>An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.
This is why the internet is ruining our country. It used to be you had to put on a tuxedo and hold a martini glass to hear this kind of garbage. Now it's everywhere.
They have a targeting system that works on highly-illuminated mosquitos in a boxin front of a reflective screen. The optics track the shadows. You wouldn't be able to sleep in a room with this device because it would have ONE REALLY POWERFUL lightbulb. And very bright walls.
Also, there's nothing in the article about differentiating males from females. Except they say they can. I would assume by size, but they don't actually say, nor do they claim that it works, or that they even have a device or a method for doing so.
99 year copyrights are meant to compete with the black market.
Back in the days of 16-year copyrights, if someone fired up a printing press and started making bootleg copies of Catcher in the Rye, you would pretty quickly find out about it. It's hard to put a bunch of fake books on a shelf and not have word getting around.
Now, copyright violation is an assumed percentage of manufactured units. Hell, I bet the studios leak movies directly to bittorrent to fire up the thirst of the poverty-stricken. If you can manage to stay impoverished for 99 years, you can still "win". But it's hard. Over a 99 year period, most people get tired with bootlegging and become regular consumers.
Can you imagine some guy on the streetcorner going "Psst, I got a xeroxed copy of Catcher in the Rye, only ten cents!"
"Cool! This will hold me over until I can save up fifty cents for the real thing!"
Bootlegging really wasn't worth the trouble before copying got easy.
The difference between the two forms is that music can be mixed, and text cannot.
With music, there's a range of extremes from simply incorporating a riff to basing a whole rap song on someone else's beat. The latter is pretty close to plagiarizing, but at least you've added something.
But with text, there's no way to sample without actually plagiarizing. The whole page you've sampled isn't yours.
If you listen to the way rappers quote other rappers, that's the way to do it. You're talking about two or three words at a time that have been sampled.
>I wonder what sort of movies he would have made if star wars had not taken over his life?
Excellent point.
Steven Spielberg is not known as a great artistic director. Adventures like "Saving Private Ryan" and "AI" are looking increasingly grim. But he *is* known for getting along with everybody to the point where movies get made.
My main complaint with George Lucas is that he is 65 years old, and he doesn't have much time left. He basically spent his entire life on Star Wars, to middling acclaim.
What else does George Lucas want to accomplish? I'm with him, if he can rally a call.
>A lot of us who were SF fans before Lucas came in and crowded the good stuff out with his space western feel that way.
Oh right, because Lucas really stopped from getting made Silent Running, Tron, Brainstorm, and the Star Trek Motion Picture (aka Spock's decision to become human).
>Star Wars the phenomenon is what people really pay for, and Lucas' role in creating that is small.
Actually, you're wrong. Lucas is known in Hollywood as being among the first directors to demand payment for marketing, including toys. If you've ever seen a videogame released with a movie, Lucas invented that. He invented the idea of the Han Solo "toy" as important as the movie.
So, while your post is well-written, I have a tough time discerning the point. If nothing else, Lucas' role in history has been to create, via marketing deals, Star Wars as "a phenomenon."
>(and arguably reveals him to be a hack of a director who wasn't surrounded by yes-men on the original films).
Actually, I got the sense in Sith that there were 2 groups who made the movie: Lucas, who wrote the script, and dedicated legions of special-effects artists who were intent on "besting" the Matrix for most-immersive graphics.
I won't argue that Lucas is the most lyrical of directors. I would argue that he knew exactly what he was doing, and did it for a reason, often for practical reasons and in tenuous (but self-serving, and ultimately redeemed) relationship to art.
I think you have a hard time proving that Sith was a "kid's film," and that Clones was anything but the most complex, baroque, and complicated "kids film" of all-time.
Maybe that's "fail," but we can argue over Lucas' intentions more easily than his accomplishments.
I remember seeing Sith three times in the theater, and being struck by how much effort was put into being better than the Matrix. Not to mention the overt political dialogue.
