You start down an interesting thought about going to Alabama and shitting on a bible. You could absolutely do that! You might not like the response from a few of the yolkles but in a city like Birmingham you might get away with it as an art exhibition. The question is if you actively go to a site that is hosted in the United States of America are you right to demand that they follow a "law" in another country. Shouldn't your expectations be to accept the governing laws of the site host? I wouldn't be surprised to find something pro Iranian government hosted in Iran because the laws make it more likely. In the U.S.A. it's every mother fucker for them selves. Unless you have corporate sponsorship. Then it's a whole different set of "stay off my lawn" ideologies. If you want to see a comparable group of religious fundies that get their ideas ridiculed on a regular basis over here the just Google stuff about Scientology. They're a pretty violent group that gets ridiculed all the time.
So let's get one other thing out of the way while we're at it. As an a-theist, you should probably not be attaching PBUH to the end of some important philosophical guy who lived in the fourth century Ano Domini. Just because a bunch of people tell me I'm the Tooth Fairy does not mean I am. It's not like if I get enough votes on Reddit, Digg or Face Book, I'm going to sprout wings and fly around looking for children's teeth. In the same manner, just because some says a person is a prophet does not make them one. There's no such thing as God therefore there cannot be an emissary of God. Therefore drawing the guy is not going to make lightning strike you dead or disallow you into a fictional playground for the dead. If these people have a problem with Face Book then they should MAKE THEIR OWN or STFU and ignore the page about scribbling a guys face.
There's a point to the whole "just tap it" thing though. Even with an awesome mouse you still have to travel from point A to point D walking your way through a menu branch until you get to what you're looking for. Click and move, repeat as many times as you have branches in your menu. I work in VFX and use programs with huge menu branching systems like Maya. I've moved from using a mouse to a massive track ball to a twelve inch Cintiq to a 21 inch Cintiq. Every time was a step in the right direction until the 21 inch Cintiq. I've easily shaved hours off of my daily routines because I'm not hunting for where my mouse pointer is. If you have a lot of pixel space to traverse (4000+ horizontal) then you can only accelerate your mouse so fast before an accidental flinch leaves you looking for your mouse and hitting hot corners or other monitors completely. The accuracy I have over an ten hour day at the desk is better when I don't have to constantly track a little black or white mouse from point to point like a fucking Labrador Retriever.
If you do stuff like programing and databasing then I can understand the whole touch thing would be a waste. The biggest problem I have with using a Cintiq is that my keyboard either sits below my screen or off to the side. Both mean that I have to switch to a different body position. I would love an onscreen keyboard with multi touch so I could just keep drawing, editing and sculpting.
Something interesting that has happened because of the move to large touch screens is that I no longer use my desk the same way. Instead of having my monitor up away from me I now rest the bottom of it on my keyboard tray and have it 45 degrees just below shoulder height. This lets me keep my arms in a comfortable position and not slouch or stretch over my table to get to the screen. kinda like this... __/------ I have my Cinema Display sitting on a platform at the back of my desk so that I can see it over the top of the Cintiq. I think architects solved this problem a long time ago. I would be surprised if this is the new way to go from here on.
Obviously this is coming from a mouse jockey and not somebody who types all day but I think as more people do photo and home movie editing this will get more appropriate.
A couple of things come to mind when everyone starts saying that life out there is impossibly to hard to get to or that it's too far away. One is that based on our current understanding of the universe there are over ten dimensions to space and we have a grasp of four and a shortcut in a fifth to cover super fluidity. Only recently has a math been developed that can even cover the higher orders of energetic states let alone say definitively that there's nothing better. Hell, String theory itself is still being developed. The LHC is going to start to find out some serious answers about some hypothetical elements of our universe including event horizon theories and wether gravitons exists etc. Give them a freaking chance to work first.
The second is that everything we do now for communications works on radio waves. We've had those for what, 150 years or so? Give us another 50 and I think we'll be using quantum entangled particles to transmit data over long distances. Our radio usage would shrink to almost a zero state. So if WE are this close to not using radio waves anymore what makes everyone think that an "Advanced" society out there would have built their civilization around a tech that is for shit when it leaves the solar system. How much interference is there from things like pulsars and general radiation? Wouldn't you as an engineer want something with a little less static to compensate for? If we can produce quarks and other "esons" couldn't we use those near speed of light particles as transmitters of information instead?
It seems like all of these studies about extra terrestrial civilizations are being validated by 1950's cereal box science.
Hi! I thought I would chime in on that bit of advice. My first reaction was to say, "Stay away from my neck of the woods!" Grolaw does make a good point. If the poster does go into a specialty then I would say film is a good way to go. Hollywood pays better than most and the hours are usually nine or ten in the morning till six at night. Average pay for decent animation using AfterEffects, Finalcut, and a 3D package of your choice is about $65.00 per hour. Not the best pay in the world but good enough to get you out of loans and drunk on the weekends. Not to mention if you actually have a talent for doing this stuff, people will actually pay for you to come to them. The perks of being close to Hollywood are beyond listing and happen all the freakin time. A couple of things that happen on a daily basis are things like open bars for clients (and you) when they come into to pixel fuck the project and of coarse catered lunches most of the time.
I work in Minneapolis and pull down a full time jobs worth of freelance with biomedical companies and commercial houses without even really advertising myself. If you can read a manual to pick up new tricks, keep a deadline, and tell a joke while someone watches you work then it's a good gig to get into. I will say that you should stay away from Flash work and web stuff unless you want to specialize in that because no one is going to pay you the same rate for Flash work. Just doesn't look the same as real animation and film. Don't tell anyone what you're degree is in. They don't care and it can land you in the IT end of film which doesn't get the rockstar treatment and leaves you covered in dust from working in the dub room. All people care about is your portfolio. If you have cool projects under your belt and can bring that level of production to the client then they will throw the money at you. It's all an image thing. But in a good way. Your paid to make things look pretty and not a thing more. No APIs, Code revisions, compatibility checks etc.. Just make it look pretty and walk away. You would be amazed how much brain you have left without keeping up with what new code needs to be added. If you do have a knowledge of something like JAVA or Python and you can set up sophisticated animation that runs on code then you can get paid a hell of a lot more and can walk into a lot of high level production houses and pull five or six grand in a week without working half of the time some one else would.
So in closing I say don't do it. The less competition the better. Stay away from the mid west too!;)
Strong with the troll force you are or the parent just explained your response. Totally agree with parent. Anger is the first response to a dangerous situation when you have perceived power over the outcome. Make some one turn off their reasoning and you'll get an answer that is two parts insult and one part restatement of the original point distorted.
"Think of the children!" is one of the classics of the internet for a reason I guess.
Well I think you might have the same thing going on as the correlation does not equal causation stance. Human beings recognize beauty in chaotic situations all the time. Hell, Jackson Pollock made a good living doing just that. Just because we can interpret a situation to have a seemingly organized function doesn't mean that it came about that way in the first place. I think reverse engineering can sometimes give us a false sense of preordained order. I'm not saying that there isn't a big old man in the sky but nothing has proven it on any level that would be considered physical that can not be explained in a natural way. It just so happens that to explain things we actually had to have an understanding of what we were looking at. Meaning that for most of human existence we had to stop explaining at "god must have done it"? Only in the last hundred years do we start to see things for what they really are. Complex...very complex. Ouch my brain hurts complex. Not magical man in the sky mystical though.
Seriously, what is with the @#$% non standards? On2? Huh? I thought this was Java? Just give me any easy way to post videos that anyone can see. At least Flash can use an H.264. I hate having to re-encode things over and over again for different mediums. It would be nice to have a link that would work on everything from a Wii/PS3 to an iPhone without having to have licensing deals bootstrapped to the tech all the time. Youtube on the iPhone is the biggest one in my mind that is just about worthless.
