Yeah, all entries to the competition have PHD professors sponsoring them. (And probably checking the math, doing 60% of the work and theory too.)
Don't get me wrong, here in America it is impressive that she would even CARE about science at this point. Our education system beats it out of you as fast as it can. But she didn't cure cancer, that is blatantly misinforming, she just helped develop a new theoretical treatment which would be more useful and informative as it was administered, and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have gotten off the ground without the PHD assistance. Again, not to undervalue her work, this is very impressive.
But there's this hero worship ingrained in our culture, we want to believe that certain people are wunderkids just 1,000x more skilled and knowledgeable than everybody else around, and we build up pedestals to put them on. We're all about obsessing over rock stars, atheletes, celebrities, and we act like these people have some magical immense talent that was god's gift, instead of the reality that they just have lots of skill that they developed over time, because they focused entirely on one subject. Eddie Van Halen said the reason he got so good at guitar was because his brother would go out to party, and he'd stay home practicing guitar. When his brother returned at 4 in the morning, he'd still be practicing. But we see him on a music video and we go "oh wow, he's so good at guitar! He's a rock god!"
See: recent/. article on the issue of medical patents, which SCOTUS seems to have sadly skipped over...
I've been wanting to develop a cure for cancer, and then patent it and hold it prisoner, so that the public will finally realize how egregious this is and overturn it.
Please stop trolling and take the time to understand what is going on first. This isn't a "Cure for cancer", this is a slightly improved treatment. And we don't know for a fact that she sacrificed her IP, this is just a big science fair in which she blew away the competition and won a prize. Calm down! The competition is open to much more than just medicine or biology, it includes math and computer science as well. So this isn't just a big pharma attempt to cash in on kids. It is a science competition. The winner gets a SCHOLARSHIP, not even just a cash prize. RTFA and stop making noise before you do research.
We can appreciate that a girl did good science at a young age and got a nice reward, and will no doubt get bigger rewards for her science over time (possibly for this very invention, we don't know that she sacrificed the rights to it for the competition) and we can complain about people ruining our economy without taking the two entirely out of context and making arbitrary comparisons. *sigh* oh, moral relativism. You shouldn't be happy about that new car because kids are starving in Ethiopia. Nobody should ever be happy, ever, in fact, so long as one person on earth is upset.
There's always a bigger fish. By making arbitrary comparisons, you can make anything seem meaningless taken out of context. She won a STEM competition, 100,000 is a pretty good size for a big science fair. There's nothing that stops her from making more money off this, that is just a start.
Especially if that other/. article about medical patents doesn't get shot down by SCOTUS... *sigh*
Careful you don't over-extrapolate. She did not just "cure cancer", people are being facetious. She came up with a new, slightly different method of fighting cancer, which should be more effective and should yield more information to doctors that are monitoring treatment. This is significant, but don't go crazy.
Knighthood is cool and all, I wouldn't mind a "sir" title, but its just decorative. Nowadays the knights are so watered down with anybody the queen thinks is special, it doesn't mean that much.
I'm also an atheist, and while I don't believe in magical moral faeries (please stop using the straw-man, it doesn't get anywhere, its a fallacy, move on), I believe that morality exists inherent to consciousness and the subjective nature of existence.
If you had the power to, you would enslave an entire population purely for your own entertainment? No second thoughts at all? The only reason you haven't is because you can't get away with it?
And you're asking WHY its morally wrong? To make living things suffer? To deny rational agents the freedom to make choice?
You're asking why SLAVERY is wrong?!? If you don't get that one, you're missing a LOT.
Do you believe in morality or ethics at all? You sound like a nihilist.
What if you want the NPCs to believe that they're real humans living in a village in the game? What if you want them to react appropriately when you come to slaughter the village? In other words, make them believe they're not in a game.
