My sentiments exactly. Windoze has largely caught up in terms of usability and lack of annoyance. The difference is the attitude. MSFT has become what Apple once was--responsive and considerate of users that have different needs and tastes. My company kind of forced me off OSX but I don't miss it. Still have 3 macbooks and 2 mini's at home. But I've also started using old W-class thinkpads. I feel much more in control of the thinkpads. Plus they are cheap as dirt and don't fight me every time I want to change something.
Sadly, as much as I would like the content all to be true, 'Quack' is my assessment too. They say they have been selling this in Austria for 11 years but want crowdfunding to take it abroad. Somehow that does not add up.
And in my experience dentists are really pretty open to innovation, especially 3d scanning and machining. Most recently I got a grinding guard and instead of taking an impression my dentist actually used a Danish scanner that pieced together a couple of hundred individual photos.
I don't know. I was not blown away. I don't know why it is 'robotic' all it is doing is sliding one way or another. You could make something out of MDF on wheels and move it by hand easily. Much less effort and complexity.
(I'm not a member of The Dao, although I do have some Ether. I switched from engineering to law in the early 90's.)
I'm sure there are some lawyers who got involved--I was tempted to get some experience with the concept early on. I decided not to primarily because the basic concept of crowdsourcing decisions where the ownership interest determines who has most of the voting power and the major holders are likely to be new at it strikes me as, frankly, a silly idea.
But even if all the participants were lawyers or represented by lawyers there are still going to be bugs. Pick up any set of service terms for just about anything and there will be logical flaws. It's just human nature. There is no such thing as a perfect contract.
To me the most interesting thing about this episode is that The Dao included limitations imposing an time lock on withdrawal that gave the community some time to consider what to do and the pros and cons re the whales in the Ethereum community doing a hard fork in the name of justice.
I don;t think lawyers could help with bugs, but their absence could be telling. Most of the lawyers I know wouldn't go anywhere near this sort of thing. A board of directors, or any other governing body, without any lawyers makes me suspect those that were asked fled the project. Or that the organizers deliberately didn't approach any lawyers because they knew what they would say. Anyone with a background in contracts, specifically dealing with contracts gone sour, would see red flags all over this concept.
how does that keyboard feel? It looks not that great from the photos. Was thinking to get the 15L for my son because the keys look the same as the HP version
The keys have a shorter travel than the original, comparing my DM-15L with a real HP-12C. So not quite as good but infinitely better than a touchscreen.
Patents are territorial. If the English guy did not bother to patent in Denmark (highly unlikely especially at that time) then Lego was perfectly free to use the design and build on it.
This really does have a stench of scam and a whiff of foolish VC on it. But just like cold fusion you hope deep down that it might be possible.
I took a look at the patents which are easily found by searching on google patents for ubeam as assignee and there just wasn't that much disclosed. Sort of vague references to steering a beam. It did not appear to be enough to 'enable one skilled in the art to practice the invention.'
I did notice one thing: mention is made of capactivie micro-machines ultrasonic transducers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitive_micromachined_ultra... which seem to be in the same family as the micromachined mirror arrays commonly used in DLP projectors. My only experience with ultrasonic is with piezo.
One thing that I learned back then was that ultrasonics -bounce-. Aiming would be really, really hard. Not to mention that one thing people worry about in this field of steered array ultrasonics is 'necrosis' (which I don't like the sound of). Turns out that people use high powered steered beams to peer into peoples' skulls and to do things to the grey matter:
Even assuming arguendo that it would be possible to transmit measurable power via a steered ultrasonic beam, I certainly don't want to do it anywhere near my head!
Yep I'm a layman when it comes to this stuff but everything I've read pretty much says that a ubeam that functioned correctly would be effectively a short range ultrasound weapon.
I actually was in the Senate gallery yesterday and watched Diane Feinstein and a male senator co-author discuss to a largely empty chamber. In came former presidential candidate McCain whose 'questions' were more in the nature of 'how can any senator -not- vote to protect American's information-. It was certainly not a debate. To the male senator's credit he seemed mostly pushing for debate and amendment on the floor.
What you were witnessing was not debate. Speaking to a largely empty chamber is the norm, and serves a different purpose.
Debate and discussion of legislation happens in the discourse Senate members have with each other, with their staff, between their staffs, with committee staffs, and with private industry and other lobbyists. These discussions are happening all the time, just not usually on the Senate floor. So while it does seem weird that Senators orate to an empty chamber, that doesn't mean that the other Senators aren't hearing the arguments.
Whether they are hearing the right arguments, however, is a different issue.