I came here to post the same kind of thing. At this moment my Jail Broken iPhone has a Windows Manager (Finder), MPLayer, a video broadcaster, video recorder, Nintendo, eBook reader and is up on my computer screen using a VNC server on the phone. I just hook it into my dock and type away any text and email on it with my keyboard and when a call comes in I use a headset and just answer it on my screen from halfway across the table in a good reception spot. I don't know what this little linux guy could do that a decently tricked out iPhone can't. I love this phone and haven't thought about it as a cell phone since I cracked it a month after I got it last year. It's a mini computer in all the right ways. The thing is the equivalent of my computer I bought in 2001 and it's 1/200th the size yet ironically gets the same battery life. I suppose the same thing could be said for the N95 or some of the other guys out there. I just think this is the closest yet to a functional user interface for a finger. Oh, and plastic screens suck. You have to mash down way too hard for it to respond in a reliable manner. Gizmodo has the same discussion going on right now about not calling them smart phones anymore because the phone is such a small part of the total functionality now. Important part to be sure but shrinking all the time with twitter and texting and email making random conversations much less invasive but still available where ever you go. Hell even because of where you go.
I think you're right about.avi not being flawed. I run macs all day and output all types of video formats. I've always run across.avi files when I get uncompressed stuff from people who do video on Windows machines. As far as I can tell it's just a wrapper like.mov is. In.mov you can have MPEG 4 or any other format. It's just an architecture thing to enable other features outside of basic specifications. I think what screwed everyone up over.avi was that they were seeing weird codecs like divx and MS-mpeg4 wrapped in it and having all kinds of trouble in the late 90's early 2ks. Just like Quicktime was thought to be the best looking video on the web during that same period. It wasn't Quicktime per se. It was the Sorenson Video 2 and 3 codec that was used for the video that made it great.
Well I was mildly intrigued about this when I read the headline and assumed they had integrated a WACOM screen into the display but that would have been just another tablet laptop with a CINTIQUE built in! Instead they give you the crappiest of WACOM tablets hammered into the right of the trackpad. I don't know anyone that uses a WACOM for anything professional that can stand anything less than the 6x8 size. Having thrown together a 12" WACOM display from an old 14x9 USB Tablet and a 12" HD LCD Display I can say that the closer the size and ratio is to what you're drawing the better it is. For a laptop screen the 6x8 is about a 2:1 for distance which makes drawing a circle only mildly a pain in the ass. On the 4x3" it's #&@!%# impossible thus drawing most organic shapes becomes a lesson in interpretive art.
I don't know how old you are but what you are describing is exactly what is happening all over the US in many jobs( I can't say how many because I'm pulling this from my own life experience but I've talked about this with a lot of different people and they all tend o agree). Like lab mice and flies, the time tables for the data are dramatically shorter in retail work. I worked in mall retail jobs form 1995-2000 and NONE of them will let you move to full time unless you are one "vested in the company mo-fo". The turn over is so high in these jobs, including Apple Stores, that the can afford the two weeks training over benefits every time. The reason this is endemic of a bigger problem is because the policy of expected benefits and workers rights are in conflict with the philosophy of business. Reduce margins like benefits and wasteful spending and increase dividens otherwise know as "get more money as many ways as possible". The longer a person works at a particular job the less likely he/she is to do anything to jeopardize that job. This means you can do things like ask them to come in on the weekend for some catch up work or see if they can get you that report by morning for the big meeting even though they gave it to you to do just that afternoon. If you want to know how bad you're getting screwed just look at your salary as an hourly number. (hourly pay=your salary/2818 hrs) This is with an 8 hr. day w/ 2 weeks removed for vacation. Make sure you add in overtime hours and figure if you think it's enough to put up with the shit you're getting dealt. Any time you negotiate a salary it should be under the assumption that it's 8 hrs per day. Every hour you work on top of that is a smaller hourly rate over all. My last job saved $24,000.00 in work before my first 6 months of employment were up. That meant in a job where the pay was 60K I was going to be working the equivalent of two 35k jobs maybe even three 20k jobs by the end of the year. All for the glory of the Co. Hell I even added 15K onto the salary requirement because I knew it would require some OT. If a skilled job ever drops under 15 per hr. QUIT. You can do better in something else. Even if you can't you should quit anyways. You won't be getting any raise that will compensate you for the money lost the previous year. If more people actually stuck to their ideas about working WITH people instead of working for them, we would all have better positions in which to negotiate fair compensation. The argument that you have to sacrifice in order to get a better position is BS. This is perpetuated by people who had to sacrifice something they hold dear to get the job they thought was the holy grail job. Of coarse they don't realize that any job in a company that makes over 40K and under 150K is a bulls eye for letting go. Usually those numbers are for higher skilled people who aren't management. This means that the people just underneath who ever this is can do the job but gets paid less to do so. This might sound bitter but I've watched this happen three times in the last seven years and it seems pretty business as usual.
It later came into the timeline that he had bone claws since he was 12 but that the adamantium ones had either encased the original or were in the channels and blocked or stunted the growth of the bone ones. I like to think they were encased and sharpened not just to be pig stickers. In the early Wolverine appearances his claws were more conical and ripped/poked things instead of razor sharp.
This all came up when Magneto ripped the metal from Wolverines bones in the mid 90's and for the next couple of years you got to see Wolverine sans invulnerability. I knida thought they should have just left it that way and let him just have an insane healing ability since his body wasn't constantly trying to reject 300 lbs. of metal.
As a side note it looks like they are using the Ultimate X-Men timeline of events for a basis and throwing a little original lore in there to keep it dramatic. Gambit and Blob are not really part of Weapon X but it just as easily could have been them instead of Juggernaut and Rogue or Night Crawler. The woman that Wolverine is holding is most likely Silverfox who he is married to in the comics but is a Hydra agent these days. Deadpool however is a Weapon X graduate and isn't really a big stretch for the movie. Deadpool by the way is the reason the Rob Leifield became the cat's meow. Between Deadpool and Cable Leifield started a small set of characters that were bad ass but not super powered into demigods. They fought people with guns and knives because they didn't have lasers that shot out of they're eyes.
This was made abundantly clear to me and my wife when we had a conversation with her dad over the movie "The Bourne Supremacy" or which ever the second one was. He said it was good but he thought that the whole spying tech that was used was unbelievable. He thought that the ability to tap into the cameras in the shopping mall and cell phone manipulation was to far fetched. I then asked him if he had heard of Echelon or any other type of surveillance and he said that he didn't think that the US Gov would do or be able to do that type of spying. I think the idea of an over reaching arm was just a scifi idea to him. To us it's just the missuse of things we can all do.
I totally agree with your analogy about the four guys. If a group of people want your blood and all being equal then you fucked up being there in the first place. Without getting to wishy washy about it. There's an analogy in Tai Chi about 4 ounces of pressure can divert a 1000 lbs. of force. Meaning that if you use just a little effort in the right place then you don't have to deal with the tidal wave later. In a way I think the CIA use this analogy to reason a bunch of little wars are better than one big world one. Letting off the steam a little so to speak. This goes back to the whole General thing being not about the action of the soldier but the movement of the army as a whole to be most effective.
I don't know if the whole population thing being reduced to a few thousand means that the Cylons in this instance can't be wiped out. They never say just how many Cylons there are in the first place. There could only be a live population of 200,000 at any given time. Might be some hefty odds but definitely not insurmountable. Plus the whole rebirth thing makes them sloppy. That what was so great about the "Scar" episode. It showed that once rebirth was no longer an option the kill rates of the Raiders went up. So they might be able to kill all humans but it would take a sacrifice of their own on a cultural level that might be too much.
When I hear anyone say there is not a way to do something I immediately start thinking about ways to do it. So of coarse when you said that there is no equivalent to Akido in war I started think if there could be. The best I got so far is the use of those stunning beam weapons just made and the Geneva Convention. Even if the other side won't follow it you can at least hold your morale together by keeping some basic human rights. The Cylons could have been wiped out theoretically with the hepatitis or what ever the disease was but that would have made an iron clad enemy if it would have survived with a true demon like immorality in us proven that they could use against us and some would agree with them. The Cylons in the show started to see that there were some lines that were not crossable if they wanted to appease their one God and keep themselves better than the humans.
