I was the team lead on that product for a long time. It's based on a standard XMPP server. Use any standard XMPP client you like, if your administrator lets you install it. (If not, well... I can't really solve that problem.) The shipped client has deliberately been simplified for non-power users, as a result of a lot of feedback from such people. For example, XMPP's resource handling confuses most people, so it has been hard-coded in the client. If you're a power user you should definitely use Pidgin or Trillian or something.
You misunderstand in two ways. First, I wasn't hypothesizing. I was actually going from an earlier article about how the machine works. Second, this is a real computer, not a magical computer. It is doing something very hard and it takes many seconds to process a question and come up with an answer. When I say it is possible for a human to flat-out beat the computer, I mean that Alex can read the question, the lights can flash to let a human buzz in, and a human can have the correct answer ready while the computer is still churning away and doesn't even have a hypothesis ready. In fact the human is faster than even that implies because typically a Jeopardy contestant, especially at the championship skill level, already has the answer long before Alex has stopped speaking and now the competition is about who can buzz in correctly; Alex is reading for the benefit of the folks at home.
This computer is state of the art, and consequently and quite expectedly, it is barely capable of playing Jeopardy, basically. Next year, of course, for the same money you could build a machine 50% better for the same price, and next year, 50% better again for the same price, and so on... but this year it's just barely able to compete.
Based on the previous articles, if the machine had to do either of the things you're talking about, it would simply lose. It is basically just fast enough to compete at Jeopardy and to have a chance it needs the advantage of having text fed to it and having a couple of seconds to chew on it before it can answer. And it is still possible for even normal humans to flat-out beat it to the punch on some questions.
BAD IDEA. Check out the Chilling Effects link: "I understand that I am declaring the above under penalty of perjury, meaning that if I am not telling the truth I may be commiting a crime." Given the analysis posted elsewhere that this really is an infringement, this is a great way to get yourself in a shitload of trouble. Right now, the game will be removed and that will probably be the end of it; filing a counter-infringement notice is asking Namco to come down on you much, much harder. It isn't like asking Namco to come down on you harder, it is an open invitation.
Only counter-file if the DMCA is actually being abused in the legal sense!
You want them to be useful for the other tasks, though. The revolution in education will not come from simply digitizing the old ways of educating, it will come from using computers to do things you couldn't do without them. Kindles won't permit that.
In fact, the studious inability for the education world to realize this and act on it is a significant part of the reason why they disgust me so.
That's a terrible example. An automated plane probably wouldn't have made that error, since it occurred via a combination of human miscommunications. An automated plane would probably have noticed the fuel problem at takeoff. Only the presence of a human as a critical component of the loop allowed that error to occur.
Yes, of course computers will cause other errors, but the question isn't whether the computers will be perfect but whether they will be better. Same for the question of when computers will be driving cars; it isn't a question of when they will be perfect, because they aren't going up against perfect competition. It's a question of when they are better drivers.
No, we don't stone teenage girls to death,... don't bury homosexuals, we just kill them,... don't beat people for listening to certain kinds of music.
No, in fact we do not do any of those things. We in fact condemn those things and tend to prosecute and imprison the individuals who do those things. Just about the only way we could show our disagreement more strongly is to execute the individuals, but better than even odds says you'd consider that barbaric to, which leaves we with not much more we can do to show our displeasure.
When the Taliban stone girls to death or actually, factually publicly execute gay people by burying them alive, they do so as the ruling government in question. If there is a "we" there, if there is in fact a broad public consent that this sort of stuff is OK, that's what it looks like.
I utterly reject any suggestion that there is moral equivalence between the US and the Taliban, and say it says more about the person doing the equating's inability or refusal to see evil than about the US. The US isn't perfect, what a shocker, but the idea that we would publicly execute someone, or deeply weave honor killings into our culture, or engage in widespread female genital mutilation, is just absurd.
