or live. Hey, we're live. Welcome, video watchers. Live, whether you're live or watching later. For you, you're watching now. That's all that matters. I hope they're alive. I hope they aren't. Yeah, I hope we don't have anyone not live. Not alive. You can ask your trump box. Ghosts. It's all live to them. Yeah. So I just I've been mentioning my experience with the transition from Verizon Fios to Frontier Fios. And I just want to note, got a call from a Frontier support person this morning, wonderful person named Bobby, bounced my ports. You know what that means? And and got got me back up to speed and then said, look, you know, I know you said it's been fluctuating. So if it goes back down, give me a call, give me his extension. So fingers crossed, things are fixed. Cool. Yeah. And that is my Frontier communications update brought to you by me, not Frontier. All right, are you guys ready? Let's do it. Why not? We all made time to be here. We're here. We ought to. All right, here we go. Two hundredths of one percent of the Daily Tech News show were brought to you by me. If you would like to decrease my already meager equity, go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 11th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Ms. Allison Sheridan, host of No Silla Cast. Welcome back, Allison. Hey, Tom, how's it going today? Doing well. Thank you for for stepping in for the Veronica Belmont Game of Thrones red carpet post day hangover. Oh, yeah, she got she did a great job. I don't know if anybody saw the Facebook live. You can go back and watch it in the archive. But she got to hug Arya Stark. Wow. Wow. I'm jealous. Right. I was pretty jealous, too. But Allison's here today. We're very happy to have Allison here because we are going to recreate an excellent conversation about virtual reality. We had at one of our LA meetups with Travis Falstad, software developer and consultant Travis. Welcome to the show. You've done. You've worked with VR. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I've worked in the space since pre-Oculus Rift. So building flight simulators for a major aircraft manufacturer and getting to know a lot of the use cases and some of the constraints with really expensive hardware a few years ago. So what we're going to do is is Allison sat down at the meetup. Allison and you basically said, like, OK, besides gaming, why should I care? Right. And we have so many people who are saying, oh, I'm tired of VR. I don't care about it. It's just for games. We're going to try to see if maybe there's other things. Yeah, prove it, Travis. Right on. I'll do my best. That's coming up in our discussion section. Let's start off with the headlines. When Google Fiber launched in Kansas City, one of the things that did to encourage neighborhoods to sign up was offered free five megabits per second internet to anyone who paid for the construction. It was a three hundred dollar one time fee. So you pay three hundred dollars once you get free five megabits per second internet for life. Google Fiber is now dropping that incentive as they have built out enough, apparently, in its place, new subscribers can get 100 megabits per second for $50 a month with no construction fee, as long as they agree to a year contract. Gigabit Fiber is $70 a month with no construction fee if they agree to a year contract. Google Fiber is also broadening its efforts to connect underserved neighborhoods in Kansas City for free. That's pretty cool. It seems like they've got enough of it now. Can I have it? I feel like because they still have the three hundred dollar and free internet for life deals in Provo, I think in Austin as well. Yeah, we would like it to come to our cities, please. You in particular would like that, right? Yeah, I wouldn't mind a little gigabit, definitely. That would be fun. Well, Nikkei Asian Review reports Hatachi unveiled a robot Friday that will compete with SoftBank's Pepper in the area of customer service. The EMU-3 is smaller and faster than Pepper and expected to hit the market in 2018. Pepper went on sale last June, targeted at elderly assistants in households, though a Microsoft partnership will sell to retail. EMU-3 will be sold to corporations. I think it's awful cute for a corporation, isn't it? Yeah, and it can actually pick itself back up off the floor, which I don't think Pepper can do. So yeah, it's I guess what they're saying is we want people to use these in like tour, the one they showed off was a tourist situation. Like you show up at the airport of the train station and say, oh, how do I get to, you know, Harishuku? How do I get to the Shibuya district? And then it says, here's how you get there. And it can respond to natural language. You can roll around on its own. It can roll around fast on its own. Yeah, it's faster than Pepper, too. You're right. Six kilometers per hour, which I think is almost four miles an hour, three point seven miles an hour. That's fast.  It does seem like they're they're trying to create these friendly robots. These are not battle bots. Yeah, she's adorable in different niches. So they're like, OK, the Pepper one is meant to make people feel comfortable. Maybe in a retail situation, maybe in an elderly assistant situation. Whereas the M.U.3, which by the way, needs a different name. That one seems to be meant for for being helpful. Like being direct consumer like customer support sort of thing. Yeah, but she still is pretty cute and short, though. Looks like the picture shows a woman kneeling and it comes up to maybe her shoulders, so it's pretty tiny. You can have to lean down to talk to it. You don't want it to be threatening. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, seven feet tall towering over going, what do you want? An accidentally published page on T-Mall gave us an early look at Amazon's Kindle Oasis that is expected to be announced later this week. It has a large bezel on one side, a 300 pixels per inch screen weighs 131 grams. It's 3.4 millimeters at its thinnest, 8.5 millimeters at its thickest page. Also described a rechargeable battery case that attaches with magnets and comes in three colors. The case provides up to 20 months of standby time. No mention on whether this is waterproof, which a lot of people had expected. I'm, you know, I'm going to reserve judgment until I see it in person. But at first blush, it's kind of chunky looking to me. Yeah, I think the case makes it feel a little chunkier. I'm curious what it looks like in person. Yeah, I mean, that's a third of an inch thick on the thick side and it's only thick on one side and the big buttons. I don't know, I was curious looking forward to this to see what problem was left to solve because I upgraded from the Kindle Paperwhite to the Kindle Voyage and while the paper is supposed to look better, I can't really tell the difference. I mean, we put we put two of them side by side and Steve and I tried to figure out if we could really see it and I don't know, maybe our eyes are too old, but it didn't look that different to us. I'm not sure what more it needs to do. I think it's interesting that we're still seeing the E Ink type screens coming out of Amazon. I personally have just switched over to reading on whatever screen is around. But I know a lot of people don't like that. They're like, no, that makes my eyes tired. And so these E Ink type screens are still working for people. My reason for the Kindle is that I can't do anything else when I'm reading on the Kindle.  