428 karma · joined November 28, 2014
You obviously didn't even open the link - the very first thing you see on page 1 is a Samsung (Galaxy S4, I think?).
I suspect this is the case. It seems like people are assuming HBO's silence means they didn't use a steganographic watermark. I disagree; I don't see any reason why they would feel the need to tell the world - especially if they plan on pursuing this legally.
Exactly - ChromeOS is a browser. "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS" makes about as much sense as "Can Mozilla write a browser for Chrome" or "Can Google write a browser for Internet Explorer".
...or it would have made that little sense before Mozilla wrote a browser in html: https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html
Apparently they can: https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Corp._v._Roxor_Games_Inc.
[2] http://www.google.com/patents/US7278913#v=onepage&q&f=false
If everyone voted for just the things that helped them and against everything else - whether in referendums, elections, whatever - minorities would pretty much always be repressed.
If Vancouver had a referendum to get rid of bike lanes and ban bikes from streets entirely, I doubt you would be saying the same thing. There are far more drivers than cyclists. I guess in that case all the drivers should vote to get rid of bike lanes and ban cyclists?
Surely biking to work is easier if there are fewer cars on the road?
I'm not trying to bash Apple fans when I say this - I'm an OS X user too, and admittedly I only finally moved on from Snow Leopard last year (I actually like a lot of the changes, and most of the ones I don't like are ones that are easy to ignore). This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to Apple fans either - just look at how many people still refuse to upgrade to Windows 8.
The NES and SNES (and I'm guessing other cartridge-based consoles) supported having extra chips (often called "mappers") inside the cartridge that would add extra hardware capabilities beyond what the console could do by itself. Basic mappers could switch between different ROM banks, effectively allowing games to have larger ROMs than the console would normally allow. Later, some cartridges would have co-processors that did some of the computation inside the cartridge itself in order to enhance graphics capabilities. That's how the original StarFox was able to run on Super NES, despite the SNES not supporting 3D polygon rendering.
For a while[1], I've wondered what a NES would be capable of if you used a modern ARM SoC - say, a Raspberry Pi - as a mapper. For one, you could make a NES game with WiFi support (you wouldn't even need an ARM chip for that, just an ESP8266 should be able to do the basics). I'm not sure if this is possible, but in theory you could even do all rendering on the ARM chip and output the image directly to the video buffer, effectively allowing you to do just about any graphics the SoC can do. As for audio, on the Famicom (the Japanese NES), there were actually extra analog audio pins for cartridges that would allow a cartridge to output any audio it could generate. The NES doesn't have these pins, but I think you could still do higher-quality audio than the NES is normally capable of by rapidly changing the DMC channel.
I don't know much about NES programming nor really anything about its video hardware, but this is still an idea I've had in the back of my mind for a while.
I know some people might ask "What's the point? All you're doing is making it harder to use a Raspberry Pi!", but I think it would be pretty cool to say you did all that with something that's technically a valid NES cartridge running on an unmodified NES.
[1] really, I first got this idea when I saw Google Maps' 2012 April Fools joke - I started thinking about how a NES-based Google Maps would technically be possible
“Each table is in its own sonic zone,” John explained. “But it’s not isolated.” He mentioned a colleague’s earlier attempt to address restaurant noise, which succeeded in suppressing chatter but led to a muffled, sterile environment: “Everyone hated it—the room ended up being completely dead.” Instead, Constellation undertakes a process akin to the Photoshopping of an image, with undesirable elements removed. John explained that there are two components to a sound as it resonates: the early reflections, which contain most of the intelligible information; and the later reverberation, which is blurrier. “Right now, with those loud people right behind me, we’re hearing only their reverb energy—it’s not enough for intelligibility. Early reflections have been cut out: you can hear voices but not what they’re saying.” The effect is conviviality without chaos.
If stage volume is loud, the sound guy is likely going to push the volume even louder, both so that he has some level of control over it, and because sound coming off the mains is going to sound a lot clearer than if you're hearing everything off the stage monitors and then reflected off the back wall (yes, even if that means things are louder, they can still be clearer).
Admittedly I haven't read the article because Vice is blocked at work, but I imagine video game addiction is a lot different from other addictions since it has to do with something you do rather than a state you're in (not to say it's necessarily worse - just different). Serious addicts can play video games for several days straight, whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts (though admittedly I'm not an expert in this). I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict.
(source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/the...)
The main UX challenge that I haven't found anything has really solved yet is the ability to show 2 or more pages at once (and do so in a way that's simple & intuitive). Also related is some way to mimic the ability to, with a textbook, stick a pen or finger in between two pages as a "temporary bookmark", to make it easy to flip back & forth.
Now that the hardware has caught up to where it needs to be, I think e-textbooks have the potential to get a lot better as software improves. I don't think the physical book will ever die, but I do suspect that ebooks will be much more prevalent in 10 years than they are now, when the software has finally solved UX challenges like these.
can be is a whole different thing from is being. Or, to use the old, tired cliche, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"
There are several steps to solving iron deficiency. Yes, an iron cooking pot or a plain iron pellet solves one of those steps. But the human step is every bit as important.
It's clearly not just a matter of aesthetics either - it's "a piece of iron shaped like a local river fish believed to be lucky". Sure, saying "they're dumb and should just learn to use a round pellet" makes sense from our educated western perspective. But that's completely ignorant of their deeply-ingrained cultural attitudes. When you're in a society that believes a certain kind of fish to be lucky, you can't just say "use science, idiot" and expect them to actually do what you say. As a more extreme example, remember that in Liberia, armed men broke into an Ebola clinic to free patients [0]. In cases like these, the human side of the problem is far more important than the scientific side.
[0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-armed-men-attack-liberia-...
Don't hold your breath - iTunes has had Sound Check since 2002.
The Wikipedia article does have a citation from 1927 [1], though, so it would seem the origins are much older than that.
My guess is it's a bit of all of the above. Maybe there was a little bit of belief in it, and the government, but government efforts to reduce energy usage as well as families using it to cover up suicide or drug overdoses helped propagate the belief and make it far more widespread.