- Background storage, even FLASH, is far larger than main memory for a reason
I don't think the intent is to replace main memory, though. The benefits to two-tier storage like this is actually quite significant. A sizable percentage of disk writes don't ever get flushed to disk because they are temporary files.
Combine a smart OS that uses the first tier for write caching and the second tier for permanent storage, you'd be able to significantly reduce wear (assuming, of course, that there is a wear problem with these things as there is with flash parts). Assuming you use a smart controller to flush recent dirty bits to disk if the power gets cut before the OS shuts down the disk correctly, beyond the obvious changes in disk caching, it wouldn't require significant OS changes to use these parts like that, and it would be quite useful, both in terms of disk performance, reliability, and data integrity.
Professional films are *not* perfect every take. Unless they happen to be blowing up a set (or doing some other expensive effect) they will just shoot over and over and over.
I never said they were. The point was that the difference between amateur film and pro film is much smaller than between amateur theater and pro theater because with amateur theater, you're much more likely to get mistakes in the final product, whereas in amateur film, you can just shoot it a few more times than you would in pro film.
Also, keep in mind that computer animation can let you shoot a scene in a blue room then animate the set. Sets are a big cost in Hollywood productions. A blue room can also have better fittings for cameras and lights, which saves a lot of money.
Or green. Either way.
Yes, I've done production work like that. The problem is that good CGI work makes sets look cheap by comparison unless the sets are particularly intricate. Thus, most Hollywood productions reserve them for places where a real set is infeasible (e.g. a moving star field seen through a window) and they build the remainder.
In practice, a low budget amateur production should try to limit CGI and compositing to... well, none if possible. It's a major pain in the backside that drives production time way up. Been there, done that. I even shot a few scenes "just in case" I decided to composite them. I then reshot those scenes in a location that was plausibly compatible with the location of some of the other action. In the end, I used only one small five or ten second clip from the blue screen footage. The rest of it got left on the cutting room floor.
That said, if you happen to have an ample supply of good 3D artists (through a university program, for example), it might be worth considering for scenes where you would otherwise have to build a complex set. Still, if you can, it's better to just not write scenes that would require complex sets.
I can't imagine using blue screen simply because of ease of camera placement. Stepladders are fifty to a hundred bucks at Lowe's or Home Depot, and cloth gaffer's tape is just a few bucks a roll. If even an hour of production can save you several hours of a graphic artist's time, you're still way, way ahead, generally speaking, barring any other constraints.
Well, at most universities, only the people enrolled in classes in the department or otherwise majoring or minoring in the subject would typically have access to those facilities, but yes.
Really, though, the cost of the equipment is such a small part of it (a $6-7000 outlay will get you a quite good HD camera with good audio hardware, a decent mic, and a laptop with Final Cut Pro or other comparable editing suite.
The intended point was that there are people with basic production skills who are willing to work cheap because the experience that will help them get a job in the future has, for them, significant value that goes way beyond a paycheck. That makes the cost of technical talent dirt cheap if you aren't counting on keeping the same crew over a long period of time.
Following an order to kill someone should land both the person giving the order in jail as well as the actor (especially if the person giving the order was a cop).
Not necessarily. It depends on the circumstances. If, in the heat of a gun battle, a cop hands a random citizen a weapon and tells him/her to go around behind and shoot the shooter (even if that random citizen's life is not in danger at the time), that qualifies as deputization, and as such that person is not and generally should not be guilty of murder. More to the point, because that person is not a trained law enforcement officer, that person should have a lot more leeway when it comes to knowing what is and is not a legal kill. This is why the responsibility has to lie with the officer to use that power only under rare circumstances.
The reason that defense didn't work in the Nuremberg trials was twofold. First, everyone was looking for someone to blame for the wars, so the defendants were at a decided disadvantage. Second, it was not just a single incident of killing someone, but rather multiple repeated events over an extended period of time. At some point, the "you should have had more sense than to follow such an obviously illegal order" problem rears its ugly head. It's a grey area, but it definitely lies somewhere between "the cop ordered me to shoot the leader of the protest because they said he was dangerous" and "the cop kept telling me to shoot random members of the crowd because he said it was the only way to restore order".