Yeah, I can't because I will instantly go, hey, what's Twitter doing?  Yeah. Yeah. Well, we got we got another product from HTC got leaked out. It's leaked product day. Oh, yeah. Sorry, got lost. HTC is expected to announce its new flagship HTC 10 phone at an event tomorrow. But a promo video leaked online gave an early sneak peek. The video shows a phone much like the HTC A9 with much chamfering of edges. Got to love some chamfers and a camera bump similar to the iPhone. And it includes USB, USB C connectivity. And again, we don't know price shipping. This is not an official announcement. It's just a leaked video. And it honestly doesn't look that different. So I'm not sure what I'm curious what the big selling point will be for this, probably the camera. Chamfers. Yes, and all the chamfers, although we've we've seen some chamfering. I've seen some chamfering. You've seen some chamfering in your time. The I think the iPhone 5 had chamfers, but they do make pretty hardware, though. I'm not going to lie, it's a good advice. Blackberry CEO, John Chen, told Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National, that Blackberry will launch two midrange Android phones this year. Chen didn't give details on release dates or anything but said one of the phones will come with a physical keyboard and the other will be all touchscreen. Chen said the $700 Blackberry priv, their Android phone to date, quote, was to a high end a product. In other words, too pricey. During the three months to the end of March, the priv sold 600,000 units, which was below the 850,000 that analysts had anticipated. I know that doesn't come in anywhere near iPhone or Samsung sales, but that sounds like pretty phenomenal sales figures for Blackberry in my book. Well, yeah, it's all about analysts' expectations, right? Whether it's disappointing or not. But if you're Blackberry, you just want to sell some units. And I think that's what John Chen's saying is like, look, this was too expensive. We sold enough of them at that price point that if we can come in at a lower price point, we think we can actually sell some phones. Well, OK. Our technical notes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned a decision that halted the Mississippi Attorney General's investigation into how Google deals with links to illegal things, including copyright violations. I love these double negatives. It overturned the halted decision. So now it's unhaunted. Yes, the appeals court noted Google could decline to comply with the subpoena, so didn't need injunctive relief given by the lower court. The MPAA has worked closely with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood on the case. The MPAA is pushing to strengthen the DMCA and focusing on Google in particular. Yeah, the MPAA is on a campaign right now, partly to negotiate better fees with services, but partly to strengthen the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Their slogan for it is instead of notice and takedown, which is the way the DMCA works, you send a notice saying, we think this is infringing and the company takes it down. They want it to be notice and stay down. So in other words, we'll send a notice that this is infringing and the service should make sure that nothing similar to it ever goes back up, which can sound reasonable if you don't think about the Internet. You're like, oh, well, if you told a company it should go down, well, then it should stay down. That's absolutely right.  And the whole point of safe harbor in the DMCA is that companies shouldn't have to be policing all of that all the time if we want to functioning Internet. Yeah, I don't see how this is workable at all. Singapore's carrier Starhub is partnering with Huawei to bring gigabit LTE to Singapore in the spring of 2017. The four and a half G service, which promises to roll out in the central business district of Singapore, doesn't have any devices that can take advantage of it yet, but there's still time. Starhub is currently rated as the world's fastest LTE operator with average speeds of 38 megabits per second already. So they just want to get obnoxiously fast in Singapore. Holy cow, that sounds fantastic. Well, I guess if they build it, they will come. Yeah. And think about it. Like we're getting 5G service within the next five years in most places. They're already talking about having it in 2018 in South Korea, I think. Verizon and AT&T have been working on their rollouts here in the United States. So I think, you know, I think we're going to be living in this world eventually, whether it, you know, gets to Singapore in the central business district first or not is a bit of bragging rights, really. Remind me again, how fast is 5G? Faster than a gig bit per second. I need it or capable of that. I mean, these things are always like, well, it's capable of this, but the implementation is actually less. So sure, I can be sitting next to my wireless router, but I don't get those speeds, right? No, I know. I love this next story. This is the perfect internet story, why the internet's wonderful. Reddit user Midwestern Housewives posted a discovery of a visual clue in Mike Tyson's punch out game for the NES. This game came out in 1987. It turns out a face in the crowd will duck in the second piston, Honda, or Bade Bowl fight if a punch is timed with the duck. The opposing fighter will be taken out with one punch. Yeah, and ball bowl, by the way, is apparently really hard. I never played punch out, which was launched as Mike Tyson's punch out. And then they removed it and just called it punch out. I don't know if it was like licensing or whatever. But yeah, here you go. You can finally beat ball bowl. That is so I just love this that they found it 30 years later. Yeah, it seems like I'm seeing more of these types of stories where people are finding hidden Easter eggs in older video games. It's like video game archaeology. It's pretty cool. They would dig it. Tech in Asia reports that I spelled A.I. Alibaba's artificial intelligence, that's not confusing, predicted