>Kids now quote the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc. Episode 1 was just another blockbuster, made a lot of money but it has no lasting impact.
It's true, when I saw Episode 1 in the theater, I was immediately struck by how awful it was.
And yet, years later, it seems an almost perfect mirror-image of Episode 4. The princess running for her life. The hero growing up and being abandoned. The award ceremony at the end.
There's quite more depth to the pod-racer scene, when you drop the idea that it's silly action nonsense, and focus on the fact that a 10-year-old kid had to engineer and pilot his own craft, just to win his freedom. The adults (including a Jedi) could do no more than cheer him on. It's like a kids' soccer tournament to the death. Nothing could be blacker or more desperate.
When you consider that Lucas actually cares about his franchise, that he thinks about this stuff way more than you do, whole new worlds open up in the imagination.
>Ep IV was decent, had a great story and was entertaining for the times.
Actually, Ep. 4 is known in Hollywood as one of the most sublime John Galt productions of all time, an example of a shepard willfully turning his back on his flock and producing a film *intentionally* of bad quality...After getting ass-raped on THX-1138, Lucas' goal in American Graffiti and Ep. 4 was nothing less than to show the American public just how low their standards are.
It's a testament to Lucas' skill that in making a deliberately-bad film, he made a classic. Even he could not dumb himself down enough to fail.
>Ep V was most definitely not aimed at children.
Except for the constant presence of Yoda, preaching at a 16-year-old Luke. Easily as distracting as Jar Jar and just as worthy of fast-forwarding through.
I could go on. I think you are an example of the type of fan that Lucas has little regard for.
>That is what George Lucas became to his own films.
You're ignoring The Process.
Lucas' re-editing of the original films was not a grand masturbation of his ego as has often been portrayed in the press. Rather, it was the process of coming to grips with new digital effects that Lucas believed would become dominant (witness Avatar).
In short, the process is this: Start by applying digital effects to sample media that is well-understood (the first trilogy). Next, craft a fully-digital actor, however forgettable (Jar-Jar). With proof-of-concept, the following two films (Clones and Sith) are about as perfect as can be imagined for sci-fi animation. In particular, Clones was basically a Disney film, oriented towards kids. (Revenge of the Sith was a little more adult.)
When you realize that Jar Jar is more like a prototype electric car than a failed work of art, the logic of casting such a character can be seen in plainly practical terms.
When Avatar wins Best Picture this year, remember it was George Lucas who heralded the coming of the purely-digital actor.
>I feel like in actuality most students typing notes are acting more like stenographers than note takers. They don't process anything they hear, they just copy it down verbatim.
I don't think writing notes was any better.
In college, I often weighed the pros and cons of taking notes or simply listening. Listen=learn and forget. Notes=don't learn, and maybe remember something.
It was an awful choice every time. I would have welcomed the chance to type fast and spend the time saved digesting what I took down.
By college, my handwriting got pretty fucking awful from the constant time-pressure to keep up with the class. In high school, it was trying to finish an essay in 40 minutes. In college, it was keeping up with the lecture. Handwriting seemed awfully time-limited, and now that I'm not in school, I can relax and write with the sophistication to which it was intended.
Consider that script was intended to be faster than print. But there's no way you can write script in real-time.
I'd say shorthand is the way to go, if you don't want to lug around a computer. But I never got the chance to try either one.
>I'd take notes and scan them after - that worked, ok.
You can photograph documents pretty easily. I'm not sure there's much purpose to scanners anymore, except for high-end applications.
>why don't we have a standard A4 device I can write on a decade later?
Because touchscreens are expensive? It's only recently imo that credit card machines can take a decent signature. And those card swipers at the supermarket can cost upwards of $1000. A full-size touchscreen (no software, no computer) can be $500, easily $2-300 more than a plain vanilla monitor.
>If only they would go back and upgrade the graphics to the first two....
Graphics? I thought the graphics were fine. They should upgrade the bugs.