Remember that they considered humans beneath them in the beginning but that was only while they had no interaction with them on an intimate level. Six didn't consider sex intimate and only felt sorry once she could feel the permanent loss of her familiar love. I think that might be one of those no kidding statements but we don't get a whole lot of this stuff in TV. The Cylons are a good example of the throw away consumer culture at its worst. You don't have to take care of anything including your body. Once they had to keep something after trauma, you started to see a cherishing of their community and individuality. They realized the mistake of the genocide. It was like a scorned child killing their parent by accident and only after trying to shake the dead carcass saying it was just playing. Do you blame the child for the accident or the parent for not noticing the warning signs. I don't know... This becomes pretty hippy wishy washy at this point but I think this grey would still be there after the end of the world. People get kooky when they're in denial of a situation. I think the genocide of the known world might bring on a little long term denial about the magnitude of the situation. Not to mention the feeling of helplessness that might be prevailing in the populace stuck in long coffins looking for death from a random spark of light from a random Cylon raider. Self destruction could easily prevail. I think of The Diary of Anne Frank and the close call because the friend was being sloppy and making noise. I don't remember the book too much but you get the sentiment.
I love that a show can illicit this kind of talk!
Just on a sidenote, I've learned from real masters and it's almost an insult to call a real master a "Master". It's like saying that they are at an end. Not that that level isn't enough of an accomplishment but just that there is always something to see and refine. The one I really knew thought it just sounded like you were trying to stroke his ego. You showed respect through your learning.
I know that this might not be looked at since it's a couple of days old but I've been following your conversation and think some parts of each are right. This is not some bullshit everyone is friends lets make up statement. Grew up military but live civilian now. There's a big gap between what would happen if such a war happened here and now and if it happened for the second time in 40 years. I think the premise of the whole genocide was a reaction to the genocide/ enslavement that the Cylons were facing 40 years previous to the current show. I think the premise for that was surrender and be the toaster slaves that you were made to be or face annihilation. I think the big strike was just a carry over from the first war kind of like people who were alive at the time of WWII thinking it was just the conclusion to WWI. I've read a few interviews and books about generals who were in the first war thinking that the second was inevitable. But that's kind of a side thought to what came across my mind when I read the posts.
I totally agree that survival is a base primal instinct that is there for a reason. That and to reproduce. Every higher level organism on Earth will fight if it has even a shred of a chance in coming out alive. But that's kind of the point of religion, philosophy, and most recently sci-fi like Star Trek, Farscape, and even Battle Star. It's the strive to not repeat the cycle of violence that we have been stuck in since we were able to shit. It's to be better than ourselves. The whole turn the other cheek thing was a direct response to the fact that war is not winnable only extendable. It was a very basic idea of just cutting the motion of intent off instead of amplifying it back. Fighting to the death only succeeds on a personal level. One of the basic treaties of war was to know your enemy...if only to know where to strike the most effective blow. But another one that was most famously stated by Machiavelli was that if you're going to wipe out a regime you better wipe out every person in the family older or younger because they'll come for you sooner or later. Yea, good luck finding that second cousin that was whisked away in a basket down the river. Lord knows that doesn't come back to bite anyone in Biblical proportions.
I've studied about five different martial arts for about 25 years and have seen the nastiest battlefield version down to the first one to tap the other person wins sports and the general feeling is one of moving form panic to understanding and overcoming the other person. We're still talking singular to small group here. Styles like Wing Chun are closer to battlefield arts in mentality because every response it the same...Beat the snot out of the other person until they are a bloody pulp. Break as much as possible as quickly as possible. That's great and all but kinda fucks your ability to respond to a drunk in a bar.
If your at all decent in a martial art, a one on one fight is like somebody asking a pro ball player to settle a bet with a friendly game of ball. You can't kill some drunk stock broker in a bar just because he challenged you to a contest in your field of interest. Arts like Tai Chi and Akido do a good job of teaching response that will allow you to look the other guy in the face afterwards not his family. The same is exponential for war.
I would never tell some one out in the field to not shot somebody that's shooting at them but as a general that is safe and not having his skull grazed all day long you can say things like, "Fall back, we've built a perimeter and were going to let them strave a little till they're ready to talk." Still kinda brutal but no where near, "Let's nuke 'em." Because if you miss even.004% of the people you were aiming for they'll be back.
My friend and I have actually had this same conversation turn into a full blow argument! We both think that your assumptions about the need to show what happens when everything runs out and what the priority of needs are but I diverge from the agreement about the point when its assumed that they can no longer manufacture things. Here's what I was thinking as best I can put into a short reply.
Somebody brought up the fact that a Battlestar is the equivalent to an aircraft carrier. I would say this is a good start but above that, they need to be a first landing and beach head vessel. That means all the equipment and know how to land an assault on a planet and keep a beach head maintained possibly far enough into space to make resupply hard if not impossible. My friend's counter argument to this was that the Battle Star Galactica was being decommissioned and was probably stripped of most of its heavy arms before the first Cylon assault took place.
The biggest problem I had with this show was in season two when they were on the planet. They lived like shit and I thought the writers did a bad job of showing the progression of tech that would have been second nature by then. The majority of people live in little tents and bivouacked together like it was 1944. This was a great way to relate to a general audience because I think it made their world more tangible but lets be honest, If they can make Battle Stars and Cylons (even the first gen models) then they could manufacture almost on a personal level. It's easy to assume that they had the tech for "printing" cement structures down. We are dabbling in it now and we can't even make it to the moon yet reliably.
With the assumption that they have at least a semi-sophisticated manufacturing process you could think that they would have fabricators on all their ships with enough raw elements to process into basic needs like clothing, contact lenses/glasses, tables etc... The raw elements can be stripped from multiple places as demonstrated at the recycling boiling plants that can be installed at places like chicken farms to strip the organic waste and extra bits into light crude oil and pure carbon and graphene. It's pretty cool to see a bone carcass go through and come out as calcium dust, refined oil, and water. These are then drummed up and sold in bulk to places like tire plants that need the raw materials.
The counter argument was that why would you have a house manufacturing machine on a Battle Star? They never would need it because everyone lives on the ship. Which is why I brought up the whole beach head thing. Forget laying sand bags. Just have it lay down a 4 foot wall with holes built for gunnery posts. it would take half a day and could be cement strong. Not to mention barracks and bunkers. Basically fortification 101 would make it a necessity to carry a few of these machines on a carrier.
The biggest split in conversation happened over food and medicine. Obviously the Battle Star isn't equipped for food production but why not. MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) could be made on the ship with protein bars and so forth like they were doing at the end of the 3rd season from the Algae but it can be taken one step further and medicine can be done the same way. Why wouldn't a deep space city in the sky type of craft have at least the basic cultures for antibiotics and the like in cold storage? Lord knows a battle ship would never need more medicine than they shipped out with.
And the final nail in the coffin is that every Battle Star could have all the city planning and agricultural/ infrastructure information with them at all times. How many gigs of info would basic city and agriculture plans take up? 5-10 TB... Maybe! That would include things like processing machines and power generation. If they had the tech to make artificial intelligence I think they had big enough drives to put a few extra "just incases" on some free space. Not to mention the on-ship Library that a Aircraft carrier has that might have been beefed u
Everyone keeps talking about flying cars not being practical because of crashing and stupid teenagers and such. They are totally right but THIS commercial actually makes a better point just in the tag line. Right now flying a plane is like using a computer with command line and no protected memory. You have barely any advanced warning systems. No redundant engines for failure. And if something does happen you have to decide in a matter of seconds where you're going to land and how many trees you're going to take out when you do. Or houses but really that's never going to happen.
The idea of a flying car is great and could work but THEY NEED BETTER SOFTWARE. Constant engine diagnostics in the back ground. Multiple emergency landing engines. Maybe lower powered but able to keep a vertically stable position until lowering is able to be done safely. The steering wheel should not be a yolk but a dumbed steering wheel so as not to let you make radical changes in velocity and direction. The software would have to make the car as smart as a horses so that it doesn't want to die anymore than the people on it's back. If it doesn't feel well then it doesn't go anywhere.
Then you move on to swarming communication between a certain radius so that if bubba joe starts to have issues the vehicles themselves start to move out of the way and reduce speed to allow the broken vehicle to land. MIT kids have this stuff running to win robot soccer games. Why not install it in some cars and see what happens. Then move it into X,Y,Z environment. Let the car make most of the decisions so that the teenage/old blind people don't have to be "Iceman" Kilmer to drive it. Take a Google map like layout and have to plot your course maybe ahead of time to allow vehicle load buffering.
