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Give them better facial quirks. If you see a CG animated character and his traits do not follow what he is trying to convey, he seems less human. I frown when i question something, i smile when i'm happy, i push back my lips when i'm wondering about something.

Without that, they feel artificial. I think a good CG character i didn't notice too much because they exagerated his facial traits was "Charming" in Shrek. The fact they made it so caricatural was, ironically, what made him seem more real.

That 1% missing from the "Valley" is attainable, but people are reluctant to bridge the gap (not to mention we don't have the power... yet) because it would make them too real.

Maybe it's a deep down, subsconscious fear that machines will one day be indistiguishable from real humans and cause problems. Think Terminator.

Yeah, I noticed this in Shrek. I was much more willing to believe Shrek as a green ogre with hair all over him, dousing himself with a mud shower, then I was the humans that came running after him 30 seconds later. They tried to make the humans look real and normal and my brain didn't buy it.

Lord Farquaad, on the other hand, was very believable, because they stopped short of trying to make him look real. It was more like a caricature. The same with Shrek as a human in Shrek 2.

RP

In his treatise on the comic book medium, "Understanding Comics," writer/artist Scott McCloud commented on what's basically the same phenomenon. For the purposes of the book, which was done in comic style, the host was a very stylized/simplified caricature of McCloud himself. In describing the reasons behind such stylization, he comments on how it forces the reader to move beyond surface characteristics, and focus on the message being portrayed. In other words, it's a artistic trick to keep the reader focus on the substance, not the style.

This article kind of reminded me of that. Particularly considering that, in most video games, too much detail can distract from the specific goals of the game. The point is not to achieve artistic realism: you're not producing a travelogue, you're playing a game. In particular, stylized characters allow us to identify more closely with the figure, as we read our own preconceptions into the "gaps" in the portrayal, which is arguably even more important in video games than it is in comics, given that you're more likely given the role of the video game character to play than the comic book figure.

Within reason, of course. Striking the balance between total simplicity (say, a stick figure, or a dot) and abject photorealism is probably the trickiest part of the whole bargain....

The major reason the Hulk didn't look realistic was because he was 12 feet tall, 6 feet wide, and green. That's somewhat outside the subject of this article, which is extremely realistic and accurate humans. FF:TSW or the Matrix series are a much better example here.

A lot of movies have already realized this was a problem and moved further back on the realism scale, which is one reason Gollum looked like such a caricature, and why Pixar and Dreamworks don't even try to render photorealistic humans even though they obviously could if they wanted to (at least the modeling and surface appearance).

He was just on the 7:30 report, and seemed like a really nice guy with fairly moderate views... a visionary who is also a pragmatist. Not at all like the caricatures of him.

I'd be proud to vote for him.

If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite?

I vote that you should give us all your money. I'm sure many Slashdotters will support me in this, particularly as they get their share. I expect a check the day after tomorrow.

What? But we VOTED on it! What are you, some kind of anti-democrat?

Sure, it's a caricature, but the UN works pretty much just like this for the most part.

Can someone please explain what it is about Anime that makes people go ga-ga?

I just don't get it -- what am I missing?

It just looks like a caricatured cartoon to me.

Help!

"The left" is a useful abstraction, nothing more, but nothing less. Are you saying we should abolish all political labels because they can be misleading?

I was under the impression that Bruce Stirling was a cool guy, although I never read any of his stuff, but he comes across as a total asshat in this article. Here is one teeny example:

nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. (((If you don't count the nuclear energy released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is.)))

Yeah, those 300,00 dead in the nuclear attacks on Japan certainly look horrible compared to the millions of air pollution deaths. He continually treats nuclear power and nuclear weapons as one and the same, and generally comes off making no sense.

I stopped reading halfway through, I couldn't stand it anymore, but he basically says, "What are you thinking? Nukes are bad. I don't care what evidence you have. I don't care what the alternatives are. Bad! Bad! Bad!" It's like a satire or caricature on the wacko ultra-environmental movement. Maybe that's what it really is. If not, then my only response is to say, what a jerk.

It's worse- the guy who started photo.net, one of the internet's oldest photography resource sites, hasn't uploaded a photo or posted in almost two years. But he's had time to write a blog almost every day. It reminds me of the "oo, shiny" phenomenon.

For all his talk of ideals, I think he just wanted to make money off it, like every other MIT professor, it seems. When it became clear phoot.net wasn't going to be making him rich with an IPO and all, he bailed- they set up some fruity corporation ("luminal path corporation"? Gimme a break) and he's a member of the board of directors.

