hobbs

Nothing too outrageous in those predictions.

One thing that I think will quickly come of age, though, is camera-based head and pupil tracking.

Camera-based head tracking would provide a 3D experience as was shown with that Wii hack, but without the need for any headgear.

Accurate pupil tracking in particular needs camera technology that is only now becoming affordable. It needs either a very high resolution camera, or a typical resolution camera that is mounted on servos that keep the camera focused on the head and eyes no matter where they may bob.

Pupil tracking would not only provide a mouseless pointer, but it could also be used to compress video bandwidth. That is, a video client could track what part of the image the fovea is concentrating on. Then only that section of the video needs to be streamed in high resolution from the media server. All other sections can be streamed in a lower resolution for the peripheral vision. The latency between the client and server would obviously have to be very low, but it could provide some very high resolution detail, particularly for medical imaging.

Hmm... gnutella was dangerous, I suppose, but certainly not "most dangerous". Sounds like it must have just been a PR puff piece to promote his latest software. (Not that Rolling Stone would ever become the tool of a press agent.)

Blech, I hate this style of journalism. I gave up reading while slogging through the guy's entire personal history. I never even got to the meat of the article. (I suppose the style works for bio-centric publications like Rolling Stone, though.)

Could anyone post a synopsis of why the guy is supposedly dangerous?

Zeno is still my favorite. To summarize in modern terms: in order for a particle to move 1 inch, it must first move 1/2 inch. Before it can move 1/2 inch, it must move 1/4 inch. Before it can move 1/4 inch, it must move 1/8 inch. And so on. The paradox is, if a particle has to traverse an infinite number of infinitely small spaces before it can move even one inch, how is it possible that it can move at all?

Some mathematicians pull out calculus to "disprove" the paradox, but to me it disproves nothing. For example, you can show, mathematically, that sum( 1/(2^N) ) = 1 as N goes from 1 to infinity. The problem is that you have to go to infinity before it will sum to 1. If space is infinitely divisible and a particle has to traverse an infinite number of subspaces in order to move just a nanometer, I still don't see how it's possible that it could move at all.

I would have gone with topigina. It has a nice cadence to it.

Ouch! The latest example in a recent spate of bad names.

Real programmers can write Fortran in any language.

Real hackers run their own hand-coded DNS server.

Seriously, though, I run a DNS server on the same machine that runs my [small] web server, etc. There is an argument to be made that you need failover machines for DNS, but my counter-argument is that if my web server machine is dead, no amount of DNS redundancy is going to fix anything.

Right now, almost every car looks like an ergonomic blobject. The trendy thing to do to cars right now is to add chrome, neon, and spinny wheels. If I were to extrapolate a future car from current trends, I'd imagine a chrome egg that glows like Las Vegas.

Sure, I could just as easily imagine a car that looked like a matte black monolith. Problem is, that's just a random shot in the dark. There is no current trending to lead me in that direction.

I think the genius in creating a new paradigm lies not in extrapolating from superficial trends, but in isolating a fundamental problem that no one else has fully appreciated yet. It would be like predicting a future car that doesn't need to be replaced as soon as it's paid for.

Not to get too deep into philosophy, but I imagine it has to do with observed cause and effect. For example, you may not realize it, but you think in a paradigm where 2 + 2 = 4. There is no good reason why 2+2=4 has to be true; we only believe it is true because we observe 4 objects every time we aggregate 2 and 2. Every time.

We break out of a paradigm when we push it to the extremes and notice effects that hadn't been observed before. For example, in quantum dynamics when something can pop up out of nothingness and 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.

The difficult part of escaping our paradigms is that we can't just assume any random thing in our current paradigm is false. (e.g., My sky is not blue.) You need to find the key ingredient in order to come up with a new paradigm that is actually useful.

I think the hardest part of breaking out of a paradigm is to realize that you're in one. For example, in physics, the only time physicists ever break out of an existing paradigm en masse is when stuff starts breaking so badly that you realize there must be an erroneous assumption somewhere. (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment that proved that there is no aether.)

You do get into an odd legal area, though, when that license allows you to burn the music to a CD. Once the music is on a CD, can the license extend to say that you can't then rip the tracks, which is otherwise covered under fair-use? (Remember the controversial "Rip, Mix, Burn" slogan that Apple itself used to sell iMac's?)

I know that the legal system doesn't operate under mathematic principals, but if I can legally transform from A to B and from B to C, why should it be illegal to directly transform from A to C?

I've always wanted to be an Apple customer, since their products have such a nice fit and finish. The problems I have, though, are always with their excessive lock-in - and the FairPlay DRM is the least of it. As a person who likes to customize my technology, the lock-in really chafes.

Example: I [stupidly] bought an iPod without realizing how it would interface with my Windows machine. I assumed that it would work just like the cheapo $20 MP3 player I had bought for my 10 year old niece. But no, dragging files to a mounted drive is much too plebeian for Apple. Apple requires iTunes, since it's better at "organizing" my music, even though I have never bought anything from the iTunes Music Store. I tolerated iTunes as long as I could, but I eventually needed my own podcatcher software and iTunes was getting in the way of dumping files onto the MP3 player. One of the most satisfying days in my life was when I installed Rockbox on my iPod and was then able to remove iTunes from my system.