I would add that if the shooter had no reason to suspect that the person was a cop and chose to commit a serious crime, then the person should be charged, albeit possibly with a lower degree than had the cop not incited the action. Hearing "You should shoot that guy," and thinking, "Hey, that's a great idea!" is really not that much better than hearing voices in your head. However, that only applies to serious crimes. For minor stuff, the "in the heat of the moment" defense combined with "that guy told me to do it" should be at least enough to get it knocked down a couple of degrees in severity, and if "that guy" was a cop, thrown out entirely.
No. Otherwise you'll have situation like "police told someone to kill someone else"... Anyway, nice try but please think before writing stuff.
I think the GP was just slightly misworded. If the police tell you to do something, it should be legal for you because the police officer is an authority figure relative to you. That doesn't mean that the officer wouldn't go to jail for giving the order.
In a similar fashion, if a police captain orders an officer to kill someone illegally, then the captain should go to jail, not the officer (unless the officer should have had reason to reject the order).
There's a world of difference between filmmaking and play production, though.
First, amateur plays are hobbled by low set construction budgets, prop budgets, limited time to reset lighting and change sets, etc. Pro plays solve these problems by throwing money at the problem, adding equipment and personnel to make things happen quickly, building nicer sets, and so on. Amateur filmmaking, by contrast, solves this by throwing away the sets and making all the world a stage. These two different approaches can achieve much the same results, within reason. Pro filmmaking solves it by using expensive sets because it gives them more control, but none of that is strictly necessary.
Also, with amateur filmmaking, unlike theater, you don't have to be perfect every take. Tape is cheap. If someone botches a line or flubs a song or whatever, you reshoot it. In effect, when making a movie, you can substitute time for talent, making even a relatively bad actor seem respectable through careful editing of multiple takes with good use of cutaways to mask edits. In stage plays, the bad actor is on stage the entire time, so every mistake can be seen no matter what you do to try to cover it up.
With school plays, you're generally limited to the people who go to that school, are free during a certain period, and want to act. That limits the talent pool immensely. With amateur filmmaking, you aren't limited to just the people from a single school. You have access to a wider age range and a much broader talent pool in general, much as you would with professional plays.
And with filmmaking, the cast doesn't even have to even be on location at the same time, much less the pit orchestra. This means that you can take the time to get the music exactly right through multiple takes instead of having to use all professional musicians. This means that you can work around people's schedules instead of having to have professional actors who are there the entire time on a rigid schedule. And so on. Such flexibility is not possible with stage plays for the most part.
Finally, with school plays, you're taking something someone else wrote and producing it. With amateur filmmaking, you're generally taking something that you or someone you know wrote and producing it. This means that you have a lot more freedom to adapt the locations and characters to suit the locations and cast that are available. With school plays, because of the smaller talent pool and the rigidity of the story, the best you can really do is put people into parts based on ability, which often produces less than ideal results. Similarly, you need a set for each location, and you just have to do the best you can.
In short, the flexibility offered by a larger potential cast pool, script flexibility, and the ability to tweak and correct mistakes after the fact makes it much, much easier for an amateur cast and crew to rival a major studio film than to rival a Broadway play. It's like writing computer software to fly a UAV versus flying it yourself. If you screw up the former, it fails the simulation and you can fix it in the next rev. If you screw up the latter, you just blew up a million dollar aircraft.
The problem with all of this, is that *talent* is still expensive.
No, not really.
...you can't get a trained steadycam operator to film an on-foot chase scene without paying him 50 an hour.
Maybe in California. Try shooting in a state with fewer unions and less bureaucratic red tape, and you'll find dozens of camera operators working at local TV stations who would gladly do it for $20 an hour just to have something to do on the weekends. Heck, if it's a low budget production, some might even volunteer to do it for nothing. Will it require a few more takes? Probably. Will it require enough more takes to justify paying a camera operator as much as a software engineer or a pharmacist? Probably not.