You're confusing things. NPCs do not "believe" anything, they do not think, they are not sentient. They follow priority lists and assembly code. Therefor, you cannot make them believe, and trying to do so is pointless anyways. All you want is for the game character to behave AS THOUGH he thought he was a human, living in a game. That can be simulated. Trying to enslave a living being for the purpose of your entertainment isn't fair, and is a huge waste of effort and money and suffering.
Right now, you could lock kids in your basement, and force them to play characters in a game with you. You could force each one to play a role in order to create realistic human behavior for your game experience. You don't need technology. But it is morally wrong.
Any AI of sufficient intelligence and consciousness is for all intents and purposes a person. So you have two options of who to play with: machine NPCs, or people. Those people can be biological or synthetic, but that is highly irrelevant. If you want to have a game to play with other people, be it intelligent machines or human beings, games like that already exist. If you want a game to interact with machines that simulate people, we have that too. Most games include both. But you can't somehow have you cake and eat it too.
Actually, I suppose all I'm asking for is decent, realistic AI. They don't actually have to be sentient now that I think about it. But they should at least appear to be.
Yeah, like I said, going back to Game AI is not true AI, you don't really want that and you don't even try for it.
But yeah, Game AI that is non-sentient but able to perform natural language parsing is feasible and becoming all the more possible each day. We'll get there. And it'll be pretty sweet, being able to talk to enemy characters rather than having to select option 1. or 2.
That said, they'll still only be able to respond to so many situations. There'll still be some ways you can derp them up.
But there's no reason we'd make those AI play videogames.
Why not? Imagine an entire game world of sentient AIs. You could do whatever you wanted. I think it would be quite fun.
Respawning NPCs that will never die sounds like an annoyance for most types of games.
At that point, why not just make an MMORPG? A sentient AI is indistinguishable from a human for these purposes. You can replace anything you said about AIs about humans. "Imagine an entire world full of actual humans to play with"
Like with humans, you'll have to come up with a reason for them to want to play as well. If you're locking up sentient AIs to play with, that's slavery.
By the way, quantum tunneling doesn't lead to flash memory either. You should check how it is made, it is quite more mundane than that.
From Flash Memory
To erase a NOR flash cell (resetting it to the "1" state), a large voltage of the opposite polarity is applied between the CG and source, pulling the electrons off the FG through quantum tunneling. Modern NOR flash memory chips are divided into erase segments (often called blocks or sectors). The erase operation can only be performed on a block-wise basis; all the cells in an erase segment must be erased together. Programming of NOR cells, however, can generally be performed one byte or word at a time.
NAND flash uses tunnel injection for writing and tunnel release for erasing. NAND flash memory forms the core of the removable USB storage devices known as USB flash drives, as well as most memory card formats and solid-state drives available today.
Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator.
It is used to program NAND flash memory. The process used for erasing is called tunnel release.
I'm talking about how an intergalactic civilization would manage resources. When resource demands are so high that dyson sphering the sun is actually practical, you're going to be dealing with extreme costs to transport that energy in some fuel form (dark matter, lots of energy cells, who knows) around space so that you can use it; instead if you could somehow use quantum technology to teleport that energy the savings would be enormous. By the time we need it, we'll probably figure out a way.
A warp drive would be great. This all started in response to,
This is an exciting time to be alive. I can see a future without those damned ugly poles and wires in the alley behind my house, with a beautiful solar paneled roof and an even more beautiful lack of an electric bill. Who knows watt will come of investigation into quantum mechanics?
This isn't a feasibility study on technology to roll out next year. I was quite facetious from the very beginning.
Why so serious? Just talking. Nobody's staking anything on anything...
It is impossible to transmit even classical information through quantum entanglement, and that was proven for sure already.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -Arthur C. Clarke
Who would figure a few years ago that flash storage by quantum tunneling would be possible? We only just considered quantum mechanics a possibility in the last century. By current understanding yeah, but what if we find a whole new realm of science on the sub-quantum level?
What about books, movies, television shows, or art depicting great acts of violence?
Something tells me they think games are different because you "control them", so they see this as tons of people "choosing" to engage in violent like acts.
