This is an example of what I call the "engineer's disease." If you give an (electrical) engineer an unlimited budget they first thing they will buy is a bucket and a shovel. That's so they can go to the nearest beach and shovel the sand that they will refine to get their own silicon for their circuits that they design from scratch on their custom built CAD system...
Do you want to do a good job or do you want "way more fun." Most of the time it is one or the other. If you are in the "fun" camp then you are NOT A PROFESSIONAL, and you give the rest of us a bad name with your never quite debugged code that is over time and over budget. Grow up. Get a clue.
Every job I've ever had had plenty of hard problems to solve, and I didn't have to go looking for extra work. If you don't have that experience they either find a different area to program in, or get out of the field. Like I said before, get out of the way and let the grown ups handle it.
When you view the world with your regular (hopefully) pair of eyes, your brain creates a "3D" experience of what you see. It does this using many cues, including parallax (both horizontal and vertical), occlusion, shading of objects, shadows, and lots of other stuff. Many people with PhDs have spent a lot of effort trying to understand this process and they still have a long way to go.
If you are watching a "regular" movie, be it photographic or CGI, the 3D world is mapped onto the 2D screen When your eyes see this 2D image, you brain is able to use all the cues that are available in the mapped 2D image and it reconstructs the 3D world that was used to create the 2D image. Therefore, a "regular" move IS IN 3D.
When you see a stereoscopic "3D" image, even if it is an old ViewMaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewmaster, all that you are getting is extra horizontal parallax that is provided by having different 2D images for the left and right eye. You are not even getting vertical parallax, so you can't see the top and bottom of things, just some extra details on the left and right of objects. Although this is noticeably different then the 2D picture image, it is still not the same as natural real world vision. So in a basic way stereographic images are not much closer to 3D then a regular image.
Because of the very limited and specialized nature of the stereo information, it is easy to create situations that cannot occur in the real world, resulting in a very confusing experience. Breaking frame is one example. This is when the "3D" object crosses the edge of the image, and it can completely destroy the illusion. Also, normal "flat" cinema uses foreground/midground/background to organize the visual composition of shots, and this becomes much more complicated when stereo is involved.
In some ways "flat" 2D is better, because it uses a uniform transformation to map from 3D to 2D. In doing stereo, the scene composition has to include intra-ocular distance information, and this adds difficult decision making for composing the scene. (Yes, the stereo mapping is mathematically uniform, but the composition restraints are different depending on the shot set up.)
There is a massive body of knowledge in how to use "flat"images that goes all the way back to he introduction of perspective in the Renaissance, and has been further developed with the invention of photography and moving pictures. Stereo has yet to prove that it really provides any kind of advancement for image presentation.
So let me get this straight: you hook this up, train it, and then in the future you can hook it up again and it will tell you how you feel. Because at some time in the future you won't know what you are feeling, so you have to ask the computer about what you just experienced.
I understand that there is a market for this in testing products, say video games, but who else would use this stuff? I just don't see this as being very commonly used. I would guess it is about as useful as a "lie detector", which doesn't do a very good job, and how many people have one of those in their home?
Even though his departure may not have been solely caused by the antenna problem with the iPhone, at least someone at the top level got kicked out at Apple after a huge screw up. No one has been punished at BP, Halliburton or TransOceanic. Although Tony Hayward was forced out as president, he was put to another big important position, and you know he was given some huge amount of money/stocks to make up for his troubles. They sent him to Russia because there is almost no english language reporting about the Russian oil industry, and out of sight is out of mind.
When you get to the top and get that obscene salary, part of the job should be that you take a bullet when things screw up. In American, it is rare for any executive to suffer in the sightest fashion for big problems, even when it is their fault.Just look at Wall St. and the crash. No one got dinged.
You can bitch about Apple about a lot of things, but at least someone got the axe. There needs to be a lot more of that at the top level if American business is ever going to be honest or meaningful again.
This agreement will have very little impact on anything. Intel is a corrupt monopolistic business and they can continue to dominate and manipulate the marketplace even if they comply with the terms of the settlement.
Here is a good technical description of the actual terms:
Read it. All it does is require that Intel stop engaging in the monopolistic practices that it has been using for
the last 10 years. So their punishment is that they have to obey the law for the next 5 years. They pay no fine. They don't admit that they did anything wrong.
The best part is at the very end of the article. This is where the juicy details are always buried.
The settlement gives the FTC authority to appoint technical consultants to monitor Intel's compliance with the settlement agreement. These technical consultants will be subject to Intel's approval and paid by Intel. The settlement requires that the technical consultants be given access to technical information on Intel products as well as other information like company personnel and finances. The total amount that Intel is required to pay for the 10-year duration of the FTC's order is limited to $2 million to all technical consultants.