Besides, you could just cut out the chase scene, film it from multiple static cameras, use software to reduce the shaking in post, or fudge it with a zoom, and odds are good that nobody is going to think any less of the movie for it no matter which of those techniques you use.
You can spend 20 hours making a music track yourself in Garage Band that everyone hates, or you can pay a group of musicians a few grand to use their stuff.
Or you can do a time-cost tradeoff and ask a few of your friends to check out local clubs, find a local band that seems good, and get them to record something for peanuts. Or if it doesn't have to be unique, you could go buy some royalty-free music CDs for fifty or a hundred bucks a pop. It all depends on what you're looking for.
In my experience, the key to making movies on a shoestring budget is to get people who can act (but who aren't famous yet), and shoot on location at locations that don't charge money to shoot there. This way you're not paying studio rental costs and you're not paying exorbitant per-hour costs for your cast, so you can take a little longer to get things done without it being a problem. Once you're no longer paying a truckload of money for every minute the cameras aren't rolling, you can get by with a much smaller crew, because one person can wear multiple hats.
For example, unless you're doing an absolutely insane amount of lighting (way more than most low budget productions), there's usually no need to have both an electrician and a lighting person (unless union rules say you have to, of course) because 90% of the power you run is for lighting anyway. (The other 10% is for your camera and audio gear, which if you're doing it on the cheap, translates into an orange extension cord running from the nearest outlet.) During the actual shooting, that person double as your camera operator or your mic boom operator. You can now easily shoot a movie with a crew of two or three people (though extra hands are always welcome when packing, unpacking, and hauling the gear to and from the truck).
You can get good workers from your local university's communications and drama programs. You can often get people to outright volunteer for the opportunity to have their names in the credits of something that they can use in their portfolios when applying for jobs.
And finally, ten days worth of Arriflex 35mm camera rental will buy you an XH-A1 that will do a good enough job that it won't get in your way. And if you edit on a laptop with Final Cut Pro or whatever, you can get away with exactly zero studio or editing bay time, and equipment costs that are a tiny fraction of what they were just a couple of decades back.
What you don't get by going this route is a distribution channel. That's the sole reason that the major studios are still in business. Most movie theaters aren't willing to take chances on works shot by no-name groups, and good luck getting a major DVD distributor to even look at you, much less any rental chains. The actual cost of making a good movie, assuming a crew of two and a principal cast of four or five at $30 an hour is maybe thirty or forty thousand dollars. If you get most o
First, let me amend that to say "most commercial aircraft". I'm deliberately ignoring small private planes, since I'm assuming this is primarily about major airports, and private planes tend to avoid those like the plague because of the landing fees.
Second, I said "can very nearly land themselves", not "can land themselves". By that standard, it covers nearly every large plane that is still in the air. Sure, some airlines have elected to cut corners and buy planes with reduced autoland support, but it has been an option in most large planes for at least thirty years. The first autoland-capable planes came out in the 1960s.
Now if you're going to be really strict and narrow the definition to planes capable of CAT III autoland, then yes, the percentages go down, but even that technology dates back to the mid-1960s technologically. Either way, it isn't exactly new tech, nor particularly rare, AFAIK. It is certainly not rare or new in the way that rear-facing radar in cars is.
Most modern aircraft can very nearly land themselves, so no, I would *not* say that a low power laser pointer is as dangerous as a handgun, even taking into account this unusual edge case....
Sweet. So if the Cyberattack function exists, it must be called. An weapon unused is a useless weapon and all that.... On the other hand, such an argument tends to be an argument of the lazy (binding).
Similarly, when the cassette recorder came out, the music industry was saying, "Yeah, but the quality of reproduction is awful and you can't copy a whole 33 1/3 RPM record." When the first computer with sound came out, they said, "Yeah, but it can only do 1-bit mono audio. It won't ever be a threat." Looking back, it's obvious that they were missing something.
