You forget when Herc went and grabbed the portable mic from the spy store and stuck it in a tennis ball. Or when they stuck the video camera in the park and got it stolen.
It's pretty much the same thing that happened here. They knew the discussions were happening, they knew where the discussions were happening, and since it was in a public space they didn't need a warrant. It's not like they are running around town putting microphones in all the bus stops hoping to catch anybody saying something. They were looking for a specific type of criminal activity and they placed the mics accordingly.
At some point every piece of technology that we use was impossible. It's very easy to sit on the hilltop and say "it's not possible". What's not easy is climbing the hill anyways and figuring out a way to make the impossible happen.
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology. I'm just saying... "what kind of world would we live in if we never looked past what we thought was possible?"
EDIT: I think that a few of you have missed an important piece of this post, so once again...
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology.
There is a spectrum of "Its not possible", generally from not feasible with current tech to fundamental laws of physics say no. Things on the "not possible with current tech" side are open for someone finding a nifty trick, things leaning towards the fundamental physics side, are not.
For this specific piece of tech its in the middle ground of the "its not possible" spectrum as human/animal safety and the air we breathe are the limiting factors, so if someone figures out how to very tightly generate the beam with no reflections/spillage and can detect when someone or a pet wanders into the beam, then its possible with high losses due to air.
All forms of wireless power suffer from effectively the same limitations of safety and air. Magnetic/RF have problems with unwanted heating of nearby metallic objects, RF spectrum rights and beam size issues (and at high freqs, air losses), optical have mild-moderate air resistance issues and issues with reflections (very small amounts of reflection=blind people), ultrasonic have severe air loss issues and beam power limitations for safety. Physics doesn't say no to wireless power, but it does say "Only if humans are not nearby or you want small amounts of power (<1w)".
Also, the best way to prove that you have conquered the limitations with a tech is to demonstrate to the world at large that it works in a practical enough manor. None of these "It's not possible" startups that I've seen have demonstrated a working prototype that people can wander up to an look at.
Disclaimer: I have worked for a company that does industrial optical wireless power.
>> Physics doesn't say no to wireless power, but it does say "Only if humans are not nearby or you want small amounts of power (<1w)".
Wouldn't the limit be raised if you could build a system that detects whether a human is in the power path(or stray paths) to turn the power off, and do that fast and accurate ?
Well, sure. Next question: Would you trust your life to that system?
'Cause your answer really shouldn't be "yes" unless there is some very, very compelling reason that there is absolutely no other choice, and there pretty much always is.
No, not really. 60 years ago people thought building 14nm transistors was possible. They had no idea how to do it but that's a very different argument.
It's one thing to say your building a cheap 40% efficient solar cell, it's another thing to say your 10x the energy of current designs because light simply does not have that much energy.
I'm no physicist, but I think that while it may be theoretically possible to distribute power wirelessly doing so in practice seems like it will be necessarily dangerous so as to be impractical. To quote a previous comment I made on HN:
To distribute sound over long distances 'wirelessly' you need to make it loud. That typically means cranking up the power. And ultrasound can be harmful at high power [1].
[1]
"Occupational exposure to ultrasound in excess of 120 dB may lead to hearing loss. Exposure in excess of 155 dB may produce heating effects that are harmful to the human body..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound
Yep, a lot of people are confusing the impossible of eg. "We can never go to the moon", which was actually just an exaggerated infeasible - it was possible, but only at great expense - with the literally physically impossible.
The moonshot wasn't about the laws of physics, it was about the laws of economics. A scale-up problem in terms of money. Whereas this charger is about trying to evade some very difficult laws of physics.
Even if you exclude the extreme physical improbability of the device, it still has massive problems in terms of practicality. It would require installing a large number of expensive ultrasound emitters in every coffee shop and fast food joint. Then installing recievers in every phone. And it will still be massively inefficient power-wise. Whereas the alternative is to install comparatively low power, more efficient wireless charging pads in every table.
So even ignoring the physics, this was going to be an incredibly hard sell.
Yup. Some things (not all) are impossible in a literal sense.
Want to extract 2 kW / m^2 from solar radiation somewhere near the Earth? Won't work, the Sun doesn't pump out that kind of power density (the max is 1.whatever kW). Literally impossible.
No you can't, because you're increasing the surface are of the collector so the 1.366kWh / square meter still stands.
From Wikipedia:
Average annual solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is roughly 1366 W/m2. The Sun's rays are attenuated as they pass through the Atmosphere, leaving maximum normal surface irradiance at approximately 1000 W /m2 at sea level on a clear day.[1]
Therefore it is impossible to get more than about 1kW / m2 from any solar panel. Until such times as something fairly fundamental changes, like a loss of atmosphere or an increase in energy output from the sun.