This all may not be a free flying as just getting in your car and hitting the peddal but it would make flying cars a heck of a lot more sane for two screaming kids, a cell phone, and soccer.
Re:Quantum entangled point to point
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Is SETI Worth It?
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This is a really interesting point that you bring up about quantum entanglement. If you keep one set of electrons on one side of a communication array and another set at the other end you can send binary in real time. This would have no broadcast leak and I think would be undetectable from our point of view. It's interesting that we've come to this point after only a hundred years of radio communication and already we can conceive of non radio transmition.
Didn't some college just come up with a way to push molecules around using a laser? Why not push an entangled electron to the moon and from that point on you would have a viable realtime data connection. Hell, why not set up a set of eight different electron sets and have a serial port ready to transmit. This could even be used in cellphones to make them non cellphones. Each SIMchip could have a pair of electrons entangled with a pair at the main switch. Say goodbye to interference from anything. It would be real time communication matter where you were, even the next planet.
Seriously! It's not like they don't have ten years of Ghost in the Shell to rip off to make some decent scripts from. Lord knows they don't have the physics of high powered impacts down any better than in the seventies. If girl kicks guy in the chest with enough impact to send him across the room then it was hard enough and a small enough diameter surface to go through his chest. That pretty much goes with every hit she makes. Hit somebody in the face at full strength? The jaw would leave on vacation to the other side of the room or turn to powder at the impact site. That's one of the things that made the woman from Ghost in the Shell so interesting. She had to learn how to dial back what she could do not go all girl power over the scary foul talking black man.
For a Sci-fi writer he has little imagination doesn't he. We just have started to figure out that the universe might have 11 dimensions. We only work in 4 of those right now. I think he might be putting himself in the same boat as the guys who thought we had learned everything we would ever know in science back last century. My were those people right on the money. I would expect somebody who doesn't even have to worry about proving his made up things to be a little more lenient with the current state of our technological development. If we just figured out what an E8 looks like from a hundred years ago and that took 9 dimensional space to prove then what happens when all of our science it that complicated. We might end up figuring out that we don't even need to bend timespace to get to another location. Maybe the interwhosawhatsit that connects all dimensions allow us just to flip a switch and be anywhere we want to be.
We don't know yet and that's the fun part. Mitchio Kaku doesn't get up in the morning just to play with his legos (OK maybe he does but then he makes a particle accelerator with them) he's looking for something. On a side note I think we're going to laugh at the idea of metal based robots in 50 years because of how easy it will be to manipulate carbon and organics Phillip K. Dick / Blade Runner style. I still want my flying car!
Yea...that would be a slashdot newbie thing that happened there. Drive by punk just came in my office and hit the html formatting button instead of the plain text. Your right though, it was a hell of an interesting thing thing to watch. It was like seeing two politicians jockey for top position in a debate. ASF was the worst format to deal with. You always new something wasn't right.
I seem to remember something about diferent patent holders wanting a certain amount and then others that came back with some silly gadgillion type number and this is what they settled on. I remember Quicktime being delayed or at least in controversy when they first released MPEG-4 because they did it before the liscensing was settled. It is a hell of a coincidence that MPEG4 got bogged down in legality while MS was developing their own in house alternative on the side. It's kinda their MO.
A better way to express the concern I was talking about is that the partners that are making this are after the fact. They did not add to the code and help create the codec. This was Microsoft's baby because everyone was focused on the ratification of H264. They didn't see this one coming. Everyone was surprised when the VC-1 Code came out as the original WMV codec. I think even you would have to admit there was a big "what the hell" from the MPEG committee. Support came after the fact not in anticipation of it. Again it's not the VC-1 encoding, because your right that's free(not really only under 100,000 people) and open to anyone to replicate that was suspect but the creation of a codec that ran parallel to H264 as it was stabilized each and every step of the way as was demonstrated by the three iterations of WMV through VC-1 which was where the code freeze happened on H264 AVC. You stopped development when they did because you knew there wouldn't be anymore advantageous progressions of code that had to be trumped.
What I was getting at with Sorenson is that you used their code as a platform to launch WMV7.0 after you saw Sorenson Video 3 compression techniques from the code they gave the Consortium which from what you say makes sense that they added and hacked the h.263 back when it was in development in 1997 or so. If I remember right, Sorenson hit their stride with Quicktime in 1998-99.
I'm curious what you do as partners with Sorenson? Do you guys co-develope Codecs or are they asking you how to better integrate their systems with your OS and media platforms. There's a big difference.
When you say stuff like "VC-1 was designed for high-performance PC playback as the #1 goal" it smacks of marketing vernacular. I know... I've done it for 10 years. What that translates to is "We know that it takes a brand knew system to fully use our program." and because its a program, you can always up the ante just a little more so that you need newer hardware. Remember that your first argument as for why you came up with VC-1 is that H264 was too intensive for computer playback. Now your saying that VC-1 was firstly made to take advantage of new hardware that easily plays back all the codecs you can throw at them including H264. So in that respect I think you can just say that it was in your best interest not back MPEG but to create your own codec that is more compatible with the philosophy and design techniques of the company. One that can grow with the demands of your customer and give them a more versatile user experience. H264 was never going to be for video conferencing as its primary goal, it was a side mention in 1998 as a possible use scenario for overlaying meta data like you would find in a weather report. AVC was specifically designed for HD digital carriers as the next major jump in distribution for broadcasting standards. The two codecs don't have different goals because if they did they wouldn't both now be on HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs. Or be touted in Windows Mobile 6 , or be the main codec for the Xbox... Wait a minute maybe that last one would fall more under the IPTV transmission aspect of H264 signaling. That sure seems like a lot of device implementation to me. By the way where is the support for h264 that you helped create? I think you left some friends at the door on your way to the show.
You have to push MS solutions... I get that. It's your devision so it comes first but this is the very real reason that no one trusts your company. They'll take your money sure but everything is laced with this poison of pickpocketing the best part of a collaboration and leaving the rest in litigation until it doesn't matter any more. I think that is one of the major under currents in the comments made on Slashdot. I say this because your really good at what you do but you happen to be part of something that is a little too much business and not enough ethics.
replied to my self on this one sorry. It was meant for this post...
So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to.
Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash.
I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market.
I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to.
Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash.
I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market.
I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
So why is it that Windows Media Player started to get a remarkably better codec just about the same time that the first drafts for MPEG 4 were coming out? It would appear from the outside like they took the code and because it didn't have to pass a slow IEEE ratification board anymore, was able to be put straight to market in the same way that DivX was. Then as new improvements in the MPEG 4 code were made, suprisingly there was a new release of Windows Media Player aswell. WMP 7,8,9 were all rapid fire released and then finally when H.264 was getting close to being ratified and released lo and behold Windows Media Player gets a brand new spankin' HD codec later be to named VC-1 so as not to remind everyone that it came directly from Microsoft as Windows Media Player 10 Video Codec. If this is wrong then please elucidate because that's a whole lot of coincidences in a row. Why would a company hand over their codec for standards? Because they know that no more improvements are going to be made and that the code base from which you were working has been frozen as H.264 AVC Level 10. Meaning you can't review the code anymore as it's updated by being on the IEEE board.
Slashdot Mirror
You start down an interesting thought about going to Alabama and shitting on a bible. You could absolutely do that! You might not like the response from a few of the yolkles but in a city like Birmingham you might get away with it as an art exhibition. The question is if you actively go to a site that is hosted in the United States of America are you right to demand that they follow a "law" in another country. Shouldn't your expectations be to accept the governing laws of the site host? I wouldn't be surprised to find something pro Iranian government hosted in Iran because the laws make it more likely. In the U.S.A. it's every mother fucker for them selves. Unless you have corporate sponsorship. Then it's a whole different set of "stay off my lawn" ideologies. If you want to see a comparable group of religious fundies that get their ideas ridiculed on a regular basis over here the just Google stuff about Scientology. They're a pretty violent group that gets ridiculed all the time.