all the winners for the Chinese TV talent show, I'm a singer. Alibaba Cloud's Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Ming Wan Li said after the show, the results demonstrated that I is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions. Dr. Wan Li had previously worked on IBM's A.I. Watson, I or A or I made its predictions based on data called from social media, song popularity and contestant ability. It's kind of a squishier goal than winning a game of go. Yeah, that's a whole different thing than that. In reality, this is just taking a bunch of data and predicting a result. What I didn't get from the article was how soon after all of the data did it come up with a decision versus the decision actually coming out? Well, yeah, everybody's tweets and everybody's emotions. You're going, OK, more people said A than B than A. Yeah, I wonder about that, too. I also would like to know a little more than I could find in the short time admittedly that I looked at this story about how the judges picked the winners and whether they knew what the predictions would be. Did that affect their decisions in any way? Good point. They were looking at the exact same data. I'm going to assume that because this is Dr. Moon Wan Li and he has worked in the industry and he's a respectable researcher that that didn't happen. I'm going to I'm going to jump to that conclusion for this story. But yeah, you want to make sure about that sort of thing, too. Yeah. Well, Tesla has voluntarily recorded recalling 2,700 model X vehicles to fix a flaw in the third row seat. Strength test ahead of a European release found that the locking hinge could fail, causing the seat to go down in a crash. Owners will be contacted to schedule replacement over the next five weeks. Yikes, not sure how many model X owners we have in the audience, but that's kind of a public service announcement. Keep an eye out for that that recall. If you do have a Tesla, by the way, buddy of mine has a model S and he had a problem with it and they came with a flat bed and picked it up and dropped off a replacement car in the meantime. You mean like when you when you go and you have a problem with your phone and the store just like says, yeah, you know, we're just going to give you a new phone. We'll give you all the data. They can do that with your car. Yeah, except they bring it to your house. They brought it to him. That's amazing. They gave him one of the newer models that had more of the cooler, automatic driving stuff. Doggone it. If he didn't turn around and trade that car and buy one of those new ones. I mean, they just it was perfect. Yeah, smart, smart movie. Finally, strategy analytics put out a report predicting global revenues from VR headsets will reach eight hundred ninety five million dollars this year. Oculus, HTC and Sony will account for seventy seven percent of that money while only making up 13 percent of the 12.8 million units estimated to ship. The rest will be made up of lower cost smartphone based VR systems. Things like Gear VR, Cardboard, etc. So what is this good for? Anyway, I mean games, right? Yeah, we're going to find that out here in a second. Thanks to PC guy 8088, Abituele Condolce and everyone who submitted stories from our subreddit, submit your own stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. And that is a look at the headlines. So yeah, we're going to we're going to make a lot of money or we're not. But some people are going to make a lot of money off VR this year selling headsets and we had a story today and Gadget was pointing to about a company called Medical Realities is going to host the first live VR stream of surgery on April 14th. It's a tumor removal surgery. They'll use Google Cardboard and their own app on a one minute delay in case something untoward happens during the surgery, but it's a fairly routine surgery and they're trying to promote using VR for surgical instruction, training, etc. So that leads us right into like, there you go. There is there is an example of a non gaming VR use. Like I said, at the top of the show, lots of people say I'm like, I'm VR really. We're going to talk about that again. It's for gamers. I don't care about that. And Allison, you were expressing a similar opinion at our meetup with Travis where you're like, look, but what's up with VR? Yeah, I am not a visionary by any means. I mean, I'm the person who said that when the 512K iMac came out, we would never need a bigger screen than that. I said we would never need color. I said there would never be undoing a CAD program. So I'm clearly not a visionary by any means. So I need people to help me see that vision of the future. And I get the VR is cool, but why? What real life problems is it going to solve for us? And Travis, you had some ideas. Yeah, so I think there are a few things. First of all, when we were having that discussion, we talked about defense, we talked about health care, we talked about medicine. And a lot of those ideas were really good then and people got excited even back in the early 90s. I think what has changed now is it's a matter of scale. And some of the things that I pointed out then, if we wanted in the blog post, I used as an example that Aerosmith video that came out in I think 94. And that was a really cool VR example. And it wasn't functional, but it was an example of things that people could be excited about. You could go have an experience with another person. But that wasn't a game either. You know, that that was an example of immersion and experience. So my point is that we have game engines, asset stores, 3D model, repositories, smartphones, high speed internet, online payments, high resolution, mobile displays, content management systems, miniature and cheap sensors. So I won't keep wind up through that list, but all of that stuff has come to fruition in the last 25 years. And so now I really do believe, you know, for example, I know you guys talked about this on the show, but this the Ricoh Theta S, you know, I've lived in LA 20 years, but I was able to hold it up, driving with my top down and take a 360 degree video and put it on YouTube and share it with my sister and give her an example of what my life is like. So I guess the idea of a shared experience or an individual experience that you wouldn't get otherwise. That kind of resonates to me. And I'm picturing Wally now, of course. So we're all sitting back in our recliners being fed our milkshakes as we fatten up and we're watching. I'm pretending that I'm hiking in Kilimanjaro at the time. And that's kind of cool, but those are those are still entertainment based. What I'm what I'm trying to get more into is talk to the defense application. There have been flight simulators for a long time. I worked on one that was a sphere that we wheeled an F 18 simulator into the middle of it and it projected the imagery on the inside of the of the dome. Why is this better than that? So the those large domes and we worked on one as well. That was, I think, at about 24 projectors and involved one or two C 130s if we wanted to deploy it to a theater, you know, and I we worked on, we built a VR application. And I remember I'll describe how that worked a little bit, but a great contrast in how the technology has changed is one of the clients, one of those people asked us how many C 130s it would take to deploy this to the theater. And I was able to say it's in this backpack, you know, which OK, OK. So so in a way, what we what we worked on in the old days, that was VR.  