Well, you're mostly correct; but not technically correct.
From /just/ a solar panel it isn't possible to achieve higher density, however you can use reflectors in the spectrum that your solar panel operates in to increase the energy available for capture at a focal point.
But there's also TheSpiceIsLife's opening comment which says:
> ...you're increasing the surface are of the collector so the 1.366kWh / square meter still stands.
It feels like your second sentence
> ...[H]owever you can use reflectors in the spectrum that your solar panel operates in to increase the energy available for capture at a focal point.
plays rhetorical games by ignoring the existence of large parts of your solar collector (namely the reflectors) in order to arrive at an inflated energy density figure.
You have been downvoted but you do make a good point although it's a cliche obviously (you could've used things like; people said planes and even trains were not possible which would push that cliche). However some things are actually outside the realm of what is possible at the moment and in the foreseeable future and if science agrees on that with solid proof and foundation it is just silly to try imho.
I am curious if investors think you like when they invest in the impossible or they just are not really interested in fact and just want portfolio or another reason?
I was close to the Jan Sloot[0] who invented impossible compression. And got invested into by prominent investors who believed him. And some of them not ignorant of the math behind it either and yet they invested. My company got asked by a 'friend' of Sloot who also lived in Nieuwegein (my company was there too) to recreate the algorithm based on discussions this guy had with Sloot and notes he wrote down during those discussions. I presented, to my colleagues and this guy, a proof based on (Kolmogorov) complexity that we cannot do that and that his writings were gibberish; some of my friends and colleagues told me I was insane in not pursuing something revolutionary like this and, as you said; a lot of great technology was perceived as 'impossible' and yet we have that as well. No-one became a billionaire on this tech yet as was promised so I'm going to say it was a good call.
Impossible meaning "we aren't sure how to build this today" and impossible meaning "this grossly violates our understanding of the basic physical laws of the universe" are two different sorts of impossible.
And with a better understanding of the basic physical laws of the universe, things that were once thought impossible may become possible. One day, perhaps, even the speed-of-light constraint will need to be revised in light of newfound physical knowledge.
An obvious analog of the correspondence principle [1], usually stated in terms of QM and Newtonian physics, holds here. It's going to take more than "new physics" to change the behavior of sound in this rather-well-understood regime, it's going to take physics-breaking-physics.
There's a time and a place for "we may learn new things in the future". This is not that time. There's no room for "new physics" to be hiding here, short of postulating outright magic, which will probably have a great deal more applications in the world than salvaging something that was always frankly a silly idea anyhow.
I mean, why go to bat for this idea anyhow? It's not flying cars or FTL, it's an incredibly annoying, inferior way of doing something you probably do every day already, and you aren't sitting there going "Gosh, this is a really inconvenient way of charging my phone and there's nothing I can do about it", because there already is something you can do about it if you just can't stand wires. Inductive chargers work and are years-old off-the-shelf tech. I have a cousin-in-law that was involved in marketing them. (It doesn't "beam" the power, but, well, that's why it works. EM beaming certainly seems to be "less" impossible, but probably never practical for ambient personal electronic charging.) Even if this all worked as claimed it would still be yawn-worthy tech. Hardly a reason to resort to nuke-the-entire-philosophical-world arguments about our complete ignorance of everything everywhere ever.
Maybe, but your point is nothing more than heresay.
The speed of light constraint also has nothing to do with light, it is the speed of information travel.
What is being proposed by ubeam is like lifting a 50 ton rocket with 10 tons of thrust. It doesn't really matter what future physics we have, fundamentally its impossible as stated. Bringing future physics into the mix is moving goalposts in an attempt to appear open minded. The rockets never going to lift off with 1/5 of its mass in thrust.
You can, it just makes the environment inhospitable for humans and requires orders of magnitude more energy than just what would be used to transmit the sound waves.
If you mean hyper-localization, that would be a new scientific phenomenon and one worth a great deal more to the world than as a wireless charging technique. The best industrial manufacturing techniques utilizing ultra-sonic arrays can do some amazing things but they:
1) Make the environment inhospitable to humans
2) Don't actually change the "relevant characteristics" of air so much as force a specific resonant behavior to allow them to target the energy at specific locations.
What specific "relevant characteristics" of air would you be changing? How do we then leverage changing of said characteristic to achieve our desired result? It would help if you utilized the terminology from the "Gas" Wikipedia page, a cursory glance and it appears to be comprehensive (from a concept perspective) [0]
Engineering is not simply about having fantasies. A fair bit of what you do as a technologist is rule out things that simply are illogical. Perpetual motion machines, a way to calculate whether a program will halt, acausal filters, and so on.
