This actually happens already, in a sense. I briefly worked for a company that was (tangientally - asbestos abatement is a big deal in older rail cars) involved in the conversion of old Pullman sleeper cars into high-roller wine-and-dine suites for companies and the wealthy. Once they'd been converted over, the owners could invite people aboard for a business trip, or rent them out to travelers looking to experience something new.
As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on. Don't think about how monstrously impractical this would be. Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts, the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service, or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate. Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design. Don't think about any of these things, because if you do your brain will break from the glaring obviousness of the problems. Just take a moment to appreciate the zoomy science-fiction cool factor, and get on with your day.
Still, my jaw hit the floor when, on reading this article, I checked Newegg and found that an 8GB DDR3 kit could be had for less money than what I paid for a 4GB kit at this time last year. I'm almost certainly going to have to jump on that...
At what point does it become okay for a company to try to bring down a government?
I'd say that it's about the point where the government allows itself to become a pawn to another corporation. At that point, what else are you supposed to do?
The problem is not just that of copyrighted content -- the other requirements of the legislation are particularly onerous for video services, which are more akin to a cable television service than a TV station. Youtube has no direct editorial input over what its users put up, and can only filter or exclude videos after-the-fact and not preemptively, as a TV station usually can. Even then, keep in mind, that Youtube now recieves almost 6 years of video every 24 hours. Berlusconi has effectively made the cost of Youtube doing business in Italy so high that (should the inevitable legal challenges to the law fail) it's most likely more cost-effective to just shut the county out, and hope the fallout causes Berlusconi to change his tune.
See, this is where I think Google should call Berlusconi's bluff. All they need to do is redirect Italian IPs to a page that says, "Due to the legal implications of new regulations, Google can no longer provide service to Italian site visitors" followed by a few informational links. Then, they just sit back and wait for public outcry to force the Italian government to backpedal, and continue on as usual.
This is hardly new, though. In high school, I had a friend whose mother was a local Republican Party organizer. My state didn't require voters to declare a party affiliation, so on the day of the 2000 presidential primaries, his whole voting-age family turned up at their polling station, asked for the Democratic Party ballots, and voted for Howard Dean.
The way it changes the rules doesn't have anything to do with morality; rather, it gives content creators the opportunity to compete with the pirates on their own terms. The Internet hasn't really increased the prevalence of piracy (In 1976, Bill Gates complained that his Altair BASIC was being illegally copied at a 9-1 ratio compared to legit sales, which tracks closely with numbers from present-day indie games publishers), but it does reduce the unit cost to a publisher to practically zero. If you give away your book, music, game, or whatever, as a basic digital product you win back the sizable chunk of people who are poor/lazy but otherwise honest, and then you can position the physical artifact -- a printed version, deluxe album, or something else -- as a value-add for people who liked the free component.
My friend Chris' case is an interesting test for the give-it-away approach, because while it's been successful for big names like Radiohead and Cory Doctorow, nobody's really tried it as an unknown. Chris is finding that he benefits from the additional publicity and goodwill, and feels that he's coming out ahead in that respect. There ain't a single one-book author out there who can support himself on that income, piracy or no, so for him the publicity win is reason enough on its own.
I have a friend who recently had his first book published. To his dismay, he found that the ebook version had been posted up on the Pirate Bay almost within hours of release. He didn't quite see it as a life-and-death issue, though. In fact, he's decided to make the digital version of his book available for free, legally, and so far it's been working out well for him.
The Internet changes the rules, and those who refuse to play by those new rules are facing a long, bitter, losing fight. From that perspective, it's maybe not so surprising that they'd be irrationally angry about it.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Blender user, I find the new interface frustrating too -- but mostly because I learned on the pre-2.5 interface, and there's a lot that doesn't carry over. For a starting user, though, I'd think that 2.5 would be pretty simple, seeing as you can press the spacebar and then search in real time for the functionality you're looking for.want to extrude something? type "extrude" and there it is! Typing "knife" gets you the knife tool. It's practically like playing Scribblenauts.
"Better ideas for cutting down on deaths: bigger bumpers" Bumpers make next to no difference in accidents that are violent enough to cause fatalities. At those speeds, the structural components of the vehicle itself must deform to absorb any meaningful amount of impact energy. The primary purpose of a bumper is provide a (relatively) cheap, easily-replacable buffer in the case of a low-speed collision.
"lower speed limit (like 45)" American interstate highways are designed to be safely traversed at a speed of about 75 miles per hour, and generally look the part. Engineering studies have shown that the majority of drivers will drive at whatever speed feels safe to them, and that road safety can be best optimized by setting the speed limit at the measured 85th-percentile speed, thereby minimizing the relative velocities of the fastest and slowest vehicles on the road. Arbitrarily lowering the speed limit actually increases the incidence and severity of accidents. To make such a speed limit stick, roads would have to be redesigned to *look* more dangerous, so drivers would have a reason to slow down.
