If you're relatively young, bet on Alzheimers. It's a relatively rare disease that will almost certainly be perfectly treatable within ten to twenty years, based on the research I've seen going by. (I take a bit of an interest as it does run in my family a little bit.)
(Alzheimers can't be cured and the damage it does by its very nature can not be truly undone, but if it's prevented in the first place, the difference between an Alzheimer suffer and a non-sufferer will be an extra pill or two every so often, and little more.)
High blood pressure and the corresponding heart problems are extremely widespread and kill millions, and maim millions more, very frequently and very reliably. Anything you can do to reduce that risk is important, and worthwhile.
Therefore, I strongly suggest that you be rational about the parent; the point is valid but be sure to take into account the relative risks of each. Expected (in the statistical sense) damage of the high blood pressure is much, much higher then the expected damage of Alhzheimers, unless you're in a situation where everybody on both sides of your family has suffered from Alzheimers (which I am not in myself).
You'd have to be a "brain-dead paranoid retard" not to realize the author was deliberately showing the two extremes for rhetorical purposes, and explicitly disclaimed at the end the idea that all people are one or the other, but instead explicitly stated it's a continuum.
>:-) (but about 25% serious.... read, people, read!)
Better: Infinity, not being a number, cannot divide any other number, so "one divided by infinity" is a meaningless statement.
Your statement would be better rendered "1 divided by x as x goes to infinity limits to zero." (I'd like to write the actual symbols because I've heard the limit symbol said a couple of different ways; that's my personal preference.)
If you want to get all mathematical in someone's face, do it right.;-)
Addendum: This holds mostly true for hierarchical organizations. This is also why it's importent for the government not to be a hierarchy, which it isn't in our system. That way, while there's no guarentee of diversity in the system, there is at least a chance of diversity in the Judicial, Congressional (two houses, even), and Executive branches. And the hierarchy certainly shouldn't extend down to individual citizens, because leadership can be surprisingly effect at squashing dissent.
Another interesting thing is that this attitude tends to come directly from the leaders (or even "leader") of the organization; there is virtually no "grass-roots" effect in a normal organization.
IMHO, the most important aspect of leadership is to make sure your organization has a healthy attitude.
It's geek-chic to assume that upper management has no effect on the company and it's all up to the guy on the ground, but the reality is that upper management really is the most important part of the company. If they lead well, the organization will at least be able to do well. If they lead poorly (or not at all), no matter how hard you try from the bottom, you will not get anywhere unless you can change the upper management, or just plain leave and form your own organization.
When you see something like somebody hiring in a new CEO in the hope that they could turn the company around, we'd like to think that one person can't make that much difference. And they can't make that much direct difference, but by changing the attitudes and having those changes radiate outwards from them, they can have a vastly disproportionate impact. (A lot of "hero" units in strategy games work this way, reinforcing nearby "normal" units; there's really nothing unrealistic about this!)
This applies to almost every organization at almost every size, and is a really important to learn, I think.
Make sure you read my original post in context; all I'm saying is to not give up, not that life is hunky dory. Please learn to read more carefully and read less of your own preconceptions into things.
Your whole message is absurd. Laws aren't stable, they get created and destroyed all the time.
Yes, a period of nastiness is probably inevitable; some would argue we're already in it. But that's not a call to fold up and declare permanent, everlasting defeat, forever and ever amen, but to keep fighting until we roll back the bad stuff.
In fact personally I think that while "we" are right, it will not penetrate into the general public's awareness until they start to experience it first hand. Fact is, the average Joe is only now starting to experience DRM, with things like TurboTax which is actually sold to lots and lots of people, and personally, I see encouragement that the general public isn't just going to take this stuff up the ass.
The reality is that expecting people to figure out how bad it is before experiencing it first hand is about three factors of magnitude too idealistic.
I was going to make a snarky Dreamcast comment too but I got beaten to it at least twice.;-) On the other hand it looks like I can be the first to say...
Perhaps what Nintendo really needs is to come out early while being as developer friendly as possible.... that that didn't work for the Dreamcast either. The DC was (and is) developer friendly, esp. compared to the whacked-out architecture of the PS2, and, well, it still didn't win.