For instance, it's impossible to construct a windmill that is 70% efficient. I learned that last week, so now I know not to think too much about it, other than noticing any refutation of Betz' Law.
There are many things that are hard but cannot be ruled out, like sending probes to Alpha Centauri. It's fair to spend energy thinking about those ideas, but to do that we need to stop thinking about things that are ruled out.
I think it's a little naive to "give up" on a language early on, but on the same note, I've walked away from several for periods of time because they lacked the maturity I needed.
I did enjoy the article and the linked article that spelled out ways to increase performance with Python. With any environment there are dramatic performance improvements to be had with a little bit of engineering and knowledge.
I've seen a bit of an odd shift towards Julia - People seem to be adopting it in droves from my perspective. That means that the development team is doing something very right. Given some of the people I've heard talking about Julia, I don't think it's going away any time soon.
This kind of feedback is good for the team. If you are going in another direction for the time being, stating why is always helpful. Glad to see a developer here in this thread.
This thread makes it seem like the general opinion is that an automatically generated news feed would be better.
It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.
If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)
That's not the point, most people have the impression that the trending news is automated and generated by some sort of algorithm. It's highly misleading. The trends should really be called "Facebook's Top Picks" instead.
Do intelligent people believe this? That's as nieve as thinking hacker news' front page is determined solely by the up arrow. Or that product hunt isn't controlled by insiders.
Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Is it shocking that they're wrong?
Are intelligent people the only people worth looking out for?
Trending implies humanity cares about it, which to the lowly average-joe means humanity cares about it, so s/he should too. This is the part that feels disingenuous on Facebook's part.
Of course even average-joe knows (though probably can't express) that everything around him just wants to consume his attention, so I'm also not overly concerned about it.
Google understood this long ago. You need human editors/curators who can manually flag spam. Otherwise your index will be filled with spammers who gamed the algorithm correctly. Those that argue differently never was responsible for such a large-scale search/media operation.
That's true. The issue here isn't that Facebook tried and failed to implement an automatically generated news feed. The issue is they were called out for bias in the news feed, and then tried to deflect by blaming it on a computer.
Yes,it does. The problem is that the pilots didn't know that they were in stall because of conflicting readings from their instrumentation due to a failure in the pitot-static system. Pitot-static runs airspeed/altimeter/vertical speed indicator.
Doesn't get much more wrong than that, poor guys. Is there some kind of G/inertia meter that could have clued them up? To see an overspeed + climb but the freefall indicator is going crazy.
The VSI (vertical speed indicator) is the "freefall indicator" of which you speak. :)
The problem is that when there's the pitot-static failure the VSI (generally) indicates by "sticking" wherever it was when the failure occurred.
"Speed" means a different thing to a pilot than it does to a non-pilot. Groundspeed is irrelevant (aerodynamically), airspeed is everything. To sense "overspeed" you have to know airspeed. And since airspeed is a measure of the movement of the aircraft relative to the medium it's moving through (air), there has to be a system to measure that movement. That system is the pitot-static system. The pitot tube sticks into the uninterrupted airflow, usually on the wing somewhere, the static port sits where the air is calm, usually on the fuselage. The airspeed indicator in particular relies on the differential between the two inputs to determine airspeed.
I second this sentiment. Especially someone in a biz-dev role. Can you imagine if he crossed the line like this with a customer? It's not something a budding business wants to ever deal with.
Someone who feels casually about this kind of misconduct with another employee - in my mind is someone who would feel casually about lying on an expense report and other things you just don't expect people to do.
I suspect the lawyers would have you fire for no cause, give a good reference, support unemployment benefits, and potentially offer a small departure package. None of that is really necessary - when confronted with the facts, nobody in their right mind is going to say "I didn't deserve to be fired. I'm going to sue!" But in the end, protecting your business is your highest priority.
I also get the sense that this is your real desire.
I'm an emacs evangelist and I'll use Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. I have half a mind to just use a windows VM for visual studio because I think it's a great Python IDE.
But then there's everything else.
I've looked a great deal for a decent javascript IDE and I have yet to find one outside of Emacs. For a lot of languages I end up using in short spurts, I appreciate having a text editor that can do what I need it to do, and can do it consistently regardless of what I throw at it.
If I have boilerplate that I need to set up, building a yasnippet template is a piece of cake. If I need syntax highlighting, it's almost guaranteed that someone has gone down that road and has a mode already set up. If I need to migrate to a new machine, I pull in my .emacs from my git repo.