(Besides, if we are morally equal no matter what we do than there's no great argument to get any better. You hate X for bruising someone, you hate X exactly equally for going on a mass murder rampage, you've not given X any particular reason to care what you think. Moral equivocation as a technique for trying to get the US to behave better is profoundly, deeply flawed, because it is based on entirely sacrificing the very idea that there is a "better" to be.)
Of course this story is quite likely not true or useful, as other have pointed out. But if we ever do develop room-temperature superconductors, expect them to be buried. Even here in Michigan we'd be running a real risk if we left a ~100 degree superconductor above ground (it only takes one day, even just one second of your superconductor not being a superconductor to ruin your day, and preventively shutting the grid down ruins your day too), but bury it and it'll never warm up. In fact as you get close to "room temperature" you get to the point where every degree is a couple hundred miles further south you can bury the superconductor without having to refrigerate it at all.
So it's not really nothing new, but it is just an another "china and communism is bad"-story when pretty much the same is done in the US.
Yes, that "requiring real names on WoW forums" really sank like a trace, didn't it? I barely heard about it. You can tell how nobody cares when that happens in the US, because, like, there would have been a big stink about it or something.
What that basically means is that your 1080P video was overcompressed and did not actually contain "1080P"-worth of information. The 4K video is probably overcompressed and doesn't contain "4K" worth of information either, but it had more than the 1080P video. (In fact there's a decent chance the 4K video is simply about 1080P's worth done right.) You shouldn't be able to tell.
Variable bit rate encodings means that resolution is pretty much a fiction, as others have pointed out in this discussion.
This is one of the reasons that BluRay won't quite die as fast as some people say. While it is technically possible to stream a BluRay-quality video, we're a ways away from it being practical on the large scale yet, and we're even further away from it being so dirt cheap that big corporations finally decide that they might as well not compress the video to death. (I've certainly streamed some video from Netflix I'd call "better than SD", but definitely not "BluRay quality".) Until then, streams can label themselves as "1080P" all they like, but without the bits it's just equivalent to a lower resolution video upsampled. There's different levels of "pixel quality".
In other news, a DVD can have a better quality than a streamed putatively-HD video, because the DVD may have less resoultion, but (like BluRay) it's full of high-quality pixels where the HD-stream may just consist of impressionistic blobs when you really look at it. Bits matter.
I used to joke it was just a matter of time before the entire state of California was labeled "California contains substances known by the State of California to cause cancer." I guess it's not a joke anymore. It may not have happened yet, but this certainly takes the humor out of it; now it's merely a rational prediction.
I hate to say this, but: this. It isn't conservatives, it isn't liberals, it isn't even anything that would be today recognized as "progressive", because all political philosophies have shifted so far in the past hundred+ years as to be unrecognizable.
What it is is a hundred-year-old meme program still running in an environment that falsifies every underlying assumption the program is built on, and until we flush it out of our system, we're not going to have any radically different results.
I strongly recommend The Underground History of American Education. You do not have to agree with the author's prescription to understand and agree with the diagnosis, which I find well-researched.
The argument is not that international treaties override the Constitution. The argument is that the way in which this promotes Progress of Science and Useful Arts is that getting sanctioned by international organizations for failing to live up to treaty obligations will inhibit the progress of science and useful arts, and therefore this falls under Congressional power. The international treaty is not "overriding" the Constitution, the international treaties are triggering Constitutional powers granted to Congress, which is quite a different thing.
If you want to convince people that their positions are wrong, you really need to understand the actual positions of your opponents, not how you want to caricature them. Opponents which, I would say again, do not include me. I'd just as soon tell the international treaties to take a hike and think international organizations are pretty toothless on the whole anyhow. The fact that your counterarguments aren't even convincing me should be taken as a sign.
Read the actual court decision. There is in fact a public benefit cited here, which is the public benefit of being in conformance with international treaties and not being sanctioned as a result of not being in conformance with international treaties.
Again, I feel I should point out I'm not necessarily endorsing this, merely trying to make you aware of it. The brief is quite a bit longer and more substantiative than the Slashdot summary.
The clawback of culture that we in common own in the public domain into private monopoly without compensation for our loss is theft.
I agree.