On a related note, I'll be intrigued to see how much more power Nintendo gets out of the unit vs. the current Gamecube. Something a lot of fanboys don't understand is that improvement in real graphics quality and CPU performance aren't anything like linear (FPS and pixels/second are somewhat closer to linear). Once you get to Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube levels, and you get artists who know what they are doing, you need a lot more power to improve the actual quality of the picture. That's why, if you're willing to be honest about it, a latest-generation PS2 game may only look 40-50% better then a last-generation DC game, rather then the 300-400% you might be led to believe from the raw processing power difference.
There's a danger that by coming out so soon, the last-generation GameCube games and the first games out of the new Nintendo machine might not look as different as Nintendo might like, whereas PS2 was an instant winner over the old PS due to the time span. (The new hardware would of course look better in the last generation, but it has to have people buying it to get that far.)
I'd say this is a desparation move, and they really need to make sure they bring developers up to speed as quickly as possible, and make the first few games stunners.
You can determine the skew empirically if you have other data to compare with. You can also correlate with known things about the ZIP code (how many yuppies live in 90210 vs. how many grandparents live in a retirement Florida zip), so if "15-30 male population" strongly correlates with how often a given show is recorded, you can guess with a certain probability that 15-30 males are watching that show, giving the advertisers the data they really want while keeping people's private information away from the advertisers.
You certainly can't get everything but given what we already know about ZIPs and such there's a lot of useful data that can still be extracted... which is why the market puts a non-zero value on the data;-)
There are statistical techniques for handling such things. Skewed populations can be handled. Size does matter. TiVo will certainly be able to provide a much finer-grained view of at least some (highly desirable!) demographics then Neilson can, even if it doesn't cover everything quite as well as Neilson.
In fact, once everything is all set up and baselined with existing Nielson ratings, TiVo may well be vastly more useful, relegating Nielson to just a source of verification data.
Once a software startup has a sellable product, what do they need the IPO money for?
What IPO money?
Not needing IPO money is the whole point. I intend to practice what I preach, too, so I'll be finding out firsthand if this can work.;-)
(In fact in my situation, in my opinion, IPO money would be nothing but a distraction. It would gain me little extra capability over what I already have while laying crushing obligations on me.)
The profit model for BitTorrent is to sell the technology, with support and probable customizations, to sites serving huge files all the time, saving them money on bandwidth, and some of that could then be given to Bram instead. Unlike most.com businesses which had an idea and software that would be out of beta two years from the IPO, he's already got software so he could start the "profit" with the first sale. (Well, theoretically there's the cost of writing the software but from the hypothetical corporation's point of view that effort is zero, since it starts off with the software.) He wouldn't be asking the client users to download anything, which helps, and with enough time might even be able to build a BitTorrent ActiveX control so the average user (Windows, IE) doesn't even have to explicitly download a BT client. (That's how I'd go, if I were going to make this into a business.)
I think a "startup" nowadays needs to go ahead and have a sellable software product in hand before expecting to go anywhere, much as a startup free software product needs to have something that does usable work before it will attract a developer community.
The only thing that would concern me about this business model is that bandwidth prices are kind of artificially inflated right now because of really crappy leadership by our Federal government. If any FCC administration ever figured out what they were doing, or suddenly had an attack of ethics and remembered that they're supposed to server the people rather then corporate interests, the bandwidth situation could significantly improve, which would lower (albiet not eliminate) the need for BitTorrent technology at the corporate level. There may be a relatively narrow window where this sort of thing is economically viable (as opposed to useful; they are not the same thing at all!). Still, said "relatively narrow window" in all likelihood is at least three or four years (I can't imagine the bandwidth situation being sorted out on a large scale in any lesser time period) and you can still make a respectable amount of money in that time, plus you have that time to refine the product into something that may be able to continue to be usable even after market conditions change.
More germane to my point: Suppose Spielberg had hypothetical perfect CGI technology available to him, which doesn't exist even now. Do you think ET would have moved like an arthritic eighty-year-old grandmother if he had the choice, or would he have made something more dynamic?
Yes, slow movement and such could be justified in the 80s. But I wasn't talking about "in universe" stuff, I was talking about stuff in our universe.
You missed the point; I'm not saying CGI humans shouldn't look human, I'm saying CGI non-humans shouldn't look human. (Or like puppets, but that's a dead issue.)
