Why does this get onto the front page at Slashdot? Am I missing something, or is this just another web page about building a mini-ITX system? How is this either News or Stuff That Matters?
This has been covered before (way back in aught-2). I'd just like to make one point (which was also covered in the comments on the previous article): it's not really transparent aluminum. It's a compound that happens to have aluminum as one of its component elements, and it happens to be transparent. That isn't actually anything new. Ever heard of ruby? Sapphire? They're both crystaline aluminum oxide.
I can't help noticing that no one has brought up the possibility that people might be finding better things to do with their time. Are we so indoctrinated as to think that people will always consume passive media? For me, in most instances, I have better things to do with my time than to sit there and absorb what Hollywood tells me. I'm not saying everyone has to be the same way, but I find it more fulfilling most of the time to work on a personal project or hang out with friends than to watch a movie or TV show. I do still watch movies sometimes, but it's an out-of-the-ordinary thing for me.
So I put forth this suggestion: perhaps people are finding better things to do with their time?
(Kind of ironic, since I'm an animator, helping provide passive media for other people to consume)
Personally I thought this show worked better on the radio, where I didn't get distracted by extremely low budget. Are British people just used to this sort of production value? No, I'm not being a troll -- I do think it's a very innovative series, but the TV version just didn't hold my interest. It seems like a lot more shows that come from the UK have much lower production values than we're used to seeing in the US. Anyone have any insights as to why there's such a difference?
I realized something when I watched ROTS: Star Wars movies are really only good when the good guys are the underdogs. I'm not saying ROTS was great because it wasn't at all, but it was definitely better than the first two prequels. I found myself much more involved in the action and the struggle, simply because I knew that Obi-Wan and Yoda were the underdogs. It was the same way in the original trilogy, particularly 4 and 5.
In the first two prequels the good guys were in power. I don't want to see a movie about the Good Republic fighting rebels. I want to see a movie about rebels fighting the Evil Empire.
How many times am I going to see announcements like this on Slashdot? I don't know if this one is going to turn out to be true, but based on reliability of past "near-native emulation speed" announcements I'm pretty skeptical.
Okay, I know a lot of people have been complaining about it being "too perfect" or something like that, but I'd like to go into it on a slightly different tack.
When you make a film, there needs to be a point. You have to make a decision about why you're making it and why the audience would want to watch it. Is it as a demo, to show off your technical prowess at modeling and backgrounds and so on? Okay, then the only people who'll watch it are people who want to see pretty pictures.
A much more common goal for a film is to be entertaining to a wide audience, and this almost always involves a story that fulfils a basic human understanding of what a story should be. Look at any sucessful feature or short and it has this.
Part of creating a successful whole is to keep focused. It's a disaster if the audience is distracted by anything. If you're deeply involved in the story and then you see a character with a face that doesn't look quite real, you're going to think about that and stop being involved in the story.
The film progresses as a "look how pretty this all is" demo. Sure, pretty. Very idyllic. Now, why am I watching this again? I want to be fulfilled, not just see pretty pictures.
Now on to some specific things.
The editing is weird. It's all about the closeups. Now, as a technical demo this is understandible -- the most important aspect in something like this is the face. That's what a viewer is most critical of (witness all the complaints in reply to this story). But from a filmmaking standpoint, it needs to be mixed up a bit. Lots of only one kind of shgot is fatiguing, particularly lots of closeups.
The baby seems to be on valium. What the hell's up with a baby who never cries? It's only neutral or smiling. In reality a baby's face contorts and expresses like crazy. Not to mention...
The baby never freakin' cries! What's up with a baby that's abandoned (twice!) and never cries, over a seemingly long period of time? In all that wandering and viewing of wonderful "life is beautiful" sunsets, did the baby never get tired, hungry, poopy, or pissed at the world? This is extremely distracting because the baby's behavior isn't consistent with its intended nature. The naturalistic rendition should be consistent with naturalistic behavior.
Gravity and mass seem to be on hiatus in this world. The woman never has any believable weight in her movement, and that little leap she makes from rock to rock is just ridiculous.
