Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.
I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?
I can't reply to the five or so comments that say the same thing but I'll put it to you this way: My grandparents are both dead of cancer-related complications in the last few months, they didn't have ten years to wait for a cure. I very much can relate and empathise with those who have to wait. But it's still better late and working than never.
Well, the fact it's not causing liver failure/brain damage/bouts of pedantic arguing/etc is a good thing. Waiting another decade to see if it actually works isn't too bad either, we haven't had a vaccine for the last 10,000 years of human civilisation, so what's another 10?
Braille would be easy to implement too, both Android and iOS control fonts at the system level (well, usually on Android) so all you have to do is add a Braille font and you're done.
The immediate benefit is that this makes, or with a little refinement (not sure how small the tactile areas can be), touch screens properly accessible to the blind without changing anything on the software interface. That is a very good thing, as it's accessibility, but layered on top of what exists. I wonder if it can do Braille? 'Cause that would just be cool.
I'm not really in to having it for standard UI, I prefer the idea of some kind of electromagnetic field providing the haptic feedback, something a bit less.. crude? Obvious? something like that.
I think that we're largely missing the point here. He's worried that his fundamentally harmless research will end up powering horrific weapons of mass destruction, enabling them to attack even more precisely and with more devastation. And quite frankly, I share his concerns that if those weapons were developed, we would use them without thought or care. And apologies to my fellow American Hackers, but America's got the rep for it, what with that one time they dropped a couple of nukes on hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women and children, killing hundreds of thousands and levelling a couple of cities.
But, I digress, he's talking about androids sneezing us to death. I'm not going near a shop mannikin ever again.
Actually, most benefits count as taxable income in the UK, it's just the tax is taken before payment. And no there isn't a correlation, I'm not saying there is. I'm pointing out that, considering the tax band isn't proportionally that much higher for the more affluent, there's significant divergence in the level of maintenance in these areas, when all these areas should be maintained without discrimination.
Not where I live. I live in a largish town called Ipswich, in the UK. Now, we have a wildly diverging GDP demographic, we have people from the poorest 5% and people from the richest 5% of the population and the council tax rate only goes up to £3,200 from just over £1,000. When you're earning £70,000, £3,000 isn't a lot of money. When you're earning £16,000, £1,000 is.
It's fascinating how subtly our environment reflects our livelihoods. For example, I look out of my window and see two, make that three trees. I advance fifteen minutes up to a much more affluent district, lo and behold, many trees and well manicured verges. These same areas are maintained by the same council and the same taxes. I also had never noticed those differences before.
Nice! One of the biggest issues I have with jQuery is the fact that animations are just JS and not CSS with JS fallbacks. I suppose that's a deliberate design choice, but still.
Fuck titles, man.