Yeah, it is called QA. It is a job and they should pay people. Oh, wait, they do. I spent 16 years doing it and my wife still does. This is just Google trying to get the public to do a job that people get paid to in other companies.
1 Like
Thatās the pre-alpha release stage. Then you let it out into real conditions that arenāt always the same as predicted.
If it is not about large atomic piles or big aircraft, I am in favor of early alpha releases. Better to see the halfbaked stuff and its limitations and possibilities outright than when it is kept behind lab walls and lawyered-up NDAs.
Sweet trick, isnāt it? 
ā¦and if they shaved off a zero from the price, Iād go for it too.
Then it wouldnāt be a status thing, like the Apple Watch.
1 Like
Thatās one of things which annoys me about this. There have been products like this out there for more than ten years. And itās kind of disconcerting for me when I have never had any problems, and then suddenly there is a media uproar about other people doing something I have been doing without experiencing their negative consequences. My setup looks like this:
ā¦and the worst Iāve ever gotten is ribbing for wearing a chunky 90s looking Borg fashion accessory. Nobody has ever, ever asked me if I was nor accused my or recording them. I have never been asked to remove them, or not wear them around certain people. Itās the same deal - I could record people with them if I wanted to, but I donāt, it just doesnāt interest me. But it sucks if everything has been fine for years and suddenly becomes a problem because of some other product.
Cops who - let me guess - are all wired up with cameras and recording everything? This would hardly make a persuasive case against ubiquitous recording devices. Also, are there even laws against filming people in public parks? This isnāt so in most areas.
Well, Iām a mixed-race person with no money, who uses a wearable computer. So assuming that I am ārichā would cause problems. Also, tech nerds are specialists. Specialists are generally not subject to having terms dictated to them by laypeople. Itās not unfair to suppose that computer science / engineering people are going to know a lot more about technologies they are developing than the peanut gallery of the public at large. Apple may have convinced people that computers are fashion, but the technology needs to come from somewhere first.
2 Likes
So it is a status thing for a while. If it helps getting it debugged, more power to it. I donāt mind if something of this kind is a status thing - as long as the period of it being Something Special is as short as possible.
As much as trickle-down doesnāt work in economy, it works quite well in technology. Smartphones and computers are just a few examples; various electronic amenities that were the domain of ultraluxury vehicles are now found in mainstream cars. And so on and on and onā¦
So, give me more wild concepts, more halfbaked status symbols that trailblaze the tech. And if the ones with the money do their part of the job in getting the electronics (which I am waiting for for decades) into the mainstream, more power to them here.
[quote=āpopobawa4u, post:84, topic:53946ā]
Cops who - let me guess - are all wired up with cameras and recording everything? This would hardly make a persuasive case against ubiquitous recording devices. Also, are there even laws against filming people in public parks? This isnāt so in most areas. [/quote]
I donāt think the cops or the parents would care and, depending on your luck, you might just (a) walk away, (b) get a free ride and overnight stay downtown until they let you go or (c) a beat down. Around here, depending on class and racial signifiers, Iād expect b and c combined.
Unless it is Google Glass, it isnāt what we were discussing. This is a Glass specific backlash, not one about nerds attaching weird things to their heads.
1 Like
The problem with all of that is that I am only obliged to cooperate with lawful police activity, so them ānot caringā tends to get them in trouble. My street lawyering is formidable and rather scary. And I might just go downtown on my own to chew out the desk lieutenant and dispatch as well for endangering people with frivolous nonsense. It wouldnāt be the first time.
Then itās not what you are discussing, but I was addressing a specific post:
ā¦and the issue of why this is Google Glass specific when peopleās complaints and concerns about them apply just as readily to other technologies. Such as dedicated covert cameras, and other kinds of wearables. People are arguing that the Glass is a special case, but I disagree.
?
If a cop says āComplyā and you donāt, they beat you and throw you in a car in most of the U.S. You can protest all you want later but if someone calls and cops roll up, youād best do what they ask you to do. Thatās reality no matter your street lawyering. Oakland PD doesnāt take a lot of lip unless youāre a 50 year old white dude wearing a $5,000 watch.
People are arguing that glass shoves the fact that you could be recording them right now into every conversation or social interaction. It turns out that we donāt have social norms for that and many people react badly to this, including, from what Iāve heard, punching people, ripping the glasses off the heads of folks, or banning them from their place of business if they donāt remove said glasses.
This isnāt a āthink of the childrenā card. This is the āme thinking of my children cardā. These are issues that Iāve personally experienced and found unsettling. And I have a right to feel unsettled and not quite understand why immediately. Some of those unsettling moments I slowly realized were not that grave while others turned out to be something much more troubling than I ever could have anticipated.
there is already so much recording of children going on
Youāre right, VanTatsu, but this is a spurious defense as it A) Implies that every childās parent consented to the usage and B) Trots out the same feeble argument that essentially says āeveryone is already doing it so they canāt cherry pick what theyāre comfortable withā. There are a tremendous number of people who do not participate in social media at all yet find that their privacy is exploited routinely. Sure, it may be low-level stuff like junk mail seemingly out of nowhere but the question is ultimately about consent.