Her hair seemed to be under the control of some sort of super-hold gel. It didn't look like the hair of someone who's been crying, sitting in a moderately windy location. The answer to that is probably that it would have been too hard to model hair that behaved realistically. The gelled quality is an okay solution, I suppose, but it doesn't really go along with other aspects of the character's appearance. For instance:
She seems to be generally un-made-up, but she has crazy fake eyelashes that really jump out as unnatural, especially in the shots from above. Either that, or they've had mascara applied liberally and sculpted so they have an unnatural shape. Either way, the eyelashes, combined with the lack of other makeup, are kind of incongruent, because if she had taken the time to apply non-subtle mascara, why not any other makeup? For instance, her lips could have used some color for sure. It might have even helped visually, since there were times when I wanted to see more definition on the lips.
The whole thing would have been better in live action. Perhaps easier to implement, too....
Both characters had really limited expressiveness. I've mentioned the baby already, but also on the woman. She seemed to be able to look morose, look happy, or smile, and nothing else. Very little variation. And one of the most important aspects, the muscles around the eyes, seem to have been completely ignor
Ahum, "their", "there" and "they're" are NOT pronounced exactly the same, look it up in an englisch dictionary if you do not believe me
Ahem. As a native English speaker, I can testify that yes, they are pronounced exactly the same way, at least by most Americans most of the time. I guess I should have been clearer about that. Perhaps in British English (which I assume, as a non-native speaker, is the variety you've learned) they're pronounced differently, though when I think about an English person pronouncing those words it wouldn't be much difference at all, and might even require a native speaker to discern.
And besides, don't tell me that the dictionary decrees that it's so, and therefore it's so, because that's just absurd. In spoken language, if 95% of people say things in a way that's contrary to what the dictionary says, then the dictionary's wrong. The study of Linguistics is there to serve languages, not vice versa.
To support my claim of the same pronunciation, here are the Merriam-Webster definitions for they're, there, and their. Note that all have a pronunciation guide in common. Yes, each one is sometimes pronounced differently depending on context or accent, but in my eperience the pronunciation the three entries have in common is by far the most common. Keep in mind, of course, that this is an American dictionary, and I'm an from the west coast of the United states, so it may not apply for all dialects. Also, as I said above, the dictionary isn't the authority -- it should merely report on how things are actually pronounced.
When englisch is not your first language, it is very annoying when they are mixed up.
I'm right with you on that. But again, that's an issue of spelling, not pronunciation. Anyone who knows English well enough to be proficient at conversation shouldn't have any trouble with "their," "there," and "they're" because tbry should be clear in context.
-David
I'm astounded that no one has mentioned what seems to me to be a more apparent mistake: the one in the title!
"PVR's Head-to-Head: MythTV vs. Microsoft MCE"
Unless this title means to refer to a Head-to-Head posessed by a single PVR, or even by the class of objects known as PVR (both of which wouldn't make much sense in this context), there shouldn't be an apostrophe in that title. We're talking multiple PVRs -- posessiveness doesn't come into it.
Of course, all this is kind of pedantic. Language rules like these were semi-arbitrarily decided upon two or three hundred years ago. We all know from context what the author of the submission meant. It's a rare circumstance when there's actually any ambiguity in context. Consider that "there," "their," and "they're" are pronounced exactly the same as each other, but we almost never need disambiguation when we speak.
The greatest command line utility I've seen recently (or set of utilities, I should say) is ImageMagick. It's comprised of several programs which, collectively, will perform most of the non-interactive effects you can do in photoshop. The list of effects and command line options is absolutely dizzying., as is the list of supported file formats.
Image Magick is fantastic for anyone who doesn't want to deal with the startup times for windowed graphics programs as well as anyone who wants to set up batch jobs to apply effects to lots of images at once.