So let's get one other thing out of the way while we're at it. As an a-theist, you should probably not be attaching PBUH to the end of some important philosophical guy who lived in the fourth century Ano Domini. Just because a bunch of people tell me I'm the Tooth Fairy does not mean I am. It's not like if I get enough votes on Reddit, Digg or Face Book, I'm going to sprout wings and fly around looking for children's teeth. In the same manner, just because some says a person is a prophet does not make them one. There's no such thing as God therefore there cannot be an emissary of God. Therefore drawing the guy is not going to make lightning strike you dead or disallow you into a fictional playground for the dead. If these people have a problem with Face Book then they should MAKE THEIR OWN or STFU and ignore the page about scribbling a guys face.
There's a point to the whole "just tap it" thing though. Even with an awesome mouse you still have to travel from point A to point D walking your way through a menu branch until you get to what you're looking for. Click and move, repeat as many times as you have branches in your menu. I work in VFX and use programs with huge menu branching systems like Maya. I've moved from using a mouse to a massive track ball to a twelve inch Cintiq to a 21 inch Cintiq. Every time was a step in the right direction until the 21 inch Cintiq. I've easily shaved hours off of my daily routines because I'm not hunting for where my mouse pointer is. If you have a lot of pixel space to traverse (4000+ horizontal) then you can only accelerate your mouse so fast before an accidental flinch leaves you looking for your mouse and hitting hot corners or other monitors completely. The accuracy I have over an ten hour day at the desk is better when I don't have to constantly track a little black or white mouse from point to point like a fucking Labrador Retriever.
If you do stuff like programing and databasing then I can understand the whole touch thing would be a waste. The biggest problem I have with using a Cintiq is that my keyboard either sits below my screen or off to the side. Both mean that I have to switch to a different body position. I would love an onscreen keyboard with multi touch so I could just keep drawing, editing and sculpting.
Something interesting that has happened because of the move to large touch screens is that I no longer use my desk the same way. Instead of having my monitor up away from me I now rest the bottom of it on my keyboard tray and have it 45 degrees just below shoulder height. This lets me keep my arms in a comfortable position and not slouch or stretch over my table to get to the screen. kinda like this... __/------ I have my Cinema Display sitting on a platform at the back of my desk so that I can see it over the top of the Cintiq. I think architects solved this problem a long time ago. I would be surprised if this is the new way to go from here on.
Obviously this is coming from a mouse jockey and not somebody who types all day but I think as more people do photo and home movie editing this will get more appropriate.
A couple of things come to mind when everyone starts saying that life out there is impossibly to hard to get to or that it's too far away. One is that based on our current understanding of the universe there are over ten dimensions to space and we have a grasp of four and a shortcut in a fifth to cover super fluidity. Only recently has a math been developed that can even cover the higher orders of energetic states let alone say definitively that there's nothing better. Hell, String theory itself is still being developed. The LHC is going to start to find out some serious answers about some hypothetical elements of our universe including event horizon theories and wether gravitons exists etc. Give them a freaking chance to work first.
The second is that everything we do now for communications works on radio waves. We've had those for what, 150 years or so? Give us another 50 and I think we'll be using quantum entangled particles to transmit data over long distances. Our radio usage would shrink to almost a zero state. So if WE are this close to not using radio waves anymore what makes everyone think that an "Advanced" society out there would have built their civilization around a tech that is for shit when it leaves the solar system. How much interference is there from things like pulsars and general radiation? Wouldn't you as an engineer want something with a little less static to compensate for? If we can produce quarks and other "esons" couldn't we use those near speed of light particles as transmitters of information instead?
It seems like all of these studies about extra terrestrial civilizations are being validated by 1950's cereal box science.
Hi! I thought I would chime in on that bit of advice. My first reaction was to say, "Stay away from my neck of the woods!" Grolaw does make a good point. If the poster does go into a specialty then I would say film is a good way to go. Hollywood pays better than most and the hours are usually nine or ten in the morning till six at night. Average pay for decent animation using AfterEffects, Finalcut, and a 3D package of your choice is about $65.00 per hour. Not the best pay in the world but good enough to get you out of loans and drunk on the weekends. Not to mention if you actually have a talent for doing this stuff, people will actually pay for you to come to them. The perks of being close to Hollywood are beyond listing and happen all the freakin time. A couple of things that happen on a daily basis are things like open bars for clients (and you) when they come into to pixel fuck the project and of coarse catered lunches most of the time.
I work in Minneapolis and pull down a full time jobs worth of freelance with biomedical companies and commercial houses without even really advertising myself. If you can read a manual to pick up new tricks, keep a deadline, and tell a joke while someone watches you work then it's a good gig to get into. I will say that you should stay away from Flash work and web stuff unless you want to specialize in that because no one is going to pay you the same rate for Flash work. Just doesn't look the same as real animation and film. Don't tell anyone what you're degree is in. They don't care and it can land you in the IT end of film which doesn't get the rockstar treatment and leaves you covered in dust from working in the dub room. All people care about is your portfolio. If you have cool projects under your belt and can bring that level of production to the client then they will throw the money at you. It's all an image thing. But in a good way. Your paid to make things look pretty and not a thing more. No APIs, Code revisions, compatibility checks etc.. Just make it look pretty and walk away. You would be amazed how much brain you have left without keeping up with what new code needs to be added. If you do have a knowledge of something like JAVA or Python and you can set up sophisticated animation that runs on code then you can get paid a hell of a lot more and can walk into a lot of high level production houses and pull five or six grand in a week without working half of the time some one else would.
So in closing I say don't do it. The less competition the better. Stay away from the mid west too! ;)
Strong with the troll force you are or the parent just explained your response. Totally agree with parent. Anger is the first response to a dangerous situation when you have perceived power over the outcome. Make some one turn off their reasoning and you'll get an answer that is two parts insult and one part restatement of the original point distorted.
"Think of the children!" is one of the classics of the internet for a reason I guess.
Well I think you might have the same thing going on as the correlation does not equal causation stance. Human beings recognize beauty in chaotic situations all the time. Hell, Jackson Pollock made a good living doing just that. Just because we can interpret a situation to have a seemingly organized function doesn't mean that it came about that way in the first place. I think reverse engineering can sometimes give us a false sense of preordained order. I'm not saying that there isn't a big old man in the sky but nothing has proven it on any level that would be considered physical that can not be explained in a natural way. It just so happens that to explain things we actually had to have an understanding of what we were looking at. Meaning that for most of human existence we had to stop explaining at "god must have done it"? Only in the last hundred years do we start to see things for what they really are. Complex...very complex. Ouch my brain hurts complex. Not magical man in the sky mystical though.
Seriously, what is with the @#$% non standards? On2? Huh? I thought this was Java? Just give me any easy way to post videos that anyone can see. At least Flash can use an H.264. I hate having to re-encode things over and over again for different mediums. It would be nice to have a link that would work on everything from a Wii/PS3 to an iPhone without having to have licensing deals bootstrapped to the tech all the time. Youtube on the iPhone is the biggest one in my mind that is just about worthless.
I came here to post the same kind of thing. At this moment my Jail Broken iPhone has a Windows Manager (Finder), MPLayer, a video broadcaster, video recorder, Nintendo, eBook reader and is up on my computer screen using a VNC server on the phone. I just hook it into my dock and type away any text and email on it with my keyboard and when a call comes in I use a headset and just answer it on my screen from halfway across the table in a good reception spot. I don't know what this little linux guy could do that a decently tricked out iPhone can't.
I love this phone and haven't thought about it as a cell phone since I cracked it a month after I got it last year. It's a mini computer in all the right ways. The thing is the equivalent of my computer I bought in 2001 and it's 1/200th the size yet ironically gets the same battery life. I suppose the same thing could be said for the N95 or some of the other guys out there. I just think this is the closest yet to a functional user interface for a finger. Oh, and plastic screens suck. You have to mash down way too hard for it to respond in a reliable manner.
Gizmodo has the same discussion going on right now about not calling them smart phones anymore because the phone is such a small part of the total functionality now. Important part to be sure but shrinking all the time with twitter and texting and email making random conversations much less invasive but still available where ever you go. Hell even because of where you go.
I think you're right about .avi not being flawed. I run macs all day and output all types of video formats. I've always run across .avi files when I get uncompressed stuff from people who do video on Windows machines. As far as I can tell it's just a wrapper like .mov is. In .mov you can have MPEG 4 or any other format. It's just an architecture thing to enable other features outside of basic specifications. .avi was that they were seeing weird codecs like divx and MS-mpeg4 wrapped in it and having all kinds of trouble in the late 90's early 2ks. Just like Quicktime was thought to be the best looking video on the web during that same period. It wasn't Quicktime per se. It was the Sorenson Video 2 and 3 codec that was used for the video that made it great.
