Maybe we could ride it to Washington on MayDay to listen to the Premier speak, and watch the Migs fly over.
Instead we have to drive our cars to Washington on Labor Day to watch the Presdient speak while F-16's patrol the skies on alert for "terrorist threats"?
Yep, I love being free from oppressive government. I give 40% of my salary to the government. Everything I buy I pay 8% sales tax on. I pay 1/2% property tax every year for the luxury of owning a home. It's illegal for me to copy DVD's or CD's that I bought and paid for. Government officials are in the pockets of rich corporations. But it's not oppressive, because it's not Communism.
By the way, I think our system of the government being controlled by rich corporate interests is better than the system they had in the Soviet Union, where the government owned all of the corporations and is then answerable to no one. At least here if the corporation starts failing, the government will change. And at least here, individual freedoms are still respectected. That might be changing though with the current "War on Terror". Ordinary people will quite readily give up liberties for a false sense of security. We have seen this happen since September 11.
Catering to those in the cities? That's funny, I happen to live in a large city with a terrible mass transit system (Los Angeles).
Japan needed something to spend money on after World War II in order to get people re-employed. And they weren't allowed to spend it on building up a huge military, so they spent it on public works projects like the shinkansen (high-speed electric rail).
No one has ever told America that she's not allowed to spend money on military growth. Maybe if we hadn't spent trillions of dollars on the cold war, we would have a great national train system right now. Instead, all we have had to show for it is a collection of weapons that are only useful against a giant enemy that doesn't exist anymore and hundreds of thousands of out of work government defense contractors (most of those lost their jobs in the early to mid-90's). Oh yeah there's that huge national debt.
The truth is that Lucas needed her to have a different job in Episode II so that she could fly around from planet to planet and people could try to kill her and Anakin would be forced to protect her and the two of them could have their cheezy dysfunctional romance.
Lucas made a big deal in Episode II about Amidala being the "former Queen" of Naboo. He rubbed our noses in the fact that she "served her term and then the new queen appointed her to be a senator". No mention of this weird system of government was ever made in Episode I.
Lucas had however received quite a bit of criticism about the morality of the Star Wars universe after Episode I came out. Episode I made things look like the universe was one in which the only way to be great was to be born great. Young girls were born into monarchy and being given authority based on their royal birth alone (not just "Queen Amidala" but also "Princess Leia"). The Jedi were all genetically superior (high midiclorian counts). The Force was only strong for Luke Skywalker because he was the son of Darth Vader, not because he was our lonely hero. And the annoying kid Anakin was born by some kind of Immaculate Conception. Lucas altered things in Episode II deliberately to change those perceptions.
This is all despite the fact that the word "queen" in the English language by definition means a woman who marries a king or a woman who is the daughter of the previous king and inherits the throne.
High speed trains weigh substantially less than conventional trains. Conventional trains have at least one huge diesel-electric engine in front and the cars themselves are heavy. High speed trains like the shinkansen are lightweight electric trains. Riding in them feels much like riding in an airplane, except without the noise.
Because they are so much lighter than conventional trains, they should produce less damage if they crash, even though they are moving faster. Remember, kinetic energy = mass times velocity squared (E_k = mv^2, Newtonian physics). Which would you rather be hit by, a two-ton pickup truck travelling at 20 miles per hour, or a tennis ball travelling at 60 miles per hour?
Ahh yes... they must have had some good air conditioning in that spaceship.
That and the fireplace scene were my favorites. The only thing the fireplace scene was missing was some "porn groove" music.
(off-topic: I still don't understand how a queen is elected, but a senator is appointed. It just seems like a stupid thing that Lucas made up so that Natalie Portman's character wouldn't need $100,000 costumes).
Popular with truck drivers, taxi drivers, long distance (1+ hour each way) commuters and anyone else whose job requires them to spend a long time in their car or truck.
Why not digital terrestrial radio?
FCC regulations. Satellite radio providers (XM and Sirius) avoided FCC regulations by broadcasting from space. If they used ground-based antannae, they would not have been able to lease the required frequency spectrum. It really was cheaper for them to send a satellite into space than it was to go through all the red tape on the ground.
Wow. That's a great idea for a spoof of the whole MPAA RIAA BSA SPA DMCA CBDTPA fiasco. Have Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen riding a fire engine and raiding some poor ordinary person's home to destroy unlicenced copies of CD's, DVD's, computer software, or whatever.