I have a similar complaint about tablets. Why can't someone take a decent screen resolution and throw it into a tablet? According to TabletPCTalk.com there's only one option that has higher than 1024x768 resolution. Give me a few more pixels and it'll start to be a viable art tool (seems like an obvious target market, since almost all of 'em have pressure sensitive stylus input).
Except that flood myths are common to many world religions. I know, for instance, that native Americans in the Pacific Northwest of the United States had a flood myth that ivolved someone building a giant canoe to survive the flood. Explaining the biblical flood with events local to the Middle East ignores those commonalities with other religions. I'm not an anothropologist, but what I learned in school about it suggests that flood myths exist because of features of the human psyche, not because of historical events.
... you just have to know where to look. It's extremely rare that I listen to mainstream radio. Instead I listen to KCRW (a listener-supported Los Angeles radio station known for its eclectic music programs and for giving many fabulous musicians their first airplay) and Radio Paradise (an internet radio station that describes what it plays as "eclectic intelligent rock"). I've discovered a number of bands that I absolutely love through these stations, and I never would have heard them on mainstream radio.
-David
But that kind of situation exists for anyone who subscribes to some sort of pay TV service. Most people only watch three or four channels regularly anyway. Personally, I'm only interested in Cartoon Network and _maybe_ Nickelodeon, Disney, and Toon Disney. There's no way I'll spend even $20 for just one channel. Until they offer a cost-per-channel option, I'm not going to give them any money.
Anyway, my point is that almost everyone is uninterested in 80% of the channels they pay for. That expectation is built into the system.
Unless everything I've learned about public key cryptography is wrong, your proposed situation can't happen. Under that situation the responding party, which is using the false public key, would send encrypted information that the first party couldn't undertand (because it was encrypted with someone else's public key). So yeah, this kind of thing could happen, but at least one side would know that something was wrong. At best this is a problem that someone can impersonate someone else, not that lines can be tapped without the participants' knowledge.
I worked in games for a few years but I just got sick of the long hours. There's this insincerity in software employment practices that really bugs me. You sign a contract that says you'll work forty hours a week and then they expect you to work fifty. Come crunch time it's up to sixty or seventy and I don't have any time left for myself. Add in that I don't enjoy the work very much (it's just not like the good old days of programming text-mode games in high school), and it became a pretty clear choice for me. I left the software industry to do animation. Now I'm in grad school going into debt so I can do something that I enjoy more. Of course, the problem is that in animation the hours are just as bad...:/
Isn't the goal of industrialization to give us more free time, support a bigger population, etc? I would love it if there were no jobs any more. I've been unemployed for the last seven months, and lemme tell you: It's fantastic! I can't count how many times I've gone to the beach this year, or how much time I've had to pursue whatever the hell I want to (usually that means working on my own animation projects).
I don't buy the talk of PNGs never catching on. I've seen almost the exact situation before: GIF in the early 90's. For years I considered GIF the best image format for my purposes (downloading, editing, and uploading of 256-color image files). I endlessly ran into frustration, though, because of the lack of commercial application support for the GIF format. Go back to 1991 and almost all the programs you'll find that support GIF are free/shareware. Meanwhile, they were everywhere on bulletin boards. I guess people didn't need them in the workplace because there were no existing files that needed to be read in. People used their friendly, soft, fuzzy PCX, LBM, TIFF, and PICT files, pretty much ignoring the issue of compression and space saving. With the high price of storage back then you'd think they would be more concerned with the size issue....
Anyway, gradually GIF came into more and more common use, until that glorious day when the WWW made it ubiquitous. Then Unisys took it away and we kind of started over with PNG. Today most commercial graphics programs support PNG (and it's been a long time coming!), but there still isn't the huge installed base of PNG files to do away with the archaicness that is GIF. I would love to eliminate the need for GIF files, but unfortunately I can't. I'm sure it'll happen some day, though, since it's clearly a superior format, and the reasons to saddle ourselves with GIF are gradually disappearing.
Hopefully MS will finally include full transparency support in IE's next release, and then we can use PNG to its full abilities.