Two million dollars to monitor a company a size of Intel for 10 years? Pathetic.
Despite the hype that the press will put out, this is a complete win for Intel. No fine. No one in the company is held responsible. No admission of guilt.
You have been getting ripped off for 10 years by Intel/Dell/HP in the form of higher prices and decreased innovation. Remember it was AMD that created the x86 64 bit architecture, not Intel. When Intel was paying bribes to Dell none of that money was going into R&D. The EETimes article makes it clear that Intel was modifying it's architecture to make AMD look bad, not to make any real world code run faster.
Your will not get a dime in compensation for the higher prices you have been paying. When you see figures that Dell paid $500 million in fines, or Intel paid AMD $1.2 billion to settle a court case, they are paying with money they stole from you, the consumer.
This settlement is a joke. Non of the people who profited will be held accountable or loose any real money. Consumers had untold billions of dollars stolen from them and the crooks got away clean. Welcome to our so-called capitalistic market driven economy, sucker.
There are so many inaccuracies in this that it is hard to know where to start. Sony bought Columbia and got Gruber-Peters to run it, and later purchased the MGM lot in Culver City. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures for the details.
Culver City is not anywhere near Burbank, which is where Disney is located. It is 10 or 12 miles the most direct route on surface streets, and 20 to 25 miles via freeway, which is almost always faster except in rush hour, were every route takes two hour or more. As far as I know, or have ever heard, Sony never ended up with "X billions of dollars for some industrial land in Burbank".
Your are almost certainly confusing this with the Universal/Matsushita acquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Studios#Matsushita_and_Vivendi which was widely viewed in Hollywood (the business/cultural community) as taking a bunch of naive out of town investors to the cleaners i.e. ripping off a bunch of cash from people who should have known better. Universal is in the San Fernando Valley, so it is not to far from Burbank, but it is not in Burbank, and it was never a bunch of empty worthless industrial property. Universal City has always been prime real estate, subject to the normal up and downs of Southern California real estate prices (aka Boom and Bust).
I know that Slashdot is often a fact free zone, but in this case there is actual history, and it is not that hard to ask Mr. Google or go the Wikipedia and have some idea of what you are talking about.
If this can be made to work at the frequencies used by infrared targeting sensors it could be extremely useful. It doesn't have to 'match' anything. All it has to do is make the platform not emit in the expected direction, but in a direction that will make tracking difficult. Remember that these kind of meta-materials have a negative index of reflection, so they can act like unusual lenses. It doesn't even have to do this for the entire vehicle, just the hot parts used for targeting. For example, this could be a big winner for UAV platforms.
BP is acting like their major problem is PR. They are not acting like they have committed a major environmental disaster. They are trying to weasel there way out of responsibility in many ways, some of them truly evil. They are trying to silence scientists who might provide evidence against them in both civil and criminal proceedings http://blog.al.com/live/2010/07/bp_buys_up_gulf_scientists_for.html
They are keeping legitimate news organizations away from key locations by pretending that it will interfere with the cleanup. (Just check NPR for reports on this.) They are hiring local off duty cops, IN UNIFORM to keep people from seeing what is going on. When the cop tells someone to leave, you have no idea if they are working as sworn officers of the law or stooges for BP (not that there is much difference). They are paying local fisherman to help in the clean up and exposing them to harmful substances, and keeping them quiet by threatening to kick them off the payroll if they talk to reporters, or tell anyone that they are getting ill from chemical exposure.
Right after the explosion, they make rig workers sign papers saying they had no injuries BEFORE THEY LET THEM GET ON SHORE. They have consistently lied about how much oil was being released, because penalties are based on a per barrel amount. This is still in process, which is why they were trying to silence local scientists who would be able to provide evidence about how bad the spill is.
I can't say that they have killed anyone, but they have bullied, lied and intimidated people to a disgusting degree. If you think this is OK, then I suggest you change places with someone who has their life ruined by corporate greed and then see how you feel. Yeah, a little PhotoShop tweaking is no big deal, but when it is a part of a pattern of law breaking and corruption then it is just one more fact that needs to be brought out to insure that the truth is not ignored.
Very true. I have a friend who teaches Computer Animation for visual effects, and he has literally lost jobs because he actually tried to teach useful skills to the students. That made it management unhappy, since it showed that most of the students did not have the basic academic qualifications to do the work. What the schools wanted was to teach by rote, so that almost anyone could learn to punch the right buttons to and do the tutorials supplied by the software vendors. A lot of the kids had done poorly in high school, or failed in other post high school settings, so the idea was to make them "computer artists" who could get high paying cool jobs working on games or for Pixar. Just like it said in all the TV adds. Granted, some of the students had talent and a good working attitude, but they were also being short changed by the low standards. Although not 4 year accredited institutions, these are still diploma mills.