See, and I really do feel that way, but I feel like we're moving along a spectrum from, you know, my StarTac back in the 90s that I was super excited about all the way StarTac absolutely all the way through lightweight, transparent, maybe it's goggles, maybe it's something beyond that that provide both AR and VR, so you're able to move displays up from the StarTac through this 3D immersive experience where you can start to use gesture recognition and that sort of thing again to get beyond just entertainment and sitting back and kind of, you know, one of our potential client that we were working with does tourism. So, you know, if you think about how a tourist destination might want to promote their their facility, VR is a great example, 360 video specifically.  We were able to bring down cost by 95 percent. OK. And what we weren't able to provide was the, you know, we weren't able to provide a seat that picked you up and moved you around. You know, so you were still just sitting in an office chair, but we were able to train about 60 percent of the curriculum, that included compressor failure, landing gear failure, bird strike. We were able to train a bunch of that stuff and give people pretty close to photo realistic environments all for five percent of the price. And and a simulator you could put in a backpack and deploy. I remember back when I was working on that big simulator, they had there was a big general who didn't believe he didn't believe that these simulators were anything that was going to actually work. And so we wheeled them out into the into the cockpit and they brand the simulation. And it was early we weren't done with it. And the simulation crashed and it crashed when the plane was at about a 30 degree angle from rotated to the left and he got out of the cockpit and fell flat on his face because gravity wasn't where it was supposed to be. And it was like, yeah, he started signing checks that day. You know, that made a big difference. What about in in medical? So this is going to be cool that we can watch somebody do surgery. I don't get how in the case of surgery, how this is going to be any more interesting. It's not like you're going to want to look behind the surgeon, right? You're going to be looking right where the surgeon's looking. So why would VR add any value to this other than it being Nido? So here there are a few and I'll kind of preface this point again, using mobile as an example.  Now we have, I think, four or five billion and billion. And, you know, I think a lot of services like Tinder, you know, 20 percent of people of subscribers in China and India and Brazil using ridesharing service, I don't think we could predict any of those features. Obviously, you know, when I was just excited that my battery lasted, I guess, eight hours or something on standby. But but I think that, you know, when we talk about medical, now we're able to, there are a few use cases that make a lot of sense. If you want to train surgery or use specific use cases in surgery, you can 3D print and instrument robotic surgery controls and provide an environment in, you know, probably a HTC Vive or a Gear VR. You can also allow patients to understand much better what's going on with their body instead of having, you know, the old models where you, you know, here's your heart and here's your valve. You could actually, yeah, I mean, and we worked with the medical center on a project involving wearables where you could actually run them through imaging and MRI and then animate their actual heart. They're wearing a wearable. So now the user can blow up their own organ and look at it operating in 3D and and actually see it animated in real time, which would be bad. Yeah. OK, so now I start to I start to get into that with if you're talking about a 3D model that I can spin around and do things with, that makes sense to me. The real time stuff, like in the surgeon case, you can't go inside the heart because there's no camera inside that heart. That's not really what's going to ever happen in that example. But you don't have to rely on a camera operator to get all of the angles that you need. If you as a viewer want to say, well, wait a minute, what's happening on the other side of that incision or what's happening over here? And let me see that from another angle. You can control all of that. That seems like an advantage to me. And that's where I think there's so much opportunity beyond, you know, we think of 360 video, but when you look at it, I mentioned game engines, you know, when you look at it as a truly digital experience, now you're you're the master of the world and you can move around. You can I mean, everything is is is editable, I guess, versus just watching a video. Yeah. When you when you were putting that camera up out of your car to share your view, the person watching that can see more than you could see while you were while you were in the car. Because they can turn around and see the reactions that people behind you and around the corner and look at it all. And you could you could only, you know, only look forward. Exactly. Maybe I'm getting hung up on specifics of the terminology because 360 video I get. That sounds really cool. I understand how there's a lot of different circumstances where that would be would be really nifty.  And it's going to hurt my neck. And by the way, my my investment advice, invest in companies that are going to build things to help us fix our neck problems. But, you know, that's the part that I don't get is is putting on the helmet and being closed off from other people and going off into this other world for something other than a game.  