It is a theft from each of us.
Indeed.
It is a theft from all of us.
Woo yeah!
It is theft on a grand scale.
Preach it!
It's unconstitutional.
Alas, that doesn't follow. The Constitution explicitly provides for the establishment of Copyright law, and while we can profitably argue about the meaning of the term "limited" (and I agree with the Slashthink that that shouldn't be 95 years), it doesn't mean that any of what you described is "unconstitutional".
Unconstitutional, contrary to popular belief, is not a synonym for "I don't like it". It means that it actually violates the text of the Constitution, optionally "as interpreted by the Supreme Court" though I am open to people reading the document and disagree with the Supremes, as long as you understand that you are in disagreement. Constitutionally-mandated "theft" is still Constitutional. Some people see the income tax as "theft", with some arguments I at least sympathize with, but you really can't call it unconstitutional, even if you don't like it. Constitutionally-mandated violations of logic or physics, as applicable, are also still Constitutional.
At the point where they took the PD work and used it to create a derivative work, they actually fully owned the derivative work. At the point where the originally-PD work is clawed back, the new owners are no longer the new owners; now they are shared owners at best, scofflaws at worst. They have lost rights they previously had.
This is my "reasonable interpretation", and note I phrased it as "reasonable interpretation" deliberately, rather than claiming it's a rock-solid argument. Your interpretation is reasonable too, I think. A court could go reasonably go either way. I just thought I'd expand on it, since you brought it up.:)
I don't like the ruling, but it's probably correct. Congress has the Constitutional authority to institute copyright laws and there is no particular legal reason to presume that once something is in the public domain, it can never be returned to being copyrighted. Not liking it is not a legal reason.
However, after skimming over the decision I see no mention of the issue of this being an ex post facto law w.r.t. using things that were in the public domain, but suddenly weren't. I believe that under a reasonable interpretation of that clause you can not touch those people, and it is not Constitutional to ask them to pony up any money, "reasonable" amounts or otherwise. Liabilities should only be incurred based on the copyrighted status of the used works at the time of use, not at the whim of any future Congressional acts. Unlike "not liking retroactive extension", this point is actually a Constitution-based argument.
In my experience, my doctor pays a lot more attention after I flash the secret sign of the Bayesian Conspiracy, to show I understand the stats involved. YMMV.
Sounds like they shot above what a normal person could understand. A good choice on that DVD, you probably own it only if you're a bit of an enthusiast, and if you're watching the special features on this already-special DVD you must really be interested.
Avatar's much more mass market, for better or for worse, and the special features are largely an excuse to see more footage of celebrities. Alas. (Perhaps Avatar specifically has good ones, I don't know, because I'm just speaking in general, where I think I've seen enough "making ofs" to have a relatively firm opinon.)
Seriously, though, modern "Making Ofs" are all the same.
Whereas the late 70s and 80s are actually interesting, because they had to do things. The "Making Ofs" for Tron and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, regardless of your opinions on the movies themselves, are actually interesting because they faced challenges that normal people could understand and met them with answers normal people can understand.
In fact, a really technical "making of" of Avatar might be really interesting to us, but because the "making of" will be targeted at people in general, it is unlikely to have more than a few seconds of really interesting technical content, because people in general do not understanding complex computer graphics issues. (Nor should they have to.) All they can say is "They made it with computers. Here, here's some shots of rotating computer models."
Tron 2 and the latest Star Trek movie are, of course, "They made it on a computer."
Bricking a system usually means that the only way or ways the system has to boot now has something unbootable on it. Now the only way to boot it is to remove the firmware chips and write them with external hardware.
If you can boot your own code, that doesn't necessarily give you full control over the device, but it's certainly a big step in that direction, so all the closed platforms do their best to prevent this. As a side effect, this makes it a lot easier to brick, because if they fry their one-and-only path in, you lose.
I didn't find anything right away, but if the Pandora can boot off of its SD card, and it would be really stupid for an open platform built on hardware that can probably already do that to make that move, then it may be effectively impossible to permanently brick the thing, barring some sort of Killer Poke. You can always boot with the SD card and reload whatever you screwed up.