Remember that this 3D printer is a fairly early design. Eventually we'll have robots that can do everything you describe in a few hours. This is just one step towards that, but it is a significant step.
Americans use the preposition "for" in this idiom for good reason. The original form makes no sense in modern English. The meanings of prepositions have been formalized significantly since those words were originally used in a bill back in 1547, and as a result, some uses of those prepositions that would have made sense to someone at that time are confusing to a modern reader or listener.
You wouldn't say that I work to the purpose of making money. That's very archaic. You would say that I work for the purpose of making money. You wouldn't say that you are building a bridge to the intent of making travel easier. You would say that you are building it with the intent of making travel easier, or maybe for the intent of making travel easier. (And realistically, these days, the noun "intent" is rather rare in non-formal writing, with most folks preferring the verb form.)
It gets even worse when the phrase is preceded by "true", as it often is. In modern English, the definition of "true" when followed by the word "to" has drifted to mean something completely different. Being "true to" something means "faithful to" in modern English. Thus, only a person, not a fact, can be true to a purpose or to an intent. More importantly, when you say something is true "to/for all intents and purposes", you are not saying that a fact is "faithful to every intent and purpose". You are saying that it is correct for every intent and for every purpose.
Thus, I would argue that "for all intents and purposes" is the more correct form because understanding the British idiom ("to all intents and purposes") requires either understanding an archaic usage of the word "to" or memorizing the meaning of the idiom, whereas the American expression ("for all intents and purposes") is inherently non-idiomatic; it does not require any specific knowledge to understand it.
I tried to get citations, but the Internet is so clogged with people complaining about WebM and H.264 that any search for codecs and indemnification returns nothing but that....
You wouldn't steal a car. But soon you'll be able to copy one. Why do I have a feeling this is going to make piracy analogies on Slashdot a lot more interesting in the years to come.
If you're writing straight to the built-in APIs, it's a lot harder to write an app in JavaScript than in Objective-C. Specifically, it's a lot easier to make mistakes when you're hand-coding all the DOM manipulation yourself instead of relying on widget toolkits that do the heavy lifting for you.
Of course, that argument goes away as soon as you use a decent JavaScript toolkit.
As for less secure... well, there's no keychain in the browser, for one, which probably isn't a big deal for something like this, but I could see somebody arguing that the lack of a keychain is a security disadvantage.
Seems to me that what they're describing is a web app, which someone can save to the home screen just like any other iPad app. Unless the app needs to do something particularly special with hardware, sound, 3D animation, the camera, etc. (which I can't imagine this sort of app doing), the only significant distinction between that and a native (store) app is the payment model.... (And the language it's written in, of course, but a user doesn't see that part.)
What's wrong with that is that power failures don't imply discovery. Breakers trip. Fuses blow. Electrical poles get hit by trucks. Small brownouts from four air conditioners starting up at once cause a machine to momentarily lose power. And so on.
Pretty much all of them if you buy from a manufacturer that offers it. Start with On2, the company that Google bought this codec from. Then move on to Microsoft. I'm pretty sure Broadcom's MPEG hardware provides indemnification. Heck, I doubt you'd have a very hard time finding at least one vendor that provides indemnification for almost every pro format.
The key difference between MPEG LA and Google is that Google is providing software, whereas MPEG LA is providing patent licenses to companies that make software and hardware. The two are not comparable.
MPEG-LA doesn't actually produce any end products that are sold to those production houses, either. They license the right to implement the technology to other companies, who then in turn manufacture products, many of whom provide indemnity. More importantly, MPEG LA is the giant elephant in the room. They are so big and own so many patents in this space that no one would dare sue one of their licensees for fear of retribution. More to the point, if anyone is going to file a lawsuit over a video codec, odds are it would be MPEG LA doing the suing rather than being sued. Therefore, in terms of risk, licensing a codec from MPEG LA is much, much lower risk.
