sammyo

I had a single very useful use case. I needed to pick up someone when a famous trial recessed, parking close was impossible, phones were not allowed for most observers. Monitoring the twitter feed of a single journalist provided an accurate low latency notice.

But this is just wrong. Virtually the only accidents were people rear ending a stopped car at a red light. The current google cars are probably improving the general driving safety.

There was an increase in boats hitting buoys when GPS became common, out on the water there really is very little traffic so setting an autopilot is often practical, but if you set a waypoint exactly on the coordinates of a buoy and forget to keep a close watch or proximity alarm, it tracks right into a big iron marker.

There perhaps should be a highly regulated frequency that is used for "Emergency - stopping dead now". With some localized physical coordinates (GPS possibly being the wrong granularity) so all within a certain radius know to immediately begin slowing, the closer the more radically.

I've seen that usage a fair number of times, usually in discussions relating to some definition of "american" and why that does not include everyone in both North and South America. For instance is a Guatemalan not an American?

The issue with a narrow specialty in Tech is that the lucrative niche can evaporate almost overnight.

Sincere Thanks. If five years later you have a "unicorn" business perhaps a substantial monetary token of appreciation would be appropriate.

I looked at it due it's consolidation of weather records with fields. Not totally impressed with the implementation but there could be significant value in analysis of larger areas, catching disease spread early or tracking pest migration.

What happens to AirBnB when the the NYC hosts file a class action suit to recover the 33 Million?

Found a very inexpensive Brooklyn AriBnB for one night JFK run and it was clearly a hostel for international students. At least six beds in the room, was never sure how many rooms.

There are actors that grew up in many different countries you have seen in movies that pass just fine as americans. But it's impractical for most folks to work with a dialect coach for years, but it clearly is possible. And outside of LA the demand for dialect coaches is almost zero.

Or Second Life...

This looks quite interesting and quite topical to a discussion I had just yesterday during an interview. I almost clicked the installer but hesitated. A link that discusses the impact and especially any issues if/when your product was uninstalled would be reassuring.

I do wonder if these stories are distributed to the Arabic editions.

Slide and drag is hitting the technological useability sweet spot, where the mouse was at last 'generation'.

Haptic (force feedback), 3D mouse, a variety of trackballs, are all available, all suffer from missing the spot, either due to expense, unneeded complexity, or just disinterest. Trackballs are an example, the one ongoing use I've seen is for film color correction workstations, but are used for a specific mode in a color wheel where it's natural to nudge on a few axis simultaneously.

Phones also have vibration feedback, I've rarely seen it used, and dare I say, never well (love to seen an example of an app that uses vibration frequently and effectively).

Slide areas on a screen are effective when the domain of attack is narrowed to the standard 3-7 options. Mouse interaction is best with a narrowed selection of areas/icons/corners, love those 4 pixel boxes. And they are both cost effective. As the tech to 'understand' the users domain becomes more sophisticated and 'early' in the interaction cycle, gesture interaction and eye tracking will be more effective, the participant will begin to feel the system knows their needs.

As much as I love thumbing through a book and can imagine a dance interface, the future is probably less and less pointing and more just single tap to “go ahead, just what I want” than elaborate touchable interaction.

Wow, your hybrid optical illusion at the end of the article was fascinating, quite spooky/surprising.

Be sure to rinse it several times, makes a big difference.

In addition to the specific type of dance, also take ballet technique classes. While it's unlikely to reach a performance level of ballet in one year the core physical habits that are trained carry over to all types of dance. Check the resume of any of the pros or contestants on the various tv competitions and you'll see ballet training.

But don't worry, the 10k hours rule is certainly in effect buy it really does not take a full year to get great results and have fun, just dance anywhere you can! Dance like no one is watching. Just Dance.

Using a different browser than the one used by the friend would prevent this from occurring.

For years Scott Adams had serious letters accusing him of secretly being an employee in 'their' workplace and just transcribing meetings.

Unspecified but probably an exothermic reaction that would release a large puff of smoke.

I'll interject one more 'done it' anecdote. The document processing system I've been working on for several years had several libraries in C. Very few issues compared to the general logical bugs. Integrating the Judy arrays library was a huge performance benefit in a number of areas.

Cell service was really bad for an hour after the explosion. My wife has an older clamshell phone that seemed harder to connect I expect due to the absence of newer 3G frequencies. Not getting a signal make one very nervous at a time like that.

I was two blocks away from the bombing for a couple hours and no one was panicking, sad perhaps but quite calm.

Monetary float.

Well one answer is that they didn't. Infection was a major cause of death. When you see a brutal dentist scene in a historical film it gives shivers, the missing context is that the patients life was probably being saved.

Just like feature films, the overriding consensus about success or failure is "nobody know anything". Clearly protocols have changed the world, the Gopher protocol was pretty good but HTTP just wiped it out. X.25 was an expensive, molasses slow, networking technology but until quite recently the only asynchronous network that could be found literally anywhere in the world. (Likely you've never heard of it but there were/(are?) mission critical applications run over it).

Probably a good bet that something will come along that wipes up Facebook and parts of Google within the next 20 years, but just like betting it all on one horse, doesn't matter how good your insider knowledge if she breaks a leg in that one big race.

A non- proprietary distributed fault tolerant, respectful of each users sense of privacy, easy to implement, robust, fast, easily searched, resistant to corporate and governmental abuse, social protocol... seems like a good idea to me.

Hermits in treehouses?

Since they cannot perfectly clone the Photoshop(tm) UI it will never seem useful to folks that grew up with and are incredibly facile with the keystrokes behaviour of Photoshop.

If you do the research and are not tied to "the perfect spot" that happens to be on public land, there are (not expensive) remote lots of land for sale where the only problem is access.

Sounds like a huge oportunity for an online escrow business.