This seems too cumbersome to be useful. The low storage capacity of a PDA is a killer, and having to port around an additional A/D converter makes the system way too bulky. What we need is a hard disk recorder like the Archos Jukebox or Creative Jukebox on which you can monitor recording levels. I'm really surprised that I haven't seen anything like that yet.
Personally, I need something that I can record six or seven hours at least between checking in with a computer. For that I have a hard time seeing a better solution than hard disk recording.
Many people wish to say something like "We can't favor one person's morality over the other" without accepting the full implications of that statement. Namely, if each person gets to decide right and wrong, then we lose the ability to judge any action as wrong, no matter how horrific.
The key to this is to realize that laws aren't there because something is right or wrong. They are there to let society run smoothly and to guarantee certain rights to the people of the society. Society wouldn't run very well if people were allowed to kill others without repercussions. Things would quickly dissolve into gang warfare as people who had the power and will to kill did so.
Morality is not absolute. That is evidenced by the fact that no two societies agree on a common set of morals. However, agreed-upon morals make a good basis for laws and government because the people agree about whether the relevant behaviors are moral or not. If too many people disagree with the morality of too many of the laws then you've got a revolution on your hands. This is why there isn't a world government right now. People are different and they can't be held under the same laws.
The closest we've come to that is the empire model of government, where the central government doesn't have much power to pass laws over the individual territories. That's more or less the theory behind the federal/state schism that exists in the USA. It lets people govern themselves -- because they have the best idea of which way their morals steer them and how best to apply laws to support their society.
For anyone who's interested and lives in or near LA, the Cowboy Bebop movie is playing at the Egyptian in Hollywood on August 11th at 5 PM. No appearance by the director and stuff, but personally I can't make it to New York....
Batman and the vat of acid
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I once had a chemistry test in high school based on a Batman comic. Batman and Robin were falling into a vat of acid. It looked like the end for the dynamic duo. But after they fell in Robin was astonished to find that they didn't get burned.
"Of course," said Batman. "The acid-neutralizing pills in my utility belt rendered the acid harmless before it was able to burn us."
I don't remember the specific numbers of the question, but it was basically: if there were n gallons of 5 molar HCl in the vat and the pills were NaOH, how much must the pills have weighed? How much energy was released in the reaction, and are Batman and Robin likely to have survived?
Batman would have needed something like two tons of NaOH in his belt, and the resulting explosion would have evaporated all the water and fried the dynamic duo to a crisp.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want metered pricing at all. Honestly I'd rather pay a net tax or set monthly fee, even if it's higher than what it would be for metered access. It's a problem of stress. I don't want think, when I'm accessing the internet, about how each byte/page/minute is costing me money. Then I have to constantly ask: is what I'm doing right now worth the money it's costing me? It's the same thing that has made me avoid getting a cel phone, and that makes me love local telephone service (in the U.S.).
What I'm afraid of is that everyone is getting used to the metered model because of cel phones, and I'm going to suffer as a result....
"Computer generated" is a tricky term. If we're talking about something like fractals, it's difficult to cross the threshold between pretty pictures and art. I see it as being much like nature photography. The artist looks for good composition and records it in his camera. Similarly, a person could explore the Mandelbrot set and find a kick-ass image that's as well-composed as best Van Gogh painting in existence, take a screen capture, and rightly call it fine art.
As to the thing about computers being a graphic design medium, that's true in many cases. That doesn't make it any less art, though. I just completed a degree in Visual Design and I definitely see myself as an artist. I have a focus in animation (yes, it's a kind of visual design), but I strive for good composition and execution in all my pieces, just as any painter or musician would.
Visual Design is the study of visual composition, whether static or dynamic (such as in animation). That ends up being very applicable to most comercial art applications such as posters, billboards, TV spots, etc. Since it's used so much in applied arts, it's easy to fall into the trap of saying that graphic design is not art, but tell that to Andy Warhol.