A quote from Randi Zuckerberg, spokesperson for Facebook:
“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.”
Yes, the Republicans responded, as quoted later in the article, but when you blame mother nature in the form of a hurricane it seems a bit disingenuous. As they said: "Or maybe she forgot about the major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast on the eve of the Republican National Convention?" As a self-professed snarker, I think this is pretty weak.
As I see it, the Chinese authoritarian attitude and the Republican authoritarian attitudes differ only in degree, not in kind.
This is extremely relevant to a conversation I had three days ago. I met someone at a party who used to have an film editing business. They did television commercials and low budget film work. That business failed because both kinds of work dried up. There was a lot of cost pressure on commercials so that side did poorly. The low budget film work endid because of piracy. People are giving that business up because they can't even make their production costs back. The work ends up on the internet, they can't get theatrical release, and they can't sell legitimate copies, either as physical media or downloads.
Just because the MPAA and RIAA are a bunch of thugs engaged in legal extortion, doesn't excuse the fact that illegal copies destroys the financial lives of artists. Do you expect that people who do art must be forced to have a day job to do their art? If you code for a living do you think that you should be forced to work at low end job so you can code in your spare time? If you read a lot of the posts here it is clear the Slashdot Pundits expect that others should work for free to provide them with online entertainment.
Microsoft just canceled the KIN after 2 months in the market. Yes Apple has problems, but how many iPhones have they sold and how big is there market share? What is every other smart phone compared to? Every time someone comes out with a new high-end smart phone the question is asked "Is this the iPhone killer?" Apple has literally defined what it means to be a smart-phone.
This is just a bump in the road for a very successful product. I don't see the iPhone loosing it's lead position any time soon. All you people going for schadenfreude are way off the mark. Apple will fix the problem in a reasonable fashion and move on. It is more of a PR screw up then anything else. Either they will come up with a firmware fix or they will give up and make the rubber bumpers available. Not a huge deal. (By the way I have a 2G dumb phone that I will use as long as possible, so I don't have a horse in this race.)
Well, if you click through the cited article you find out that the cost of the launch tower was $500,000. I don't know if this is just the tower or the tower and associated launch pad infrastructure, although I suspect the later. This is being compared to the cost of the Falcon program at about $700,000 according to a previous post.
Look at the cost of cars vs. highways. You can easily buy a Honda for between $15000 and $20000. You can buy other cars for less. According to this source http://www-pam.usc.edu/volume2/v2i1a3s2.html
Elevated multi-lane highways through cities can be costly because of the displacement of current infrastructure. For example, recent costs in the New York City area have been $333 million per mile (Wieman, 1996). However, these high costs are not representative of other major cities. Even with considerable displacement, the costs were only half of that amount in the Los Angeles area 710 freeway extension (Moe, 1994), and only $127 million per mile for Los Angeles' Century Freeway, which is still criticized as having been too costly (Smith, 1993), even though it was relatively cheap in comparison to other projects.
...
In 1996 dollars, the Federal Highway Administration has calculated the "weighted rural and urban combined" costs per mile of interstate highway to be $20.6 million.(9) Other highway construction normally ranges from $1 million to $5 million per mile, but in mountainous regions, like West Virginia, the costs can be as high as $15 million per mile (Brogan, 1997).
So if you compare the $20,000 Honda to a $20 Million mile of road, you can buy 1000 Hondas for the same price as a mile of road. If you take the $127 Million per mile for the Century Freeway in LA, you can buy over 60,000 Hondas for the price of a mile of road.
Using the logic of the posted article, no roads should be built because cars are cheap compared to roads. Heck, you can buy thousands of cars instead of building a mile of road, so clearly a car is a better (cheaper) purchase.
Gosh I wonder if there might be a flaw in this logic? Maybe in the real world fixed infrastructure has high initial costs that are amortized over time, so comparing those costs to vehicle development costs is not a meaningful measure: trains vs. track, ships vs. harbors, airports vs. airplanes,....
Let's face it, this is another anti-NASA hit piece. Someone found numbers that were roughly comparable, even though they were costs of wildly different kinds of projects, and they put them together to make NASA look bad. And as is always the case, the Slashdot Pundits responded like well trained dogs and started barking and howling in unison. Not much higher mental activity going on in this discussion.