What they are completely FAILING to do is recognize why violence is wrong it the first place. They've lost track of the purpose of morality and now they just uphold political correctness for its own sake. The REASON (We have completely abandoned reason these days, haven't we?) why violence is wrong is because SOMEBODY ELSE GETS HURT. Violence isn't wrong if nobody is on the other end.
Lemme ask the Red Cross, is it wrong to shoot Clay Pidgeons? Would it be wrong to shoot Clay Pidgeons with a PICTURE of a person on it?
Because that is what game violence amounts to. Shooting at targets, for sport, that you KNOW ahead of time are unliving, unconscious, unfeeling objects.
Will AI ever reach the level where we do have to consider the rights of the NPCs?
No. Never.
This is a confusion of two different uses of the term "AI". Game AI is very simple, it is custom written for the game at hand (you have a starcraft bot that ONLY play starcraft, a mario kart bot that ONLY plays mario kart, etc.) They're hardcoded to use the game's rules and to operate in the best all-purpose strategy the developer could come up with and represent as a computer. Game AI is usually little more than a priority queue and a few tasks. Game AI is "dead", there is no life to it, no personality, and no reason why "killing" it would matter; it isn't alive in the same place. It would be like saying that
A* ob = new A();
delete A;
Is violence. it isn't, fundamentally, and saying it is belittles real violence.
Eventually, given the technological singularity, we will achieve a conscious, living AI. (likely through advanced neural networks modeling our own brain). Then, turning off or destroying the computers those AI live on would be equivalent to murder. THOSE, the TRUE AI, would have rights, and we will need to respect them.
But there's no reason we'd make those AI play videogames. And even if we did, they would play it like us, as players. They'd spawn, go out, shoot people, and then their CHARACTER would die, but THEY, the consciousness, are just playing a game, controlling a virtual agent, same as you are. The AI would no more die from playing call of duty than you would. When you "die", you just respawn. AI would do the same. There would be NO reason to kill the AI based on its performance inside a game.
I don't think we've proven any of that for sure yet. Absolutely what I'm talking about is beyond theoretical, but given infinite scientific advancement who is to say what is or is not physically possible? ^_^
I never mentioned quantum teleportation. Just some process whereby using quantum mechanical science we might achieve energy transfer. I think I read a paper on the concept awhile ago... anyways.
The real future is when we dyson sphere the sun and teleport the energy directly to devices that need it using quantum entanglement. Near-limitless wireless energy anywhere in the universe!
It sure doesn't help that he just linked to wikipedia on coherence and quantum coherence.
At that point, why not just let me google that for you ? Does this really need inclusion? Its almost insulting.
Seriously guys if somebody doesn't understand quantum physics reading the wiki page isn't going to do it.
But Transformers had extremely detailed high-poly models for the transformers! So its not like Bay was trying to hide bad CG, they had the GOOD CG and they hid it anyways! But yeah, I think it has to do with physics, coreography, etc. With the shakey cam and fast cuts, all they need are some quick clips of robots swinging fists at each other out of context and you can imagine somebody is fighting. It doesn't require an actual fight coreography, with who goes where, and actual fight tactics of WHY they would be fighting...
That one's been pretty lost in hollywood though. Look at swordfighting, its ludicrous. Its all "I'm going to hit your sword with mine now to make that clang nose", back and forth and back and forth. Even movies that supposedly hire professional swordfighting coreographers, I feel like it is still only vaguely realistic, at best. Real fighting is far more visceral and far more practiced. All the big swinging motions you see in fights in movies would get you instantly killed against a professional.
Yeah, its like when you have lens flares in videogames; they're kind of annoying, and they could very well take them out (and actually it would be easier to, they take work to add IN) since its CG, but they do it because we sort of expect it, we're used to looking through camera lenses.
