Ohtrahddis

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure.

Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this?

For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why would they agree to cooperate with competitors? Of course there is the obvious benefit that this would help all the players, but why does that marginal benefit outweigh the risk of commoditizing a brand new market / product and eliminating the chance to establish a market share lead. I am partly raising these hypothetical questions because I think companies are trying to "tough it out" and do it without such changes to city infrastructure first and see how that turns out.

I appreciate your simple approach, but you might be disregarding the societal and business factors in favor of making the engineering challenge simpler.

Edit: grammar

Not sure if that's the case,

[Spoliers!] ###########

It's been a while since I've read the book, but if I recall correctly nukes are used against Venezuela when they disagree with launching supplies to the Ark project. There are further hints of looming conflict (e.g. Ivy's fiance mentioning the nuclear sub he was in was on high alert).

I also believe there were numerous delays of supplies and disagreements even within NASA / the U.S. space program. Not too certain of all the world powers cooperating, although admittedly their cooperation on the Ark project at all may seem odd, but doesn't seem out of place with the status quo and how world powers "get along" in regards to the ISS?

I'm really not an authority on this, but to answer the question of "do I need a PhD", my view is that it depends on which 'part' of HCI you want to do.

Do you want to work on Project Soli at ATAP? Which part, the actual hardware / Radio antenna design? Then a PhD in analog design might be required to be qualified. Do you want to do the signal interpretation / analysis to detect gestures? Maybe a strong background in signals, filtering or even machine learning may be required.

HCI work can involve a lot of specific specialization which often requires these research / industry giants to demand a strong testament of your qualifications. Although not required, a PhD is often an easy way for them to see that.

If it is the more 'high-level' stuff, I'm not sure, as sometime a 'PhD in HCI' itself may be required (although I don't know too much what a 'PhD in HCI' entails)

Source: Experiences with HCI PhD's at UC Berkeley

Those who are interested in some discussion about games may find extra credits youtube channel interesting.

This particular episode mentions the previous study on violent video games, and talks about how maybe video games actually help make people more empathetic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fftjo1CepQE

A phone's native location capabilities (as they are currently) are limited to GPS pretty much - which is often insufficient for figuring out if a customer is inside the JC Penny or Macy's in a large shopping mall

Even better (for stores), they want to be able to see if you are walking past the Men's Shirts section and perhaps send you a notification that the specific shirt you were looking for in the past is now on sale - thus individualized local content!

For more, see things like Estimote: http://estimote.com/

On the note of self-driving cars, check out http://www.getcruise.com/

I just heard of them from a friend who will be joining and I was skeptical at first. Their model seems to be to attach/install peripherals to a non- self-driving car and turn it into a self driving car. That way they can compete on a level with Google (optimistically) but don't need to manufacture vehicles.

Hmm don't think that's true either -

here are some breakout boards with the Module:

https://electricimp.com/docs/gettingstarted/devkits/

Just wanted to also add that Imp has gerber files for many of their reference designs and dev boards here:

https://electricimp.com/docs/hardware/resources/reference-de...

Me too, but I think we'll have to keep waiting. I was one of these people who "thought I had the balls" to use piezo using this chip: http://www.linear.com/solutions/1506 Not only did this not sustain enough current, but taking up more space (doubling the size of my board) also hurt it to the point of it being too clunky (e.g. See linqet http://m.connectedly.com/linquet-review-smart-tracking-devic...)

Believe it or not, BTLE isn't a holy grail for power, batteries are still a better bet when it comes to long life. One method that might work is inductive charging, which is what the pebblebee dragon does (http://www.pebblebee.com/products/bluetooth-dragon). Also notice how big the pebblebee is too- but that's because it has many other sensors.

But yeah, there are several devices in this business, and they are all trying to do a variety of things, and energy harvesting just isn't cutting it at the moment.

I really don't think it's a matter of balls ;P

Interesting idea, but I suspect there would be a lot of retailers who would vehemently oppose this e.g. Apple opposing anything that might make their customers aware of where the labor and materials to make their iPhone come from.

Your concluding statement about this knowledge affecting your choices would probably be a nightmare for these retail giants who might fight tooth and nail to stop this.

I must say the writing in this is pretty great. The moment when he described viscerally a perhaps mundane action - laughing - I paused and realized that I had never read such a description of laughter ever. It was as if he was dying, I was genuinely afraid for him and confused what was happening.

Great read on an interesting topic, phenomenal writing.

(I know I'm going a little overboard with my praise but I was always a sucker for words)

Wifi has always been a tricky problem for small devices. However, I think there are some good tricks that people have been using involving playing around with sleep times, skipping beacon intervals, etc. - tricks that the electric imp, the Wifi board used in Lockitron, utilizes to lower the current consumption by a bit.

You're totally correct that always-on-instant-unlock feature is a fool's errand as that would mandate always-on Wifi, spelling death for battery life.

I think one feasible method is sleeping the Wifi and using an external input (like a button or a "knock" sensor) that wakes up the Wifi, tells the chip to check the server for updated lock state, and then go back to sleep. I've played around with capacitive sensing on a door handle to wake up the Wifi and check the server as soon as someone lays hands on the door. Cap sensing is also incredibly low power so it had minimal impact on battery life.

This of course introduces all kinds of problems, but if Wifi is absolutely necessary, then this is one solution.

Either that, or wake up to poll Wifi every 5, 10, 15 minutes (destroying instant lock/unlock)

For more info about the technology that saves battery life, check out gbatteries (makes of BatteryOS) http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/