Anybody fancy a guess as to how many (more) brains will be produced by unskilled labor before the first one is simulated?

There is http://maps.google.com/gl which uses webGL to add some amount of integrated 3d stuff to Google Maps, wholly in-browser. Definitely more limited than the plugin-based or freestanding Google Earth 3d tricks.

I don't know whether this is because webGL is currently too fucked to support it, or whether there just isn't any demand, or whether it's a project in progress, or what.

And that is why you try to avoid talking to academic experts in any fields that your favorite poorly thought out pet theory steals jargon from...

It might be helpful to consider an analogy: "What is the 3d desktop going to give me that 2d doesn't?".

The first stab at '3d web', the ghastly VRML horror, is very similar in spirit to the various abortive attempts at creating '3d desktop' graphical shells. As it turns out, this is an area where you are lucky to break even with what you are trying to replace, and epic failure is the rule. Such attempts have largely died, and deserved it.

'WebGL'(as its name suggests) is much more closely aligned to '3d desktop' in the sense of 'people writing programs for this platform can expect OpenGL and/or Direct3d to be available to their programs if they want it'. This has proven to be enormously useful: lots of applications are simply impossible in anything approaching real time on affordable hardware with a pure-software render path, and the bad old days of having one variant for 3dfx/Glide, one for software, one for openGL, and possibly one or two others for oddball losers like 'S3 METAL'.

If you fundamentally don't like this 'web-app' stuff, you won't like it any more once OpenGL ES is given javascript hooks and set loose upon the world. However, the ability to deploy as 'web-apps' applications that require 3d capabilities has the same basic set of use cases as deploying 3d applications as native binaries.

As best I can tell, it appears to be a bit more sophisticated than that(as well as presumably smaller, if they managed to shoehorn one into a space probe):

The laser burns the sample and allows the apparatus to examine the carbon isotope ratio in the combustion products. Their commercialization partner, 'Protium', apparently makes isotope-ratio mass spectrometer gear, and this laser apparatus seems to have similar capabilities.

Not like whoever is in charge of such things, being an evil regulatory entity, would have the staff for this; but it shouldn't be necessary to specifically ban false labelling/advertising product-by-product. Fraud is fraud.

One minor little difference is that for agricultural commodities, there tend to be local producers(in most areas at least, exactly what is 'local' obviously varies by location and season). In the case of books or motherboards, it's pretty unlikely that you are doing anything other than choosing between the local reseller and the online reseller.

People who 'buy local' tend to want to either support a local/regional production system, or a local reseller that has some sort of brick-and-mortar charm. In the case of books or electronics, the former is mostly moot(most of it Just Isn't Made Locally, and if you do happen to live near an Intel chip fab or something, you probably 'buy local' no matter where you buy). The latter, unfortunately, tends to be largely moot. Back when I was in college, the local book store kicked ass, and everybody shopped there. Now, the local bookstore is just an appendage of Barnes and Noble, only with limited hours and an even more limited selection. At least I have MicroCenter, which makes buying all but relatively esoteric hardware in person worth doing.

Baylis' real problem is that he is acting as a lobbyist without getting paid for it... If he could get even a few patent trolls(sorry, sorry, 'non-practicing entities') kicking some 'consulting' fees his way, he'd be all set...

I don't know whether there was any really nasty interpersonal knife-twisting and violatation-of-not-actually-contracts-but-verbally-they-felt-like-them in that specific case(which my account for some of the bitterness swirling around it; but I certainly wouldn't want to be 'guy with a clever mechanical power-smoothing technique' in a world where supercaps have become downright cheap, and the demands of digital electronics of various flavors have driven serious improvements in DC-DC conversion and various techniques for bludgeoning ill-mannered input power into nice clean low-voltage DC...

The question that I'm left with is whether the spring arrangement was simply too expensive in absolute terms(ie, even if the 'intellectual property' were valued at zero, is the BOM cost of the spring +simpler electronics just higher than dumb crank + more sophisticated power conditioning apparatus) or whether this is a case where the patent holder, by holding out for more than he was worth, encouraged people to 'innovate around' the patent.

This is probably why most of the review-snark is focused on our wacky adventures in novel legal interpretation with a side of collateral damage, rather than the (not particularly exceptional, if comparatively cheap) capabilities of the drone itself.

The news isn't that weapons have marched on; but that we really haven't been covering ourselves with glory when it comes to using them.

Remember: Anesthesiology pays relatively well because knocking people out is easy; but knocking them out such that you can wake them back up is hard.

Also, murder charges are a real hassle, and even jurisdictions that allow you to shot people for little more than trespassing tend to frown on lethal traps...

That just increases the number of cops the situation requires, it's a nuisance really.

While '1 million euros' is a big scary number(and certainly higher than evidence handling for more prosaic cases), it isn't exactly free to have a bunch of cops go around swabbing at evidence, a judge, some lawyers, a jury, etc. Processing a case, especially a serious criminal case, just isn't inexpensive. Given the existing acceptance of the relatively high cost of justice, it seems strange to wring hands about an abnormally high cost cropping up in an abnormal case.

Even if justice didn't demand it, it seems like it would be trivially sensible to just quietly pay what it costs to get the DNA analyzed properly, if only to deter others from trying to get cute.

There is 'alien' for turning RPMs into DEBs, somebody should really hack together 'predator' for turning DEBs into RPMs...

(as for shell, it isn't pretty; but the debian package format is (mostly) friendly enough that you can crack a deb open manually if you really want to.)

You might want to ask Judith Miller about how carefully the NYT protects its valuable reputation...

In this case, though, I'm not saying that the NYT is subject to the same incentive structure as a blogger; but that the writer is.

The Times obviously wants to avoid being embarrassed by its writers; but it also has no incentive to retain writers who are unproductive or uninteresting. This means that the writer(just like the blogger), is subject to a continual pressure to produce content, and content that gets read. If they don't, it's not as though there is a major shortage of aspiring writers...

Without access to the vehicle logs, there isn't anything obviously fishy about the story so no obvious reason(or ability, without going straight to the company they are writing about, which presents obvious problems) for the Times to become suspicious before running the story. If, in the end, it becomes clear that the writer was 'improving' upon the facts, I'd expect the Times to terminate him; but we haven't reached the point where we get to learn whether or not that happens yet.