Fallout's finest charm is the combat takes place in discrete space. All of your units are standing on tiles, with different distances and angles from each other. This is like X-Com, any "tactics" game, and even the original Wasteland. In particular, I never had friendly fire be such an issue in a game besides Fallout. (Granted, X-Com had a lot of FF incidents, but it felt far more random. Rocket launchers and the like.)
The graphics did a fine job of conveying this. But Fallout has so many bugs, it's almost not worth playing. The strategy guide reads like, "Well, you should do this, but since there's a bug...you don't have to."
I play it for the charm, but they should tighten up the game and make it a real challenge.
Mmm, I'm not sure why you were down-modded, except that I've been on sd for about 10 years and I've seen the vagaries of moddation.
But I've been reading Calvin for 15 years now, and your observations are correct.
I never remembered strips quite like this where Hobbes shrunk into the background in the face of superior reality-power. Yes, Hobbes had trouble treading water, but in this comic he is shut down.
Non-canonical is my feeling. If you want to kill the tiger, then just kill him. This is sauce. Weak, tepid, vodka-filled vodka-sauce against an opponent who didn't know what was coming.
Slashdot Mirror
>An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.
This is why the internet is ruining our country. It used to be you had to put on a tuxedo and hold a martini glass to hear this kind of garbage. Now it's everywhere.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html
They don't have a lethal system.
They have a targeting system that works on highly-illuminated mosquitos in a box in front of a reflective screen. The optics track the shadows. You wouldn't be able to sleep in a room with this device because it would have ONE REALLY POWERFUL lightbulb. And very bright walls.
Also, there's nothing in the article about differentiating males from females. Except they say they can. I would assume by size, but they don't actually say, nor do they claim that it works, or that they even have a device or a method for doing so.
>Forgive me if I'm skeptical.
No kidding. In this video, a kid burns a mosquito with a blu-ray laser. The damn thing runs around for 20 seconds before it finally starts to die.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiShG2OxWVc
How come the inventors of this device don't have a video?
>As a result, they are also experimenting with the minimum amount of energy a laser strike must possess to render the mosquito infertile
That sounds really bad.
1. A mosquito in the room has malaria.
2. Laser renders it infertile.
3. ?
4. You get malaria.
99 year copyrights are meant to compete with the black market.
Back in the days of 16-year copyrights, if someone fired up a printing press and started making bootleg copies of Catcher in the Rye, you would pretty quickly find out about it. It's hard to put a bunch of fake books on a shelf and not have word getting around.
Now, copyright violation is an assumed percentage of manufactured units. Hell, I bet the studios leak movies directly to bittorrent to fire up the thirst of the poverty-stricken. If you can manage to stay impoverished for 99 years, you can still "win". But it's hard. Over a 99 year period, most people get tired with bootlegging and become regular consumers.
Can you imagine some guy on the streetcorner going "Psst, I got a xeroxed copy of Catcher in the Rye, only ten cents!"
"Cool! This will hold me over until I can save up fifty cents for the real thing!"
Bootlegging really wasn't worth the trouble before copying got easy.
The difference between the two forms is that music can be mixed, and text cannot.
With music, there's a range of extremes from simply incorporating a riff to basing a whole rap song on someone else's beat. The latter is pretty close to plagiarizing, but at least you've added something.
But with text, there's no way to sample without actually plagiarizing. The whole page you've sampled isn't yours.
If you listen to the way rappers quote other rappers, that's the way to do it. You're talking about two or three words at a time that have been sampled.
Actually, from the discussion it sounds like the gyroscopic forces keep the car from tipping in a turn.
I believe it's an attempt to melt the rubber so you get better traction.
Of course, you're supposed to do it *before* the flag goes down...
>I wonder what sort of movies he would have made if star wars had not taken over his life?
Excellent point.
Steven Spielberg is not known as a great artistic director. Adventures like "Saving Private Ryan" and "AI" are looking increasingly grim. But he *is* known for getting along with everybody to the point where movies get made.