It's an apples and oranges comparison. You're arguing that customers will gladly buy unpasteurized orange juice because grocery stores sell unpasteurized apples.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the intent is to replace main memory, though. The benefits to two-tier storage like this is actually quite significant. A sizable percentage of disk writes don't ever get flushed to disk because they are temporary files.
Combine a smart OS that uses the first tier for write caching and the second tier for permanent storage, you'd be able to significantly reduce wear (assuming, of course, that there is a wear problem with these things as there is with flash parts). Assuming you use a smart controller to flush recent dirty bits to disk if the power gets cut before the OS shuts down the disk correctly, beyond the obvious changes in disk caching, it wouldn't require significant OS changes to use these parts like that, and it would be quite useful, both in terms of disk performance, reliability, and data integrity.
I never said they were. The point was that the difference between amateur film and pro film is much smaller than between amateur theater and pro theater because with amateur theater, you're much more likely to get mistakes in the final product, whereas in amateur film, you can just shoot it a few more times than you would in pro film.
Or green. Either way.
Yes, I've done production work like that. The problem is that good CGI work makes sets look cheap by comparison unless the sets are particularly intricate. Thus, most Hollywood productions reserve them for places where a real set is infeasible (e.g. a moving star field seen through a window) and they build the remainder.
In practice, a low budget amateur production should try to limit CGI and compositing to... well, none if possible. It's a major pain in the backside that drives production time way up. Been there, done that. I even shot a few scenes "just in case" I decided to composite them. I then reshot those scenes in a location that was plausibly compatible with the location of some of the other action. In the end, I used only one small five or ten second clip from the blue screen footage. The rest of it got left on the cutting room floor.
That said, if you happen to have an ample supply of good 3D artists (through a university program, for example), it might be worth considering for scenes where you would otherwise have to build a complex set. Still, if you can, it's better to just not write scenes that would require complex sets.
I can't imagine using blue screen simply because of ease of camera placement. Stepladders are fifty to a hundred bucks at Lowe's or Home Depot, and cloth gaffer's tape is just a few bucks a roll. If even an hour of production can save you several hours of a graphic artist's time, you're still way, way ahead, generally speaking, barring any other constraints.
Well, at most universities, only the people enrolled in classes in the department or otherwise majoring or minoring in the subject would typically have access to those facilities, but yes.
Really, though, the cost of the equipment is such a small part of it (a $6-7000 outlay will get you a quite good HD camera with good audio hardware, a decent mic, and a laptop with Final Cut Pro or other comparable editing suite.
The intended point was that there are people with basic production skills who are willing to work cheap because the experience that will help them get a job in the future has, for them, significant value that goes way beyond a paycheck. That makes the cost of technical talent dirt cheap if you aren't counting on keeping the same crew over a long period of time.
Not necessarily. It depends on the circumstances. If, in the heat of a gun battle, a cop hands a random citizen a weapon and tells him/her to go around behind and shoot the shooter (even if that random citizen's life is not in danger at the time), that qualifies as deputization, and as such that person is not and generally should not be guilty of murder. More to the point, because that person is not a trained law enforcement officer, that person should have a lot more leeway when it comes to knowing what is and is not a legal kill. This is why the responsibility has to lie with the officer to use that power only under rare circumstances.
The reason that defense didn't work in the Nuremberg trials was twofold. First, everyone was looking for someone to blame for the wars, so the defendants were at a decided disadvantage. Second, it was not just a single incident of killing someone, but rather multiple repeated events over an extended period of time. At some point, the "you should have had more sense than to follow such an obviously illegal order" problem rears its ugly head. It's a grey area, but it definitely lies somewhere between "the cop ordered me to shoot the leader of the protest because they said he was dangerous" and "the cop kept telling me to shoot random members of the crowd because he said it was the only way to restore order".