"tougher driving tests, taking away licenses more aggressively"
I'm with you on this one. In America all it really takes to earn a license is a pulse, and you get to keep it until that pulse stops. Better driver training, requiring a more thorough understanding of vehicle dynamics and emergency maneuvers, would go a long way towards making our roads safer for everybody.
"mandating disc brakes"
A good idea in theory, but in practice almost every new car on the market as *at least* front discs, the rears don't actually do much anyhow (front brake bias tends to be 80% or higher), and unless something has gone terribly wrong with your brake system you should be able to lock up all four with ease anyhow. ABS was a much more important feature, since tires generate peak grip right on the verge of locking up, and most drivers lack the finesse required to keep them right at this point without the aid of an anti-lock brake system.
I'm a firm believer in the benefits of driver education. In America we have a very cavalier attitude towards the control of the two-ton lumps of metal we pilot around at incredible speed. Better driver's ed, regular retesting for licenses, and any kind of police enforcement of traffic laws other than speeding (I know it's harder than pointing a radar gun at things, but seriously, get with program, cops!) would do much more good than trying to legislate more safety into cars themselves.
I can't fathom why the government is spending so much effort trying to shove all this back into Pandora's Box. The info is out, will stay out, and there's nothing they can do about. Pursuing third parties like Wikileaks is of minimal use as well. At the root of it all is this: If a low-ranking intelligence analyst has easy access to a gigantic range of information that not in the slighted related to the task he was given, it's indicative of some pretty enormous opsec failures. I would have thought information like this would have been controlled and compartmentalized better than it apparently was.
No, I'm not an intelligence agent... but I do play EVE Online.
A guy from my old Mechwarrior gaming clan worked with Google on their datacenter (we were rather amused that he'd been picked up by Google, since his self-admitted nickname was "The Toothless Hillbilly!"). By the time he was done on that project, though, he had a somewhat dim opinion of Google's corporate culture, though. I wonder if they and other firms will continue to have issues with "culture shock" with regard to local employees and neighbors.
His 1952 MG also crumples up like a soda can in an accident, whereas your Corolla is stuffed to the gills with crumple zones, traction-control gizmos, and eight thousand-odd computer-controlled airbags. On the other hand, it also weighs twice as much as the MG and handles like it, so good luck avoiding an accident that he could.
On the bright side, you probably don't have to keep a fire extinguisher in your car to put out the daily wiring harness fires.
Have you ever pressed a "Close Doors" button before? It's pretty obvious that they don't actually do anything. I'd just figured they only worked when the fire service key was used.
"Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
HDRI done badly is a terribly thing, I agree. But when you see it used subtly, like in this image of New York City at night or to bring out the colors of a scene in manner reminiscent of Impressionist painting like this sunrise shot you start to see the potential. It's not something to be slapped indiscriminately on every shot you take; unfortunately, a lot of what you see on the Web is just that.
The bright spots are indeed an artifact of the HDR process -- partulcarly the tone-mapping algorithms. On its own, HDR is basically a method of capturing intensity values that would otherwise fall above or beneath the threshold of a camera's sensitivity. The problem is, when yo do that you end up with image data that can't be completely represented within the gamut of a printer or a screen. You could simply display a "slice" out of the data, which results in a regular images at whatever exposure setting you've chose, or try to "compress" the tone values into your available gamut, which results in a washed-out appearance. This is where tone-mapping comes in. What tone-mapping does is try to compute the correct exposure levels on a per-pixel basis, by comparing its intensity relative to nearby pixels. Ideally, this results in shadows being brightened to the point where you can see detail in them, and blown-out highlights brought toned down (analogous to "dodging" and "burning" in terms of old-school darkroom film processing -- the dynamic range of film is much higher than that of photo paper).
In practice, though, you end up with weird highlights around dark areas, like the ones you saw around the man's arms, because the tone-mapping algorithm is trying to maximize the local contrast in the image. It's brightened up the coat, and so it also brightens nearby pixels to compensate for the reduction in contrast. Some people try to adjust the algorithms to minimize this effect, while others try to maximize it for dramatic effect, or even an oversaturated, impressionistic look -- it's largely an artistic choice, though when done badly it can also be a sign of amateurism. Still others will manually composite multiple exposures to get the benefits of HDR imaging while avoiding its side effects entirely,
Slashdot Mirror
This actually happens already, in a sense. I briefly worked for a company that was (tangientally - asbestos abatement is a big deal in older rail cars) involved in the conversion of old Pullman sleeper cars into high-roller wine-and-dine suites for companies and the wealthy. Once they'd been converted over, the owners could invite people aboard for a business trip, or rent them out to travelers looking to experience something new.