But Transformers takes it way too far. I understand that a camera should shake as pressure is applied to it. If a camera in a movie is in an action shot, it should move some to reflect it is part of the scene. It adds to immersion. But in transformers, literally the fight scenes in the city, they spent millions of dollars to render extremely complex very-high poly models and I can't see them for shit because the camera is moving so fast the entire thing is blurred. And they cut so often the blur almost doesn't even matter, your eyes don't have time to keep up. It ruins everything, just give me a nice slow arc around the city so I can figure out where each guy is located, see the action and try to figure out the tactics of the fight. That'll be far more dramatic. But I'm guessing that this was also done to cover up the tactics, and there aren't really any, and it is just a series of pictures of robots wailing on each other.
If you're making a movie, but you can't afford to make it good enough to look at, maybe you shouldn't be making a movie.
That or be more clever, like in Alien, and just don't show the thing so much. Hide it in shadow. But shaking the camera around so I'm too busy vomiting to notice the rubber suit is not a solution. -__-
And no, I'm not talking about Blair-witch or cloverfield. Those were fine, they used the camera as part of the story. It was fresh. Saving Private Ryan used LOTS of shakey-cam, because it was appropreate, but they balanced it carefully by using long, static shots otherwise. You had time to adjust.
I'm talking about the Bourne Ultimatum, which seems to think that making a cut every second and drop kicking the camera around the set counts as cinematography. Only movie I've ever walked out of. Unwatchable. No idea what the hell is going on during action scenes at all. Completely lost.
And for all the CG in the Transformers movies, I found it the same way. ITS CG, WHY IS THE CAMERA SHAKING SO MUCH, YOU HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL. And then cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, so many fast cuts, who knows what is going on.
Its not about CG or not-CG, its about all the terrible cliches this industry has fallen into. (Like how everything has to be 24fps).
Also, if a mom and pop store wants to let their customers pay with credit cards and not have to follow every contraint of PCI then there are lots of companies and bank who'll gladly sell them their secure online service.
There definitely are. But are you saying you want to de facto make it ILLEGAL to not buy that software? And who decides which software is good enough?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, all entries to the competition have PHD professors sponsoring them. (And probably checking the math, doing 60% of the work and theory too.) Don't get me wrong, here in America it is impressive that she would even CARE about science at this point. Our education system beats it out of you as fast as it can. But she didn't cure cancer, that is blatantly misinforming, she just helped develop a new theoretical treatment which would be more useful and informative as it was administered, and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have gotten off the ground without the PHD assistance. Again, not to undervalue her work, this is very impressive.
But there's this hero worship ingrained in our culture, we want to believe that certain people are wunderkids just 1,000x more skilled and knowledgeable than everybody else around, and we build up pedestals to put them on. We're all about obsessing over rock stars, atheletes, celebrities, and we act like these people have some magical immense talent that was god's gift, instead of the reality that they just have lots of skill that they developed over time, because they focused entirely on one subject. Eddie Van Halen said the reason he got so good at guitar was because his brother would go out to party, and he'd stay home practicing guitar. When his brother returned at 4 in the morning, he'd still be practicing. But we see him on a music video and we go "oh wow, he's so good at guitar! He's a rock god!"
See: recent /. article on the issue of medical patents, which SCOTUS seems to have sadly skipped over...
I've been wanting to develop a cure for cancer, and then patent it and hold it prisoner, so that the public will finally realize how egregious this is and overturn it.
Please stop trolling and take the time to understand what is going on first. This isn't a "Cure for cancer", this is a slightly improved treatment. And we don't know for a fact that she sacrificed her IP, this is just a big science fair in which she blew away the competition and won a prize. Calm down! The competition is open to much more than just medicine or biology, it includes math and computer science as well. So this isn't just a big pharma attempt to cash in on kids. It is a science competition. The winner gets a SCHOLARSHIP, not even just a cash prize. RTFA and stop making noise before you do research.