Don't even need to bring in QM... observe the simple, high-school level formulation of the gas laws, which with only a few more twists works on a wide variety of real gases, and adequately describes the macroscopic behavior of gas with only a few equations, yet this gas consists of trillions of molecules.
Also compare "lazy evaluation" in computer science; if nobodys looking, it doesn't need to be done.
Finally, "observer" is an easy word in QM to get hung up on. "Observer" in QM is any other particle, only fairly wacky theories require a concious observer. High-level simulation is adequate the vast majority of the time.
CGI will never look human, because typically the CGI isn't human, not supposed to be human, would be wrong if it were human.
In the clips of the Incredible Hulk, does it look wrong? Yes? Good! The Incredible Hulk is not human. He bounces better, moves differently, is just plain built differently.
Did Spiderman look unusual? Good! A man swinging through a city shouldn't be normal for you.
In fact, your claims that the old effects "looked better" are a backhanded slam against the realism of those effects. Everything moved like a human or a puppet, because everything was a human or a puppet. Both of those motions looked "natural" to you, because you're used to them, but unless they were supposed to be a human or a puppet, that actually means the effect was a poor imitation of what "the real thing" should be.
Do you really think ET's race could have survived long enough to build those spaceships they have if they moved like an eighty-year-old arthritic grandmother? The equivalent of wolves on their planet would have torn them to pieces long before they developed civilization.
This is not to say all CGI is perfect. But you're going to have to either cut them some slack, or watch "Finding Nemo"*-style cartoons for the rest of cinematic history.
In conclusion, I disagree completely. Compared to modern effects the 80s effects are, well, 20 years out of date. They only look better because you're used to them. I've tried to adjust to the modern style, and while it could still use some improvement, compared to the 80s its stellar. If the (non-humanoid) aliens of the 80s are any indication, what the universe needs most from our planet is enormous quantities of Ben-Gay, Aspercreme, and Gold Bond medicated powder, 'cause there sure is an awful lot of joint pain out there.
*: Not meant as a slam against Finding Nemo; I haven't seen it yet but I expect to enjoy it. The point is that it quite deliberately moves like a cartoon, which is another style of movement we're "used to", even though it's totally 100% fake.
You left the part of your message off where you explained why you think this is a bad thing.
Do you think TiVo has some sort of obligation to make all hacks equally easy? Do you think TiVo is obligated to ignore the differences between hacks? Would you be happy if they simply banned all hacks equally?
I mean, you sound like you're awfully upset about something, but what exactly would make you happy that's also practical in the real world? What obligations would you place on TiVo?
(I suspect that once stated in the form of what you're trying to obligate TiVo to do, you'll find that it sounds absurd, especially in light of the fact that you shouldn't treat TiVo specially, all hardware makers should be treated equally. But hey, prove me wrong; it's even possible I might agree with your reasoning if it's thought-out well enough. I just don't know what it is.)
Actually all of your examples boil down to poor definition, not simulation.
For a long time, people thought matter was somehow "solid". Yet I now incorporate the idea that what I know of as "matter" is mostly empty space, yet it does not materially affect me in any way, because while humanity had to update our definition, "matter" did not suddenly change. It's still solid, and trying to stick a hand through a table still doesn't work.
Later people discovered that matter is all waves and is basically contained energy. This blew some people's minds, but again, only because they had poor definitions and misunderstood the nature of energy. In the meantime, sticking your hand through the table remains impossible.
"Language" is not a simulation, you just have a crappy definition of what it is. My definition happens to include a mode of language that is communicated via letters, and can still encompass the communication of ideas.
This all sounds very postmodern... "Look, this thing you call 'blah' is made up of parts that are not themselves 'blah', therefore what you call 'blah' does not exist!" But it's shit. What I call 'blah' is a whole that is greater then the sum of its parts, which happens all the time. My car does not fall apart when I realize that it is made up of many parts that are not themselves a car. The whole is just are real as the parts; your definition of the whole may be wrong, there may even be times where you need to revise it for border cases, but that does not mean that the whole is not a meaningful distinction.
This isn't deep thought, this is pot-smoking philosophy.