As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on. Don't think about how monstrously impractical this would be. Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts, the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service, or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate. Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design. Don't think about any of these things, because if you do your brain will break from the glaring obviousness of the problems. Just take a moment to appreciate the zoomy science-fiction cool factor, and get on with your day.
Still, my jaw hit the floor when, on reading this article, I checked Newegg and found that an 8GB DDR3 kit could be had for less money than what I paid for a 4GB kit at this time last year. I'm almost certainly going to have to jump on that...
At what point does it become okay for a company to try to bring down a government?
I'd say that it's about the point where the government allows itself to become a pawn to another corporation. At that point, what else are you supposed to do?
The problem is not just that of copyrighted content -- the other requirements of the legislation are particularly onerous for video services, which are more akin to a cable television service than a TV station. Youtube has no direct editorial input over what its users put up, and can only filter or exclude videos after-the-fact and not preemptively, as a TV station usually can. Even then, keep in mind, that Youtube now recieves almost 6 years of video every 24 hours. Berlusconi has effectively made the cost of Youtube doing business in Italy so high that (should the inevitable legal challenges to the law fail) it's most likely more cost-effective to just shut the county out, and hope the fallout causes Berlusconi to change his tune.
See, this is where I think Google should call Berlusconi's bluff. All they need to do is redirect Italian IPs to a page that says, "Due to the legal implications of new regulations, Google can no longer provide service to Italian site visitors" followed by a few informational links. Then, they just sit back and wait for public outcry to force the Italian government to backpedal, and continue on as usual.
...err, 2004. note to self: In addition to spelling, fact-check before hitting "Submit."
This is hardly new, though. In high school, I had a friend whose mother was a local Republican Party organizer. My state didn't require voters to declare a party affiliation, so on the day of the 2000 presidential primaries, his whole voting-age family turned up at their polling station, asked for the Democratic Party ballots, and voted for Howard Dean.
The way it changes the rules doesn't have anything to do with morality; rather, it gives content creators the opportunity to compete with the pirates on their own terms. The Internet hasn't really increased the prevalence of piracy (In 1976, Bill Gates complained that his Altair BASIC was being illegally copied at a 9-1 ratio compared to legit sales, which tracks closely with numbers from present-day indie games publishers), but it does reduce the unit cost to a publisher to practically zero. If you give away your book, music, game, or whatever, as a basic digital product you win back the sizable chunk of people who are poor/lazy but otherwise honest, and then you can position the physical artifact -- a printed version, deluxe album, or something else -- as a value-add for people who liked the free component.
My friend Chris' case is an interesting test for the give-it-away approach, because while it's been successful for big names like Radiohead and Cory Doctorow, nobody's really tried it as an unknown. Chris is finding that he benefits from the additional publicity and goodwill, and feels that he's coming out ahead in that respect. There ain't a single one-book author out there who can support himself on that income, piracy or no, so for him the publicity win is reason enough on its own.
I have a friend who recently had his first book published. To his dismay, he found that the ebook version had been posted up on the Pirate Bay almost within hours of release. He didn't quite see it as a life-and-death issue, though. In fact, he's decided to make the digital version of his book available for free, legally, and so far it's been working out well for him.
The Internet changes the rules, and those who refuse to play by those new rules are facing a long, bitter, losing fight. From that perspective, it's maybe not so surprising that they'd be irrationally angry about it.
Nah, you're thinking of AMC.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Blender user, I find the new interface frustrating too -- but mostly because I learned on the pre-2.5 interface, and there's a lot that doesn't carry over. For a starting user, though, I'd think that 2.5 would be pretty simple, seeing as you can press the spacebar and then search in real time for the functionality you're looking for.want to extrude something? type "extrude" and there it is! Typing "knife" gets you the knife tool. It's practically like playing Scribblenauts.
"Better ideas for cutting down on deaths: bigger bumpers"
Bumpers make next to no difference in accidents that are violent enough to cause fatalities. At those speeds, the structural components of the vehicle itself must deform to absorb any meaningful amount of impact energy. The primary purpose of a bumper is provide a (relatively) cheap, easily-replacable buffer in the case of a low-speed collision.
"lower speed limit (like 45)"
American interstate highways are designed to be safely traversed at a speed of about 75 miles per hour, and generally look the part. Engineering studies have shown that the majority of drivers will drive at whatever speed feels safe to them, and that road safety can be best optimized by setting the speed limit at the measured 85th-percentile speed, thereby minimizing the relative velocities of the fastest and slowest vehicles on the road. Arbitrarily lowering the speed limit actually increases the incidence and severity of accidents. To make such a speed limit stick, roads would have to be redesigned to *look* more dangerous, so drivers would have a reason to slow down.
