Google goes looking for more GLASSHOLES Google's “Glass” tech specs may have been written off by Steve Wozniak as a promising-but-impractical technology, but that hasn't stopped The Chocolate Factory from lengthening the queue to obtain them. That queue starts here, at the “Glass Explorer Program”, which Google kindly says it is “expanding … little by little”. How …
The requirement that only US residents may wear Google Glass kit is probably due to the NSA only being allowed to spy on non-US residents. I mean, if only US-residents are wearing Glass - feeding their video streams to the NSA via Google - then it stands to reason that they can only be spying on foreigners, right?
Some might say that the UK is "One Nation Under CCTV", but when the US population is fully equipped with personal CCTV equipment - possibly equipped with NSA backdoor APIs to activate the video stream at will - then the Panopticon will have arrived.
The next step for Google Glass will be to include technology to enable The Authorities to change the direction of the wearer's head so that They can view "objects of interest".
I'm interested in what Glass can do. Despite the cynicism displayed on here. Perhaps it ought to be forced to make a noise while photographing/recording, in the way that I believe Japanese mobile phones have to.
If I could read the screen of course... Which Google say is the equivalent of a 25" HD telly at 8 feet. Sadly I can't read text on that size screen from that distance - so I guess it won't help me. Because it would be great to be able to go somewhere with a GPS that outputs turn-by-turn directions to a pair of glasses. Also when in the train station it would be nice to point a camera at the information displays so helpfully placed 20' in the air, so they're impossible to read. At the moment I carry a monocular for this purpose, but at airports/stations it can be a bit of a juggling job with bag, case, coat, passport, tickets, coffee, sausage roll, monocular... However I suspect I'll be swapping peering at a 100" screen from 20 feet away to peering at a 1/2" screen from 2 inches away, that's equivalent to a 25" screen 8 feet away - and they'll all end up being equally useless.
Oh well, I guess it's not aimed at me anyway. A quick look at Google's promo for Glass suggest that it's aimed at ice-skating, sky-diving hipsters who're obsessed with social networking and videoing everything they do, while looking at weather forecasts the rest of the time.
Oddly when I'm outside, I consider it too late to look at the weather forecast. Looking at the sky will do at that point, it was before I came out into the rain that I needed to have remembered my umbrella. Which is another thing taking up a hand that could usefully be holding a monocular... This tech will probably make it's way to low-vision aids by about the time I'm ready for the nursing home. At least I might get some nice nursey-porn out of it to help pay the bills.
There's no speccy icon (either with rainbow or glasses...), so I'll have to settle for the lab goggles one. I guess I'll stick to my bag with magnifying glass, reading glasses, TV watching glasses, polarised and photo-chromic sunglasses, monocular and jewellers screwdrivers to fix the one of them that will inevitably break.
Is because Microsoft and Apple don't have it yet.
Remember when PS3 had Blu-Ray and Xbox didin't? Blu-Ray was a trojan horse, and it didn't matter. No Microsoft have jumped on the last-gen specs with their latest console, Blu-Ray matters all of a sudden.
Expect the same, loads of piss taking until Microsoft and Apple have similar copy-cat products for sale.
So anything that Google or Samsung productize first is automatically good, and any criticism is just fanboys hating on the other guy? So does that mean anything that Apple or Microsoft productize first is automatically stupid, and any hating on it from Google or Samsung fanboys is fully justified?
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