I would add that if the shooter had no reason to suspect that the person was a cop and chose to commit a serious crime, then the person should be charged, albeit possibly with a lower degree than had the cop not incited the action. Hearing "You should shoot that guy," and thinking, "Hey, that's a great idea!" is really not that much better than hearing voices in your head. However, that only applies to serious crimes. For minor stuff, the "in the heat of the moment" defense combined with "that guy told me to do it" should be at least enough to get it knocked down a couple of degrees in severity, and if "that guy" was a cop, thrown out entirely.
I think the GP was just slightly misworded. If the police tell you to do something, it should be legal for you because the police officer is an authority figure relative to you. That doesn't mean that the officer wouldn't go to jail for giving the order.
In a similar fashion, if a police captain orders an officer to kill someone illegally, then the captain should go to jail, not the officer (unless the officer should have had reason to reject the order).
There's a world of difference between filmmaking and play production, though.
First, amateur plays are hobbled by low set construction budgets, prop budgets, limited time to reset lighting and change sets, etc. Pro plays solve these problems by throwing money at the problem, adding equipment and personnel to make things happen quickly, building nicer sets, and so on. Amateur filmmaking, by contrast, solves this by throwing away the sets and making all the world a stage. These two different approaches can achieve much the same results, within reason. Pro filmmaking solves it by using expensive sets because it gives them more control, but none of that is strictly necessary.
Also, with amateur filmmaking, unlike theater, you don't have to be perfect every take. Tape is cheap. If someone botches a line or flubs a song or whatever, you reshoot it. In effect, when making a movie, you can substitute time for talent, making even a relatively bad actor seem respectable through careful editing of multiple takes with good use of cutaways to mask edits. In stage plays, the bad actor is on stage the entire time, so every mistake can be seen no matter what you do to try to cover it up.
With school plays, you're generally limited to the people who go to that school, are free during a certain period, and want to act. That limits the talent pool immensely. With amateur filmmaking, you aren't limited to just the people from a single school. You have access to a wider age range and a much broader talent pool in general, much as you would with professional plays.
And with filmmaking, the cast doesn't even have to even be on location at the same time, much less the pit orchestra. This means that you can take the time to get the music exactly right through multiple takes instead of having to use all professional musicians. This means that you can work around people's schedules instead of having to have professional actors who are there the entire time on a rigid schedule. And so on. Such flexibility is not possible with stage plays for the most part.
Finally, with school plays, you're taking something someone else wrote and producing it. With amateur filmmaking, you're generally taking something that you or someone you know wrote and producing it. This means that you have a lot more freedom to adapt the locations and characters to suit the locations and cast that are available. With school plays, because of the smaller talent pool and the rigidity of the story, the best you can really do is put people into parts based on ability, which often produces less than ideal results. Similarly, you need a set for each location, and you just have to do the best you can.
In short, the flexibility offered by a larger potential cast pool, script flexibility, and the ability to tweak and correct mistakes after the fact makes it much, much easier for an amateur cast and crew to rival a major studio film than to rival a Broadway play. It's like writing computer software to fly a UAV versus flying it yourself. If you screw up the former, it fails the simulation and you can fix it in the next rev. If you screw up the latter, you just blew up a million dollar aircraft.
No, not really.
Maybe in California. Try shooting in a state with fewer unions and less bureaucratic red tape, and you'll find dozens of camera operators working at local TV stations who would gladly do it for $20 an hour just to have something to do on the weekends. Heck, if it's a low budget production, some might even volunteer to do it for nothing. Will it require a few more takes? Probably. Will it require enough more takes to justify paying a camera operator as much as a software engineer or a pharmacist? Probably not.
Besides, you could just cut out the chase scene, film it from multiple static cameras, use software to reduce the shaking in post, or fudge it with a zoom, and odds are good that nobody is going to think any less of the movie for it no matter which of those techniques you use.
Or you can do a time-cost tradeoff and ask a few of your friends to check out local clubs, find a local band that seems good, and get them to record something for peanuts. Or if it doesn't have to be unique, you could go buy some royalty-free music CDs for fifty or a hundred bucks a pop. It all depends on what you're looking for.