I don't want to talk to anybody anyway. That might be great that I think I need to separate. I need to put those things into one category, not as two separate things. I think so. I mean, and that's the, you know, I think I agree with you that there's a tremendous amount of hype around VR. And, you know, I've had a lot of people make a case to me that, you know, they'll talk about AR or they'll talk about VR. And it's clear that they're kind of very new and don't quite understand it yet. I think that the reality is it's just again, it's just another piece on that continuum as we move from low quality immersion, low immersion, low quality displays up through really immersive experiences that are almost like matrix, matrix like is the. I also like the conversion, the continuum that takes you from that 3D model that you can spin around and do stuff with all the way down into the 3D printed model that you can take apart still and say, OK, this is where your heart valve is actually messed up. I saw a thing on the new screensavers. Guy Leo had interviewed a doctor and a mother of a young child who'd had heart surgery and they made a 3D model of her heart, her actual heart from imaging and then they gave the little girl her heart on a necklace when it was done and it was just really cool. But that I'll go ahead, Tom. No, go ahead, Travis. But that and that's one of the things that I think as we it's not strictly VR. And it's not, you know, kind of the hype. But it's it's when the average average consumer starts to think about things like 3D models and animation and they start to understand that things things can be controlled by them and manipulated by them. That, to me, is kind of the great the big step that will allow some of these technologies to take hold like they wouldn't have maybe 25 years ago. Yeah, I like what you're saying about it being a continuum, because I think the thing to remember is VR doesn't do anything you couldn't do on your screen. It actually just makes it makes you able to do it differently. Right.  In virtual reality, you just turn some catches your eye, you just look. And I think you can't really understand exactly what that gets you until you use it the same way we had apps on flip phones, right? But there was a limit to what they could do and how we would use them, even though they were technically capable of a lot of the same things until we got the iPhone and touch screens and Android and the ability to use them in a different way. I did get to wear an Oculus Rift at CES a year ago that Home Depot had where they walked you through a virtual room and and that was that was pretty cool. I like the idea of being able to say, OK, if I put if I put this cabinetry and what would it look like in my house? That was that was kind of cool. I don't know. There's one thing I mean to where we are in the space that I think is kind of funny. I have an HTC Vive right here, but I don't have a computer that will want it. So it just looks nice. You know, I hope to have one soon. But I mean, but that's I think that's a great example kind of for where we are with the technology. You forgot to buy the thousand dollar add on to it. Yeah, I was like, oh, the vibe came for free. But yeah, the add on is more significant. Well, and that is where we are. This is gen one. I think a lot of other people, a lot of people are also turned off when they look at these like, wow, they're they're bulky and heavy. You're not wrong, Allison. I need a more expensive computer to run it. You know, what is it good for? Those are all first generation issues with everything that we have. And so, yeah, I mean, the Oculus Rift is apparently a little more comfortable to wear than the HTC Vive, but I wouldn't get either one of them or even the PlayStation VR, unless you're just someone who's enthusiastic about adopting technology early, because the second generation and the third generation are going to learn what they're good at and fix the issues that we don't know exist because all the early adopters are using them. We're also going to need people to work on our brains. A friend of mine's got a the first generation DK one of the Oculus Rift with a gaming machine and he said that after he plays a game for like a couple hours when he takes it off, he says the world is really weird looking. He says it's he says it's like hyper 3D and it's and it's upsetting. And he worries about what if his kid wears it?  But what if he puts it on his little kid for a couple hours? Will her reality be changed? You know, and and that transfer just real quickly, that transfer is one of the things that they're trying to improve with every generation of these. Well, and I mean, I have to say there was a point you know, being part owner of a company that builds VR products. I won't when we started working in VR. I remembered Steve Martin's the jerk and I remember what happened to everybody's eyes and I thought, is this really a liability? Is this because I'm with you. I wore, you know, I have my gear also sitting right here. And I wore when I first got it. I wore it for about two hours, which certainly killed the phone battery. And when I took it off, the world was different. It was just strange for a little bit. I get the same thing with my view master. So yeah, permanent. That is I actually thought of the exact same example from the jerk. I was going to do a meme with it where I, you know, showed him with the ice cross, except an Achilles Strip. I was too lazy to make it. All right, well, we'll keep this conversation going, folks. Feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com. And T.G. Stellar is usually pretty good about posting these things in the subreddit. If you want to do some commentary in there. Meanwhile, our pick of the day comes from Bruce in Peterborough, Canada, who was listening to our talk about bots, chat bots. And Bruce's pick is the 2015 book by Pedro Domingos, a leading researcher in machine learning called The Master Algorithm, how the quest for ultimate learning machine will remake our world. Domingos provides a history of machine learning and describes the five different approaches to it and how the Holy Grail of machine learning is a master algorithm, a single universal learning algorithm that could drive all past, present, and future knowledge and change the world. Bruce says it's fascinating read for anyone with an interest in AI. And Domingos even provides some resources for those interested in entering the field of machine learning. And all this stuff is tied together, man, machine learning, bots, AI, and virtual reality. I mean, there's going to be a lot of machine learning applications within the world of VR and augmented reality as well. I love the pics, by the way, Tom, I get so much out of the pics. I just started watching the code from yesterday's pick or Friday's pick. Great stuff, great stuff. I think I've read a couple of books that you guys have recommended. This is fun. Cool. Keep the pics coming, folks. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can find more pics at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash pics. A few messages of the day before we go. First one is a voicemail about something that a way to connect an amendment to the US Constitution to the encryption debate. Hi, Tom and company. This is Mechamist Prime from Lovely Huntsville, Alabama. Over the course of this FBI versus Apple catastrophe, I've noticed the arguments the government is using against encryption are eerily similar to the arguments that it uses against public ownership of guns. But this is no coincidence. US international traffic and arms regulations, informally known as ITAR, classify cryptography as auxiliary munitions equipment, a component of the general term arms. As such, our right to bear cryptography shall not be infringed as per the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Think about that the next time you use your bank's website. All right, so I admit that's a stretch and, you know, I don't want to bring up a debate about guns, but it is an interesting parallel that if encryption is considered to be a munition, would it be covered? Well, it was wasn't it? Wasn't there a point in time where we weren't allowed to export it? Yeah, back in the 90s, there was a whole encryption fight. And what was did they ever characterize it as an arm, though? I don't know. I hesitate to say they never did, but I don't remember. I bet they did. Got to go find that. That's awesome. And I, you know, there's a difference between being classified ITAR and actually being constitutionally considered a weapon that falls under Second Amendment protection. But but I'm surprised that more people haven't brought that up. It's an interesting point. And then finally, Justin wrote further proof of IP address not equaling your physical address was actually at the top of our subreddit today. It's a story from Fusion. Justin says, I came across the article posted today about many people who are getting harassed and having trouble with law enforcement because people are using services to tie an IP address to a physical location. And sometimes it's not the same location. One 80 year old lady has more than six million IP addresses tied to her physical address because of the way a default in a database was set up. And yeah, I read the story on Fusion. It's fascinating. There's lots of different case studies about this. But essentially back in 2002, when a digital mapping company called MaxMind was set up, they pointed unresolved IP addresses from the United States where all they knew was like, OK, we know it's in the US, but we don't know where they pointed up to the geographical center of the country, which happens to be in northern Kansas. They also decided to round off the coordinates to make it simpler. I get to store maybe save in a few bits. I don't know why they did it. But when they rounded it off, that moved it from the exact geographical center two hours away to the front yard of Ms. Joyce Taylor's house. And so people who didn't realize that this was just a default location would look up this IP address in a MaxMind powered database, see that it was located in central Kansas, northern Kansas, and then assume that that's where that IP address was located. Five thousand companies rely on MaxMind's IP mapping information. So poor thing has happened a lot. Now, because of this Fusion article, MaxMind has been made aware of this. They say we were not aware of this was happening and they have changed the default location to not be in her front yard and it may take weeks to months for everybody to update their databases. But I grew up in Kansas and I hope they didn't change it to my front yard. No, they actually said they've changed. There were two different locations that were having problems. They changed both of them to be in the middle of bodies of water so that it would be fairly clear, we hope, that it wasn't a person's house in the middle of the lake. But yeah, IP address, not a location. I'm back. Well, this was a great conversation, you guys. Thank you so much, Travis Falstead. Where can folks find more about you and what you're up to? I keep all my info on my personal website. It's TravisFalstead.com. So go there. I know you're on Twitter as well. I don't know if you want to push people there, but, you know. Absolutely, it's at T-Falstead. Alice and Sheridan, of course, host of the NoSyllaCast podcast and more at podfeat.com. What you've been up to lately. Well, I had a really interesting interview this last week on my show. I called Chit Chat Across the Pond. It was with Greg Scound from Smile, the makers of TextExpander. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle about their new policies on their products and the internet's kind of a Twitter about it, as you could say. And it was a very interesting interview. He is not a sponsor of my show, which allowed me to push pretty hard on him and ask him some pretty tough questions and there's been probably more comments on this post than almost anything I've ever done. So if you want to go check that out, it's over at podfeat.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at podfeat. Yeah, with with internet anger being what it is, the fact that he was willing to come on and talk to you about it is to his credit, I think. Oh, yeah, a lot of people said that, said, you know, if nothing else, good on you for coming to the party. And he knew ahead of time what I was going to ask him. So good, good for him. Thank you, folks, for supporting the show. DailyTechNewShow.com slash support is the place to go if you would like to be one of those people. If you're already supporting us, thank you so much for making it possible to have these conversations and bring you the news. We're constantly experimenting with different content, new ways of delivering you the content, and we want to do even more. The more of you that support us, the better we can do. DailyTechNewShow.com slash support provides several different ways to support the show. An ongoing way is the Patreon at Patreon.com slash DTNS. We also have a store with t-shirts, a DTNS t-shirt looks nice on people. I've seen them in real life, so I can attest to that. And of course, just telling people about the show. Going to iTunes and leaving a review or whatever podcatcher you use helps more people discover the show. So just go tell someone that, hey, I think you might like DailyTechNewShow.com. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily. It's 5932459. Catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphagiegradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website, DailyTechNewShow.com. Back tomorrow with Brian Brushwood. Talk to you then. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Allison, are you there? So I just suddenly had a screen that said, you've been disconnected because of an authentication error. The DMCA got you. I bet, yeah. And I just hit OK. And then the button and then it reconnected. Reconnected? Yeah, I've never seen that before. I bet it was TextExpander. Exactly. Luckily, I wasn't talking. It worked out OK, right? They'll never know. No, I didn't notice till I saw your your note in the chat there. And Travis, that was fantastic. Thanks so much. Excellent. Thank you very much. I am taking a sigh of relief now. My favorite part was watching the blanket moving behind you, trying to figure out what was under it. Oh, it's a cat. Yeah. I know it's it's funny and I didn't realize this would happen. But I I really tried to focus. I kept zoning out when you're reading the headlines because I felt like I was watching the show, which I've done so many times. So I felt like and I kept wanting to take notes like I really do. But I'm like, no, wait, this is live. Yeah, so you'll notice that happened to me once where you saw Tom just waiting for me to answer. I was like, it's really interesting. What are you talking about? Oh, I'm on the show. Yes. Yes. Well, you you were you were excellent with the analysis. So thank you so much. You guys got to stop taking me so serious. Show titles. Yeah. Well, I saw a good one. Somebody put in yeah. Where is that show? Well, if you go to showbot.tv, it collects them all from the chat room. And the top right now is an organ. It's the one I saw go by. That's it. Oregon. Well, the one at the top organs, blown up organs, blown up organs like human organs. Well, yeah, Tom said something about blowing up organs, blown up organs. Well, the top is VR, huh?  Pepper pot bot. It's kind of hot. Yeah.  Lots of leakage in the pipeline.  That's pretty good. I mean, it's very coaching to it ties into a more common reaction than I expected with people like pulling back for a second.  And we've been through that. Buzz out loud used to get complaints that we covered Microsoft too much, then we covered Apple too much, then we covered smartphones too much. I was kind of glad to hear you got it about VR, though, because I always hear you apologizing for too much Apple. And of course, you can talk about Apple all day and I won't get bored. And honestly, we're starting to get the opposite reaction of like, you guys don't like Apple. You don't cover them enough. So I'm like, oh, we're that that one's receding now. And now VR and bots and AI are taking over as the new heavily covered things. I forgot to work in that tweet from Tim on Twitter. Oh, shoot. Yeah. I love it at one point, too. Yeah, I loved that when I saw that that was pretty hilarious. You know, now I'm forgetting. What did he say? He said it's good for filling up podcasts. Yeah. Is it good for more than that? Yes. I think we've just so so I forgot to ask you, Alison, has your position moved on this? It's moved in that I'm thinking about VR as being beyond putting a headset on. OK, that putting a headset on is a way of viewing virtual reality. Right. You could still have virtual reality that is that you view another way. Well, and I didn't want to get to, you know, I tried to say really, I don't know, benign or neutral, but it I've heard a lot of people talk about VR the way I remember music publicists would call me and talk about bands. And so it's just like, oh, wow, you know, I know this band is probably very similar to the last band that you called about, but I'm sure it's different. And, you know, but and she would have read the bio and maybe written the bio and maybe done one interview, but that was it.  And I didn't want to bring it up too much in the weeds. But if anybody's familiar with the business model canvas that talks about distribution, economies of scale, marketing, you know, channels and all that, and VR affects every one of those, you know, or those have been affected since VR's last appearance. So anyway, I'm clearly primed to talk about this topic. Yeah, yeah, it's great. I still want to put together a virtual reality special. I know Aaron Carson from Tech Republic, who covers the VR beat is excited about that too. So I'll be in touch. Awesome. Thank you. We've got a couple other people out there that are interested in that. Stuart Chafe would sure be good for that. If he we're having a Stewart on in May. Oh, are you good? Good. Is it Roger May 11th? I think 11th to Wednesday. Excellent. I would be so eager. I mean, I'll turn in. I can't I would be so eager to see how he reacts to. I mean, because, Allison, you've been pushing that a lot. And and I think, I mean, it's a great point. And I did watch that whole episode. He's was that crazy? I mean, that that could have been today, except for the graphics. And the, you know, it's it's it is the computing and the miniaturization that has changed. It's not the any of the concepts. I mean, he saw that future. He's sort of like the opposite of me. He openly mocked me on my show.  Yeah, it was close to it. You know, it reminds me a little bit of Star Trek, the next generation. I'm I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring that up. But when I think about touch screens, when I bring, think about so many, you know, replicator 3D printing. When I think about so many of the things that they writers just kind of thought of and extended that are now common occurrence. And, you know, and I kept pulling back because I a lot of the stuff that I wanted to say, I actually heard on the show. So that's fine. People don't listen to every one of them. See, here's where you make another another great point is on next generation. What was it? Rise of Seven, whatever the episode, I think it's called the game where they all wear the where the headset and it had the game and they were zoning into it. That is what VR looks like to me. Oh, absolutely. The VR should have been VR should have been the holodeck is, I think. That's what everyone wants. That's that's augmented reality, though, really. It is. And it is. And it isn't because. Well, I guess it's not because it's not out in the real world. You're right. It's not in the real world. And what you see is is is literally a computer generated fiction. I believe. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, I just think like through the creative use of force fields, you you get impacted by things like a wall that's essentially just a hologram. And so you get the you get the sensation that you are in this other reality, even though when you're even though you're not. Well, you know, it's I mean, I think that when a character left the holodeck because of a glitch or whatever, that to me is augmented reality. Yeah, but but I'm supposed to see a demo in a couple of weeks from a company that's using sound waves to make you feel like you're touching a hard surface. We'll see. It sounds like they've aware to me, but we'll see. Yeah, I've read a couple of articles about probably maybe the same company and there may be more than one working on it. Trying to use that as sort of a haptic where you get some resistance. I can't imagine it would be able to mimic hardwood, but I can see where it can provide texture. Yeah, it's not blowing on your hands. Yeah. That's kind of cool. The idea of that, the texture. Yeah. A little bit of resistance because that's one of the things in the reviews of Oculus and HTC Vive, particularly, is that the Vive gets some some nice points for having the independent controllers so that you feel more like you're interacting. But neither one of them really allow you to like reach out and grab something right or push against something. So that kind of technology that Travis is mentioning could suddenly provide a little bit of a simulation, not a replacement, obviously, but a simulation of the real world so that a bullet whipping by could actually make your hair flip or whatever. Well, I thought it would be fun to do a boxing simulator where you, during halfway through the demo, you punch the person in the face. Real fun, depending on which side of that demo you're on. Ultimately, I think the best way to go with VR is kind of what they did in the Matrix.  Although, you know, I was so secretive. That's what they're going to do. They're just big Matrix tanks. Well, I was wondering, this is the one question that was never really answered is so Neil learned Kung Fu in the Matrix. Would he be able to like whip out those skills once he's out of it? Like, is it still in his head? Is it in his head or is it in the Matrix? Wouldn't you not have the muscle memory that I mean, you never have had it, right? You would know it and you would have to train your body. But you would it's like knowing how to hand like my handwriting is crappy now, like, since I learned from second grade. But I know what proper handwriting should look like and how I should do it. So I will have to, you know, I'll have to retrain my my nerve bundles in my hand and my forearm to to go through that same motion. But, you know, that's different than not having, you know, any memory of of of the the skill Wait, wait, here you go, Roger. A.R. in a headset, you're writing by hand. You're trying to emulate exactly what you're seeing on screen and that sound thing gives you does stuff to your head when you don't do it. Right. So you know what? Some 70 year old guy says to take off the headset. Here's a pencil. Here's a sheet of paper. And I'll smack and I'll smack you when you don't do it. But you can't update content automatically to the sheet of paper. That's that's all I can think of. It's called your memory, photographic memory. You know, can I make one last point that I forgot? Sure. Yeah. So and this is actually the bulk of the research I did. So I look down and see this piece of paper. I'm a little bit sad. But the the second machine age. I'll never say his name, but MIT's Eric Bernd Jolfson. OK. And I think I heard this on that on the show, actually. But he describes something called GPT that are general purpose technologies that cut across multiple sectors of the economy, which I think VR can arguably do that. But the point he makes is that these always need compliments. And his quote is coming up with these can take years or decades. And this creates lag in between the introduction of technology and the realization of its benefits. And that's where I would say all of those other game engines and internet access and everything are the complementary technologies that support each other. So well, we we hovered around that point. You're right. Like, you know, the your example of phones, you know, being introduced and taking a while before we actually started realizing that you could use them for Tinder and other things is good. So yeah, I don't feel like we missed that point entirely. But yeah, that's well made. But I have OKCupid to thank for my girlfriend. So these technologies have certainly impacted my life. Yeah. So we get spam posts on the blog all the time. And WordPress does a great job of catching them. It's always amusing to me what types of spam posts are trying to fool me and get me to approve them. This one, the text reads, hi there, friends. How is the whole thing and what you want to say regarding this paragraph is entertaining enough. But the title, the author is Star Trek Timelines Dilithium. Wow, that's fantastic. They knew you'd read it. Maybe that's just future speak. Yeah, maybe they're trying to contact you from the future. Yeah, maybe they're paying me in the future for that. TV is my girlfriend. Oh, TV is my girlfriend. That's how it's pronounced. Is asking questions about getting podcast transcribed for the deaf. So expensive is the problem. Yeah, it seemed that if I can if I can talk to my Mac and have a transcribe what I say and I can have so I can do speech to text on my Mac and I can pipe audio out of my Mac, should I be able to pipe it out, turn around and send it back in I have yet to be able to figure out how to do that. But I'm thinking between Loopback and Audio Hijack, I should be able to get this to work or use a second computer. Yeah, use a second computer that would just obviate it. But the the trend, the trend, I mean, YouTube does speech to text captions. They're just not very good. Yeah, you know, human transcribers aren't that good either. I used to remember all the of the closed caching that came from that came after a call for help because they would close caption for an international broadcast. It's like, whoa, because they would send us to transcripts to correct anything because oftentimes the transcriber had no idea what we were talking about and could only guess at all the words we were using. And so we just went to the CSUN persons with disabilities expo and Steve's posted a video on Podfy.com of a telephone service for not the deaf but for people who are real hard of hearing. So for maybe for the elderly and somewhat hard of hearing. And it's this crazy thing. You make the phone call and it connects to a service where a human is listening and real time transcribing what they're hearing. So a human is listening to the phone call and typing it at the exact same time. Wow, I actually said, yeah, these people are weird as heck. I actually interviewed for a job doing something like that for Sprint in Austin. I didn't get the job. I don't think my typing was fast enough. Yeah, can you imagine though you'd have to be using both sides of your brain at the same time? I mean. All right, well, I'm out of the post. So the show is up. It's published. Thanks, everybody, for watching and listening, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye. Thank you.