My main complaint with George Lucas is that he is 65 years old, and he doesn't have much time left. He basically spent his entire life on Star Wars, to middling acclaim.
What else does George Lucas want to accomplish? I'm with him, if he can rally a call.
>This would be like seeing Einstein decades later doing an experiment on his own and making a complete and utter mess of it
Einstein hated quantum mechanics, which came of age in the 1930's. Einstein was totally wrong. And yet we would have no universe without him.
>even when Lucas himself is clearly uncomfortable with the results.
I'm comfortable with the results. The results include Sith, one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all-time. What are we arguing about?
>A lot of us who were SF fans before Lucas came in and crowded the good stuff out with his space western feel that way.
Oh right, because Lucas really stopped from getting made Silent Running, Tron, Brainstorm, and the Star Trek Motion Picture (aka Spock's decision to become human).
>Star Wars the phenomenon is what people really pay for, and Lucas' role in creating that is small.
Actually, you're wrong. Lucas is known in Hollywood as being among the first directors to demand payment for marketing, including toys. If you've ever seen a videogame released with a movie, Lucas invented that. He invented the idea of the Han Solo "toy" as important as the movie.
So, while your post is well-written, I have a tough time discerning the point. If nothing else, Lucas' role in history has been to create, via marketing deals, Star Wars as "a phenomenon."
I can only hope you're a troll.
>(and arguably reveals him to be a hack of a director who wasn't surrounded by yes-men on the original films).
Actually, I got the sense in Sith that there were 2 groups who made the movie: Lucas, who wrote the script, and dedicated legions of special-effects artists who were intent on "besting" the Matrix for most-immersive graphics.
I won't argue that Lucas is the most lyrical of directors. I would argue that he knew exactly what he was doing, and did it for a reason, often for practical reasons and in tenuous (but self-serving, and ultimately redeemed) relationship to art.
I think you have a hard time proving that Sith was a "kid's film," and that Clones was anything but the most complex, baroque, and complicated "kids film" of all-time.
Maybe that's "fail," but we can argue over Lucas' intentions more easily than his accomplishments.
>The prequels just appealed to children.
Including Sith?
I remember seeing Sith three times in the theater, and being struck by how much effort was put into being better than the Matrix. Not to mention the overt political dialogue.
>Kids now quote the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc. Episode 1 was just another blockbuster, made a lot of money but it has no lasting impact.
It's true, when I saw Episode 1 in the theater, I was immediately struck by how awful it was.
And yet, years later, it seems an almost perfect mirror-image of Episode 4. The princess running for her life. The hero growing up and being abandoned. The award ceremony at the end.
There's quite more depth to the pod-racer scene, when you drop the idea that it's silly action nonsense, and focus on the fact that a 10-year-old kid had to engineer and pilot his own craft, just to win his freedom. The adults (including a Jedi) could do no more than cheer him on. It's like a kids' soccer tournament to the death. Nothing could be blacker or more desperate.
When you consider that Lucas actually cares about his franchise, that he thinks about this stuff way more than you do, whole new worlds open up in the imagination.
>Ep IV was decent, had a great story and was entertaining for the times.
Actually, Ep. 4 is known in Hollywood as one of the most sublime John Galt productions of all time, an example of a shepard willfully turning his back on his flock and producing a film *intentionally* of bad quality...After getting ass-raped on THX-1138, Lucas' goal in American Graffiti and Ep. 4 was nothing less than to show the American public just how low their standards are.
It's a testament to Lucas' skill that in making a deliberately-bad film, he made a classic. Even he could not dumb himself down enough to fail.
>Ep V was most definitely not aimed at children.
Except for the constant presence of Yoda, preaching at a 16-year-old Luke. Easily as distracting as Jar Jar and just as worthy of fast-forwarding through.
I could go on. I think you are an example of the type of fan that Lucas has little regard for.