The point of the passage was the training of the drones, the uneducated workers who existed to serve society but who did not live. An appreciation for flowers or literature would not be useful for these people and would in fact be a detriment to their subserviance. So by this training, they were given a dislike for such things.
By the way, the book is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. And no, they never made a movie of it.
Why would humans want to interfere with the actions of a superior lifeform that possesses some amount of power over the world? Do lower animals interfere with the affairs of humans? If they have a modicum of intelligence, they don't. Neither would we interfere with our superior creations.
A more interesting question is, "What will the humans do with their time once they realize they are obsolete?"
This is however, completely off topic, since the distributed computation network is in fact constructed to be a brute-force application of computation for playing chess. So the only "human interference" this system will experience is some silly human trying to beat it at chess. And the machine's only "defense" is to beat that human into the ground in as few moves as possible. Soon, the human will decide that chess against the computer is no longer fun and will stop playing.
Chess algorithms are almost all brute force. There will be no more intelligence in using a massive network of computers to solve chess than there would be in using a massive network of computers to calculate Excel spreadsheets.
D, being digital, means zeroes and ones are getting stored, and they don't degrade much over time and have almost zero noticable artifacts between generational copies.
The reason why data written to DAT's and DVHS and computer backup tapes and other digital tape does not degrade over time is because additional protection bits are written to the tape. There are systems whereby if you want to store k bits to the tape, you actually write n bits (n>k) in such a way that you can have some number of bits which can be lost due to noise or tape media dropouts or scratches or whatever and you will still be able to decode the original k bits. It is introducing redundancy into the data storage.
Yes, it's very clever. And yes, it only works with digital data. Remember, everything is analog at the lowest level.
LD was great for all the people who were interested in anime. Lots of titles were released on laserdisc that weren't even released on VHS. And since the price of the laserdisc version was the same as the price of the VHS version, laserdisc remained popular. Laserdisc was the home market format, while VHS was mostly for rental shops.
This was the case up until a few (2-3) years ago when everything switched over to DVD almost overnight.
I still have a sizeable collection of laserdiscs, although eventually everything I have will be released on DVD. And I will probably buy many of the DVD's simply because they are more convenient to handle than laserdiscs.
Good point. But as far as I know, the three panel DLP's use three lamps. So they do get more light. And you're right, they avoid the "rainbow" effects from when the wheel is out of synchronization.
He did. He used HDTV cameras with resolution of something like 1900 pixels wide. The digital theater projectors support at most 1310 pixels wide. I believe that he used a 1310 pixel version to transfer to film so that the film version would not be better than the digital projection version.
As far as I know, when a big major studio movie gets released, they have deals with the movie theaters. The studio will get something like 90% of the box office receipts (ticket money) for the first week or so. That's why they charge so much for popcorn and soft drinks. After that, the percentage drops and the theater gets to keep more money.
I don't exactly know how it works for screenings at university cinemas. Usually university cinemas show things like foreign language films or interesting independant films as opposed to major studio offerings. Also ususally they will only have one or two screenings of a film and it will be at night on a Friday or Saturday and will be held at a converted lecture hall. So the deal for them is probably different.
You're bias toward film is showing. The film version of Star Wars Episode II was made from the DLP version. So it is impossible for it to be better than the DLP version. Lucas had a higher resolution source that he could have used for the film transfer, but he didn't use it since he wanted to make the DLP version look better.
The only thing about the film version that is better is the shutter effect.
Uh, not really, unless you count your computer monitor pixels three times because it handles three different planes (red, green, and blue).
What using three DLP devices gets them is a brighter image, which allows them to project onto a huge screen. Consumer DLP projectors use a wheel with red, green, and blue filters on it. The DLP device will rapidly switch to the correct channel when the corresponding filter is in the light path. That is why there is a "whirring" sound when you are operating a DLP projector (well, there's also the fan sound).
Everyone likes the AOTC digital version better because Lucas made the film transfer from the DLP instead of from the original HDTV 1900 pixel wide source. If he had used the higher resolution source, the film version would have looked better. And he didn't want that, since he's trying to promote his interests in digital cinema.
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It's actually shipping fees and the fact that Americans expect to pay more for shitty electronics.
Maybe we could ride it to Washington on MayDay to listen to the Premier speak, and watch the Migs fly over.
Instead we have to drive our cars to Washington on Labor Day to watch the Presdient speak while F-16's patrol the skies on alert for "terrorist threats"?
