That's called an ultrasonic scaler, which is quite different to the device in the article. A scaler is for removing tartar and stain while the device in the article is an ultrasound (like the device for viewing babies during pregnancy) which looks under your gums at your tooth roots and bones to see if you have any bone loss or gum disease.

You might not have the dentist or dental hygienist use the probe very often. When they do it's a rounded straight tip device, and they usually call out numbers to an assistant for how deep under the gumline the probe can reach. That's the procedure this device would replace. If nothing else it's an improvement because you don't need an assistant to record the numbers, and if someone has bad gum disease it might hurt them when you poke in there with a probe.

I went 14 years between dental visits, and the move to ultrasound cleaning was the biggest change I noticed. The cleaning had always been a bloody affair, scraping and scratching in a way that would leave me with a throbbing pain after my appointment was ove. The ultrasound cleaning was like science fiction.

In the US most visit that person twice a year. They have that ultrasound machine, but they only use it on people who don't visit that often - the machine just gets the build up do the point where manual tools can finish the job. If you brush/floss and visit regularly the manual tools are all they need.

In this was at least it looks like the US system is better. Of course there is no way nuance can be expressed in a short forum like this, but maybe you need to look at the Finland system to see if it is really good enough.

It is also in Germany that you go 2 times a year to the dentist.

Has anyone else found an ultrasonic scaler very loud while in use, and to cause tinnitus for a couple days after?

Please don't give yourself tinnitus. Always wear protection (for your ears).

For the patient with an ultrasonic scaler in their mouth, are you saying that that a significant percentage of harmful noise is coming in through the ear canal, so conventional ear protection would help?

I can be argued that Trump inherited the good economy from Obama. But there is so much more to life than just economy.

Trump did in fact inherit a good economy from Obama, but that's not really what I was talking about. I was talking about actions, not so much where the economy was.

Well, if you read factcheck.org or any other fact checker, or just read transcripts of Trumps speeches you can see that the negative spin is usually there for a reason.

In the old days a project would often start in Lisp (Common Lisp for example), and then later be rewritten in C.

This is the same pattern, and one should embrace it. Write the first cut, explore the problem space and prototype in a dynamic language. Once the design is proven, rewrite in statically typed language for performance and to get the possible remaining bugs out.

If the design was perfect from the get go, you could just write it in assembler to start with.

What would be the off the self hardware (CPU) to use for this problem today? Still Intel, or AMD, or does ARM architecture do squaring fast? Or something else entirely, like GPU?

I keep "loaning" my finger to family members all the time, when I'm driving, watching TV, and they want to borrow my phone. Not really sure Apple thought through this from every angle...

They could just hold the phone up and you could look over for a fraction of a second. No different than if you were talking to them.

Oh boy, that's going to be awful fun for parents. Let the kid play with a game; they call your name while pointing the forward camera at you and you've just Face ID'ed some in-app purchase.

That's an interesting corner case. My phone has a setting that lets me turn off touch ID for App Store purchases (so I would have to use my passcode) so I guess you'd just have to use that if your kid kept tricking you and you couldn't stop them.

After figuring out how to deploy to device (see AppDelegate.m), I tested accessibility and it seems there is virtually none. At least in the Movies example app, VoiceOver reads practically nothing.

How would one go about making the Movies sample accessible, or is that even possible?

Btw. what braille do you use for reading code? 8-dot us-computer braille, or something else?

(I'm the author of MBraille, now working on Vietnamese braille table for liblouis, so braille is in my mind...)

I tend to use 8-dots US braille, simply because I am used to it. Working with other tables would work just as well though if that's what you are used to, there's no 7 and 8 dot features that set it apart

Krita is great. https://krita.org

Hey, this is just one of the necessary steps towards Marvin the Paranoid Android, or perhaps the sentient door...

all of which will exist in 42 years of course