So where do the morons and oranges come in? Well, obviously the morons are the barking Slashdot hoards. The oranges have absolutely nothing to do with dogs or Slashdot, making as much sense as the article that started the ruckus.
Yes,the Valery Plame investigation should be reopened immediately with a new independent counsel. Not only should the office of the president and vice president during the Bush administration be examined, but the the DOJ and various intelligence organizations should be examined to see if they were involved in the leak or the following cover up.
Specifically, the new intelligence groups created by Bush/Chaney that were outside the regular chain of command should be investigated. If I remember correctly, these were in the Pentagon, and were staffed by neo-cons, and they reported primarily to Chaney.
All we know right now is that the name of an active serving CIA asset was revealed to the public, with the result of "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Clearly treason. We also know that Scooter Libby was convicted of obstructing the investigation. So a crime was committed and a successful cover-up occurred. We cannot let this treasonous act go unpunished.
Well, my right wing Slashdot readers, how does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot? Ready to see high ranking members of the Bush team spend the rest of their lives in jail, or be lined up against a wall and shot? Personally, I would volunteer to fire one of the guns, but I guess I just am the kind of person who holds a grudge.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. That was really fast. You prove my point more thoroughly and succinctly then I was able to do.
First, let me restate my argument in a very simple fashion so there can be no misunderstanding. I was trying to say that you could be an environmentalist and be pro-fusion. I was also saying that the majority of negative posts were falsely equating environmentalism with blanket anti-nuclear sentiment. I also asserted that those critical of environmentalism were assuming that environmentalist were anti-technology Luddites.
I did not in my post deny that there are environmentalists that are against all nuclear power. I did not even bring it up.
Your response was to go to known anti-nuclear environmental web sites and show that, in fact, they are anti-nuclear. This is about as insightful as going to a vegetarian web site to show that some people are against eating meat.
Disagreeing with me means that you think that there are no pro-environmental and pro-fusion interests groups. You could support this hypothesis by searching for such groups and not finding any. You didn't do this.
My other criticism was that Slashdot posters bring blind prejudice into the arguments, and do not use facts and logical reasoning. To quote myself: "There are no shades of gray."
I would assert that your response proves my point. You did not look for any information that would prove me right, you only looked for information that would support your pre-existing conclusion.
Am I guilty of "fatuous ramblings"? It might appear that way to some readers. I think that I use logic and sarcasm (also know as snark) to make well founded, if somewhat cranky, criticism of people who are not thinking very much.
Are you a ' "pigheaded moron" '? (Note that I had to put single quotes around double quotes to get this completely accurate.) I cannot make a meaningful judgment about the "moron" part, and I will leave that determination to others. I can, however, say with some certainty that the "pigheaded" part applies, based on your response. I tried to point out that it was not a simple black and white case of all environmentalists being anti-nuclear, and all I got from you is a reiteration of that same simplistic view. That makes the case for "pigheaded" as far as I can tell.
By the way, thank you for a very enjoyable time. I haven't had this much fun on Slashdot in ages. I was literally laughing out loud all the time I was writing this.
"Anti-fusion environmentalist organizations" I wonder who that is exactly? Care to name one? I took a quick look at the referenced article, and all it said was "the greens", which I assume means the Green Parties in Europe. If that is the case then why didn't they say so? Note that they did not say explicitly any Green Party member or refer to any specific Green Party platform.
So now we have a mysterious un-named evil anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-scientific pressure group. How much power do these evil mysterious trouble makers have? Are they completely in control of whatever organization that they are in? Are there any other people in these groups that are in favor of fusion research? Is there any debate about the relative merits of fusion vs. other non-fossil energy sources among the "anti-fusion environmentalist organizations"?
The article referred to is in Nature, the prestigious British science journal. Do you think that they have any self interest in this debate? What are the chances that they would support the ending of a major scientific research effort in Europe in any circumstances? It's not that they are corrupt, but there is no question what side of the issue they will support.
And look how the Slashdot hoards start barking like a bunch of dogs who just caught a cat when they have a chance to trash "environmentalists". Some quotes:
"Having them argue against a *fusion* project pretty much proves that these idiots are not qualified to remember to breathe, much less protect the environment."
"The hard greens don't like what we do with power."
"All progress must stop so we can, um, stay in the financial crisis forever?"
Yes, according to the Slashdot Pundits, all environmentalists are the same: irrational anti-scientific scum who want to drive the planet into a new dark ages because of their ill founded personal vendetta against rational thought. No shades of gray here. No possibility that environmentalists can have various opinions. No possibility that there might be people in the environmental movement who are pro-fusion.