"tougher driving tests, taking away licenses more aggressively"
I'm with you on this one. In America all it really takes to earn a license is a pulse, and you get to keep it until that pulse stops. Better driver training, requiring a more thorough understanding of vehicle dynamics and emergency maneuvers, would go a long way towards making our roads safer for everybody.
"mandating disc brakes"
A good idea in theory, but in practice almost every new car on the market as *at least* front discs, the rears don't actually do much anyhow (front brake bias tends to be 80% or higher), and unless something has gone terribly wrong with your brake system you should be able to lock up all four with ease anyhow. ABS was a much more important feature, since tires generate peak grip right on the verge of locking up, and most drivers lack the finesse required to keep them right at this point without the aid of an anti-lock brake system.
I'm a firm believer in the benefits of driver education. In America we have a very cavalier attitude towards the control of the two-ton lumps of metal we pilot around at incredible speed. Better driver's ed, regular retesting for licenses, and any kind of police enforcement of traffic laws other than speeding (I know it's harder than pointing a radar gun at things, but seriously, get with program, cops!) would do much more good than trying to legislate more safety into cars themselves.
I can't fathom why the government is spending so much effort trying to shove all this back into Pandora's Box. The info is out, will stay out, and there's nothing they can do about. Pursuing third parties like Wikileaks is of minimal use as well. At the root of it all is this: If a low-ranking intelligence analyst has easy access to a gigantic range of information that not in the slighted related to the task he was given, it's indicative of some pretty enormous opsec failures. I would have thought information like this would have been controlled and compartmentalized better than it apparently was.
No, I'm not an intelligence agent... but I do play EVE Online.
Yes.
What's the Samsung-built ARM stuff in an iPhone? Sapple? Samphone?
The world needs to know. This is important!
All your face are belong to Mark Zuckerberg.
A guy from my old Mechwarrior gaming clan worked with Google on their datacenter (we were rather amused that he'd been picked up by Google, since his self-admitted nickname was "The Toothless Hillbilly!"). By the time he was done on that project, though, he had a somewhat dim opinion of Google's corporate culture, though. I wonder if they and other firms will continue to have issues with "culture shock" with regard to local employees and neighbors.
His 1952 MG also crumples up like a soda can in an accident, whereas your Corolla is stuffed to the gills with crumple zones, traction-control gizmos, and eight thousand-odd computer-controlled airbags. On the other hand, it also weighs twice as much as the MG and handles like it, so good luck avoiding an accident that he could.
On the bright side, you probably don't have to keep a fire extinguisher in your car to put out the daily wiring harness fires.
Have you ever pressed a "Close Doors" button before? It's pretty obvious that they don't actually do anything. I'd just figured they only worked when the fire service key was used.
"Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
So, you mean just like a real university?
.
(padding here because Slashdot doesn't recognize the laconic wit of Trafalmadorian)
AOL now has more subscribers in 2010 than they did in 2000. And I'm one of them (Netscape ISP at $7/month).
ME TOO!!
Sorry, had to be done.
HDRI done badly is a terribly thing, I agree. But when you see it used subtly, like in this image of New York City at night or to bring out the colors of a scene in manner reminiscent of Impressionist painting like this sunrise shot you start to see the potential. It's not something to be slapped indiscriminately on every shot you take; unfortunately, a lot of what you see on the Web is just that.
The bright spots are indeed an artifact of the HDR process -- partulcarly the tone-mapping algorithms. On its own, HDR is basically a method of capturing intensity values that would otherwise fall above or beneath the threshold of a camera's sensitivity. The problem is, when yo do that you end up with image data that can't be completely represented within the gamut of a printer or a screen. You could simply display a "slice" out of the data, which results in a regular images at whatever exposure setting you've chose, or try to "compress" the tone values into your available gamut, which results in a washed-out appearance. This is where tone-mapping comes in. What tone-mapping does is try to compute the correct exposure levels on a per-pixel basis, by comparing its intensity relative to nearby pixels. Ideally, this results in shadows being brightened to the point where you can see detail in them, and blown-out highlights brought toned down (analogous to "dodging" and "burning" in terms of old-school darkroom film processing -- the dynamic range of film is much higher than that of photo paper).
In practice, though, you end up with weird highlights around dark areas, like the ones you saw around the man's arms, because the tone-mapping algorithm is trying to maximize the local contrast in the image. It's brightened up the coat, and so it also brightens nearby pixels to compensate for the reduction in contrast. Some people try to adjust the algorithms to minimize this effect, while others try to maximize it for dramatic effect, or even an oversaturated, impressionistic look -- it's largely an artistic choice, though when done badly it can also be a sign of amateurism. Still others will manually composite multiple exposures to get the benefits of HDR imaging while avoiding its side effects entirely,
The Wikipedia article on tone-mapping goes into great detail on the different approaches to HDR photography, if you're interested.