Closed systems brick easily. Open systems don't. I wouldn't call that so much an advantage of the open system as a disadvantage of the closed one. We know nothing stops consoles from booting off of writable optical media; the Dreamcast could.
We play with a House Rule whereby all players are simply given the list of two-letter words. We have no intention of ever competing in a tournament, and this is nearly equivalent to memorizing them.
It actually moves things along. There's enough valid two-letter words that it makes legal moves where there didn't used to be, and now we far more rarely have the problem where the entire board is basically consumed, everybody still has tiles, and there's "nowhere" left to play. Now the play board ends up more compact and we more rarely end up with "nowhere" to move.
Many people have done a good job of giving you metaphors on how to think about it. I want to warn about something you must not think about. Forget everything science fiction has ever "taught" you about dimensions. 4D is not "subspace". 4D does not lead to "alternate dimensions", which is loaded down with connotative baggage far, far beyond what the actual math implies.
A three dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 3 numbers to locate a given point. Those three dimensions may be space, but they may be other things too; for instance the rotational characteristics of a rigid object are also three dimensional (three possible axes of rotation you must account for). The description of the income of a two-income family requires two dimensions to describe fully, one describing the one partner's income and the other, the other partner's income. Science fiction and to a lesser extent pop sci load the term "dimension" down with all kinds of things that are, frankly, bullshit.
A four dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 4 numbers to locate a given point. Space-time requires 3 for the spatial dimensions and 1 for the temporal dimension. A strictly 4-spatial-dimension space requires 4 for the spatial dimensions. Technically, that means this game is 5D as there is definitely a time component to the game as well:).
As I pointed out in another comment, this game appears to actually use a rather small space, where the playfield is actually about 8x8x8x4 or so, with 3D cubes layered on top of points as a presentation device. If that is true, then any constituent cube in the playing field can be described with 4 rather small numbers; 3 for the usual spatial dimensions, then a 4th to indicate its 4d position. Nothing more, nothing less. The reason it looks weird is that we aren't ready for 4D rotations, but mathematically it's a straightforward extension of rotations. It bends our brains because they are highly optimized (with good reason!) for the 3D case, but there isn't much mystery to it.
If you'd like to see an example of some of the prime-grade bullshit I was referring to, I submit to you this video, which isn't intended to be an exhaustive catalog of every bullshit idea about dimensionality that scifi has produced, but manages quite well nevertheless. It's accurate up to 4 but takes a sharp turn to gibberish after that.
Looking at the video, it is pretty clear that despite drawing the gardens with cubes everywhere, the garden itself is actually made out of points that are being represented with cubes. If they were "really" cubes, the first fourth-dimension shift would not have left the ring that gets moved unchanged; exactly what happens depends on the exact nature of the transformation but it would have done something to it. (I think one likely possibility is that you would end up with something still recognizably a ring, but now only two dimensional.) But because the ring is actually made of points, it's actually a 2D square, so when we shift, the square remains unchanged in the two dimensions we didn't rotate, and so it all works. (You would get the 2D square I described if you rotated such that depth and 4thD switched, leaving height and breadth alone.) That is also why the ring we don't move retained an entire cube, rather than manifesting as a (small) square after the shift.
So rather than a 3D environment of significant size, we're actually working in a puzzle space of something like 8x8x8x4 points or something (I recall that what is initially the fourth dimension was smaller than the rest but I have not gone back to count. Incidentally, also note that there appears to be another 3D garden world two steps 4above the initial world.).
That's just a non-sequitor. Those few advocating anarchy are no more a viable political force today than they were twenty years ago, and they certainly didn't magically attract the affiliation of half the country in the last two years.
And trying to wrap your admission that you have no evidence of your claims in sarcasm doesn't... do whatever rhetorical trick you thought you were accomplishing there. Have you considered perhaps examining your beliefs to see if they should be changed, rather than just lashing out at people? It does hurt the first few times (no sarcasm intended at all, I'm dead serious), but it gets easier with practice.