I'd like to try an iPhone as well, but I don't think that I could stand the constraints on that either.

One disappointing thing from the article is that they state that Hollywood loses billions a year to piracy - as if it were an established fact. Sure, there's billions of dollars worth of content traded via piracy, but it's debatable how many of those dollars were lost to Hollywood.

Otherwise I have to say this article is one more example of why I love The Economist. You'd never see a publication from, say, a Time Warner company chiding Hollywood for being stupid. I started reading The Economist in the 90's because it was the only news outlet that didn't have weekly in-depth coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial or Monica Lewinsky. I've never looked back.

True, if TiVo or a cable company had 50 million subscribers, then yeah, it could be worth $15 billion. I don't see a $25/mo product from Facebook, though.

Not to mention that we don't know what percentage of the 50 million are active, participating users.

Maybe so, maybe no. Depends on what sort of promises were sold to the investors. Even so, caveat emptor I guess.

Considering that Facebook has been "valued" at $15 billion, yes, 50 million users is a failure. That would mean that they'd have to justify why each and every user is worth $300. A good percentage may be worth close to that much, but certainly not every one.

Most commentators thought Zuckerberg was an idiot to turn down the $1 billion offer. My guess is that they can't wait to have their opinion vindicated.

Personally, I've yet to find a reason to even visit Facebook. I still have plenty of old friends - don't need any replacements yet, nor a different way to keep in touch with them.

"You should come try it at our booth at the Game Developers Conference. Then you'll see it really works and we're not lying."

Ouch! I'm no PR expert, but I'd think that lying is one thing you neither admit nor deny. Best to just presume honesty, otherwise you'll wind up looking shifty either way.

Vaudeville: True enough. In fact, I can only use that around close friends who are already familiar with the original quote. If I said something like that to anyone else, they'd think I'm being an ass.

It would be bad: You have to use it in the proper context as a gross understatement. As in every atom in your body exploding at the speed of light would be bad. True, the same line has been used as an understatement in other movies, but the Ghostbusters instance sticks out for some reason.

Ghostbusters has many good quotes (e.g., no dick), but here's a few that I've actually used in conversation:

"Don't cross the streams"

"It would be bad"

"Yes, have some."

"I don't have any Tylenol, but I do have some acetylsalicylic acid."

"Listen... do you smell something?"

"Where do the stairs go?" "They go up"

The last one usually isn't quoted directly. Rather some variation, such as "I wonder what's behind that door." "A room."

I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine, Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.

...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.

Having just completed a ColdFusion-to-J2EE conversion project, ColdFusion skills aren't quite obsolete yet. But I have brought it one step closer to the grave.

If you can get a good signal, never get HD cable, unless you NEED Discovery HD or HBO HD. The over-the-air signal is much less compressed than HD cable. If you're an A/V geek, you can really notice the difference in the macroblocking.

It would be interesting to redo the map using GDP per square mile, or GDP per capita. For instance Georgia has the equivalent GDP of Switzerland, but it is much larger than Switzerland, geographically speaking. On the other hand, New Jersey has the same GDP as Russia, but is a fraction of the size, both geographically and in population.

The article didn't really make clear what the point is of the new new math. Is it to provide a deeper understanding of number theory? Or is it to provide different algorithms that don't require memorization of the multiplication table?

Not that I know anything about math education, but how hard is it, really, to understand that 3 x 7 means that you add 3 together 7 times? Once you understand that, you understand the fundamental "meaning" of multiplication.

Granted, adding 3 together 7 times is the long and tedious way to do it and there are handy shortcuts, but do we really need to understand how the shortcuts work in order to use them effectively? Besides, based on the [biased] reports given in the article, it would seem that the kids don't really understand the mechanism behind the new methods either.

It would, however, be nice to do away with memorizing the multiplication table. And maybe it really can be done with only a slight increase in algorithmic complexity. If that's the case, then I imagine this is just the age-old gripe of parents not knowing how to help their kids with their homework.

Heck, if you can collect the arrival times from the various airlines, you could send a confirmation message a few minutes after the plane lands. Checking in would be as simple as hitting reply.

I had a gut instinct that this was the case while in school, but then every authority figure in my life was telling me that I could be the valedictorian if only I'd "buckle down and study". It took some distance before I was able to objectively look back and judge who was ultimately right.

Since I've remained good friends with the person who actually became the valedictorian, I've been able to compare notes over time. It turns out that in as little as 5 years after graduation, being the valedictorian doesn't mean squat. Everyone wants to know what you've done lately.

This sounds like a good opportunity for a startup. You wouldn't even need to establish a counter at the airport. As a customer, you just check-in via Blackberry, iPhone, or even text message. The shuttle bus swings by to pick you up and you're off.