In my experience, the key to making movies on a shoestring budget is to get people who can act (but who aren't famous yet), and shoot on location at locations that don't charge money to shoot there. This way you're not paying studio rental costs and you're not paying exorbitant per-hour costs for your cast, so you can take a little longer to get things done without it being a problem. Once you're no longer paying a truckload of money for every minute the cameras aren't rolling, you can get by with a much smaller crew, because one person can wear multiple hats.
For example, unless you're doing an absolutely insane amount of lighting (way more than most low budget productions), there's usually no need to have both an electrician and a lighting person (unless union rules say you have to, of course) because 90% of the power you run is for lighting anyway. (The other 10% is for your camera and audio gear, which if you're doing it on the cheap, translates into an orange extension cord running from the nearest outlet.) During the actual shooting, that person double as your camera operator or your mic boom operator. You can now easily shoot a movie with a crew of two or three people (though extra hands are always welcome when packing, unpacking, and hauling the gear to and from the truck).
You can get good workers from your local university's communications and drama programs. You can often get people to outright volunteer for the opportunity to have their names in the credits of something that they can use in their portfolios when applying for jobs.
And finally, ten days worth of Arriflex 35mm camera rental will buy you an XH-A1 that will do a good enough job that it won't get in your way. And if you edit on a laptop with Final Cut Pro or whatever, you can get away with exactly zero studio or editing bay time, and equipment costs that are a tiny fraction of what they were just a couple of decades back.
What you don't get by going this route is a distribution channel. That's the sole reason that the major studios are still in business. Most movie theaters aren't willing to take chances on works shot by no-name groups, and good luck getting a major DVD distributor to even look at you, much less any rental chains. The actual cost of making a good movie, assuming a crew of two and a principal cast of four or five at $30 an hour is maybe thirty or forty thousand dollars. If you get most o
Poor trolling one,
though thou hast surely strayed,
take heart of grace,
thy keys retrace,
poor trolling one!
Poor trolling one,
if such poor taste as thine
can help one find
humor in kind,
then post it, pay no mind!
First, let me amend that to say "most commercial aircraft". I'm deliberately ignoring small private planes, since I'm assuming this is primarily about major airports, and private planes tend to avoid those like the plague because of the landing fees.
Second, I said "can very nearly land themselves", not "can land themselves". By that standard, it covers nearly every large plane that is still in the air. Sure, some airlines have elected to cut corners and buy planes with reduced autoland support, but it has been an option in most large planes for at least thirty years. The first autoland-capable planes came out in the 1960s.
Now if you're going to be really strict and narrow the definition to planes capable of CAT III autoland, then yes, the percentages go down, but even that technology dates back to the mid-1960s technologically. Either way, it isn't exactly new tech, nor particularly rare, AFAIK. It is certainly not rare or new in the way that rear-facing radar in cars is.
I'm having a Gilbert and Sullivan moment here.
You think a pilot is easy to blind.... Though I suppose they could always fall back on the windows if someone did.
Most modern aircraft can very nearly land themselves, so no, I would *not* say that a low power laser pointer is as dangerous as a handgun, even taking into account this unusual edge case....
Sweet. So if the Cyberattack function exists, it must be called. An weapon unused is a useless weapon and all that.... On the other hand, such an argument tends to be an argument of the lazy (binding).
From a purely Machiavellian perspective, if you throw the first punch and they're still able to hit back, then you deserve to get hit.
Similarly, when the cassette recorder came out, the music industry was saying, "Yeah, but the quality of reproduction is awful and you can't copy a whole 33 1/3 RPM record." When the first computer with sound came out, they said, "Yeah, but it can only do 1-bit mono audio. It won't ever be a threat." Looking back, it's obvious that they were missing something.
Remember that this 3D printer is a fairly early design. Eventually we'll have robots that can do everything you describe in a few hours. This is just one step towards that, but it is a significant step.