Not necessarily. You seem to be suffering from the infinity fallacy, "an infinite set necessarily contains all humanly conceivable elements." This is trivially incorrect: Consider the set of all integers. No matter how long you look, you will never find "1.5". It's not in there.
An infinite set does not necessarily contain all humanly conceivable elements. It is certainly possible that despite an infinite number of worlds, this is the only one inhabited by intelligent life. We can say with confidence then that such inhabitation was not done by chance, since whatever the probability there would be infinitely other inhabited worlds, but suppose natural worlds inhabited by intelligent life are simply impossible for some reason, and this world alone is inhabited because of the actions of some external agency that does not affect the other worlds?
I'm not making this claim in particular; my point is "There are an infinite number of worlds, therefore there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds" does not follow logically from the definition of infinity. More evidence is required.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
Only if the simulation is poorly written, which we can't assume. It is not conceptually difficult to imagine that the "zoomed in" parts of reality exactly match the approximation to a fine enough level of detail that we can not tell the difference, even in principle.
So observation doesn't affect anything in any coarse way, it just affects the depth of the simulation, and there's no experiment you can run from the inside to tell what's going on. Simulation or no, the double-slit experiment will behave the same, or the simulation is broken.
The original formulation was "the author deserves the opportunity to benefit from their work". Only in recent times has our understanding of copyright become sick enough that "the opportunity" has increasingly become "the right". I don't find the original formulation so objectionable.
Also, it's not about "fair", it's about incentive to create. Few people will create things that require lots of hard work without some reason to do so ("free software" is by far the exception, not the rule, and even then doesn't cover all the software many people would want to use), even fewer will be able to do things that require work without at least some form of support. Given the authors the right to benefit helps much of this stuff get made.
The original view was OK, it's only the later distortion that is causing trouble.
But at the same time it's not so easy to pass a serialized type from one system to another without rolling your own solution. Int and String will have no problem but what happens when you try to pass a custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in.net to a j2ee system.
You have to face facts... there isn't a way to pass a "custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in.net" to a "j2ee" system because there isn't a general one-to-one correspondence between any two data structures.
You can't create a system that automagically coerces all possible types between even two languages, let alone all possible languages like SOAP and XML-RPC support. Such a thing does not even theoretically exist. How do you pass an arbitrary Python object into a C++ program? It's not even possible (at run time), the closest you can get is the use of accessor functions but that's not the same as having actual language support for the object.
More complex types will always have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Of course standard software engineering practices can mitigate that (extensions to allow same-language communication more efficiently, extensions to support This-to-That so you don't personally have to write it), but that's not a problem that can be solved at the protocol level. It's good that the protocol makers knew this and built it right into the protocol; when protocol makers don't realize that they typically make things that tie the hands of the user too much to be useful outside of the narrow domain it was originally specified for. (Same for APIs.)
SOAP actually supports more complex types through the standard XML namespace extensions; this additional flexibility over XML-RPC has also contributed to the difficulty of getting all the implementations to interoperate, though as I understand it difficulties are the exception rather then the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're relatively young, bet on Alzheimers. It's a relatively rare disease that will almost certainly be perfectly treatable within ten to twenty years, based on the research I've seen going by. (I take a bit of an interest as it does run in my family a little bit.)
(Alzheimers can't be cured and the damage it does by its very nature can not be truly undone, but if it's prevented in the first place, the difference between an Alzheimer suffer and a non-sufferer will be an extra pill or two every so often, and little more.)
High blood pressure and the corresponding heart problems are extremely widespread and kill millions, and maim millions more, very frequently and very reliably. Anything you can do to reduce that risk is important, and worthwhile.
Therefore, I strongly suggest that you be rational about the parent; the point is valid but be sure to take into account the relative risks of each. Expected (in the statistical sense) damage of the high blood pressure is much, much higher then the expected damage of Alhzheimers, unless you're in a situation where everybody on both sides of your family has suffered from Alzheimers (which I am not in myself).
You'd have to be a "brain-dead paranoid retard" not to realize the author was deliberately showing the two extremes for rhetorical purposes, and explicitly disclaimed at the end the idea that all people are one or the other, but instead explicitly stated it's a continuum.
>:-) (but about 25% serious.... read, people, read!)
Better: Infinity, not being a number, cannot divide any other number, so "one divided by infinity" is a meaningless statement.