Slashdot Mirror
I was the team lead on that product for a long time. It's based on a standard XMPP server. Use any standard XMPP client you like, if your administrator lets you install it. (If not, well... I can't really solve that problem.) The shipped client has deliberately been simplified for non-power users, as a result of a lot of feedback from such people. For example, XMPP's resource handling confuses most people, so it has been hard-coded in the client. If you're a power user you should definitely use Pidgin or Trillian or something.
You misunderstand in two ways. First, I wasn't hypothesizing. I was actually going from an earlier article about how the machine works. Second, this is a real computer, not a magical computer. It is doing something very hard and it takes many seconds to process a question and come up with an answer. When I say it is possible for a human to flat-out beat the computer, I mean that Alex can read the question, the lights can flash to let a human buzz in, and a human can have the correct answer ready while the computer is still churning away and doesn't even have a hypothesis ready. In fact the human is faster than even that implies because typically a Jeopardy contestant, especially at the championship skill level, already has the answer long before Alex has stopped speaking and now the competition is about who can buzz in correctly; Alex is reading for the benefit of the folks at home.
This computer is state of the art, and consequently and quite expectedly, it is barely capable of playing Jeopardy, basically. Next year, of course, for the same money you could build a machine 50% better for the same price, and next year, 50% better again for the same price, and so on... but this year it's just barely able to compete.
Based on the previous articles, if the machine had to do either of the things you're talking about, it would simply lose. It is basically just fast enough to compete at Jeopardy and to have a chance it needs the advantage of having text fed to it and having a couple of seconds to chew on it before it can answer. And it is still possible for even normal humans to flat-out beat it to the punch on some questions.
BAD IDEA. Check out the Chilling Effects link: "I understand that I am declaring the above under penalty of perjury, meaning that if I am not telling the truth I may be commiting a crime." Given the analysis posted elsewhere that this really is an infringement, this is a great way to get yourself in a shitload of trouble. Right now, the game will be removed and that will probably be the end of it; filing a counter-infringement notice is asking Namco to come down on you much, much harder. It isn't like asking Namco to come down on you harder, it is an open invitation.
Only counter-file if the DMCA is actually being abused in the legal sense!
You want them to be useful for the other tasks, though. The revolution in education will not come from simply digitizing the old ways of educating, it will come from using computers to do things you couldn't do without them. Kindles won't permit that.
In fact, the studious inability for the education world to realize this and act on it is a significant part of the reason why they disgust me so.
That's a terrible example. An automated plane probably wouldn't have made that error, since it occurred via a combination of human miscommunications. An automated plane would probably have noticed the fuel problem at takeoff. Only the presence of a human as a critical component of the loop allowed that error to occur.
Yes, of course computers will cause other errors, but the question isn't whether the computers will be perfect but whether they will be better. Same for the question of when computers will be driving cars; it isn't a question of when they will be perfect, because they aren't going up against perfect competition. It's a question of when they are better drivers.
No, in fact we do not do any of those things. We in fact condemn those things and tend to prosecute and imprison the individuals who do those things. Just about the only way we could show our disagreement more strongly is to execute the individuals, but better than even odds says you'd consider that barbaric to, which leaves we with not much more we can do to show our displeasure.
When the Taliban stone girls to death or actually, factually publicly execute gay people by burying them alive, they do so as the ruling government in question. If there is a "we" there, if there is in fact a broad public consent that this sort of stuff is OK, that's what it looks like.
I utterly reject any suggestion that there is moral equivalence between the US and the Taliban, and say it says more about the person doing the equating's inability or refusal to see evil than about the US. The US isn't perfect, what a shocker, but the idea that we would publicly execute someone, or deeply weave honor killings into our culture, or engage in widespread female genital mutilation, is just absurd.
(Besides, if we are morally equal no matter what we do than there's no great argument to get any better. You hate X for bruising someone, you hate X exactly equally for going on a mass murder rampage, you've not given X any particular reason to care what you think. Moral equivocation as a technique for trying to get the US to behave better is profoundly, deeply flawed, because it is based on entirely sacrificing the very idea that there is a "better" to be.)
