Posts by Charles 9

Re: I must be way out of step..

It's not just that systems are expensive. It's also that systems people actually WANT are difficult because they (especially now) tend to involve things that are, for lack of a better word, "fuzzy". Take the examples above: cooking dinner and doing the laundry. How does a robot know if the milk in the fridge is still good, especially if the "best by" date is smudged? How does it know the sock on the floor is really a rag because it's lost its mate? How will your drone army recognize the lost child if the kidnappers immediately ties a wide-brim hat on the child, wraps a towel around her, and keeps her under an umbrella?

Re: Lack of imagination

Maybe it's not so much lack of imagination as it is the creative juices are running low. Everything we can imagine that can exist in reality already exists. The rest (like true VR and highly-accurate natural language processing out of the box) are still too far ahead of their time. There are only so many ways to build the proverbial better mousetrap before you run into previously-invented material, and since the best solutions tend to be the simplest, that limits your options, and it would take something truly revolutionary (like something that can disprove a fundamental tenet of physics) to really shake things up.

Re: "VR is hot right now"

VR won't be real VR until it's virtual EVERYTHING: including motion and sensation, like you see in sci-fi stories where your body doesn't have to move.

Trouble is the manufacturers KNOW they can't let that fish go or someone else will just hook it, so they make the cloud part and parcel and leave you a Hobson's Vhoice, figuring those that try not to will lose the critical repeat business and just vsnish later.

IOW, unless you can roll your own, you just can't have nice things; the long-term money isn't there.

Re: North Dakota is a very low population state

Forget the next state. I-29 is in North Dakota which goes through to Canada.

Re: Letter of the law

The problem is that big companies keep a stick. If countries pressure them they can threaten to leave, denying them ALL tax revenues. Which would you rather have: 10% of something or 100% if nothing?

Re: Who on earth?

"How do these people look in a mirror in the morning? Do they tell their mothers what they do for a living?"

One, you're not familiar with sociopaths (they could look in the mirror AND SMIRK at what they're doing--the luzahs...). Two, who's to say their mothers weren't doing this to their own kids?

PS. Be careful about shooting on sight. Sociopaths are also the kind to take hostages and keep dead man's plans.

Re: Obligatory Dumbass Question

Here's a different hint: content still needs to be CREATED. Video and audio still need to be edited, and pro gamers still need an edge. Plus, for them, money isn't necessarily an object as they're in positions to pass costs along.

Not if it's the GOVERNMENT doing the jamming, since last I checked State use of jammers is exempt, especially for security reasons.

Re: Just wondering....

Capacitive stylii still depend on your body to work, which is why you still need to hold them with either bare fingers or special conducting gloves.

So anything that can affect your using a finger will also affect the stylus.

Re: Why would this happen-

And if they LIKE Vegemite?

Re: Changing the name

Um, the catch phrase DOESN'T get sent to Amazon, only the parts after it, and there are some VERY simple ways to run comparisons to a fixed target (like a ROM, which unlike RAM can still be quick to access AND not need to be constantly refreshed--with RAM, it's one OR the other, not both) using inverse match and delta graphing.

Re: Could help reduce Piracy.

Oh, and another nasty touch. According to their official policy, digital downloads of movies or music are not returnable.

Re: Again, it's illiterate tech users that don't do their homework

But then again, how do you appease an audience that demands unicorns and will happily dump their money on the first person to come along with a horn glued onto a horse?

Re: Confirmation?

Then the NEXT version of the prank will insert a two-second pause followed by "Yes!" to include the confirmation phrase. Which means confirmation MUST be out of band. Trouble is, not everyone has a second factor with which to do this.

And no, one one will be willing to get up and push a button to confirm. Otherwise, they'd never be using voice activation in the first place.

Re: Kill them with fire

And if it turns out to rise again like a phoenix?

Re: Alexa or Lintilla clones

Then you're at a dilemma. The reason for fixed watch words is to conserve battery (the waveforms are in ROM). So you either have a battery-sipper with a fixed vocabulary or a dynamic battery hog. And while you can opt for meither, many will DEMAND it. Out voted by the stupid.

Re: Comedy Material From the 70s

Remember the Clapper? I think it was Not Necessarily The News that did an ad about running a Clapper ad in a room with the TV plugged into a Clapper. Hilarity Ensued.

Re: PIN!

But a spoken PIN is dead easy to recognize AND record from a distance.

You ever thought he could be absolutely sincere? I don't think gross stupidity is a crime yet.

Unless, of couse, such things were never set up in the first place. The wrong e-mail address, no app, notifications turned off due to inbox spam, any number of cracks to fall through...

Re: Alexa, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

"When the system is as smart as me, able unambiguously to identify me, able to correctly understand free-form speech without error, and never allows any signal out of itself without confirmation and permission, it will still get it wrong."

Even humans can get confused by homophonic phrases. What chance does a computer have? Did you just tell it to "recognize speech" or to "wreck a nice beach"?

Re: Could help reduce Piracy.

No, he got it right. The idea is that pirate tracks will contain Alexa commands in the beginning, basically forcing pirates to buy excessive music to make up for them not buying music normally.

Re: Echo is perfectly designed and working as planned

OR a bunch of lawsuits from people with a beef and the potential to stick it to not just Amazon but ALL e-tailers.

Re: In upside down world ...

After all, how do you get a CEO to sign onto what's essentially a sinking ship? Businesspeople are savvy enough to demand guaranteed perks or they won't sign, and sinking ships can't exactly wait.

Re: Microbot Push

Why not just come up with a new version of "The Most Useless Thing EVER" (look it up on YouTube)?

Re: That ain't VR.

And who says that's a bad thing? Steady isn't sexy, but at least we wouldn't have the Internet of Stupid Things.

Re: you are the product

Doesn't matter if it's intentionally blocked or lost to static. Still means no impression.

Re: I am surprised the address is visible

They either use Unicode lookalike characters or images that Amazon's algorithms can't grok (though you would think at this point they'd be running images through something like Tesseract to get around this trick).

Re: Don't forget the content in the discussion about the technology

"Why is this so hard?"

Because analog radio is basically the KISS principle. It's all physics: no magic or jiggerypokery. That's why you can listen to radio with just a few parts: just enough to repeat the physics. It's also why it needs so little extra power: the signal IS the power essentially. And since radio has emergency applications, you REALLY need it as simple as possible because some out in the field need to be able to MacGyver their solutions.

If any government dares to take analogue radio off, dare them to be able to get news of a major disaster through in time during a major blackout.

Re: @ Commswonk

"That is why music "works" with most instruments: the harmonics that characterise it (that are all ratio related) seem to be equal spacing in a tonal sense, and the note scale and corresponding chords have a set ratio."

Anyone who combines music and computers/tech quickly learns of the logarithmic nature of music. Going up an octave, for example, doubles the tonal frequency, vice versa, and/or in reverse.

Re: Considering that most digital radio is utter crap in quality...

Also, stereo on FM and analog TV is a delta setup (mono+difference) rather than true dual channel, which causes artifact issues of their own.