We can appreciate that a girl did good science at a young age and got a nice reward, and will no doubt get bigger rewards for her science over time (possibly for this very invention, we don't know that she sacrificed the rights to it for the competition) and we can complain about people ruining our economy without taking the two entirely out of context and making arbitrary comparisons. *sigh* oh, moral relativism. You shouldn't be happy about that new car because kids are starving in Ethiopia. Nobody should ever be happy, ever, in fact, so long as one person on earth is upset.
There's always a bigger fish. By making arbitrary comparisons, you can make anything seem meaningless taken out of context. She won a STEM competition, 100,000 is a pretty good size for a big science fair. There's nothing that stops her from making more money off this, that is just a start.
/. article about medical patents doesn't get shot down by SCOTUS... *sigh*
Especially if that other
Careful you don't over-extrapolate. She did not just "cure cancer", people are being facetious. She came up with a new, slightly different method of fighting cancer, which should be more effective and should yield more information to doctors that are monitoring treatment. This is significant, but don't go crazy.
Knighthood is cool and all, I wouldn't mind a "sir" title, but its just decorative. Nowadays the knights are so watered down with anybody the queen thinks is special, it doesn't mean that much.
I'm also an atheist, and while I don't believe in magical moral faeries (please stop using the straw-man, it doesn't get anywhere, its a fallacy, move on), I believe that morality exists inherent to consciousness and the subjective nature of existence.
If you had the power to, you would enslave an entire population purely for your own entertainment? No second thoughts at all? The only reason you haven't is because you can't get away with it?
And you're asking WHY its morally wrong? To make living things suffer? To deny rational agents the freedom to make choice?
You're asking why SLAVERY is wrong?!? If you don't get that one, you're missing a LOT.
Do you believe in morality or ethics at all? You sound like a nihilist.
What if you want the NPCs to believe that they're real humans living in a village in the game? What if you want them to react appropriately when you come to slaughter the village? In other words, make them believe they're not in a game.
You're confusing things. NPCs do not "believe" anything, they do not think, they are not sentient. They follow priority lists and assembly code. Therefor, you cannot make them believe, and trying to do so is pointless anyways. All you want is for the game character to behave AS THOUGH he thought he was a human, living in a game. That can be simulated. Trying to enslave a living being for the purpose of your entertainment isn't fair, and is a huge waste of effort and money and suffering.
Right now, you could lock kids in your basement, and force them to play characters in a game with you. You could force each one to play a role in order to create realistic human behavior for your game experience. You don't need technology. But it is morally wrong.
Any AI of sufficient intelligence and consciousness is for all intents and purposes a person. So you have two options of who to play with: machine NPCs, or people. Those people can be biological or synthetic, but that is highly irrelevant. If you want to have a game to play with other people, be it intelligent machines or human beings, games like that already exist. If you want a game to interact with machines that simulate people, we have that too. Most games include both. But you can't somehow have you cake and eat it too.
Actually, I suppose all I'm asking for is decent, realistic AI. They don't actually have to be sentient now that I think about it. But they should at least appear to be.
Yeah, like I said, going back to Game AI is not true AI, you don't really want that and you don't even try for it.
But yeah, Game AI that is non-sentient but able to perform natural language parsing is feasible and becoming all the more possible each day. We'll get there. And it'll be pretty sweet, being able to talk to enemy characters rather than having to select option 1. or 2.
That said, they'll still only be able to respond to so many situations. There'll still be some ways you can derp them up.
But there's no reason we'd make those AI play videogames.
Why not? Imagine an entire game world of sentient AIs. You could do whatever you wanted. I think it would be quite fun.
Respawning NPCs that will never die sounds like an annoyance for most types of games.
At that point, why not just make an MMORPG? A sentient AI is indistinguishable from a human for these purposes. You can replace anything you said about AIs about humans. "Imagine an entire world full of actual humans to play with"
Like with humans, you'll have to come up with a reason for them to want to play as well. If you're locking up sentient AIs to play with, that's slavery.
By the way, quantum tunneling doesn't lead to flash memory either. You should check how it is made, it is quite more mundane than that.