For all the pretense that Slashdot readers are rationalist who use there intellect to examine all sides of an issue, all I see here is a bunch of prejudiced morons who are more interested in thumping their chests and screaming insults at a perceived enemy then actually thinking about issues. You are exactly the same as the people who you construe as your opposition: irrational pigheads who cling to their preconceived notions and would rather make baseless charges then engage in meaningful discussion.
Let's logically examine two statements, one from your post and one from the original post.
First, the original: "The agency's notorious 750,000 patent application backlog..."
Your statement: "For those who may not be aware: the USPTO is largely self-funding and is one of the few (the only?) government bodies that has historically been able to run without additional funding. In fact since 1991 they have had $700 million diverted from their coffers."
So you are saying that a backlog of three quarters of a million patent applications along with a loosing $700 million in funding is a system that works. Most people, and even more Slashdot readers, would define this as abject failure, and a basic impediment to technical and financial growth in the US. Whether you support or oppose the current system, I think the vast majority see that this kind of backlog as being really really disfunctional.
However, you are planning on becoming a lawyer, so I guess that means you think it is OK.
Clearly Mann engaged in thought crimehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime He dared to suggest that the oil/coal/government official denial of climate change might be incorrect. Remember, "We have always been at war with Eastasia"
I have also worked in the film business and worked on 3D projects, and it is still an art, not a science. There are a lot of trade-offs involved, and experience is a big factor in making the right choices.
Besides this, Cameron has already worked with scientists. Between Titanic and Avatar he got involved in other deep sea filming projects. He's been with oceanographers and worked with remotely operated vehicles. Kind of like a rover on Mars.
The way he makes films uses 'pre-visualization', where virtual environments are built before the film is shot, allowing many problems to be solved before being on the set. This is what they do when planning spacecraft operations. This is why there are all those flyby simulations that they show before the actual data comes back. In addition, the current Mars rover planning uses a virtual environment for generating path planning before the commands are sent to the real rover. Just like pre-viz in movies.
I would say that Cameron is a real asset for NASA. It's not like he is inserting himself where he is not wanted. I think he can make a positive contribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want to do a good job or do you want "way more fun." Most of the time it is one or the other. If you are in the "fun" camp then you are NOT A PROFESSIONAL, and you give the rest of us a bad name with your never quite debugged code that is over time and over budget. Grow up. Get a clue.
Every job I've ever had had plenty of hard problems to solve, and I didn't have to go looking for extra work. If you don't have that experience they either find a different area to program in, or get out of the field. Like I said before, get out of the way and let the grown ups handle it.
If you are watching a "regular" movie, be it photographic or CGI, the 3D world is mapped onto the 2D screen When your eyes see this 2D image, you brain is able to use all the cues that are available in the mapped 2D image and it reconstructs the 3D world that was used to create the 2D image. Therefore, a "regular" move IS IN 3D.
When you see a stereoscopic "3D" image, even if it is an old ViewMaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewmaster, all that you are getting is extra horizontal parallax that is provided by having different 2D images for the left and right eye. You are not even getting vertical parallax, so you can't see the top and bottom of things, just some extra details on the left and right of objects. Although this is noticeably different then the 2D picture image, it is still not the same as natural real world vision. So in a basic way stereographic images are not much closer to 3D then a regular image.
Because of the very limited and specialized nature of the stereo information, it is easy to create situations that cannot occur in the real world, resulting in a very confusing experience. Breaking frame is one example. This is when the "3D" object crosses the edge of the image, and it can completely destroy the illusion. Also, normal "flat" cinema uses foreground/midground/background to organize the visual composition of shots, and this becomes much more complicated when stereo is involved.
In some ways "flat" 2D is better, because it uses a uniform transformation to map from 3D to 2D. In doing stereo, the scene composition has to include intra-ocular distance information, and this adds difficult decision making for composing the scene. (Yes, the stereo mapping is mathematically uniform, but the composition restraints are different depending on the shot set up.)
There is a massive body of knowledge in how to use "flat"images that goes all the way back to he introduction of perspective in the Renaissance, and has been further developed with the invention of photography and moving pictures. Stereo has yet to prove that it really provides any kind of advancement for image presentation.
I understand that there is a market for this in testing products, say video games, but who else would use this stuff? I just don't see this as being very commonly used. I would guess it is about as useful as a "lie detector", which doesn't do a very good job, and how many people have one of those in their home?
Droog, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Concordance:A_Clockwork_Orange#D, Nadsat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat slang for 'friend' from the Antony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange made into a film by Stanly Kubrick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)
to the RIAA and MPAA
When you get to the top and get that obscene salary, part of the job should be that you take a bullet when things screw up. In American, it is rare for any executive to suffer in the sightest fashion for big problems, even when it is their fault.Just look at Wall St. and the crash. No one got dinged.