But when it really comes down to it, art is art only if people say it's art. What else can we define it by? So if you say "I created this, it's art", then it is. Whether other people think the same thing is a seperate issue. And you'll need to ask yourself: what's the value of something that you create if only you can appreciate it? I'm not saying it isn't valuable, just that it's something to think about. There are lots of artists who don't care about an audience. Personally, I need an audience for the art I create. It's part of my medium. Every artist has to decide why he or she creates art.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does this get onto the front page at Slashdot? Am I missing something, or is this just another web page about building a mini-ITX system? How is this either News or Stuff That Matters?
This has been covered before (way back in aught-2). I'd just like to make one point (which was also covered in the comments on the previous article): it's not really transparent aluminum. It's a compound that happens to have aluminum as one of its component elements, and it happens to be transparent. That isn't actually anything new. Ever heard of ruby? Sapphire? They're both crystaline aluminum oxide.
I can't help noticing that no one has brought up the possibility that people might be finding better things to do with their time. Are we so indoctrinated as to think that people will always consume passive media? For me, in most instances, I have better things to do with my time than to sit there and absorb what Hollywood tells me. I'm not saying everyone has to be the same way, but I find it more fulfilling most of the time to work on a personal project or hang out with friends than to watch a movie or TV show. I do still watch movies sometimes, but it's an out-of-the-ordinary thing for me.
So I put forth this suggestion: perhaps people are finding better things to do with their time?
(Kind of ironic, since I'm an animator, helping provide passive media for other people to consume)
Personally I thought this show worked better on the radio, where I didn't get distracted by extremely low budget. Are British people just used to this sort of production value? No, I'm not being a troll -- I do think it's a very innovative series, but the TV version just didn't hold my interest. It seems like a lot more shows that come from the UK have much lower production values than we're used to seeing in the US. Anyone have any insights as to why there's such a difference?
I realized something when I watched ROTS: Star Wars movies are really only good when the good guys are the underdogs. I'm not saying ROTS was great because it wasn't at all, but it was definitely better than the first two prequels. I found myself much more involved in the action and the struggle, simply because I knew that Obi-Wan and Yoda were the underdogs. It was the same way in the original trilogy, particularly 4 and 5.
In the first two prequels the good guys were in power. I don't want to see a movie about the Good Republic fighting rebels. I want to see a movie about rebels fighting the Evil Empire.
How many times am I going to see announcements like this on Slashdot? I don't know if this one is going to turn out to be true, but based on reliability of past "near-native emulation speed" announcements I'm pretty skeptical.
-David
Warning: there will be spoilers below.
Okay, I know a lot of people have been complaining about it being "too perfect" or something like that, but I'd like to go into it on a slightly different tack.
When you make a film, there needs to be a point. You have to make a decision about why you're making it and why the audience would want to watch it. Is it as a demo, to show off your technical prowess at modeling and backgrounds and so on? Okay, then the only people who'll watch it are people who want to see pretty pictures.
A much more common goal for a film is to be entertaining to a wide audience, and this almost always involves a story that fulfils a basic human understanding of what a story should be. Look at any sucessful feature or short and it has this.
Part of creating a successful whole is to keep focused. It's a disaster if the audience is distracted by anything. If you're deeply involved in the story and then you see a character with a face that doesn't look quite real, you're going to think about that and stop being involved in the story.
The film progresses as a "look how pretty this all is" demo. Sure, pretty. Very idyllic. Now, why am I watching this again? I want to be fulfilled, not just see pretty pictures.
Now on to some specific things.
Ahem. As a native English speaker, I can testify that yes, they are pronounced exactly the same way, at least by most Americans most of the time. I guess I should have been clearer about that. Perhaps in British English (which I assume, as a non-native speaker, is the variety you've learned) they're pronounced differently, though when I think about an English person pronouncing those words it wouldn't be much difference at all, and might even require a native speaker to discern.
And besides, don't tell me that the dictionary decrees that it's so, and therefore it's so, because that's just absurd. In spoken language, if 95% of people say things in a way that's contrary to what the dictionary says, then the dictionary's wrong. The study of Linguistics is there to serve languages, not vice versa.