I think what screwed everyone up over
Well I was mildly intrigued about this when I read the headline and assumed they had integrated a WACOM screen into the display but that would have been just another tablet laptop with a CINTIQUE built in! Instead they give you the crappiest of WACOM tablets hammered into the right of the trackpad. I don't know anyone that uses a WACOM for anything professional that can stand anything less than the 6x8 size. Having thrown together a 12" WACOM display from an old 14x9 USB Tablet and a 12" HD LCD Display I can say that the closer the size and ratio is to what you're drawing the better it is. For a laptop screen the 6x8 is about a 2:1 for distance which makes drawing a circle only mildly a pain in the ass. On the 4x3" it's #&@!%# impossible thus drawing most organic shapes becomes a lesson in interpretive art.
I don't know how old you are but what you are describing is exactly what is happening all over the US in many jobs( I can't say how many because I'm pulling this from my own life experience but I've talked about this with a lot of different people and they all tend o agree). Like lab mice and flies, the time tables for the data are dramatically shorter in retail work. I worked in mall retail jobs form 1995-2000 and NONE of them will let you move to full time unless you are one
"vested in the company mo-fo". The turn over is so high in these jobs, including Apple Stores, that the can afford the two weeks training over benefits every time.
The reason this is endemic of a bigger problem is because the policy of expected benefits and workers rights are in conflict with the philosophy of business. Reduce margins like benefits and wasteful spending and increase dividens otherwise know as "get more money as many ways as possible". The longer a person works at a particular job the less likely he/she is to do anything to jeopardize that job. This means you can do things like ask them to come in on the weekend for some catch up work or see if they can get you that report by morning for the big meeting even though they gave it to you to do just that afternoon.
If you want to know how bad you're getting screwed just look at your salary as an hourly number. (hourly pay=your salary/2818 hrs) This is with an 8 hr. day w/ 2 weeks removed for vacation. Make sure you add in overtime hours and figure if you think it's enough to put up with the shit you're getting dealt. Any time you negotiate a salary it should be under the assumption that it's 8 hrs per day. Every hour you work on top of that is a smaller hourly rate over all. My last job saved $24,000.00 in work before my first 6 months of employment were up. That meant in a job where the pay was 60K I was going to be working the equivalent of two 35k jobs maybe even three 20k jobs by the end of the year. All for the glory of the Co. Hell I even added 15K onto the salary requirement because I knew it would require some OT.
If a skilled job ever drops under 15 per hr. QUIT. You can do better in something else. Even if you can't you should quit anyways. You won't be getting any raise that will compensate you for the money lost the previous year.
If more people actually stuck to their ideas about working WITH people instead of working for them, we would all have better positions in which to negotiate fair compensation. The argument that you have to sacrifice in order to get a better position is BS. This is perpetuated by people who had to sacrifice something they hold dear to get the job they thought was the holy grail job. Of coarse they don't realize that any job in a company that makes over 40K and under 150K is a bulls eye for letting go. Usually those numbers are for higher skilled people who aren't management. This means that the people just underneath who ever this is can do the job but gets paid less to do so.
This might sound bitter but I've watched this happen three times in the last seven years and it seems pretty business as usual.
It later came into the timeline that he had bone claws since he was 12 but that the adamantium ones had either encased the original or were in the channels and blocked or stunted the growth of the bone ones. I like to think they were encased and sharpened not just to be pig stickers. In the early Wolverine appearances his claws were more conical and ripped/poked things instead of razor sharp. This all came up when Magneto ripped the metal from Wolverines bones in the mid 90's and for the next couple of years you got to see Wolverine sans invulnerability. I knida thought they should have just left it that way and let him just have an insane healing ability since his body wasn't constantly trying to reject 300 lbs. of metal. As a side note it looks like they are using the Ultimate X-Men timeline of events for a basis and throwing a little original lore in there to keep it dramatic. Gambit and Blob are not really part of Weapon X but it just as easily could have been them instead of Juggernaut and Rogue or Night Crawler. The woman that Wolverine is holding is most likely Silverfox who he is married to in the comics but is a Hydra agent these days. Deadpool however is a Weapon X graduate and isn't really a big stretch for the movie. Deadpool by the way is the reason the Rob Leifield became the cat's meow. Between Deadpool and Cable Leifield started a small set of characters that were bad ass but not super powered into demigods. They fought people with guns and knives because they didn't have lasers that shot out of they're eyes.
This was made abundantly clear to me and my wife when we had a conversation with her dad over the movie "The Bourne Supremacy" or which ever the second one was. He said it was good but he thought that the whole spying tech that was used was unbelievable. He thought that the ability to tap into the cameras in the shopping mall and cell phone manipulation was to far fetched. I then asked him if he had heard of Echelon or any other type of surveillance and he said that he didn't think that the US Gov would do or be able to do that type of spying. I think the idea of an over reaching arm was just a scifi idea to him. To us it's just the missuse of things we can all do.
I totally agree with your analogy about the four guys. If a group of people want your blood and all being equal then you fucked up being there in the first place. Without getting to wishy washy about it. There's an analogy in Tai Chi about 4 ounces of pressure can divert a 1000 lbs. of force.
Meaning that if you use just a little effort in the right place then you don't have to deal with the tidal wave later. In a way I think the CIA use this analogy to reason a bunch of little wars are better than one big world one. Letting off the steam a little so to speak. This goes back to the whole General thing being not about the action of the soldier but the movement of the army as a whole to be most effective.
I don't know if the whole population thing being reduced to a few thousand means that the Cylons in this instance can't be wiped out. They never say just how many Cylons there are in the first place. There could only be a live population of 200,000 at any given time. Might be some hefty odds but definitely not insurmountable. Plus the whole rebirth thing makes them sloppy. That what was so great about the "Scar" episode. It showed that once rebirth was no longer an option the kill rates of the Raiders went up. So they might be able to kill all humans but it would take a sacrifice of their own on a cultural level that might be too much.
When I hear anyone say there is not a way to do something I immediately start thinking about ways to do it. So of coarse when you said that there is no equivalent to Akido in war I started think if there could be. The best I got so far is the use of those stunning beam weapons just made and the Geneva Convention. Even if the other side won't follow it you can at least hold your morale together by keeping some basic human rights. The Cylons could have been wiped out theoretically with the hepatitis or what ever the disease was but that would have made an iron clad enemy if it would have survived with a true demon like immorality in us proven that they could use against us and some would agree with them. The Cylons in the show started to see that there were some lines that were not crossable if they wanted to appease their one God and keep themselves better than the humans.
Remember that they considered humans beneath them in the beginning but that was only while they had no interaction with them on an intimate level. Six didn't consider sex intimate and only felt sorry once she could feel the permanent loss of her familiar love. I think that might be one of those no kidding statements but we don't get a whole lot of this stuff in TV. The Cylons are a good example of the throw away consumer culture at its worst. You don't have to take care of anything including your body. Once they had to keep something after trauma, you started to see a cherishing of their community and individuality. They realized the mistake of the genocide. It was like a scorned child killing their parent by accident and only after trying to shake the dead carcass saying it was just playing. Do you blame the child for the accident or the parent for not noticing the warning signs. I don't know... This becomes pretty hippy wishy washy at this point but I think this grey would still be there after the end of the world. People get kooky when they're in denial of a situation. I think the genocide of the known world might bring on a little long term denial about the magnitude of the situation. Not to mention the feeling of helplessness that might be prevailing in the populace stuck in long coffins looking for death from a random spark of light from a random Cylon raider. Self destruction could easily prevail. I think of The Diary of Anne Frank and the close call because the friend was being sloppy and making noise. I don't remember the book too much but you get the sentiment.
I love that a show can illicit this kind of talk!
Just on a sidenote, I've learned from real masters and it's almost an insult to call a real master a "Master". It's like saying that they are at an end. Not that that level isn't enough of an accomplishment but just that there is always something to see and refine. The one I really knew thought it just sounded like you were trying to stroke his ego. You showed respect through your learning.