You can bitch about Apple about a lot of things, but at least someone got the axe. There needs to be a lot more of that at the top level if American business is ever going to be honest or meaningful again.
Here is a good technical description of the actual terms:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4205889/Intel-not-fined--agrees-to-restrictions-in-FTC-deal
Read it. All it does is require that Intel stop engaging in the monopolistic practices that it has been using for the last 10 years. So their punishment is that they have to obey the law for the next 5 years. They pay no fine. They don't admit that they did anything wrong.
The best part is at the very end of the article. This is where the juicy details are always buried.
Two million dollars to monitor a company a size of Intel for 10 years? Pathetic.
Despite the hype that the press will put out, this is a complete win for Intel. No fine. No one in the company is held responsible. No admission of guilt.
You have been getting ripped off for 10 years by Intel/Dell/HP in the form of higher prices and decreased innovation. Remember it was AMD that created the x86 64 bit architecture, not Intel. When Intel was paying bribes to Dell none of that money was going into R&D. The EETimes article makes it clear that Intel was modifying it's architecture to make AMD look bad, not to make any real world code run faster.
Your will not get a dime in compensation for the higher prices you have been paying. When you see figures that Dell paid $500 million in fines, or Intel paid AMD $1.2 billion to settle a court case, they are paying with money they stole from you, the consumer.
This settlement is a joke. Non of the people who profited will be held accountable or loose any real money. Consumers had untold billions of dollars stolen from them and the crooks got away clean. Welcome to our so-called capitalistic market driven economy, sucker.
Culver City is not anywhere near Burbank, which is where Disney is located. It is 10 or 12 miles the most direct route on surface streets, and 20 to 25 miles via freeway, which is almost always faster except in rush hour, were every route takes two hour or more. As far as I know, or have ever heard, Sony never ended up with "X billions of dollars for some industrial land in Burbank".
Over the long run Sony made money with their film/TV unit. They had a big write-down in 1995 for about $2.5 Billion (US), but have done reasonably well since then. See http://www.google.com/search?q=sony+pictures+revenue+history&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=7Ru&sa=X&pwst=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=rm5PTPZQjbqxA6TuhfAH&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CEwQ5wIwCg for the the total entertainment revenue which includes music (I think). This chart shows a successful profitable film/TV business unit.
Your are almost certainly confusing this with the Universal/Matsushita acquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Studios#Matsushita_and_Vivendi which was widely viewed in Hollywood (the business/cultural community) as taking a bunch of naive out of town investors to the cleaners i.e. ripping off a bunch of cash from people who should have known better. Universal is in the San Fernando Valley, so it is not to far from Burbank, but it is not in Burbank, and it was never a bunch of empty worthless industrial property. Universal City has always been prime real estate, subject to the normal up and downs of Southern California real estate prices (aka Boom and Bust).
I know that Slashdot is often a fact free zone, but in this case there is actual history, and it is not that hard to ask Mr. Google or go the Wikipedia and have some idea of what you are talking about.
If this can be made to work at the frequencies used by infrared targeting sensors it could be extremely useful. It doesn't have to 'match' anything. All it has to do is make the platform not emit in the expected direction, but in a direction that will make tracking difficult. Remember that these kind of meta-materials have a negative index of reflection, so they can act like unusual lenses. It doesn't even have to do this for the entire vehicle, just the hot parts used for targeting. For example, this could be a big winner for UAV platforms.
They are keeping legitimate news organizations away from key locations by pretending that it will interfere with the cleanup. (Just check NPR for reports on this.) They are hiring local off duty cops, IN UNIFORM to keep people from seeing what is going on. When the cop tells someone to leave, you have no idea if they are working as sworn officers of the law or stooges for BP (not that there is much difference). They are paying local fisherman to help in the clean up and exposing them to harmful substances, and keeping them quiet by threatening to kick them off the payroll if they talk to reporters, or tell anyone that they are getting ill from chemical exposure.
Right after the explosion, they make rig workers sign papers saying they had no injuries BEFORE THEY LET THEM GET ON SHORE. They have consistently lied about how much oil was being released, because penalties are based on a per barrel amount. This is still in process, which is why they were trying to silence local scientists who would be able to provide evidence about how bad the spill is.
I can't say that they have killed anyone, but they have bullied, lied and intimidated people to a disgusting degree. If you think this is OK, then I suggest you change places with someone who has their life ruined by corporate greed and then see how you feel. Yeah, a little PhotoShop tweaking is no big deal, but when it is a part of a pattern of law breaking and corruption then it is just one more fact that needs to be brought out to insure that the truth is not ignored.