;-)
Your statement would be better rendered "1 divided by x as x goes to infinity limits to zero." (I'd like to write the actual symbols because I've heard the limit symbol said a couple of different ways; that's my personal preference.)
If you want to get all mathematical in someone's face, do it right.
Addendum: This holds mostly true for hierarchical organizations. This is also why it's importent for the government not to be a hierarchy, which it isn't in our system. That way, while there's no guarentee of diversity in the system, there is at least a chance of diversity in the Judicial, Congressional (two houses, even), and Executive branches. And the hierarchy certainly shouldn't extend down to individual citizens, because leadership can be surprisingly effect at squashing dissent.
Another interesting thing is that this attitude tends to come directly from the leaders (or even "leader") of the organization; there is virtually no "grass-roots" effect in a normal organization.
IMHO, the most important aspect of leadership is to make sure your organization has a healthy attitude.
It's geek-chic to assume that upper management has no effect on the company and it's all up to the guy on the ground, but the reality is that upper management really is the most important part of the company. If they lead well, the organization will at least be able to do well. If they lead poorly (or not at all), no matter how hard you try from the bottom, you will not get anywhere unless you can change the upper management, or just plain leave and form your own organization.
When you see something like somebody hiring in a new CEO in the hope that they could turn the company around, we'd like to think that one person can't make that much difference. And they can't make that much direct difference, but by changing the attitudes and having those changes radiate outwards from them, they can have a vastly disproportionate impact. (A lot of "hero" units in strategy games work this way, reinforcing nearby "normal" units; there's really nothing unrealistic about this!)
This applies to almost every organization at almost every size, and is a really important to learn, I think.
So the answer is to just give up?
Make sure you read my original post in context; all I'm saying is to not give up, not that life is hunky dory. Please learn to read more carefully and read less of your own preconceptions into things.
Your whole message is absurd. Laws aren't stable, they get created and destroyed all the time.
Yes, a period of nastiness is probably inevitable; some would argue we're already in it. But that's not a call to fold up and declare permanent, everlasting defeat, forever and ever amen, but to keep fighting until we roll back the bad stuff.
In fact personally I think that while "we" are right, it will not penetrate into the general public's awareness until they start to experience it first hand. Fact is, the average Joe is only now starting to experience DRM, with things like TurboTax which is actually sold to lots and lots of people, and personally, I see encouragement that the general public isn't just going to take this stuff up the ass.
The reality is that expecting people to figure out how bad it is before experiencing it first hand is about three factors of magnitude too idealistic.
I was going to make a snarky Dreamcast comment too but I got beaten to it at least twice. ;-) On the other hand it looks like I can be the first to say...
... that that didn't work for the Dreamcast either. The DC was (and is) developer friendly, esp. compared to the whacked-out architecture of the PS2, and, well, it still didn't win.
Perhaps what Nintendo really needs is to come out early while being as developer friendly as possible.
On a related note, I'll be intrigued to see how much more power Nintendo gets out of the unit vs. the current Gamecube. Something a lot of fanboys don't understand is that improvement in real graphics quality and CPU performance aren't anything like linear (FPS and pixels/second are somewhat closer to linear). Once you get to Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube levels, and you get artists who know what they are doing, you need a lot more power to improve the actual quality of the picture. That's why, if you're willing to be honest about it, a latest-generation PS2 game may only look 40-50% better then a last-generation DC game, rather then the 300-400% you might be led to believe from the raw processing power difference.
There's a danger that by coming out so soon, the last-generation GameCube games and the first games out of the new Nintendo machine might not look as different as Nintendo might like, whereas PS2 was an instant winner over the old PS due to the time span. (The new hardware would of course look better in the last generation, but it has to have people buying it to get that far.)
I'd say this is a desparation move, and they really need to make sure they bring developers up to speed as quickly as possible, and make the first few games stunners.
That wasn't enough for the Dreamcast either, but hey, the alternative is certain failure.
Well, submit an RFCC to the MIETF and see what happens.
You can determine the skew empirically if you have other data to compare with. You can also correlate with known things about the ZIP code (how many yuppies live in 90210 vs. how many grandparents live in a retirement Florida zip), so if "15-30 male population" strongly correlates with how often a given show is recorded, you can guess with a certain probability that 15-30 males are watching that show, giving the advertisers the data they really want while keeping people's private information away from the advertisers.