This website's HTML is dubious, but it has a chart and discussion of ground temperature despite the focus on Virginia. Ground temperature tends to be fairly steady about thirty feet below the surface. I don't know what soil temperature would be in India but I suspect it would still be below 100 degrees at that point.
Of course this story is quite likely not true or useful, as other have pointed out. But if we ever do develop room-temperature superconductors, expect them to be buried. Even here in Michigan we'd be running a real risk if we left a ~100 degree superconductor above ground (it only takes one day, even just one second of your superconductor not being a superconductor to ruin your day, and preventively shutting the grid down ruins your day too), but bury it and it'll never warm up. In fact as you get close to "room temperature" you get to the point where every degree is a couple hundred miles further south you can bury the superconductor without having to refrigerate it at all.
Yes, that "requiring real names on WoW forums" really sank like a trace, didn't it? I barely heard about it. You can tell how nobody cares when that happens in the US, because, like, there would have been a big stink about it or something.
No, wait...
What that basically means is that your 1080P video was overcompressed and did not actually contain "1080P"-worth of information. The 4K video is probably overcompressed and doesn't contain "4K" worth of information either, but it had more than the 1080P video. (In fact there's a decent chance the 4K video is simply about 1080P's worth done right.) You shouldn't be able to tell.
Variable bit rate encodings means that resolution is pretty much a fiction, as others have pointed out in this discussion.
This is one of the reasons that BluRay won't quite die as fast as some people say. While it is technically possible to stream a BluRay-quality video, we're a ways away from it being practical on the large scale yet, and we're even further away from it being so dirt cheap that big corporations finally decide that they might as well not compress the video to death. (I've certainly streamed some video from Netflix I'd call "better than SD", but definitely not "BluRay quality".) Until then, streams can label themselves as "1080P" all they like, but without the bits it's just equivalent to a lower resolution video upsampled. There's different levels of "pixel quality".
In other news, a DVD can have a better quality than a streamed putatively-HD video, because the DVD may have less resoultion, but (like BluRay) it's full of high-quality pixels where the HD-stream may just consist of impressionistic blobs when you really look at it. Bits matter.
I used to joke it was just a matter of time before the entire state of California was labeled "California contains substances known by the State of California to cause cancer." I guess it's not a joke anymore. It may not have happened yet, but this certainly takes the humor out of it; now it's merely a rational prediction.
I hate to say this, but: this. It isn't conservatives, it isn't liberals, it isn't even anything that would be today recognized as "progressive", because all political philosophies have shifted so far in the past hundred+ years as to be unrecognizable.
What it is is a hundred-year-old meme program still running in an environment that falsifies every underlying assumption the program is built on, and until we flush it out of our system, we're not going to have any radically different results.
I strongly recommend The Underground History of American Education. You do not have to agree with the author's prescription to understand and agree with the diagnosis, which I find well-researched.
The argument is not that international treaties override the Constitution. The argument is that the way in which this promotes Progress of Science and Useful Arts is that getting sanctioned by international organizations for failing to live up to treaty obligations will inhibit the progress of science and useful arts, and therefore this falls under Congressional power. The international treaty is not "overriding" the Constitution, the international treaties are triggering Constitutional powers granted to Congress, which is quite a different thing.
If you want to convince people that their positions are wrong, you really need to understand the actual positions of your opponents, not how you want to caricature them. Opponents which, I would say again, do not include me. I'd just as soon tell the international treaties to take a hike and think international organizations are pretty toothless on the whole anyhow. The fact that your counterarguments aren't even convincing me should be taken as a sign.
Read the actual court decision. There is in fact a public benefit cited here, which is the public benefit of being in conformance with international treaties and not being sanctioned as a result of not being in conformance with international treaties.
Again, I feel I should point out I'm not necessarily endorsing this, merely trying to make you aware of it. The brief is quite a bit longer and more substantiative than the Slashdot summary.