Yep, I love being free from oppressive government. I give 40% of my salary to the government. Everything I buy I pay 8% sales tax on. I pay 1/2% property tax every year for the luxury of owning a home. It's illegal for me to copy DVD's or CD's that I bought and paid for. Government officials are in the pockets of rich corporations. But it's not oppressive, because it's not Communism.
By the way, I think our system of the government being controlled by rich corporate interests is better than the system they had in the Soviet Union, where the government owned all of the corporations and is then answerable to no one. At least here if the corporation starts failing, the government will change. And at least here, individual freedoms are still respectected. That might be changing though with the current "War on Terror". Ordinary people will quite readily give up liberties for a false sense of security. We have seen this happen since September 11.
Catering to those in the cities? That's funny, I happen to live in a large city with a terrible mass transit system (Los Angeles).
Japan needed something to spend money on after World War II in order to get people re-employed. And they weren't allowed to spend it on building up a huge military, so they spent it on public works projects like the shinkansen (high-speed electric rail).
No one has ever told America that she's not allowed to spend money on military growth. Maybe if we hadn't spent trillions of dollars on the cold war, we would have a great national train system right now. Instead, all we have had to show for it is a collection of weapons that are only useful against a giant enemy that doesn't exist anymore and hundreds of thousands of out of work government defense contractors (most of those lost their jobs in the early to mid-90's). Oh yeah there's that huge national debt.
These trains travel at 500 km/h, not 500 mph. So they really only travel less than twice as fast as current shinkansen.
g le v_frame_E.html
There is a lot of interesting information about the technology on this page:
http://www.rtri.or.jp/rd/maglev/html/english/ma
You'd probably die in either case, so it doesn't matter.
The truth is that Lucas needed her to have a different job in Episode II so that she could fly around from planet to planet and people could try to kill her and Anakin would be forced to protect her and the two of them could have their cheezy dysfunctional romance.
Lucas made a big deal in Episode II about Amidala being the "former Queen" of Naboo. He rubbed our noses in the fact that she "served her term and then the new queen appointed her to be a senator". No mention of this weird system of government was ever made in Episode I.
Lucas had however received quite a bit of criticism about the morality of the Star Wars universe after Episode I came out. Episode I made things look like the universe was one in which the only way to be great was to be born great. Young girls were born into monarchy and being given authority based on their royal birth alone (not just "Queen Amidala" but also "Princess Leia"). The Jedi were all genetically superior (high midiclorian counts). The Force was only strong for Luke Skywalker because he was the son of Darth Vader, not because he was our lonely hero. And the annoying kid Anakin was born by some kind of Immaculate Conception. Lucas altered things in Episode II deliberately to change those perceptions.
This is all despite the fact that the word "queen" in the English language by definition means a woman who marries a king or a woman who is the daughter of the previous king and inherits the throne.
High speed trains weigh substantially less than conventional trains. Conventional trains have at least one huge diesel-electric engine in front and the cars themselves are heavy. High speed trains like the shinkansen are lightweight electric trains. Riding in them feels much like riding in an airplane, except without the noise.
Because they are so much lighter than conventional trains, they should produce less damage if they crash, even though they are moving faster. Remember, kinetic energy = mass times velocity squared (E_k = mv^2, Newtonian physics). Which would you rather be hit by, a two-ton pickup truck travelling at 20 miles per hour, or a tennis ball travelling at 60 miles per hour?
Ahh yes... they must have had some good air conditioning in that spaceship.
That and the fireplace scene were my favorites. The only thing the fireplace scene was missing was some "porn groove" music.
(off-topic: I still don't understand how a queen is elected, but a senator is appointed. It just seems like a stupid thing that Lucas made up so that Natalie Portman's character wouldn't need $100,000 costumes).
Satellite Radio:
Popular with truck drivers, taxi drivers, long distance (1+ hour each way) commuters and anyone else whose job requires them to spend a long time in their car or truck.
Why not digital terrestrial radio?
FCC regulations. Satellite radio providers (XM and Sirius) avoided FCC regulations by broadcasting from space. If they used ground-based antannae, they would not have been able to lease the required frequency spectrum. It really was cheaper for them to send a satellite into space than it was to go through all the red tape on the ground.
Wow. That's a great idea for a spoof of the whole MPAA RIAA BSA SPA DMCA CBDTPA fiasco. Have Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen riding a fire engine and raiding some poor ordinary person's home to destroy unlicenced copies of CD's, DVD's, computer software, or whatever.
