There's already an attempt at doing this on PC [0] led by Brian Fargo of Interplay / inXile fame. I can't speak to how effective it is or how many people use it but it seems to be still operative after a year on public beta.
One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.
Sorry to be the downer on this article, but if you head to oneroof's "news" page [0] you'll see their entire raison d'être is to push out articles for NZ's media outlets to reproduce in the hopes of encouraging the continued misallocation of capital into residential real estate. So them making light of the house heating situation is in extremely poor taste considering such issues as NZ being the only developed country in the world with significant instances of rheumatic fever [1] and a quarter of South Island renters being stuck with cold and mouldy accommodation [2] (which they couldn't leave for weeks due to the pandemic).
Can you connect the last dot for me and explain why "(mis)allocation of capital into residential real estate" is bad for warmth, affordability, and fighting rheumatic fever?
The NZ renting experience can best be described as punitive, and for foreigners coming here can be quite a shock at what it entails (no pets [0], no hanging pictures, short-notice no-fault eviction, good luck getting plumbing and electric fixed, etc. etc.). But relevant to this discussion is the extremely poor state of the housing stock. It is woeful beyond belief.
The house I rent is in a town with median household (i.e. avg of 1.5 earners) income of US$44,000, and my rent is US$1,100/month. One of the inclusions in that cost is what I call the "mould room", which is not just uninhabitable but I don't dare even enter it without a mask [1]. I run a dehumidifier in my kids room for 14hrs/day or they would cough all night in bed - it sucks about 4L moisture per day. But I put up with that because my landlord hasn't put up rent too much (is about 15% behind market at the moment) and the alternatives that come on the market are scarcely any better.
Lest you think I'm being dramatic or that my situation isn't generalisable, I suggest you read this recent reddit thread of NZ renters detailing how cold their houses are [2]. Particularly funny are comments from Norwegian, Swedish, Canadian migrants saying they've never felt as cold in their life as in a New Zealand bedroom.
The only way out of this situation is to buy your own house. That's it. There is no incentive whatsoever for landlords to improve their capital once someone is paying off their mortgage, and covid slowdown notwithstanding, that is guaranteed to be the case due to extreme supply shortage.
Perhaps you were confused by my use of the phrase "capital into real estate" - that doesn't mean building more and certainly never means improving existing stock - it just means buying the same existing houses for more and more money each year. The effect of this, of course, is that people renting these houses have to save more each year for a deposit if they ever hope to own. In this town, in the last 12 months, if you saved anything less than US$12,000 towards your deposit you are now further away from owning a bottom quartile house than last August. It is now estimated that for those born after 1990 (everyone < 30 yrs old) ~60% will never own, because their disposable income will never cover a deposit. So those people will be putting up with cold, expensive, diseased housing for life.
OneRoof, being a real estate advertising company, makes its money on listings priced based on the value of property, and so want to see both higher prices and/or higher turnover. Against typical microecon thinking, these factors are correlated in NZ, so in short all they want to see is higher prices. In other words they make more money the harder it is for renters to escape the cold, and thus put out an endless stream of PR guff about rags-to-riches stories of people flipping houses, hoping (and often succeeding) that 'serious' news outlets like the NZ Herald run the stories uncritically.
That is why "cats are warm lol" is so offensive coming from them.
[0] Adding further insult in the context of this article
[1] If you're wondering why I haven't put in a solution for this - it's a hilly town and this room is embedded in the Earth up to about half way, a not uncommon feature around here. Since it wasn't waterproofed properly, it's about as moist as a rainforest in there, and the only fix would be knocking two walls down and rebuilding that whole section of house.
Presumably, high rates of investment drive up prices (since supply is somewhat constrained). High prices reduce the ability for people to purchase, so they have to rent, but then higher purchase price means the investors have to increase rent too. This means there is a lot of demand at the low end of the housing market, where houses aren't as well maintained/insulated/upgraded
Investing in housing should lead to building more housing, which will lower prices for everyone. Is the investment only used to renovate existing housing?
