Better than watching the results of the election, which was a foregone conclusion which even the US pollsters couldn’t screw up, was checking out some of new (?) technology that CNN had going on in their ‘war room’. The highlight of which was when from Chicago, correspondent Jessica Yellin seemed to materialize, in 3-D, in CNN’s New York election center to chat with anchor Wolf Blitzer.
HoloTV? 10, maybe 20 years, you heard it here first. Check it.
Here are the tech specs for it - 35 HD cameras in a circle and a computer to splice the footage together. The only thing it doesn’t do, which is probably coming is “projecting” the holo onto the floor, rather it just inserts it into the video feed, you need the holo projected so you can have the total Star Wars experience. You could probably make the projection system with a series of “lasers”.
Who is putting money on which sitcom gets the HoloTV treatment first? Friends 2015?
Growing up in my twenties I recall vividly when Bush went into power, then again when he was re-elected. What could have been with Gore was never to be. It’s been an rocky ride for the entire world these past years. Watching the campaign over the past months has been painful. I vowed that if Palin would become VP I’d be going out to buy a gun the next day and move to the woods. I hope this crazy version of the US is behind us.
Granted this is coming from a Canadian, but I too am pleased to hear about change in America.
It appear Tesla Motors, the brightest hope of Silicon Valley’s nascent clean-automotive industry, has only $9 million in the bank, says ValleyWag.
The company, which recently laid off dozens of employees and announced the closing of its Detroit office, called an all-hands meeting yesterday evening to inform employees of its financial state. What makes the company’s low cash balance especially scary, our tipster says, is that the company has taken “multiple tens of millions” of dollars in deposits from customers — anywhere from $5,000 to $60,000 per vehicle — and has only delivered 50 of them (out of 1200). The obvious conclusion: Having already spent its customers’ deposits, it may run out of money before it delivers the cars they have paid for.
The Tesla CEO Elon Musk then admitted that they only have $9 mil left. However, he notes, importantly that cash on hand does not equal liquidity and that they are looking for a new infusion of $20 million. In today’s market environment, one doesn’t want to be raising cash right now. Ugly.
Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government’s $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a “clean feed”, censoring adult material.
Despite planning to hold “live trials” before the end of the year, Senator Conroy said it was not known what content the mandatory filter would bar, with euthanasia or pro-anorexia sites on the chopping block.
A “mandatory filter” is a terrible limitation to establish, especially because no one seems to know what or why things will be filtered. It is oh so easy to see that undesirable websites could get filtered out even when they are not “illegal”. Being pro-anorexia may be one of the stupidest things I have ever heard of, but that doesn’t mean I want my government to come in and protect my innocent eyes from that concept. The people who really want to seek out pro-anorexia sites, for example, will likely do so even with the filter through use of proxies. And as the New York Times pointed out, this is a slippery slope. Where does the government stop censoring?
