Gring

Second life was just never "real" enough for me to even try it. Up the graphics a few orders of magnitude, add Oculus Rift support, and I'll be there!

"only a minuscule proportion of the sensory data processed by the unconscious mind (capable of processing approximately 11 million bits per second) is referred to the conscious mind (capable of processing approximately 50 bits per second)."

By that measure, a two-hour movie can be compressed down to 22.5 kilobytes... :-)

Making it easier for a post to hit the frontpage might be desirable to reward people for interacting with the "new submissions" page - if it only needs 3 votes, there is a much higher likelihood of instant gratification.

Might be something to build into the next algorithm.

Mexico's problem is in essense, that outside market pressure makes its inhabitants behave in a way that is at odds with keeping up a state under the rule of law.

As a thought experiment, think what would happen if Mexico made drugs legal. Their government would had to fight against the cartels, and might at some point win.

What you have then is a system where Mexico has much less criminality. They can't export to the US directly of course, but people will just buy drugs legally in the Mexican north and try to smuggle it the the US. The US can decide for themselves if they want to legalize it or not, and if they don't the US criminality is still there, but the Mexican criminality is gone.

Well what would likely happen then is another 1989 Panama. One of the main reasons why the US invaded Panama was its involvement in drug trade. So the US would criticize Mexico publicly, and at some point probably invade it.

It looks to me like current time Mexico is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They must be opposed to drugs because their powerful northern neighbor wants them to, but outside market pressure, from the very same neighbor at the same time destabilizes it.

So it's an issue that should be solved by an outside party - the US. But that party won't tackle the issue because Mexican people can't vote in the US.

Sounds like bad US colonialism to me :-(

Absolutely. The problem is that the project is driven by Sergey Brin, who trusts his company completely.

Privacy would have to built into the project on many layers. Without a push to do so from above, they won't.

"We might even see a flying car".

Sign me up! :-)

Buy some earplugs. Same effect, much cheaper.

Alternative: play a low frequency sound and detect the stereo speakers using the built-in magnetometer / compass sensor.

We're talking about Model X, but that's the model S pricing you're linking to.

Don't buy the product?

Of course it's different for everybody. But please do post more, and how you wound up with them, it's fascinating.

The problem with the 48fps solution that Peter Jackson went with is that it is using a 48fps 360° shutter. Let me quickly explain.

Traditional film production uses 24fps with a 180° shutter: a film frame gets exposed for half of 1/24th of a second, and then during the other half of that 1/24th of a second, nothing is exposed. We learned to associate the motion artifacts produced that way as looking "film-like".

With digital camera, you can easily crank that up to a 360° shutter: each frame gets exposed for a full 1/24th of a second. Some films used 24fps 360° for selected scenes, and people immediately said that it looked "like TV". A fair response, since TV always had similar motion artifacts.

Now when PJ moved to a higher frame rate, he could have said "let's make sure we get a 180° degree shutter look for both 24fps and 48fps by filming at 96fps, then for every 4 frames, combining frames 1+2 to get traditional 24fps 180° footage, and using frames 1+3 to get a comfortable 24fps 180° (frame 4 would get thrown away in the process). PJ mainly uses Red Epic cameras that go up to 120fps, so this would have been no problem.

Instead, PJ went with filming at 48fps and a 360° shutter. This resulted in normal looking 24fps 180° footage, and very TV-like looking 48fps 360° footage for those cinemas that support 48fps. For me, this whole mess is just an unfortunate lack of good testing in pre-production.

Let's hope that James Cameron recognizes these issues and shows everybody how it's done properly by using the 96fps solution while filming Avatar 2.

This is already one of my favorite articles about videogames, ever.

Could you explain more?

Buckyballs are just magnets of a certain material, shape, and size. There are countless shops on- and offline that sell the exactly same product, among other types, shapes and sizes, to consumers and professionals, sometimes to both.

How is the CPSC planning to implement this ban? Prohibit this exact combination? Or ban everybody that sells them in a package that looks vaguely toy-like? Are they ok if the packaging looks boring and industrial? Where do they draw the line? The CPSC is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

This is brilliant. Thank you!

As far as I know, there are a lot of Facebook apps that ask for more privileges than they need. The question is, why doesn't facebook look at the app, its requested privileges and reject them if they ask for too much? This would prevent the most egregious problems, and make MyPermissions unnecessary.

Shouldn't the platform owner (e.g. Facebook) make sure that no intrusive apps can connect in the first place?

Since the speed of light doesn't change in real life, and there is no answer at what speed a changing speed of light would propagate in real life, does it really matter how it's implemented in this game? My guess is that they took the easiest route and made it change instantaneously for the whole world.

A year ago, Apple was asked whether the iPhone 4 or even the 3GS will get Siri. They said no, to do good voice search, you need advanced tech - several microphones, special noice canceling DSPs, fast processors - so get out and buy a new iPhone.

Well, I just did the test. Google voice search on a 40 month old iPhone 3GS is more responsive and much more precise than Siri on the latest and best 1 month old iPhone 5.

Apple has so much egg on their face.

I always felt Jar Jar Binks was more the Goofy of Star Wars :)

The problem with maps is the back-end data, which he was't responsible for, as far as I know.

Exactly. So the question is, when facing the risk of a black-out, why don't they just stop the windmills?

And in the long term, why is Europe not building more Pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants, which would solve the issue? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...)

According to kicktraq, they're indeed trending towards not making it (trending to 651k, 86% of goal):

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-super...

That's a great idea!

But eyes that are randomly wandering around are actually kinda creepy, too... :-)

I don't know. It kinda fits the cartoon eyes ;-)

They seem to consider a score of 7.5 or 8 "average", much like the rest of gaming publications. Sad, really.

You do are aware that on iOS you can tap the top bar and scroll back to the top with 1 tap? And on non-mobile, there is a scroll-to-the-top key that does the same thing…?

This site has the same issue 98% of all websites with a big overlay at the top have - every time you scroll using the page down key, the page jumps too far and you miss one or more lines of text. I hope this gets fixed quickly.

Interestingly enough, it's better on the iPad, where the top scrolls normally with the rest of the page.

This idea of having stuff fixed on the page goes back to the late 1990s, when frames were popular and tasteless big corp CEOs went "oh hey great, with frames we can ensure that certain parts of our branding are always in the face of the customer. Bring it on!".

A few years down the line, we grew up, refined our taste and trusted that if a visitor sees the logo in the top left and then scrolls down, he still remembers the branding. It's sad, really, that this lesson was lost again in the past year.

This needs [2005] in the title.

Prescient timing in the article: "If it's not Google that finally subverts the power structure of the industry, then it'll be someone else...eventually."

Just at that time of publication (Nov 2005), Apple worked intensively on the first iOS device (iPhone, first shown 14 months later).

John was right - but even he didn't dare to dream that his favorite company (Apple) is the one that eventually subverted the power structure.