To support my claim of the same pronunciation, here are the Merriam-Webster definitions for they're, there, and their. Note that all have a pronunciation guide in common. Yes, each one is sometimes pronounced differently depending on context or accent, but in my eperience the pronunciation the three entries have in common is by far the most common. Keep in mind, of course, that this is an American dictionary, and I'm an from the west coast of the United states, so it may not apply for all dialects. Also, as I said above, the dictionary isn't the authority -- it should merely report on how things are actually pronounced.
I'm right with you on that. But again, that's an issue of spelling, not pronunciation. Anyone who knows English well enough to be proficient at conversation shouldn't have any trouble with "their," "there," and "they're" because tbry should be clear in context. -David
I'm astounded that no one has mentioned what seems to me to be a more apparent mistake: the one in the title!
"PVR's Head-to-Head: MythTV vs. Microsoft MCE"
Unless this title means to refer to a Head-to-Head posessed by a single PVR, or even by the class of objects known as PVR (both of which wouldn't make much sense in this context), there shouldn't be an apostrophe in that title. We're talking multiple PVRs -- posessiveness doesn't come into it.
Of course, all this is kind of pedantic. Language rules like these were semi-arbitrarily decided upon two or three hundred years ago. We all know from context what the author of the submission meant. It's a rare circumstance when there's actually any ambiguity in context. Consider that "there," "their," and "they're" are pronounced exactly the same as each other, but we almost never need disambiguation when we speak.
-David
Image Magick is fantastic for anyone who doesn't want to deal with the startup times for windowed graphics programs as well as anyone who wants to set up batch jobs to apply effects to lots of images at once.
I have a similar complaint about tablets. Why can't someone take a decent screen resolution and throw it into a tablet? According to TabletPCTalk.com there's only one option that has higher than 1024x768 resolution. Give me a few more pixels and it'll start to be a viable art tool (seems like an obvious target market, since almost all of 'em have pressure sensitive stylus input).
-David
Except that flood myths are common to many world religions. I know, for instance, that native Americans in the Pacific Northwest of the United States had a flood myth that ivolved someone building a giant canoe to survive the flood. Explaining the biblical flood with events local to the Middle East ignores those commonalities with other religions. I'm not an anothropologist, but what I learned in school about it suggests that flood myths exist because of features of the human psyche, not because of historical events.
-David
... you just have to know where to look. It's extremely rare that I listen to mainstream radio. Instead I listen to KCRW (a listener-supported Los Angeles radio station known for its eclectic music programs and for giving many fabulous musicians their first airplay) and Radio Paradise (an internet radio station that describes what it plays as "eclectic intelligent rock"). I've discovered a number of bands that I absolutely love through these stations, and I never would have heard them on mainstream radio. -David
Why go to the bother of writing code when someone else has already done it for you? I translated the binary with zero lines of code.
But that kind of situation exists for anyone who subscribes to some sort of pay TV service. Most people only watch three or four channels regularly anyway. Personally, I'm only interested in Cartoon Network and _maybe_ Nickelodeon, Disney, and Toon Disney. There's no way I'll spend even $20 for just one channel. Until they offer a cost-per-channel option, I'm not going to give them any money.
Anyway, my point is that almost everyone is uninterested in 80% of the channels they pay for. That expectation is built into the system.
-David
Unless everything I've learned about public key cryptography is wrong, your proposed situation can't happen. Under that situation the responding party, which is using the false public key, would send encrypted information that the first party couldn't undertand (because it was encrypted with someone else's public key). So yeah, this kind of thing could happen, but at least one side would know that something was wrong. At best this is a problem that someone can impersonate someone else, not that lines can be tapped without the participants' knowledge.