I agree.
Indeed.
Woo yeah!
Preach it!
Alas, that doesn't follow. The Constitution explicitly provides for the establishment of Copyright law, and while we can profitably argue about the meaning of the term "limited" (and I agree with the Slashthink that that shouldn't be 95 years), it doesn't mean that any of what you described is "unconstitutional".
Unconstitutional, contrary to popular belief, is not a synonym for "I don't like it". It means that it actually violates the text of the Constitution, optionally "as interpreted by the Supreme Court" though I am open to people reading the document and disagree with the Supremes, as long as you understand that you are in disagreement. Constitutionally-mandated "theft" is still Constitutional. Some people see the income tax as "theft", with some arguments I at least sympathize with, but you really can't call it unconstitutional, even if you don't like it. Constitutionally-mandated violations of logic or physics, as applicable, are also still Constitutional.
At the point where they took the PD work and used it to create a derivative work, they actually fully owned the derivative work. At the point where the originally-PD work is clawed back, the new owners are no longer the new owners; now they are shared owners at best, scofflaws at worst. They have lost rights they previously had.
This is my "reasonable interpretation", and note I phrased it as "reasonable interpretation" deliberately, rather than claiming it's a rock-solid argument. Your interpretation is reasonable too, I think. A court could go reasonably go either way. I just thought I'd expand on it, since you brought it up. :)
I don't like the ruling, but it's probably correct. Congress has the Constitutional authority to institute copyright laws and there is no particular legal reason to presume that once something is in the public domain, it can never be returned to being copyrighted. Not liking it is not a legal reason.
However, after skimming over the decision I see no mention of the issue of this being an ex post facto law w.r.t. using things that were in the public domain, but suddenly weren't. I believe that under a reasonable interpretation of that clause you can not touch those people, and it is not Constitutional to ask them to pony up any money, "reasonable" amounts or otherwise. Liabilities should only be incurred based on the copyrighted status of the used works at the time of use, not at the whim of any future Congressional acts. Unlike "not liking retroactive extension", this point is actually a Constitution-based argument.
In my experience, my doctor pays a lot more attention after I flash the secret sign of the Bayesian Conspiracy, to show I understand the stats involved. YMMV.
Sounds like they shot above what a normal person could understand. A good choice on that DVD, you probably own it only if you're a bit of an enthusiast, and if you're watching the special features on this already-special DVD you must really be interested.
Avatar's much more mass market, for better or for worse, and the special features are largely an excuse to see more footage of celebrities. Alas. (Perhaps Avatar specifically has good ones, I don't know, because I'm just speaking in general, where I think I've seen enough "making ofs" to have a relatively firm opinon.)
Seriously, though, modern "Making Ofs" are all the same.
Whereas the late 70s and 80s are actually interesting, because they had to do things. The "Making Ofs" for Tron and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, regardless of your opinions on the movies themselves, are actually interesting because they faced challenges that normal people could understand and met them with answers normal people can understand.
In fact, a really technical "making of" of Avatar might be really interesting to us, but because the "making of" will be targeted at people in general, it is unlikely to have more than a few seconds of really interesting technical content, because people in general do not understanding complex computer graphics issues. (Nor should they have to.) All they can say is "They made it with computers. Here, here's some shots of rotating computer models."
Tron 2 and the latest Star Trek movie are, of course, "They made it on a computer."
Bricking a system usually means that the only way or ways the system has to boot now has something unbootable on it. Now the only way to boot it is to remove the firmware chips and write them with external hardware.
If you can boot your own code, that doesn't necessarily give you full control over the device, but it's certainly a big step in that direction, so all the closed platforms do their best to prevent this. As a side effect, this makes it a lot easier to brick, because if they fry their one-and-only path in, you lose.
I didn't find anything right away, but if the Pandora can boot off of its SD card, and it would be really stupid for an open platform built on hardware that can probably already do that to make that move, then it may be effectively impossible to permanently brick the thing, barring some sort of Killer Poke. You can always boot with the SD card and reload whatever you screwed up.