;-)
You certainly can't get everything but given what we already know about ZIPs and such there's a lot of useful data that can still be extracted... which is why the market puts a non-zero value on the data
There are statistical techniques for handling such things. Skewed populations can be handled. Size does matter. TiVo will certainly be able to provide a much finer-grained view of at least some (highly desirable!) demographics then Neilson can, even if it doesn't cover everything quite as well as Neilson.
In fact, once everything is all set up and baselined with existing Nielson ratings, TiVo may well be vastly more useful, relegating Nielson to just a source of verification data.
Once a software startup has a sellable product, what do they need the IPO money for?
;-)
What IPO money?
Not needing IPO money is the whole point. I intend to practice what I preach, too, so I'll be finding out firsthand if this can work.
(In fact in my situation, in my opinion, IPO money would be nothing but a distraction. It would gain me little extra capability over what I already have while laying crushing obligations on me.)
The profit model for BitTorrent is to sell the technology, with support and probable customizations, to sites serving huge files all the time, saving them money on bandwidth, and some of that could then be given to Bram instead. Unlike most .com businesses which had an idea and software that would be out of beta two years from the IPO, he's already got software so he could start the "profit" with the first sale. (Well, theoretically there's the cost of writing the software but from the hypothetical corporation's point of view that effort is zero, since it starts off with the software.) He wouldn't be asking the client users to download anything, which helps, and with enough time might even be able to build a BitTorrent ActiveX control so the average user (Windows, IE) doesn't even have to explicitly download a BT client. (That's how I'd go, if I were going to make this into a business.)
I think a "startup" nowadays needs to go ahead and have a sellable software product in hand before expecting to go anywhere, much as a startup free software product needs to have something that does usable work before it will attract a developer community.
The only thing that would concern me about this business model is that bandwidth prices are kind of artificially inflated right now because of really crappy leadership by our Federal government. If any FCC administration ever figured out what they were doing, or suddenly had an attack of ethics and remembered that they're supposed to server the people rather then corporate interests, the bandwidth situation could significantly improve, which would lower (albiet not eliminate) the need for BitTorrent technology at the corporate level. There may be a relatively narrow window where this sort of thing is economically viable (as opposed to useful; they are not the same thing at all!). Still, said "relatively narrow window" in all likelihood is at least three or four years (I can't imagine the bandwidth situation being sorted out on a large scale in any lesser time period) and you can still make a respectable amount of money in that time, plus you have that time to refine the product into something that may be able to continue to be usable even after market conditions change.
More germane to my point: Suppose Spielberg had hypothetical perfect CGI technology available to him, which doesn't exist even now. Do you think ET would have moved like an arthritic eighty-year-old grandmother if he had the choice, or would he have made something more dynamic?
Yes, slow movement and such could be justified in the 80s. But I wasn't talking about "in universe" stuff, I was talking about stuff in our universe.
You missed the point; I'm not saying CGI humans shouldn't look human, I'm saying CGI non-humans shouldn't look human. (Or like puppets, but that's a dead issue.)
When can we begin to affect our universe in ways that show that we are conscious thinkers and not just voracious biojelly?
And I suppose the computer you posted that note on is engineered by the purity of your soul, and powered with your oneness with reality?
You're like the poor kids sitting and wishing they lived in Harry Potter's world without realizing that in most every way that counts they already do.
Don't even need to bring in QM... observe the simple, high-school level formulation of the gas laws, which with only a few more twists works on a wide variety of real gases, and adequately describes the macroscopic behavior of gas with only a few equations, yet this gas consists of trillions of molecules.
Also compare "lazy evaluation" in computer science; if nobodys looking, it doesn't need to be done.
Finally, "observer" is an easy word in QM to get hung up on. "Observer" in QM is any other particle, only fairly wacky theories require a concious observer. High-level simulation is adequate the vast majority of the time.
Oh, cool! Sorry for misreading the tone then. I think it's a fine arrangement too.
CGI will never look human, because typically the CGI isn't human, not supposed to be human, would be wrong if it were human.
