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Comment Re:It needs a camera (Score 1) 37

You don't necessarily want the camera in the lens, because:

1) You don't want the additional hardware sitting on your eye, and the associated added costs of the lens (which can be lost, broken, etc.).

2) You don't want the camera to go blind when you blink or sleep.

3) You don't want the camera lens obscured by the environment of your eye, including mucus, tears, and eyelashes.

4) You don't want the camera to be subjected to the normal rapid motion and vibration that your eyes normally experience, let alone medical conditions like nystagmus. Much better to have the camera affixed to a more stable point on your body.

Comment Re:Incredibly huge (Score 2) 315

If an entire city is powered by a mega-windmill positioned offshore, wouldn't it be an enormous target during wartime? Destroy one structure, cripple an entire city until it can build a new city-sized power facility, and do so *without existing power*, during a war. Just consider that entire city permanently offline, and a new source of crisis for the government to figure out how to feed, clothe, bathe, etc. the entire population without power.

This is a single point of catastrophic vulnerability, and these don't sound like the physically hardiest structures in the world. You could attack it with warships, with submarines, with aerial drones or missiles, or from space. And defending against it, vs. defending against a land-based target where you can surround it with surface-to-air missiles or standing garrisons, seems much more difficult.

Comment Re:Great, humans do this already. (Score 1) 55

It's not that simple. Reality is much more complicated.

Picture one of these new shadow-detecting autonomous vehicles seeing an odd black shape on the road ahead, concluding that it's a car coming from around the corner, and violently swerving and braking to avoid it. Only it's not a shadow - it's just tar from recent road work - and the compensating measures taken by the car lead to an accident, such as sideswiping the car in the next lane or a rear-end collision due to the sharp, unanticipated braking.

The fact that this shadow-detecting car can detect shadows in some trials is nice, but hardly sufficient to prove road-worthiness without a whole lot of trials to detect and avoid false positives. So treat this study like the weekly "scientists show that drug X cures condition Y (in mice, in lab conditions, in one trial)" headlines.

Comment "Sadly?" (Score 4, Insightful) 36

Sadly, Apple's blunder didn't go unnoticed and earlier this month, a security researcher named Pwn20wnd released a public exploit based on Williamson's bug that could be used to jailbreak up-to-date iOS devices and grant users complete control over their iPhones.

What's with this "sadly" shit? It's a good thing for people to be able to control the devices that they purchase and own outright.

Comment wat (Score 4, Interesting) 180

The reason that terrestrial germs are dangerous to humans is that they've spent millions of years evolving to attack animal immune systems. HIV is extremely well-targeted to avoid the human immune system, for instance. And what germs lose by being "designed" stochastically and through the brute-force process of evolution, they make up for in vast numbers of replications and mutations to find new ways to attack us.

Lunar germs have not had that experience. They are not well-adapted for terrestrial immune systems. Our immune systems would identify and expel them pretty easily.

Comment Superbly shitte (Score 1) 57

Two characters from the game were revealed at the panel: Max, who will exhibit karate kicks and the ability to add fire damage to those kicks; and Eleven, described by Chris Lee, director of Interactive Games at Netflix, as "the most powerful character in the game" -- she will have psychic push power.

I can't wait to not play that.

This doesn't just sound like crap - this sounds like burning-dumpster-fire, Street Fighter: The Movie levels of crap.

Comment "Fix bugs" (Score 5, Insightful) 227

"Microsoft needs to stop developing new features and just fix bugs."

Generally true, but what does Microsoft do about core features that are so intensely buggy that they are literally unsalvageable?

  • The Windows registry is a dumpster fire.
  • The Windows role-based security model is an unmitigated headache.
  • App compatibility is so bad that Windows still has a "Program Files" folder and a "Program Files (x86)" folder.
  • Windows Help has been beyond useless for the entire lifespan of Windows. It's so bad that people resort to MSDN, which is also beyond useless.

Comment Geopolitics (Score 4, Interesting) 397

Let's not forget the obvious geopolitical angle: The U.S. has positioned itself on a path contrary to the entire rest of the world by dropping renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels. By choosing renewables, China can position itself on the international stage as taking the high road - and then bash the U.S. incessantly, with support from the rest of the world.

The U.S. will eventually change its mind (as soon as it can change its administration to one that's actually responsible), and then it will have to struggle to catch up. China can also exploit its enormous head start, both for profit and for strategic leverage - including inserting espionage equipment into renewable devices sold to the the U.S.

It may well take the U.S. a decade or more to catch up, including still more deficit spending. The U.S. may well find itself unable to recover, and may even experience energy shortages if it cannot get the renewable tech it needs. The end result may be a significant shift of political power among first-world nations.

Comment BS (Score 2) 96

Okay, this is a bunch of bullshit.

My wife has an Apple Watch. Its detection algorithms are extremely inconsistent: it frequently doesn't detect that she's exercising or her heart rate. It frequently doesn't detect that she has raised her wrist. Etc.

The actual title of this article should be: "Apple Watch Cannot Reliably Detect Falls." Because that's the far simpler explanation: not that it has some fancy algorithmically-generated profiles for "real falls" vs. "fake falls," but that it has one profile for "falls" that is unreliable.

Comment LinkedIn's weird subscription model (Score 4, Interesting) 308

The value of LinkedIn is vastly diminished by its weird subscription model. You have two choices:

1) Receive about 80% of the Facebook experience for $0; or

2) Receive a few modest but nice premium features, such as messaging and more detailed "who viewed your profile" info, for $$$$$$$$$$. The cheapest plan starts at $30/month.

That's it. There is no in-between.

The costs are such that the only reason I would ever "subscribe" would be when I had a specific, acute need - and once that need was satisfied, probably after one month, I'd immediately cancel. On the other hand, at a price point of around $10/month (which, incidentally, is what Apple Music charges...), I'd just sign up to have the features available at my whim.

LinkedIn is one of many companies that just doesn't seem to understand how people view its features. It could really boost its user base *and value* by making its subscription plans not suck.

Comment Re:No hardware or software fault? (Score 1) 80

Can't blame NASA though, when the commands are transmitted over 3 billion miles, the signal would degrade so much it is possible some critical command or an command argument was not correctly received.

Nonsense - that's one of the easiest problems to solve in all of computer science: you just tack on a hashcode, checksum, parity bit, etc., and the receiver verifies that it got the right message. If it doesn't verify, the receiver doesn't follow it, and when the sender doesn't get an acknowledgment, it retransmits the message.

That technique is baked into every communications protocol. Hamming even invented a technique to allow automatic correction...in the 1950's.

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