If were talking about a performance it depends a lot on they type of performance. For a loud flashy rock concert I could care less.
But you know who could care? The artist. Not necessarily because their IP is infringed (valid) and not necessarily because they didnāt consent (though an obvious argument can be made for public performance=consent), but because an artist is sharing a part of themselves that is deeply felt and intimate. It is understandable in the excitement of the moment for someone to want to capture it, but the artist strives to share that intimacy and to have it devolve into an abstraction is disheartening (I know from personal accounts). I canāt imaging that calculus changes much if an artist plays loud and flashy. You say as much in the very next paragraph:
a case where the social norms already tell us to put away the recording device
Society does not have to arrive at consensus on this, the venue or artist often already does. Explicitly. And people ignore it. Routinely.
The takeaway here is that just because a lot of peopleā¦ hell, perhaps even most people, consent to this it does not immediately follow that all of society has to resign themselves to talking to someone through the back of their phone. Or glasses. Or whatever.
But your point about this invective being directed at Google Glass specifically is valid. But sometimes we need a case study to understand our relationship with a new paradigm.
I know. But, like I was saying, this is not exclusive to Google Glass. The same could be said about any other wearable computer which has a camera on it.
This goes some way towards explaining why, as a wearable computer user, such behavior and its motivations concerns me.
2 Likes
What is the crucial difference? The underlying tech is the same, it is only either the form factor that finally makes such devices more practical, or the involvement of a larger brand-name that became fashionable to hate. But the chips are some bog-standard SoC and some crappy CMOS sensor and the only somewhat-interesting part is the LCD/optics combo. (In a better world, SPI/HDMI/PAL/NTSC-interfaced combos like this would be $5 on Aliexpress, including eyeglasses clip.)
ā¦also, this just in. Notice the presence of the 1.3 Mpix camera.
http://www.dhgate.com/product/s29-u8-android-bluetooth-smart-watch-camera/228617322.html#s1-0-1|1534663057
1 Like
The perception of it isnāt the same. Those dumb plebes in the public you were complaining about earlier donāt view it the same way necessarily.
Me? I understand that but, that said, if I was sitting down with a friend at the coffee shop, which I did yesterday, and they were wearing a recording device focused on me on their head, Iād ask them to take it off, whether it was on or not. Just like friends donāt pull out their phones and play with them when theyāre having dinner or coffee with other friends.
Which quite proves their dumbness.
And we know where they can stuff the perceptions.
Until they pass a law.
Thatās the problem with the plebes.
Quite many laws, luckily, can be often ignored. Do you know them all, anyway?
In this case, we have too many cameras around with varying degree of concealment to make such law anywhere close to practical/enforceable.
And if assistive devices using the same technologies come into the fray, which is quite inevitable (see the Wired article earlier), we get the ADA and accessibility issues in the ring, ready for a round of quite heavyweight boxing, cheered for by an army of people with ranges of sensoric and cognitive issues.
1 Like
I think the obvious question is; do I want to have a conversation with someone wearing this thing?
What difference does the thing make? If you canāt discern if you are talking to the person or the tech highlights your own insecurities. Phones can be used to broadcast or record audio, which is a much stickier legal quagmire than images, but nobody seems interested in this. Do you know anybody who refuses to speak to a person with a mobile phone on the off chance that they might record you? Would this scenario suddenly cause you to distrust your friends, family, or co-workers?
Another thing to keep in mind is why precisely wearable computers have cameras. They have had them for many years, and they are employed for augmented reality, the ability to overlay useful data upon real-world surroundings. Many of the early applications - even 10+ years ago, when this tech was really expensive - have involved stuff such as tactical displays, and mobile repair for utilities. The same kinds of applications are being extended now for phones and tablets, because they are useful. Hereās a pic of an iPad being used to label electronics parts for hobby building which illustrates this:
This kind of thing is much, much easier to do with a wearable where you can see the work, the overlay, and have both of your hands free!
Typically, people have simply not been using this tech to just ogle people. Itās not what it was developed for, nor marketed for. Itās a tool, and people who donāt know anything about it crying foul makes about as much sense as complaining that drones could give them wedgies.
2 Likes
And now imagine a scope probe with a floating waveform display, a multimeter probe with a value, or test pads with attached instrumentation and showing signals as they are. With optional schematics overlay or pin labels or notes that you could point and dictate.
Same for GIS, so you could make and share virtual markers in physical space. Map overlays, live bus schedules/positions, millions of uses. Without the awkward and hands (and cognition) tying touchscreens.
And memory cues.
And the people-recognition functions. And so on and on and onā¦
1 Like
I think there are a couple of factors tied to hatred of Glass. The first is that itās at eye level, putting it on very personal terms, compared to most surveillance cameras which are up high, and are therefore less personal.
The other is that Glass does so much more than record a video. It can, practically or theoretically, tie in tons of metadata to the video stream such as GPS location, face and voice recognition to create a searchable picture of where someone is and what they are doing, without that personās consent. Connect that data to all the other things Google already has information on, and it feels like real surveillance.