The point of the passage was the training of the drones, the uneducated workers who existed to serve society but who did not live. An appreciation for flowers or literature would not be useful for these people and would in fact be a detriment to their subserviance. So by this training, they were given a dislike for such things.
By the way, the book is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. And no, they never made a movie of it.
Are you daft? Think "cat" and "rooster". The book is written in British English, not American English.
Why would humans want to interfere with the actions of a superior lifeform that possesses some amount of power over the world? Do lower animals interfere with the affairs of humans? If they have a modicum of intelligence, they don't. Neither would we interfere with our superior creations.
A more interesting question is, "What will the humans do with their time once they realize they are obsolete?"
This is however, completely off topic, since the distributed computation network is in fact constructed to be a brute-force application of computation for playing chess. So the only "human interference" this system will experience is some silly human trying to beat it at chess. And the machine's only "defense" is to beat that human into the ground in as few moves as possible. Soon, the human will decide that chess against the computer is no longer fun and will stop playing.
Chess algorithms are almost all brute force. There will be no more intelligence in using a massive network of computers to solve chess than there would be in using a massive network of computers to calculate Excel spreadsheets.
Left handed? Then use the PL;' combination instead of WASD. Or if that feels icky, use the IJKL combination.
GQ is obsolete now that there are FHM, Maxim, and Stuff.
The reason why data written to DAT's and DVHS and computer backup tapes and other digital tape does not degrade over time is because additional protection bits are written to the tape. There are systems whereby if you want to store k bits to the tape, you actually write n bits (n>k) in such a way that you can have some number of bits which can be lost due to noise or tape media dropouts or scratches or whatever and you will still be able to decode the original k bits. It is introducing redundancy into the data storage.
Yes, it's very clever. And yes, it only works with digital data. Remember, everything is analog at the lowest level.
LD was great for all the people who were interested in anime. Lots of titles were released on laserdisc that weren't even released on VHS. And since the price of the laserdisc version was the same as the price of the VHS version, laserdisc remained popular. Laserdisc was the home market format, while VHS was mostly for rental shops.
This was the case up until a few (2-3) years ago when everything switched over to DVD almost overnight.
I still have a sizeable collection of laserdiscs, although eventually everything I have will be released on DVD. And I will probably buy many of the DVD's simply because they are more convenient to handle than laserdiscs.
What about the 80 mph crash tests? Was there a massive Hindenburg-style explosion?
Hydrogen spontaneously combusts when in contact with oxygen. Gasoline or diesel fuel at least need a spark or heat to combust.
Hmm... maybe "ars gratia artis", art for the sake of art.
Good point. But as far as I know, the three panel DLP's use three lamps. So they do get more light. And you're right, they avoid the "rainbow" effects from when the wheel is out of synchronization.
He did. He used HDTV cameras with resolution of something like 1900 pixels wide. The digital theater projectors support at most 1310 pixels wide. I believe that he used a 1310 pixel version to transfer to film so that the film version would not be better than the digital projection version.
As far as I know, when a big major studio movie gets released, they have deals with the movie theaters. The studio will get something like 90% of the box office receipts (ticket money) for the first week or so. That's why they charge so much for popcorn and soft drinks. After that, the percentage drops and the theater gets to keep more money.
I don't exactly know how it works for screenings at university cinemas. Usually university cinemas show things like foreign language films or interesting independant films as opposed to major studio offerings. Also ususally they will only have one or two screenings of a film and it will be at night on a Friday or Saturday and will be held at a converted lecture hall. So the deal for them is probably different.
You're bias toward film is showing. The film version of Star Wars Episode II was made from the DLP version. So it is impossible for it to be better than the DLP version. Lucas had a higher resolution source that he could have used for the film transfer, but he didn't use it since he wanted to make the DLP version look better.
The only thing about the film version that is better is the shutter effect.
Uh, not really, unless you count your computer monitor pixels three times because it handles three different planes (red, green, and blue).
What using three DLP devices gets them is a brighter image, which allows them to project onto a huge screen. Consumer DLP projectors use a wheel with red, green, and blue filters on it. The DLP device will rapidly switch to the correct channel when the corresponding filter is in the light path. That is why there is a "whirring" sound when you are operating a DLP projector (well, there's also the fan sound).
Everyone likes the AOTC digital version better because Lucas made the film transfer from the DLP instead of from the original HDTV 1900 pixel wide source. If he had used the higher resolution source, the film version would have looked better. And he didn't want that, since he's trying to promote his interests in digital cinema.