Closed systems brick easily. Open systems don't. I wouldn't call that so much an advantage of the open system as a disadvantage of the closed one. We know nothing stops consoles from booting off of writable optical media; the Dreamcast could.
We play with a House Rule whereby all players are simply given the list of two-letter words. We have no intention of ever competing in a tournament, and this is nearly equivalent to memorizing them.
It actually moves things along. There's enough valid two-letter words that it makes legal moves where there didn't used to be, and now we far more rarely have the problem where the entire board is basically consumed, everybody still has tiles, and there's "nowhere" left to play. Now the play board ends up more compact and we more rarely end up with "nowhere" to move.
I recommend it.
Many people have done a good job of giving you metaphors on how to think about it. I want to warn about something you must not think about. Forget everything science fiction has ever "taught" you about dimensions. 4D is not "subspace". 4D does not lead to "alternate dimensions", which is loaded down with connotative baggage far, far beyond what the actual math implies.
A three dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 3 numbers to locate a given point. Those three dimensions may be space, but they may be other things too; for instance the rotational characteristics of a rigid object are also three dimensional (three possible axes of rotation you must account for). The description of the income of a two-income family requires two dimensions to describe fully, one describing the one partner's income and the other, the other partner's income. Science fiction and to a lesser extent pop sci load the term "dimension" down with all kinds of things that are, frankly, bullshit.
A four dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 4 numbers to locate a given point. Space-time requires 3 for the spatial dimensions and 1 for the temporal dimension. A strictly 4-spatial-dimension space requires 4 for the spatial dimensions. Technically, that means this game is 5D as there is definitely a time component to the game as well :).
As I pointed out in another comment, this game appears to actually use a rather small space, where the playfield is actually about 8x8x8x4 or so, with 3D cubes layered on top of points as a presentation device. If that is true, then any constituent cube in the playing field can be described with 4 rather small numbers; 3 for the usual spatial dimensions, then a 4th to indicate its 4d position. Nothing more, nothing less. The reason it looks weird is that we aren't ready for 4D rotations, but mathematically it's a straightforward extension of rotations. It bends our brains because they are highly optimized (with good reason!) for the 3D case, but there isn't much mystery to it.
If you'd like to see an example of some of the prime-grade bullshit I was referring to, I submit to you this video, which isn't intended to be an exhaustive catalog of every bullshit idea about dimensionality that scifi has produced, but manages quite well nevertheless. It's accurate up to 4 but takes a sharp turn to gibberish after that.
Looking at the video, it is pretty clear that despite drawing the gardens with cubes everywhere, the garden itself is actually made out of points that are being represented with cubes. If they were "really" cubes, the first fourth-dimension shift would not have left the ring that gets moved unchanged; exactly what happens depends on the exact nature of the transformation but it would have done something to it. (I think one likely possibility is that you would end up with something still recognizably a ring, but now only two dimensional.) But because the ring is actually made of points, it's actually a 2D square, so when we shift, the square remains unchanged in the two dimensions we didn't rotate, and so it all works. (You would get the 2D square I described if you rotated such that depth and 4thD switched, leaving height and breadth alone.) That is also why the ring we don't move retained an entire cube, rather than manifesting as a (small) square after the shift.
So rather than a 3D environment of significant size, we're actually working in a puzzle space of something like 8x8x8x4 points or something (I recall that what is initially the fourth dimension was smaller than the rest but I have not gone back to count. Incidentally, also note that there appears to be another 3D garden world two steps 4above the initial world.).
That's just a non-sequitor. Those few advocating anarchy are no more a viable political force today than they were twenty years ago, and they certainly didn't magically attract the affiliation of half the country in the last two years.
And trying to wrap your admission that you have no evidence of your claims in sarcasm doesn't... do whatever rhetorical trick you thought you were accomplishing there. Have you considered perhaps examining your beliefs to see if they should be changed, rather than just lashing out at people? It does hurt the first few times (no sarcasm intended at all, I'm dead serious), but it gets easier with practice.