From Flash Memory
To erase a NOR flash cell (resetting it to the "1" state), a large voltage of the opposite polarity is applied between the CG and source, pulling the electrons off the FG through quantum tunneling. Modern NOR flash memory chips are divided into erase segments (often called blocks or sectors). The erase operation can only be performed on a block-wise basis; all the cells in an erase segment must be erased together. Programming of NOR cells, however, can generally be performed one byte or word at a time.
NAND flash uses tunnel injection for writing and tunnel release for erasing. NAND flash memory forms the core of the removable USB storage devices known as USB flash drives, as well as most memory card formats and solid-state drives available today.
Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator. It is used to program NAND flash memory. The process used for erasing is called tunnel release.
Or does Wikipedia need updating?
I'm talking about how an intergalactic civilization would manage resources. When resource demands are so high that dyson sphering the sun is actually practical, you're going to be dealing with extreme costs to transport that energy in some fuel form (dark matter, lots of energy cells, who knows) around space so that you can use it; instead if you could somehow use quantum technology to teleport that energy the savings would be enormous. By the time we need it, we'll probably figure out a way.
This is an exciting time to be alive. I can see a future without those damned ugly poles and wires in the alley behind my house, with a beautiful solar paneled roof and an even more beautiful lack of an electric bill. Who knows watt will come of investigation into quantum mechanics?
This isn't a feasibility study on technology to roll out next year. I was quite facetious from the very beginning.
Why so serious? Just talking. Nobody's staking anything on anything...
It is impossible to transmit even classical information through quantum entanglement, and that was proven for sure already.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -Arthur C. Clarke
Who would figure a few years ago that flash storage by quantum tunneling would be possible? We only just considered quantum mechanics a possibility in the last century. By current understanding yeah, but what if we find a whole new realm of science on the sub-quantum level?
What about books, movies, television shows, or art depicting great acts of violence?
Something tells me they think games are different because you "control them", so they see this as tons of people "choosing" to engage in violent like acts.
What they are completely FAILING to do is recognize why violence is wrong it the first place. They've lost track of the purpose of morality and now they just uphold political correctness for its own sake. The REASON (We have completely abandoned reason these days, haven't we?) why violence is wrong is because SOMEBODY ELSE GETS HURT. Violence isn't wrong if nobody is on the other end.
Lemme ask the Red Cross, is it wrong to shoot Clay Pidgeons? Would it be wrong to shoot Clay Pidgeons with a PICTURE of a person on it?
Because that is what game violence amounts to. Shooting at targets, for sport, that you KNOW ahead of time are unliving, unconscious, unfeeling objects.
Will AI ever reach the level where we do have to consider the rights of the NPCs?
No. Never.
This is a confusion of two different uses of the term "AI". Game AI is very simple, it is custom written for the game at hand (you have a starcraft bot that ONLY play starcraft, a mario kart bot that ONLY plays mario kart, etc.) They're hardcoded to use the game's rules and to operate in the best all-purpose strategy the developer could come up with and represent as a computer. Game AI is usually little more than a priority queue and a few tasks. Game AI is "dead", there is no life to it, no personality, and no reason why "killing" it would matter; it isn't alive in the same place. It would be like saying that
A* ob = new A();
delete A;
Is violence. it isn't, fundamentally, and saying it is belittles real violence.
Eventually, given the technological singularity, we will achieve a conscious, living AI. (likely through advanced neural networks modeling our own brain). Then, turning off or destroying the computers those AI live on would be equivalent to murder. THOSE, the TRUE AI, would have rights, and we will need to respect them.
But there's no reason we'd make those AI play videogames. And even if we did, they would play it like us, as players. They'd spawn, go out, shoot people, and then their CHARACTER would die, but THEY, the consciousness, are just playing a game, controlling a virtual agent, same as you are. The AI would no more die from playing call of duty than you would. When you "die", you just respawn. AI would do the same. There would be NO reason to kill the AI based on its performance inside a game.