Buying a house (in NZ) is a liquid investment with better returns than the stock market and no captial gains tax. Building involves much more risk, nimbyisn, geographic constraints. The cost of building is more closely related to the cost of labour than it is materials, so even at higher prices margins aren't nessecarily better.
Usually it's used to re-sell and re-mortgage the same run-down Victorian houses over and over again with no improvement at all. As a student tenant I had my fair share of renting horror houses that were lethally dangerous
This is only true if you limit your AR HMD design to beamsplitter + projector. There are existing prototypes [1] which demonstrate quite accurate lcd based occlusion for darkening the environment on a per-hmd-pixel basis.
Have you used any optical see-through HMDs? There's heaps, and they all have no problem displaying text. If you look at the spec sheet for the BT-300 for example [0] you'll see "Virtual screen size: 80" support (virtual viewing distance 5m)", or in other words you need to focus your eyes five meters away to see the display sharply, at which point it will appear to take up 80in of diagonal space in the real world (don't know why they mixed the units like this though). I'm pretty sure most people could read text off a 720p 80" screen 5m away.
As for not making things dark, yes that's true. You can of course tint the glasses or use an extra layer to darken the outside world, or you can really crank the brightness causes the user's iris to contract creating the impression of higher contrast in the dark regions. Best option is to combine the approaches with a camera observing the environment, which can even be done on a per-pixel basis as in the paper I helped write [1]
As for power/performance, it's all a matter of desired form factor. If you don't mind a cable to an arm or hip attached android device, you can have everything you need right now. Alternatively there's the Hololens style huge headset. But if you want slimline glasses yes you'll be waiting a few years.
A lot a people are bearish on the future of AR and I can appreciate that viewpoint, but the arguments you've brought for it are at best half true and I hope readers don't see this and think any of these problems are unsolvable (or indeed, haven't already been solved)
Whilst I am certainly supportive of open access science in general, and in the case of my own writing am glad to see it reach a wider audience, I'm surprised by the brazenness of linking to a pirated article whilst in discussion with its author. I don't know whether to be offended or impressed
Do you see a reason that, as an author, you wouldn't want your article to be pirated as widely as possible? You get no actual benefit from IEEE making money off of your article, right?
This is speculation, but perhaps there's a game-theory issue here. If IEEE loses money by people pirating (and you can apply the usual counter-arguments about whether the pirateer would have gone on to purchase it anyway) rather than paying then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future if they want to publish in the journal again.
A better situation is where the preprint or open access version is available.
> then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future
WHAT?! Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?
I think the university insulates the author from the costs you mention. This also assumes that the market for articles is fair and rational, when it's anything but.
I think that science should be your ultimate goal as a scientist. Science is an inclusive goal, not an exclusive clique. You can certainly argue that your article was meant only for students and viewers who have access to IEEE's walled garden. But then you must also admit that your work isn't meant to benefit anyone else, except indirectly.
It also fosters discussion, since we can view your work and see whether it stands on its own merits, or whether it's related to the discussion past the title and the abstract.
The IEEE site also shows that your article has been viewed 238 times. My comment linking to the unimprisoned version was upvoted 5 times, and a good rule of thumb is that 4*upvotes = view count on a clickable link. (I've measured this in the past.) So your readership probably increased by at least 10%.
Lastly, I'm hopeful that IEEE and other institutions will eventually yield to the forces of technology, as the RIAA did. Attempting to stop technology by force doesn't have a good track record of success. It will be an unpleasant ride until then, but the world will be better off.
I think my manner of speaking was too wry. To be clear: I'm perfectly happy for people to read my research by whatever means they need to take. I too hope that scientific publishing gets its act together and moves away from hoarding knowledge behind paid subscriptions, and guerilla efforts to bring that closer to reality are appreciated. It was a tongue in cheek way of saying "I'm right here, you could have asked :)" (I would have said 'go for it')
To answer some of the sibling comments:
rspeer > You get no actual benefit from IEEE making money off of your article, right?