I know that this might not be looked at since it's a couple of days old but I've been following your conversation and think some parts of each are right. This is not some bullshit everyone is friends lets make up statement. Grew up military but live civilian now. There's a big gap between what would happen if such a war happened here and now and if it happened for the second time in 40 years. I think the premise of the whole genocide was a reaction to the genocide/ enslavement that the Cylons were facing 40 years previous to the current show. I think the premise for that was surrender and be the toaster slaves that you were made to be or face annihilation. I think the big strike was just a carry over from the first war kind of like people who were alive at the time of WWII thinking it was just the conclusion to WWI. I've read a few interviews and books about generals who were in the first war thinking that the second was inevitable. But that's kind of a side thought to what came across my mind when I read the posts.
.004% of the people you were aiming for they'll be back.
I totally agree that survival is a base primal instinct that is there for a reason. That and to reproduce. Every higher level organism on Earth will fight if it has even a shred of a chance in coming out alive. But that's kind of the point of religion, philosophy, and most recently sci-fi like Star Trek, Farscape, and even Battle Star. It's the strive to not repeat the cycle of violence that we have been stuck in since we were able to shit. It's to be better than ourselves. The whole turn the other cheek thing was a direct response to the fact that war is not winnable only extendable. It was a very basic idea of just cutting the motion of intent off instead of amplifying it back. Fighting to the death only succeeds on a personal level. One of the basic treaties of war was to know your enemy...if only to know where to strike the most effective blow. But another one that was most famously stated by Machiavelli was that if you're going to wipe out a regime you better wipe out every person in the family older or younger because they'll come for you sooner or later. Yea, good luck finding that second cousin that was whisked away in a basket down the river. Lord knows that doesn't come back to bite anyone in Biblical proportions.
I've studied about five different martial arts for about 25 years and have seen the nastiest battlefield version down to the first one to tap the other person wins sports and the general feeling is one of moving form panic to understanding and overcoming the other person. We're still talking singular to small group here. Styles like Wing Chun are closer to battlefield arts in mentality because every response it the same...Beat the snot out of the other person until they are a bloody pulp. Break as much as possible as quickly as possible. That's great and all but kinda fucks your ability to respond to a drunk in a bar.
If your at all decent in a martial art, a one on one fight is like somebody asking a pro ball player to settle a bet with a friendly game of ball. You can't kill some drunk stock broker in a bar just because he challenged you to a contest in your field of interest. Arts like Tai Chi and Akido do a good job of teaching response that will allow you to look the other guy in the face afterwards not his family. The same is exponential for war.
I would never tell some one out in the field to not shot somebody that's shooting at them but as a general that is safe and not having his skull grazed all day long you can say things like, "Fall back, we've built a perimeter and were going to let them strave a little till they're ready to talk." Still kinda brutal but no where near, "Let's nuke 'em." Because if you miss even
My friend and I have actually had this same conversation turn into a full blow argument! We both think that your assumptions about the need to show what happens when everything runs out and what the priority of needs are but I diverge from the agreement about the point when its assumed that they can no longer manufacture things. Here's what I was thinking as best I can put into a short reply.
Somebody brought up the fact that a Battlestar is the equivalent to an aircraft carrier. I would say this is a good start but above that, they need to be a first landing and beach head vessel. That means all the equipment and know how to land an assault on a planet and keep a beach head maintained possibly far enough into space to make resupply hard if not impossible. My friend's counter argument to this was that the Battle Star Galactica was being decommissioned and was probably stripped of most of its heavy arms before the first Cylon assault took place.
The biggest problem I had with this show was in season two when they were on the planet. They lived like shit and I thought the writers did a bad job of showing the progression of tech that would have been second nature by then. The majority of people live in little tents and bivouacked together like it was 1944. This was a great way to relate to a general audience because I think it made their world more tangible but lets be honest, If they can make Battle Stars and Cylons (even the first gen models) then they could manufacture almost on a personal level. It's easy to assume that they had the tech for "printing" cement structures down. We are dabbling in it now and we can't even make it to the moon yet reliably.
With the assumption that they have at least a semi-sophisticated manufacturing process you could think that they would have fabricators on all their ships with enough raw elements to process into basic needs like clothing, contact lenses/glasses, tables etc... The raw elements can be stripped from multiple places as demonstrated at the recycling boiling plants that can be installed at places like chicken farms to strip the organic waste and extra bits into light crude oil and pure carbon and graphene. It's pretty cool to see a bone carcass go through and come out as calcium dust, refined oil, and water. These are then drummed up and sold in bulk to places like tire plants that need the raw materials.
The counter argument was that why would you have a house manufacturing machine on a Battle Star? They never would need it because everyone lives on the ship. Which is why I brought up the whole beach head thing. Forget laying sand bags. Just have it lay down a 4 foot wall with holes built for gunnery posts. it would take half a day and could be cement strong. Not to mention barracks and bunkers. Basically fortification 101 would make it a necessity to carry a few of these machines on a carrier.
The biggest split in conversation happened over food and medicine. Obviously the Battle Star isn't equipped for food production but why not. MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) could be made on the ship with protein bars and so forth like they were doing at the end of the 3rd season from the Algae but it can be taken one step further and medicine can be done the same way. Why wouldn't a deep space city in the sky type of craft have at least the basic cultures for antibiotics and the like in cold storage? Lord knows a battle ship would never need more medicine than they shipped out with.
And the final nail in the coffin is that every Battle Star could have all the city planning and agricultural/ infrastructure information with them at all times. How many gigs of info would basic city and agriculture plans take up? 5-10 TB... Maybe! That would include things like processing machines and power generation. If they had the tech to make artificial intelligence I think they had big enough drives to put a few extra "just incases" on some free space. Not to mention the on-ship Library that a Aircraft carrier has that might have been beefed u
Everyone keeps talking about flying cars not being practical because of crashing and stupid teenagers and such. They are totally right but THIS commercial actually makes a better point just in the tag line. Right now flying a plane is like using a computer with command line and no protected memory. You have barely any advanced warning systems. No redundant engines for failure. And if something does happen you have to decide in a matter of seconds where you're going to land and how many trees you're going to take out when you do. Or houses but really that's never going to happen.
The idea of a flying car is great and could work but THEY NEED BETTER SOFTWARE. Constant engine diagnostics in the back ground. Multiple emergency landing engines. Maybe lower powered but able to keep a vertically stable position until lowering is able to be done safely. The steering wheel should not be a yolk but a dumbed steering wheel so as not to let you make radical changes in velocity and direction. The software would have to make the car as smart as a horses so that it doesn't want to die anymore than the people on it's back. If it doesn't feel well then it doesn't go anywhere.
Then you move on to swarming communication between a certain radius so that if bubba joe starts to have issues the vehicles themselves start to move out of the way and reduce speed to allow the broken vehicle to land. MIT kids have this stuff running to win robot soccer games. Why not install it in some cars and see what happens. Then move it into X,Y,Z environment. Let the car make most of the decisions so that the teenage/old blind people don't have to be "Iceman" Kilmer to drive it. Take a Google map like layout and have to plot your course maybe ahead of time to allow vehicle load buffering.
This all may not be a free flying as just getting in your car and hitting the peddal but it would make flying cars a heck of a lot more sane for two screaming kids, a cell phone, and soccer.
This is a really interesting point that you bring up about quantum entanglement. If you keep one set of electrons on one side of a communication array and another set at the other end you can send binary in real time. This would have no broadcast leak and I think would be undetectable from our point of view. It's interesting that we've come to this point after only a hundred years of radio communication and already we can conceive of non radio transmition.
Didn't some college just come up with a way to push molecules around using a laser? Why not push an entangled electron to the moon and from that point on you would have a viable realtime data connection. Hell, why not set up a set of eight different electron sets and have a serial port ready to transmit. This could even be used in cellphones to make them non cellphones. Each SIMchip could have a pair of electrons entangled with a pair at the main switch. Say goodbye to interference from anything. It would be real time communication matter where you were, even the next planet.
