I’m not SURE you’re wrong, but that looks like single pane glass which barely muffles sound at all (just like I have in my 70 year old house), and crows are definitely known for learning how to mimic words quite well.

Or perhaps (more likely) this unit has a malfunctioning cpu and its surveillance recordings are getting mixed up with its bird sound effect files and its amplifier is also being overpowered.
Birds aren’t real!

or... put a 4-way stop, where the main road (and cyclists in danger) would have to stop as well.

Or create a new sign "Cyclists, look left for arseholes"

Even if you don't put a 4-way stop, could certainly have a solar-powered (battery at night) LED "flasher" on the stop signs that would blink when detects movement on main road. A raspberry-pi has enough cpu power. Might cost $20k to install a pole to mount 2 cameras and solar panel(s). This "blinking stop sign" would be so rare, that it would catch drivers attention and they'll be more likely to stop.
(I'm not suggesting raspberry pi are reliable enough for this application, but my point is the computer vision can be done in < 10W, which can easily be handled by a solar panel, even in England)

your contention that ONLY personal profit drives invention or innovation.

I'm afraid I've never argued that, I can lead by agreeing whole heartedly that such a contention is false.

I merely pointed out that in a video about how 'capitalism didn't create the iphone', the authors own examples of innovations that lead to the iphone are all 100% from within an economy based on capitalism. My very first post stated clearly that it's not a purely capitalist system, but that it is noteworthy that not a one of the examples chosen by the author making his point came from a socialist country.

Can you offer a comparative American/Russian timeline of computer innovations
Well, I could actually. If you want to deny the fact that Russia basically halted their computer R&D multiple times in the 70s, 80s and 90s in place of just stealing American advances because they were so far behind I can cite examples for you...

And for some unknown to you reason China is beating the ever loving pants off America lately.
1. Factually, no they are not. The fastest network gear, CPU and GPU tech are all base on American research and innovation. America is still hands down leading the field in all categories but manufacturing cost, but that isn't for reasons of technological advancement but instead a 'different approach' to environmental and labour regulations.
2. Within the 5G space you alluded to earlier, there is an additional answer. Their 5G isn't 'better' but rather 'cheaper' for reasons stated in 1. The existence of their 'own' 5G tech though isnt' because Huawei's own R&D was caught up so fast through their own innovation. Instead if you look into the history of network companies, Canadian giant Nortel was giving Cisco a solid run for it's money for a time, until they utterly collapsed because of massive corporate espionage stealing almost all of their tech and under cutting them on price. China's just using the same playbook as Russia to catch up.

Russia beat America into space

Well, if you want to go down that road the conclusion is that fascism is the key to technological advancement, as America and Russia were largely just pitting the scientists they each captured from the Nazis against one another.

Once again though, my point has never been that only capitalism can result in innovation. Instead, I made the vastly more modest proposal that personal profit from inventions is beneficial to innovation. I further observed that the video author's own examples support that observation, and in that contradict his own conclusion.

he can just shut the cpu off and on to get rid of it

As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

*quality

I'm currently reading "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom and it's pretty *fear inducing.

If we ever do hit the singularity... it doesn't really matter what we do.

First up, if it's an AGI is to be any use, it needs to be at least as smart as us. Which means, by definition, it will be capable of writing its own AGI.

There are any number of nightmare scenarios where even a seemly benevolent goal might be disastrous for humanity.

"Multivac, fix the environment!"
"Ok, what's the major issue with the environment?"
/wipes out humanity

"Multivac, solve the Riemann hypothesis!"
"Ok, but I'll need a lot of processing power"
/converts entire planet to a giant cpu

Even if, by some miracle, we end up developing a benevolent AI that understands our needs and is aligned with them, (e.g. the Culture Minds), we are no longer in control.

We might be along for the ride, but we're certainly not driving.

The other thing that's interesting is a question of scale. We tend to think of intelligence in human terms, like this.

infants..... children.....mentally impaired..Sarah Palin.....normal people.....Neil deGrasse Tyson.....Feynman, Einstein, Newton, etc.

But that ignores all the lower intelligences:

bacteria...Trump......insects.....sheep.....dogs...chimps, dolphins, etc............................... dumb human..smart human.

But from a superintelligence's point of view, the scale looks more like this
bacteria.. humanity ... Tesla ................................................... ..................................................................................................
..................................................................................................
............................................................................................. AI

I stopped in a Mouse computer store (small section on 1 floor of a much larger 9 floor "tech mall" in Tokyo). Nothing especially impressive. Computers in Japan are > 15% more expensive (and 1-2 CPU generations behind) computers sold in the US.

Nice commercial though.

She may be pretty, but that brain downright sexy. The CPU is strong with this one.

was interesting at the end, he seemed to have no problem with responding to "thank you" and "goodbye".... maybe because those are so common and regularly used, it's processed by a different part of the brain ("L1 cache" in CPU terms) ?

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

Gluing the heat sink to the CPU? Please, no, don't give the OEMs that idea.

I also need logarithms daily as an optical engineer.

That said, a CPU only does +,-,*,/, and approximates everything with those basic functions, so maybe he's onto something...nah...:)

Next you'll be telling me that Intel put a 1-200%ish mark-up on their top end CPU's because they have no real competition from AMD....

......*checks parts shop* OH NOES that's exactly what the twats have done!"!!!!

12 hours to render a single frame? Whew, that makes me feel so much better about my gaming rig's CPU.

They're pretty awesome, but keep in mind they are static scenes with nothing else to tax the CPU like character movements, fight mechanics, NPCs, moveable objects, etc.. Add in all the things that make a game, not just a pretty picture/scene, and even a powerful computer is going to have serious problems keeping up at this quality. I expect this to be the best they can do for now when you make it a game and not just a scene.....
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Snowdrop-Next-Gen-Engine-Tom-Clancys-The-Division