I'm well aware, although as an IEEE member I don't think it's fair to say no benefit, although it is very hard to quantify.
klibertp > what difference it makes for you personally, as an author and researcher, whether people access your work via a paywall or not?
None. As said above, I think my tenor wasn't communicated well enough. I was more just surprised that, given that sillysaurus3 and I have never communicated before, someone would take an action that could have potentially been quite upsetting (I know a few researchers where that would have definitely been the case).
klibertp > Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?
Absolutely not in our field. As I understand it, in some fields there is a charge for very long form writing to cover the work required in reviewing and editing (though perversely the actual person who does that work is often unpaid), but generally pay-to-publish would indicate a low quality journal and would be an outlet of last resort.
I know next to nothing about the process of writing and publishing scientific papers, so forgive me if the question is stupid, but: what difference it makes for you personally, as an author and researcher, whether people access your work via a paywall or not?
Sounds like an interesting place, I loved Isle of Skye when I travelled that area. I think the article might be overselling the "leading the world in energy" angle though -- I too live on an island where > 98% of the energy is from renewable sources [1], and it has over a million people on it.
"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions — in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing."
From that I take away, whether the universe proves to be a well-meaning entity or a bleak, chaotic, meaningless one, it is not useful^ to attempt to discern its motivations except to the extent you can affect them. As you noted, it is up to you to determine then what really is or isn't in your control.
^ note that this is distinct from the idea of intellectual exploration for your own enjoyment or edification
And if compile times are getting you down, you can still get the checks without producing a binary and save quite a bit of time with https://github.com/rsolomo/cargo-check
If you haven't tried ConEmu [0], it's pretty awesome. I use it with the Git Bash that comes with the full windows git installer and it Just Works for most of my terminal needs. Haven't tried it with WSL but it can most likely be rigged up.
I use conemu with WSL... it's the best one available for Windows, but it still pales in comparison to the default macOS terminal, and even the one that ships with Elementary. The customziation, tabs, layout, fonts all work fine but seem a bit bolted on.
I feel the need to point out that what "ships" with elementaryOS is basically meaningless. You can install what you want, easily, and the default configuration is a recommendation. Welcome to Linux-land. https://www.distrowatch.com/
Oh, absolutely, but I'm actually saying the terminal that ships with Elementary is superb. The macOS stock terminal is also really good. But the Windows stock terminal is downright horrible, Powershell is slightly better, but not Unixy, and ConEmu is so-so, but better than the other Windows options.
No, it isn't. Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, etc. are tested together as a group and you can expect that they integrate properly. The same cannot be said for third-party OSX .apps. They're more like adding another repo to your sources.list. Hell, OSX won't even let you uninstall Terminal.app.
Correct. I can't find the exact news article I read it, though this one shows the trend [0]. The most recent HILDA report shows that over 50% of < 30s in Aus will never own a home
> But at least one of these videos — showing an alien invader game that let the wearer of the supposed headset or glasses make use of real-world objects — was created by visual effects studio Weta Workshop. Prior to today, it was believed Weta had simply created the visual assets for the game. However, The Information reveals the entire video was created by the studio.
Was this ever really in doubt? You don't have to be a physicist or AR expert to note that throughout the video they occlude bright background colours with dark AR elements - somehow projecting 'black light'. Whilst I wouldn't expect the man on the street to pick this up it would be nice if journalists about to pen a breathless puff piece would at least give the subject matter 30 seconds of consideration.
Here is the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM It doesn't have any disclaimers that this was faked -- some earlier videos from Magic Leap did have disclaimers.
It is obviously too high resolution and pixel perfect to be from a headset display though. So it didn't fool me, but I think the way it is presented could be quite misleading to folks without a 3D background.
Yeah, it's funny how they think they got some scoop here. It was obviously a concept video. Totally obvious, and not just from what you mentioned, just the look and feel of the whole thing in general.
One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.
[0] https://store.robotcache.com/