I don't think we've proven any of that for sure yet. Absolutely what I'm talking about is beyond theoretical, but given infinite scientific advancement who is to say what is or is not physically possible? ^_^
I never mentioned quantum teleportation. Just some process whereby using quantum mechanical science we might achieve energy transfer. I think I read a paper on the concept awhile ago... anyways.
The real future is when we dyson sphere the sun and teleport the energy directly to devices that need it using quantum entanglement. Near-limitless wireless energy anywhere in the universe!
Spoilers: It may be awhile.
It sure doesn't help that he just linked to wikipedia on coherence and quantum coherence.
At that point, why not just let me google that for you ? Does this really need inclusion? Its almost insulting.
Seriously guys if somebody doesn't understand quantum physics reading the wiki page isn't going to do it.
But Transformers had extremely detailed high-poly models for the transformers! So its not like Bay was trying to hide bad CG, they had the GOOD CG and they hid it anyways! But yeah, I think it has to do with physics, coreography, etc. With the shakey cam and fast cuts, all they need are some quick clips of robots swinging fists at each other out of context and you can imagine somebody is fighting. It doesn't require an actual fight coreography, with who goes where, and actual fight tactics of WHY they would be fighting...
That one's been pretty lost in hollywood though. Look at swordfighting, its ludicrous. Its all "I'm going to hit your sword with mine now to make that clang nose", back and forth and back and forth. Even movies that supposedly hire professional swordfighting coreographers, I feel like it is still only vaguely realistic, at best. Real fighting is far more visceral and far more practiced. All the big swinging motions you see in fights in movies would get you instantly killed against a professional.
Yeah, its like when you have lens flares in videogames; they're kind of annoying, and they could very well take them out (and actually it would be easier to, they take work to add IN) since its CG, but they do it because we sort of expect it, we're used to looking through camera lenses.
But Transformers takes it way too far. I understand that a camera should shake as pressure is applied to it. If a camera in a movie is in an action shot, it should move some to reflect it is part of the scene. It adds to immersion. But in transformers, literally the fight scenes in the city, they spent millions of dollars to render extremely complex very-high poly models and I can't see them for shit because the camera is moving so fast the entire thing is blurred. And they cut so often the blur almost doesn't even matter, your eyes don't have time to keep up. It ruins everything, just give me a nice slow arc around the city so I can figure out where each guy is located, see the action and try to figure out the tactics of the fight. That'll be far more dramatic. But I'm guessing that this was also done to cover up the tactics, and there aren't really any, and it is just a series of pictures of robots wailing on each other.
They spend all their time on the wrong parts.
If you're making a movie, but you can't afford to make it good enough to look at, maybe you shouldn't be making a movie.
That or be more clever, like in Alien, and just don't show the thing so much. Hide it in shadow. But shaking the camera around so I'm too busy vomiting to notice the rubber suit is not a solution. -__-
Don't get me started on shakey-cam.
And no, I'm not talking about Blair-witch or cloverfield. Those were fine, they used the camera as part of the story. It was fresh. Saving Private Ryan used LOTS of shakey-cam, because it was appropreate, but they balanced it carefully by using long, static shots otherwise. You had time to adjust.
I'm talking about the Bourne Ultimatum, which seems to think that making a cut every second and drop kicking the camera around the set counts as cinematography. Only movie I've ever walked out of. Unwatchable. No idea what the hell is going on during action scenes at all. Completely lost.
And for all the CG in the Transformers movies, I found it the same way. ITS CG, WHY IS THE CAMERA SHAKING SO MUCH, YOU HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL. And then cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, so many fast cuts, who knows what is going on.
Its not about CG or not-CG, its about all the terrible cliches this industry has fallen into. (Like how everything has to be 24fps).
Also, if a mom and pop store wants to let their customers pay with credit cards and not have to follow every contraint of PCI then there are lots of companies and bank who'll gladly sell them their secure online service.
There definitely are. But are you saying you want to de facto make it ILLEGAL to not buy that software? And who decides which software is good enough?