>That is what George Lucas became to his own films.
You're ignoring The Process.
Lucas' re-editing of the original films was not a grand masturbation of his ego as has often been portrayed in the press. Rather, it was the process of coming to grips with new digital effects that Lucas believed would become dominant (witness Avatar).
In short, the process is this: Start by applying digital effects to sample media that is well-understood (the first trilogy). Next, craft a fully-digital actor, however forgettable (Jar-Jar). With proof-of-concept, the following two films (Clones and Sith) are about as perfect as can be imagined for sci-fi animation. In particular, Clones was basically a Disney film, oriented towards kids. (Revenge of the Sith was a little more adult.)
When you realize that Jar Jar is more like a prototype electric car than a failed work of art, the logic of casting such a character can be seen in plainly practical terms.
When Avatar wins Best Picture this year, remember it was George Lucas who heralded the coming of the purely-digital actor.
>I feel like in actuality most students typing notes are acting more like stenographers than note takers. They don't process anything they hear, they just copy it down verbatim.
I don't think writing notes was any better.
In college, I often weighed the pros and cons of taking notes or simply listening. Listen=learn and forget. Notes=don't learn, and maybe remember something.
It was an awful choice every time. I would have welcomed the chance to type fast and spend the time saved digesting what I took down.
But the stenographer aspect...so true.
>Or you simply write faster than you type.
Right. That never worked for me though.
By college, my handwriting got pretty fucking awful from the constant time-pressure to keep up with the class. In high school, it was trying to finish an essay in 40 minutes. In college, it was keeping up with the lecture. Handwriting seemed awfully time-limited, and now that I'm not in school, I can relax and write with the sophistication to which it was intended.
Consider that script was intended to be faster than print. But there's no way you can write script in real-time.
I'd say shorthand is the way to go, if you don't want to lug around a computer. But I never got the chance to try either one.
>I'd take notes and scan them after - that worked, ok.
You can photograph documents pretty easily. I'm not sure there's much purpose to scanners anymore, except for high-end applications.
>why don't we have a standard A4 device I can write on a decade later?
Because touchscreens are expensive? It's only recently imo that credit card machines can take a decent signature. And those card swipers at the supermarket can cost upwards of $1000. A full-size touchscreen (no software, no computer) can be $500, easily $2-300 more than a plain vanilla monitor.
You got a writer's callus at 15? We (U.S.) had those in elementary school. Lot of pencil from what I recall.
It's a good thing that "news organizations" is now defined as individual people on the Internet.
>If only they would go back and upgrade the graphics to the first two....
Graphics? I thought the graphics were fine. They should upgrade the bugs.
Fallout's finest charm is the combat takes place in discrete space. All of your units are standing on tiles, with different distances and angles from each other. This is like X-Com, any "tactics" game, and even the original Wasteland. In particular, I never had friendly fire be such an issue in a game besides Fallout. (Granted, X-Com had a lot of FF incidents, but it felt far more random. Rocket launchers and the like.)
The graphics did a fine job of conveying this. But Fallout has so many bugs, it's almost not worth playing. The strategy guide reads like, "Well, you should do this, but since there's a bug...you don't have to."
I play it for the charm, but they should tighten up the game and make it a real challenge.
So Calvin was our Aeon Flux?
The chaos warrior, in the face of massive ordering?
I'll take that. It lends more to Calvin than was previously theorized.
Mmm, I'm not sure why you were down-modded, except that I've been on sd for about 10 years and I've seen the vagaries of moddation.
But I've been reading Calvin for 15 years now, and your observations are correct.
I never remembered strips quite like this where Hobbes shrunk into the background in the face of superior reality-power. Yes, Hobbes had trouble treading water, but in this comic he is shut down.
Non-canonical is my feeling. If you want to kill the tiger, then just kill him. This is sauce. Weak, tepid, vodka-filled vodka-sauce against an opponent who didn't know what was coming.