Americans use the preposition "for" in this idiom for good reason. The original form makes no sense in modern English. The meanings of prepositions have been formalized significantly since those words were originally used in a bill back in 1547, and as a result, some uses of those prepositions that would have made sense to someone at that time are confusing to a modern reader or listener.
You wouldn't say that I work to the purpose of making money. That's very archaic. You would say that I work for the purpose of making money. You wouldn't say that you are building a bridge to the intent of making travel easier. You would say that you are building it with the intent of making travel easier, or maybe for the intent of making travel easier. (And realistically, these days, the noun "intent" is rather rare in non-formal writing, with most folks preferring the verb form.)
It gets even worse when the phrase is preceded by "true", as it often is. In modern English, the definition of "true" when followed by the word "to" has drifted to mean something completely different. Being "true to" something means "faithful to" in modern English. Thus, only a person, not a fact, can be true to a purpose or to an intent. More importantly, when you say something is true "to/for all intents and purposes", you are not saying that a fact is "faithful to every intent and purpose". You are saying that it is correct for every intent and for every purpose.
Thus, I would argue that "for all intents and purposes" is the more correct form because understanding the British idiom ("to all intents and purposes") requires either understanding an archaic usage of the word "to" or memorizing the meaning of the idiom, whereas the American expression ("for all intents and purposes") is inherently non-idiomatic; it does not require any specific knowledge to understand it.
I tried to get citations, but the Internet is so clogged with people complaining about WebM and H.264 that any search for codecs and indemnification returns nothing but that....
You wouldn't steal a car. But soon you'll be able to copy one. Why do I have a feeling this is going to make piracy analogies on Slashdot a lot more interesting in the years to come.
Silverlight would be just as much of a nonstarter on iOS in a native app, though.
If you're writing straight to the built-in APIs, it's a lot harder to write an app in JavaScript than in Objective-C. Specifically, it's a lot easier to make mistakes when you're hand-coding all the DOM manipulation yourself instead of relying on widget toolkits that do the heavy lifting for you.
Of course, that argument goes away as soon as you use a decent JavaScript toolkit.
As for less secure... well, there's no keychain in the browser, for one, which probably isn't a big deal for something like this, but I could see somebody arguing that the lack of a keychain is a security disadvantage.
Neither of those is a very good argument, though.
Seems to me that what they're describing is a web app, which someone can save to the home screen just like any other iPad app. Unless the app needs to do something particularly special with hardware, sound, 3D animation, the camera, etc. (which I can't imagine this sort of app doing), the only significant distinction between that and a native (store) app is the payment model.... (And the language it's written in, of course, but a user doesn't see that part.)
Much ado about nothing, methinks.
Even better.
What's wrong with that is that power failures don't imply discovery. Breakers trip. Fuses blow. Electrical poles get hit by trucks. Small brownouts from four air conditioners starting up at once cause a machine to momentarily lose power. And so on.
Pretty much all of them if you buy from a manufacturer that offers it. Start with On2, the company that Google bought this codec from. Then move on to Microsoft. I'm pretty sure Broadcom's MPEG hardware provides indemnification. Heck, I doubt you'd have a very hard time finding at least one vendor that provides indemnification for almost every pro format.
The key difference between MPEG LA and Google is that Google is providing software, whereas MPEG LA is providing patent licenses to companies that make software and hardware. The two are not comparable.
MPEG-LA doesn't actually produce any end products that are sold to those production houses, either. They license the right to implement the technology to other companies, who then in turn manufacture products, many of whom provide indemnity. More importantly, MPEG LA is the giant elephant in the room. They are so big and own so many patents in this space that no one would dare sue one of their licensees for fear of retribution. More to the point, if anyone is going to file a lawsuit over a video codec, odds are it would be MPEG LA doing the suing rather than being sued. Therefore, in terms of risk, licensing a codec from MPEG LA is much, much lower risk.
It's an apples and oranges comparison. You're arguing that customers will gladly buy unpasteurized orange juice because grocery stores sell unpasteurized apples.