as an independent for risk of splitting the left wing vote. You could have a system where candidates can pledge to transfer their votes to another candidate in the event they fail to secure enough votes themselves. It could bring an end to the endless oscillation between Republican and Democrat presidents.

Any battery developed by Dyson will no doubt be massively overpriced like their other products. Even if he were able to double the energy density of batteries, it seems likely you would be able to buy several of the conventional batteries for the same price.

Besides which, it looks like there is already quite a breakthrough happening right now. http://news.mit.edu/2016/lithi...

" Microsoft is really dismissing how much legacy code is out there"

I had any illusions that they cared about that sort of thing shattered when they dumped Visual Basic. It was huge in industry and millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of lines of code, representing untold millions of dollars, suddenly became legacy code. (VB.NET was/is a completely different language)

I doubt AR glasses will make you vomit since you will still be able to see most of the real world. However, Hololens has a crappy field of view which they do not seem interested in addressing. The demos they have shown have all been "fake" composites of what you would ideally see if the FOV was huge and if Hololens was also able to show objects darker than the background (which it isn't).

I don't think they seriously intend Hololens as a consumer product. I think it is all just marketing hype for windows 10.

Perhaps they would like a vote where people over 40 are excluded as well as Lincolnshire and any other strong Brexit areas. Really, the remain camp are not being very gracious in defeat. They would have been insufferable if they had won.