Very true. I have a friend who teaches Computer Animation for visual effects, and he has literally lost jobs because he actually tried to teach useful skills to the students. That made it management unhappy, since it showed that most of the students did not have the basic academic qualifications to do the work. What the schools wanted was to teach by rote, so that almost anyone could learn to punch the right buttons to and do the tutorials supplied by the software vendors. A lot of the kids had done poorly in high school, or failed in other post high school settings, so the idea was to make them "computer artists" who could get high paying cool jobs working on games or for Pixar. Just like it said in all the TV adds. Granted, some of the students had talent and a good working attitude, but they were also being short changed by the low standards. Although not 4 year accredited institutions, these are still diploma mills.
A quote from Randi Zuckerberg, spokesperson for Facebook:
Yes, the Republicans responded, as quoted later in the article, but when you blame mother nature in the form of a hurricane it seems a bit disingenuous. As they said: "Or maybe she forgot about the major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast on the eve of the Republican National Convention?" As a self-professed snarker, I think this is pretty weak.
As I see it, the Chinese authoritarian attitude and the Republican authoritarian attitudes differ only in degree, not in kind.
Just because the MPAA and RIAA are a bunch of thugs engaged in legal extortion, doesn't excuse the fact that illegal copies destroys the financial lives of artists. Do you expect that people who do art must be forced to have a day job to do their art? If you code for a living do you think that you should be forced to work at low end job so you can code in your spare time? If you read a lot of the posts here it is clear the Slashdot Pundits expect that others should work for free to provide them with online entertainment.
This is just a bump in the road for a very successful product. I don't see the iPhone loosing it's lead position any time soon. All you people going for schadenfreude are way off the mark. Apple will fix the problem in a reasonable fashion and move on. It is more of a PR screw up then anything else. Either they will come up with a firmware fix or they will give up and make the rubber bumpers available. Not a huge deal. (By the way I have a 2G dumb phone that I will use as long as possible, so I don't have a horse in this race.)
Look at the cost of cars vs. highways. You can easily buy a Honda for between $15000 and $20000. You can buy other cars for less. According to this source http://www-pam.usc.edu/volume2/v2i1a3s2.html
So if you compare the $20,000 Honda to a $20 Million mile of road, you can buy 1000 Hondas for the same price as a mile of road. If you take the $127 Million per mile for the Century Freeway in LA, you can buy over 60,000 Hondas for the price of a mile of road.
Using the logic of the posted article, no roads should be built because cars are cheap compared to roads. Heck, you can buy thousands of cars instead of building a mile of road, so clearly a car is a better (cheaper) purchase.
Gosh I wonder if there might be a flaw in this logic? Maybe in the real world fixed infrastructure has high initial costs that are amortized over time, so comparing those costs to vehicle development costs is not a meaningful measure: trains vs. track, ships vs. harbors, airports vs. airplanes,....
Let's face it, this is another anti-NASA hit piece. Someone found numbers that were roughly comparable, even though they were costs of wildly different kinds of projects, and they put them together to make NASA look bad. And as is always the case, the Slashdot Pundits responded like well trained dogs and started barking and howling in unison. Not much higher mental activity going on in this discussion.
So where do the morons and oranges come in? Well, obviously the morons are the barking Slashdot hoards. The oranges have absolutely nothing to do with dogs or Slashdot, making as much sense as the article that started the ruckus.
Oh no, there goes my scheme to get rich by trading in futures in the D.U. market!!!
Specifically, the new intelligence groups created by Bush/Chaney that were outside the regular chain of command should be investigated. If I remember correctly, these were in the Pentagon, and were staffed by neo-cons, and they reported primarily to Chaney.
All we know right now is that the name of an active serving CIA asset was revealed to the public, with the result of "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Clearly treason. We also know that Scooter Libby was convicted of obstructing the investigation. So a crime was committed and a successful cover-up occurred. We cannot let this treasonous act go unpunished.
Well, my right wing Slashdot readers, how does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot? Ready to see high ranking members of the Bush team spend the rest of their lives in jail, or be lined up against a wall and shot? Personally, I would volunteer to fire one of the guns, but I guess I just am the kind of person who holds a grudge.
In Soviet America, leaks plug you.
First, let me restate my argument in a very simple fashion so there can be no misunderstanding. I was trying to say that you could be an environmentalist and be pro-fusion. I was also saying that the majority of negative posts were falsely equating environmentalism with blanket anti-nuclear sentiment. I also asserted that those critical of environmentalism were assuming that environmentalist were anti-technology Luddites.