Photo.net is rotting; no innovation, nobody's fixing problems with it, the columns are self-promoting drivel...hell, go into the lens database and there's 50 billion different versions of the same exact lens typed slightly differently because people didn't pick from existing lenses, and nobody has gone into the database to clean up the mess. So we have the "EF 50mm/1.8", the "50/1.8", the "50mm EF-S f1.8", etc.

on his own weblog

One does wonder exactly how an MIT CS professor became qualified to have a weblog on Harvard Law's website.

it's like he's trying to karma whore -- the trollish kind, that is -- on his own weblog. (Which appears to be down right now. So much for my point.)

There's never been a shortage of crap in the popular music industry and there never will be. It goes hand and hand with mass marketing. I'd like David Crosby to sit down and give a good listen to "Yummy Yummy Yummy,I've Got Love In My Tummy" and explain to me how that is superior to todays popular offerings. The problem isn't the overwhelming majority of pop crap that's out there; that's always been the case. The problem that Crosby articulates is that's all that there seems to be room for anymore given the consolidation in the music industry and the few clueless people running the industry. I think he's right. Face it. Crap sells and makes predictable fortunes for those that effectively market it because crap is what the overwhelming majority of the public want. If you don't believe me, tune into the hugely popular American Idol, a musical caricature of pop crap music at its worse.

Besides justice and economics should never be mixed. It is a pitty some many in US think otherwise. And the worst thing is that model of caricatured justice is exported world-wide...

The article proposes killing as a joke but the proposal of thinking justice in economic terms is serious.

Interestingly enough someone moded my article down as "troll".

The person who posted the story for this thread presents all people who are against nuclear power as "the left"( with the implication that all of "the left" is against atomoic energy ).

Slashdot posts his/her story.

I point this out, and while some people moded it up as a good point someone else moded me as "troll".

The meta moderation is long overdue, IMHO.

Many moderators are moding posts down not because they are off topic, redundant, or otherwise lower quality posts.

They are moding down messages they personally do not like to hear.

There was this site which was linked to in a slashdot article, politicalcompass.org. It gives at least one more dimension to the left-right issue.

(Personally I'd like to have a dimension for how fervent one is also. There is a big difference between being a doubting radical and a dedicated centrist :-)

Lovelock is hard to place, certainly. Calling him a leader of the green movement is - well, I suppose the story speaks for itself. He's probably a little crazy and very visionary, but altogether not too wrong about things. Interestingly, he's one of the few people who have come out and said "There's no life on Mars, and probably there never was". That's astonishingly rare in these days of spirit and opportunity. Try googling for it - almost no one believes Mars never had life, even though it's a distinct possibility.

There are some knowledgable people on slashdot.

There are some thinkers on slashdot.

There are some people who know tech.

There are some people who know something about other things.

There are some who a some of one or more of these things.

There are also people on slashdot who lack one or more of these qualities and there are even people who lack them all.

Steve

Interesting how not only the author said this, but SlashDot left it in the final version, isn't it?

Who is "the left"?

I have been very impressed with the diverse range of opinions many people have.

The only place where I haven't seen this is in people who buy their ideas wholesale in a package deal from talk radio dj/cranks like the author of this thread has.

Who is "the left"?

If you eat tofu are you "the left", and are you against atomic energy?

Now that this person supports atomic energy does that mean he is a republican?

Oy!

Steve

Slashdot posts silly articles like this one, where Linux is "Improving Life of Poor In India," yet posts articles like the infamous "Microsoft Violates Human Rights In China," based on the fact that Windows is used by the government there which somehow equates to Microsoft oppressing the people.

But the Chinese government has its own custom Linux distribution, and Red Hat removed the Taiwanese flag to sell there. So, why is it Microsoft violates human rights in China while Linux improves the life of the poor in India?

I'll tell you why--propaganda and bias. This place is a caricature of the website it was seven years ago. Just had to say my piece.

Hey genius, why not open a f*cking history book and read about the things that YOUR country has been doing to OTHER countries for decades. And you're an idiot if you think it's OK for the US to hold double standards in this world, that it's OK if the US does shit to other countries but not OK if other countries do shit to the US. Yeah, it's OK for Americans to do whatever they want. Sure. You're a f*cking retard if you can't see the sheer, arrogant hypocrisy inherent in your so-called "logic". Nobody asked you to "be nice to Timmy", God, grow up you childish dickwad, this is the REAL WORLD, where millions of people really suffer due to what the US does. Wake up. If you honestly think your strategy of increasing interference and control over other countries by sheer force is going to help the situation, then you're a fool. Keep going with your oversimplified view of brown people as caricatured stereotypes, and keep wondering why nobody in the world loves the US anymore, not just the Arabs. You've got a lot of growing up to do. Start by touring outside your borders.