Little things that might be a challenge - like opening a file over SSH or needing kerberos authentication in order to edit a file - are challenges that have long since been dealt with.
There were two videos that brought me back to Emacs after years of using other editors - one was about python development in Emacs when I was looking for a python IDE, the other was a video about org-mode.
It took me two weeks of forcing myself to use Emacs before the muscle memory came back and I started preferring Emacs over vi again.
I wouldn't be too concerned about whether or not you should migrate to it. Use what you know. When you have a need for the power of emacs, you can safely ignore it the first five or ten times it pops up.
Eventually, you'll wander into a video how-to like I did and turn to the dark side. Or not.
This seems like a story built specifically for a segment on Fox News where the newscasters feign shock and horror that their news topics aren't being covered by "mainstream media".
Of course trending news is curated. All hell would break loose otherwise.
There is no shortage of rabid political content conservative or otherwise on Facebook. A good part of the end user community would rather not deal with it.
An angry conservative who worked at Facebook was shocked and horrified when he was instructed to remove the breitbart 'story' about how Obama is actually a secret Muslim terrorist from Benghazi and is throwing a hissy fit all over the internet.
Not necessarily the case, but this is certainly my initial assessment of the situation without learning more.
Yeah, without some concrete examples it's hard to know exactly what is going on here.
That said, Facebook is certainly not coming out of this smelling like roses. The "Top Stories" mode is horrible, and Facebook tries really really hard to force you into it, especially on mobile. IMHO it is going to be the death of them in the long term. When they're yet another Friendster/MySpace/etc... this is what I'm going to point to.
but youre comparing two completely different products that get lumped into the same "social network" category, when really the have very little in common anymore.
1. I completely agree that the mainstream media in the U.S. (and in most parts of the world) is very biased and partisan.
2. I also agree that, as private companies, both Facebook and the mainstream media are in their complete right to proceed with their business as they see fit, within the legality of it anyway. I don't believe whatever it is that they do is a First Amendment (the rule forbidding the government from suppressing freedom of speech, assembly, etc) matter although it can be a freedom of speech (the natural right) matter.
With that out of the way the main reasoning of this post.
The great promise of the Internet in general and social media in particular is that, maybe for the first time in history, the natural rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly come together in this amazing technological manner and, at least in principle, without the need for authorization and without the interference of powerful third parties like the government or the elite.
People can exchange thoughts and ideas, coordinate, and interact instantaneously all across the globe without the need of long travel or intermediaries relaying those messages.
There was even an implicit promise, an unrealized one when, in many of the big public manifestations of the beginning of this decade the so called "Social Media Revolution" helped to magnify the voice of the people in the streets, to help them to coordinate outside the graps of their governments (that usually have full control of both the media and the old means of communication like landlines and mobile phones).
And these new companies (like FB, Twitter, Reddit to name a few) capitalized on that claim too, posting themselves as bastions of freedom of speech, the tools for people to change the world, one hashtag at a time.
Now, the damnedest thing: with each revelation like this one it becomes apparent that "the king is dead, long live the king".
These companies, far from providing the means for people to communicate, to freely exchange thoughts and ideas, they try to shape and mold these ideas just like the very tools the government and the oligarchy uses to control the people.
If it is real that Facebook does that (and there is no reason to doubt) that betrays the people a lot more than the examples you mention. I believe people, after all these centuries since the printing press (now synonymous with journalism) are used to the idea that it is biased, partisan and, in general unreliable.
But when it is their very words and thoughts that are being distorted, the ones from their friends, their neighbors, whose opinions and ideas can be amplified or muted at will depending on whether they conform or not to the gateway controllers agenda, that in my opinion is the ultimate betrayal by those companies.
Assuming this and many other suspicious about their behavior is true Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and the social media in general is betraying the people a lot worse than the mainstream media are.
I would agree that the free exchange of ideas is the great promise of the internet, but I disagree that Facebook or any high traffic website has any responsibility to blindly post what is popular.
That kind of thing is relegated to smaller and active communities that can decide for themselves what content to exchange.
A highly trafficked global community has to be managed differently, and a system that is completely democratic will be gamed because of the eyeballs it has in front of it.
Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. are all sites that have been heavily targeted by astroturfing campaigns. They've all attacked that problem in their own ways, and they all have failed spectacularly.
One way of attacking the problem is curating popular content. It works but it doesn't. Show me the website that has more than a few million daily visitors that has democratized information, and I'll show you a website that is being gamed by marketers. (Seriously... because if it isn't already, I'd love to make a quick buck)