I did not in my post deny that there are environmentalists that are against all nuclear power. I did not even bring it up.
Your response was to go to known anti-nuclear environmental web sites and show that, in fact, they are anti-nuclear. This is about as insightful as going to a vegetarian web site to show that some people are against eating meat.
Disagreeing with me means that you think that there are no pro-environmental and pro-fusion interests groups. You could support this hypothesis by searching for such groups and not finding any. You didn't do this.
My other criticism was that Slashdot posters bring blind prejudice into the arguments, and do not use facts and logical reasoning. To quote myself: "There are no shades of gray."
I would assert that your response proves my point. You did not look for any information that would prove me right, you only looked for information that would support your pre-existing conclusion.
Am I guilty of "fatuous ramblings"? It might appear that way to some readers. I think that I use logic and sarcasm (also know as snark) to make well founded, if somewhat cranky, criticism of people who are not thinking very much.
Are you a ' "pigheaded moron" '? (Note that I had to put single quotes around double quotes to get this completely accurate.) I cannot make a meaningful judgment about the "moron" part, and I will leave that determination to others. I can, however, say with some certainty that the "pigheaded" part applies, based on your response. I tried to point out that it was not a simple black and white case of all environmentalists being anti-nuclear, and all I got from you is a reiteration of that same simplistic view. That makes the case for "pigheaded" as far as I can tell.
By the way, thank you for a very enjoyable time. I haven't had this much fun on Slashdot in ages. I was literally laughing out loud all the time I was writing this.
So now we have a mysterious un-named evil anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-scientific pressure group. How much power do these evil mysterious trouble makers have? Are they completely in control of whatever organization that they are in? Are there any other people in these groups that are in favor of fusion research? Is there any debate about the relative merits of fusion vs. other non-fossil energy sources among the "anti-fusion environmentalist organizations"?
The article referred to is in Nature, the prestigious British science journal. Do you think that they have any self interest in this debate? What are the chances that they would support the ending of a major scientific research effort in Europe in any circumstances? It's not that they are corrupt, but there is no question what side of the issue they will support.
And look how the Slashdot hoards start barking like a bunch of dogs who just caught a cat when they have a chance to trash "environmentalists". Some quotes:
Yes, according to the Slashdot Pundits, all environmentalists are the same: irrational anti-scientific scum who want to drive the planet into a new dark ages because of their ill founded personal vendetta against rational thought. No shades of gray here. No possibility that environmentalists can have various opinions. No possibility that there might be people in the environmental movement who are pro-fusion.
For all the pretense that Slashdot readers are rationalist who use there intellect to examine all sides of an issue, all I see here is a bunch of prejudiced morons who are more interested in thumping their chests and screaming insults at a perceived enemy then actually thinking about issues. You are exactly the same as the people who you construe as your opposition: irrational pigheads who cling to their preconceived notions and would rather make baseless charges then engage in meaningful discussion.
First, the original: "The agency's notorious 750,000 patent application backlog..."
Your statement: "For those who may not be aware: the USPTO is largely self-funding and is one of the few (the only?) government bodies that has historically been able to run without additional funding. In fact since 1991 they have had $700 million diverted from their coffers."
So you are saying that a backlog of three quarters of a million patent applications along with a loosing $700 million in funding is a system that works. Most people, and even more Slashdot readers, would define this as abject failure, and a basic impediment to technical and financial growth in the US. Whether you support or oppose the current system, I think the vast majority see that this kind of backlog as being really really disfunctional.
However, you are planning on becoming a lawyer, so I guess that means you think it is OK.
So how does that make your coffee taste?
There are potholes in the roads near my house that are visible from space (on Google).
Clearly Mann engaged in thought crimehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime He dared to suggest that the oil/coal/government official denial of climate change might be incorrect. Remember, "We have always been at war with Eastasia"
Besides this, Cameron has already worked with scientists. Between Titanic and Avatar he got involved in other deep sea filming projects. He's been with oceanographers and worked with remotely operated vehicles. Kind of like a rover on Mars.
The way he makes films uses 'pre-visualization', where virtual environments are built before the film is shot, allowing many problems to be solved before being on the set. This is what they do when planning spacecraft operations. This is why there are all those flyby simulations that they show before the actual data comes back. In addition, the current Mars rover planning uses a virtual environment for generating path planning before the commands are sent to the real rover. Just like pre-viz in movies.
I would say that Cameron is a real asset for NASA. It's not like he is inserting himself where he is not wanted. I think he can make a positive contribution.