-David
I worked in games for a few years but I just got sick of the long hours. There's this insincerity in software employment practices that really bugs me. You sign a contract that says you'll work forty hours a week and then they expect you to work fifty. Come crunch time it's up to sixty or seventy and I don't have any time left for myself. Add in that I don't enjoy the work very much (it's just not like the good old days of programming text-mode games in high school), and it became a pretty clear choice for me. I left the software industry to do animation. Now I'm in grad school going into debt so I can do something that I enjoy more. Of course, the problem is that in animation the hours are just as bad... :/
-David
Isn't the goal of industrialization to give us more free time, support a bigger population, etc? I would love it if there were no jobs any more. I've been unemployed for the last seven months, and lemme tell you: It's fantastic! I can't count how many times I've gone to the beach this year, or how much time I've had to pursue whatever the hell I want to (usually that means working on my own animation projects).
-David
Anyway, gradually GIF came into more and more common use, until that glorious day when the WWW made it ubiquitous. Then Unisys took it away and we kind of started over with PNG. Today most commercial graphics programs support PNG (and it's been a long time coming!), but there still isn't the huge installed base of PNG files to do away with the archaicness that is GIF. I would love to eliminate the need for GIF files, but unfortunately I can't. I'm sure it'll happen some day, though, since it's clearly a superior format, and the reasons to saddle ourselves with GIF are gradually disappearing.
Hopefully MS will finally include full transparency support in IE's next release, and then we can use PNG to its full abilities.
-David
This seems too cumbersome to be useful. The low storage capacity of a PDA is a killer, and having to port around an additional A/D converter makes the system way too bulky. What we need is a hard disk recorder like the Archos Jukebox or Creative Jukebox on which you can monitor recording levels. I'm really surprised that I haven't seen anything like that yet.
Personally, I need something that I can record six or seven hours at least between checking in with a computer. For that I have a hard time seeing a better solution than hard disk recording.
-David
Morality is not absolute. That is evidenced by the fact that no two societies agree on a common set of morals. However, agreed-upon morals make a good basis for laws and government because the people agree about whether the relevant behaviors are moral or not. If too many people disagree with the morality of too many of the laws then you've got a revolution on your hands. This is why there isn't a world government right now. People are different and they can't be held under the same laws.
The closest we've come to that is the empire model of government, where the central government doesn't have much power to pass laws over the individual territories. That's more or less the theory behind the federal/state schism that exists in the USA. It lets people govern themselves -- because they have the best idea of which way their morals steer them and how best to apply laws to support their society.
-David
For anyone who's interested and lives in or near LA, the Cowboy Bebop movie is playing at the Egyptian in Hollywood on August 11th at 5 PM. No appearance by the director and stuff, but personally I can't make it to New York....
"Of course," said Batman. "The acid-neutralizing pills in my utility belt rendered the acid harmless before it was able to burn us."
I don't remember the specific numbers of the question, but it was basically: if there were n gallons of 5 molar HCl in the vat and the pills were NaOH, how much must the pills have weighed? How much energy was released in the reaction, and are Batman and Robin likely to have survived?
Batman would have needed something like two tons of NaOH in his belt, and the resulting explosion would have evaporated all the water and fried the dynamic duo to a crisp.
What I'm afraid of is that everyone is getting used to the metered model because of cel phones, and I'm going to suffer as a result....
-David
As to the thing about computers being a graphic design medium, that's true in many cases. That doesn't make it any less art, though. I just completed a degree in Visual Design and I definitely see myself as an artist. I have a focus in animation (yes, it's a kind of visual design), but I strive for good composition and execution in all my pieces, just as any painter or musician would.
Visual Design is the study of visual composition, whether static or dynamic (such as in animation). That ends up being very applicable to most comercial art applications such as posters, billboards, TV spots, etc. Since it's used so much in applied arts, it's easy to fall into the trap of saying that graphic design is not art, but tell that to Andy Warhol.
But when it really comes down to it, art is art only if people say it's art. What else can we define it by? So if you say "I created this, it's art", then it is. Whether other people think the same thing is a seperate issue. And you'll need to ask yourself: what's the value of something that you create if only you can appreciate it? I'm not saying it isn't valuable, just that it's something to think about. There are lots of artists who don't care about an audience. Personally, I need an audience for the art I create. It's part of my medium. Every artist has to decide why he or she creates art.