Seriously! It's not like they don't have ten years of Ghost in the Shell to rip off to make some decent scripts from. Lord knows they don't have the physics of high powered impacts down any better than in the seventies. If girl kicks guy in the chest with enough impact to send him across the room then it was hard enough and a small enough diameter surface to go through his chest. That pretty much goes with every hit she makes. Hit somebody in the face at full strength? The jaw would leave on vacation to the other side of the room or turn to powder at the impact site. That's one of the things that made the woman from Ghost in the Shell so interesting. She had to learn how to dial back what she could do not go all girl power over the scary foul talking black man.
For a Sci-fi writer he has little imagination doesn't he. We just have started to figure out that the universe might have 11 dimensions. We only work in 4 of those right now. I think he might be putting himself in the same boat as the guys who thought we had learned everything we would ever know in science back last century. My were those people right on the money. I would expect somebody who doesn't even have to worry about proving his made up things to be a little more lenient with the current state of our technological development. If we just figured out what an E8 looks like from a hundred years ago and that took 9 dimensional space to prove then what happens when all of our science it that complicated. We might end up figuring out that we don't even need to bend timespace to get to another location. Maybe the interwhosawhatsit that connects all dimensions allow us just to flip a switch and be anywhere we want to be.
We don't know yet and that's the fun part. Mitchio Kaku doesn't get up in the morning just to play with his legos (OK maybe he does but then he makes a particle accelerator with them) he's looking for something. On a side note I think we're going to laugh at the idea of metal based robots in 50 years because of how easy it will be to manipulate carbon and organics Phillip K. Dick / Blade Runner style. I still want my flying car!
Yea...that would be a slashdot newbie thing that happened there. Drive by punk just came in my office and hit the html formatting button instead of the plain text. Your right though, it was a hell of an interesting thing thing to watch. It was like seeing two politicians jockey for top position in a debate. ASF was the worst format to deal with. You always new something wasn't right.
I seem to remember something about diferent patent holders wanting a certain amount and then others that came back with some silly gadgillion type number and this is what they settled on. I remember Quicktime being delayed or at least in controversy when they first released MPEG-4 because they did it before the liscensing was settled. It is a hell of a coincidence that MPEG4 got bogged down in legality while MS was developing their own in house alternative on the side. It's kinda their MO.
A better way to express the concern I was talking about is that the partners that are making this are after the fact. They did not add to the code and help create the codec. This was Microsoft's baby because everyone was focused on the ratification of H264. They didn't see this one coming. Everyone was surprised when the VC-1 Code came out as the original WMV codec. I think even you would have to admit there was a big "what the hell" from the MPEG committee. Support came after the fact not in anticipation of it. Again it's not the VC-1 encoding, because your right that's free(not really only under 100,000 people) and open to anyone to replicate that was suspect but the creation of a codec that ran parallel to H264 as it was stabilized each and every step of the way as was demonstrated by the three iterations of WMV through VC-1 which was where the code freeze happened on H264 AVC. You stopped development when they did because you knew there wouldn't be anymore advantageous progressions of code that had to be trumped.
What I was getting at with Sorenson is that you used their code as a platform to launch WMV7.0 after you saw Sorenson Video 3 compression techniques from the code they gave the Consortium which from what you say makes sense that they added and hacked the h.263 back when it was in development in 1997 or so. If I remember right, Sorenson hit their stride with Quicktime in 1998-99.
I'm curious what you do as partners with Sorenson? Do you guys co-develope Codecs or are they asking you how to better integrate their systems with your OS and media platforms. There's a big difference.
When you say stuff like "VC-1 was designed for high-performance PC playback as the #1 goal" it smacks of marketing vernacular. I know... I've done it for 10 years. What that translates to is "We know that it takes a brand knew system to fully use our program." and because its a program, you can always up the ante just a little more so that you need newer hardware. Remember that your first argument as for why you came up with VC-1 is that H264 was too intensive for computer playback. Now your saying that VC-1 was firstly made to take advantage of new hardware that easily plays back all the codecs you can throw at them including H264. So in that respect I think you can just say that it was in your best interest not back MPEG but to create your own codec that is more compatible with the philosophy and design techniques of the company. One that can grow with the demands of your customer and give them a more versatile user experience. H264 was never going to be for video conferencing as its primary goal, it was a side mention in 1998 as a possible use scenario for overlaying meta data like you would find in a weather report. AVC was specifically designed for HD digital carriers as the next major jump in distribution for broadcasting standards. The two codecs don't have different goals because if they did they wouldn't both now be on HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs. Or be touted in Windows Mobile 6 , or be the main codec for the Xbox... Wait a minute maybe that last one would fall more under the IPTV transmission aspect of H264 signaling. That sure seems like a lot of device implementation to me. By the way where is the support for h264 that you helped create? I think you left some friends at the door on your way to the show.
You have to push MS solutions... I get that. It's your devision so it comes first but this is the very real reason that no one trusts your company. They'll take your money sure but everything is laced with this poison of pickpocketing the best part of a collaboration and leaving the rest in litigation until it doesn't matter any more. I think that is one of the major under currents in the comments made on Slashdot. I say this because your really good at what you do but you happen to be part of something that is a little too much business and not enough ethics.
replied to my self on this one sorry. It was meant for this post... So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to. Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash. I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market. I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
So basicaly what your saying is that becasue they submitted and got approved the codec for SMPTE it some how did not derive from MPEG 4? Does the MPEG LA get paid for the use of VC-1 or does payment go directly to the members who hold essential patents on the format. It says that there are 15 other companies mentioned but Microsoft is the only one putting out codecs for it. I don't hear of a Hitachi or Toshiba VC-1 encoder. Every reference to VC-1 looks like this, "SMPTE VC-1/Windows Media® Video 9". Looks obvious who it belongs to. Ah yes, the venerable MPEG-4v3 codec, It's weird how the data rates it used were around the same as Sorenson's codec at the time. I could swear that Sorenson joined the consortium and were one of the guys who actually brought code to the table. Then about 6 months later we have MPEG-4v3. Wow. I say that because Sorenson then started touting their MPEG 4 codec about the same time but had troubles with it because it was not any better than their proprietary codec and gave yet another code base to keep up with. What's Sorenson doing these days? Keeping their mouths shut that's what. All along ON2 opted for their own glory and have a codec that is atleast close to H.264 and VC-1 but only recently do they have the market share they thought they would 5 years ago through flash. I don't know if you can talk about processor intensity these days because the level needed for software play back is so much that HD playback is only useable with in the last year and a half for the average PC anyways. The sheer size in pixels of the image was part of the problem. Let alone the math behind what to decrypt. I'm sure the Silverlight browser plug in can play back HD because hell even Flash can do it these days. 1080p is still a theoretical for most people let alone for a website unless its on an internal network over Gigabit for more than 20 users. The processors are just faster that's all. Why would they sit on a body like the MPEG 4 and then release a competing product with the same functionality? Because they can provide a better service? It seems a bit disingenuous and looks like they were there to keep an eye on the competition and to slow them down with patent disputes while they got VC-1 WVC-1/WMVa/WMV3 to market. I can see how there might be a different way of looking at this but damn, Ben it looks like it was on purpose from some points of view. MS's codecs have always been a bane to me because there's always a catch to using them and maybe that is changing but beyond that I would like to say that I really respect your knowledge in this area and used to pour over your books for how to make stuff look great. You helped me out in many situations over the past few years doing compressions just by experimenting with the data rates like you did. So thank you for your hard work and your skill.
So why is it that Windows Media Player started to get a remarkably better codec just about the same time that the first drafts for MPEG 4 were coming out? It would appear from the outside like they took the code and because it didn't have to pass a slow IEEE ratification board anymore, was able to be put straight to market in the same way that DivX was. Then as new improvements in the MPEG 4 code were made, suprisingly there was a new release of Windows Media Player aswell. WMP 7,8,9 were all rapid fire released and then finally when H.264 was getting close to being ratified and released lo and behold Windows Media Player gets a brand new spankin' HD codec later be to named VC-1 so as not to remind everyone that it came directly from Microsoft as Windows Media Player 10 Video Codec. If this is wrong then please elucidate because that's a whole lot of coincidences in a row. Why would a company hand over their codec for standards? Because they know that no more improvements are going to be made and that the code base from which you were working has been frozen as H.264 AVC Level 10. Meaning you can't review the code anymore as it's updated by being on the IEEE board.