In the clips of the Incredible Hulk, does it look wrong? Yes? Good! The Incredible Hulk is not human. He bounces better, moves differently, is just plain built differently.
Did Spiderman look unusual? Good! A man swinging through a city shouldn't be normal for you.
In fact, your claims that the old effects "looked better" are a backhanded slam against the realism of those effects. Everything moved like a human or a puppet, because everything was a human or a puppet. Both of those motions looked "natural" to you, because you're used to them, but unless they were supposed to be a human or a puppet, that actually means the effect was a poor imitation of what "the real thing" should be.
Do you really think ET's race could have survived long enough to build those spaceships they have if they moved like an eighty-year-old arthritic grandmother? The equivalent of wolves on their planet would have torn them to pieces long before they developed civilization.
This is not to say all CGI is perfect. But you're going to have to either cut them some slack, or watch "Finding Nemo"*-style cartoons for the rest of cinematic history.
In conclusion, I disagree completely. Compared to modern effects the 80s effects are, well, 20 years out of date. They only look better because you're used to them. I've tried to adjust to the modern style, and while it could still use some improvement, compared to the 80s its stellar. If the (non-humanoid) aliens of the 80s are any indication, what the universe needs most from our planet is enormous quantities of Ben-Gay, Aspercreme, and Gold Bond medicated powder, 'cause there sure is an awful lot of joint pain out there.
*: Not meant as a slam against Finding Nemo; I haven't seen it yet but I expect to enjoy it. The point is that it quite deliberately moves like a cartoon, which is another style of movement we're "used to", even though it's totally 100% fake.
You left the part of your message off where you explained why you think this is a bad thing.
Do you think TiVo has some sort of obligation to make all hacks equally easy? Do you think TiVo is obligated to ignore the differences between hacks? Would you be happy if they simply banned all hacks equally?
I mean, you sound like you're awfully upset about something, but what exactly would make you happy that's also practical in the real world? What obligations would you place on TiVo?
(I suspect that once stated in the form of what you're trying to obligate TiVo to do, you'll find that it sounds absurd, especially in light of the fact that you shouldn't treat TiVo specially, all hardware makers should be treated equally. But hey, prove me wrong; it's even possible I might agree with your reasoning if it's thought-out well enough. I just don't know what it is.)
Actually all of your examples boil down to poor definition, not simulation.
For a long time, people thought matter was somehow "solid". Yet I now incorporate the idea that what I know of as "matter" is mostly empty space, yet it does not materially affect me in any way, because while humanity had to update our definition, "matter" did not suddenly change. It's still solid, and trying to stick a hand through a table still doesn't work.
Later people discovered that matter is all waves and is basically contained energy. This blew some people's minds, but again, only because they had poor definitions and misunderstood the nature of energy. In the meantime, sticking your hand through the table remains impossible.
"Language" is not a simulation, you just have a crappy definition of what it is. My definition happens to include a mode of language that is communicated via letters, and can still encompass the communication of ideas.
This all sounds very postmodern... "Look, this thing you call 'blah' is made up of parts that are not themselves 'blah', therefore what you call 'blah' does not exist!" But it's shit. What I call 'blah' is a whole that is greater then the sum of its parts, which happens all the time. My car does not fall apart when I realize that it is made up of many parts that are not themselves a car. The whole is just are real as the parts; your definition of the whole may be wrong, there may even be times where you need to revise it for border cases, but that does not mean that the whole is not a meaningful distinction.
This isn't deep thought, this is pot-smoking philosophy.
Not necessarily. You seem to be suffering from the infinity fallacy, "an infinite set necessarily contains all humanly conceivable elements." This is trivially incorrect: Consider the set of all integers. No matter how long you look, you will never find "1.5". It's not in there.
An infinite set does not necessarily contain all humanly conceivable elements. It is certainly possible that despite an infinite number of worlds, this is the only one inhabited by intelligent life. We can say with confidence then that such inhabitation was not done by chance, since whatever the probability there would be infinitely other inhabited worlds, but suppose natural worlds inhabited by intelligent life are simply impossible for some reason, and this world alone is inhabited because of the actions of some external agency that does not affect the other worlds?
I'm not making this claim in particular; my point is "There are an infinite number of worlds, therefore there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds" does not follow logically from the definition of infinity. More evidence is required.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
Only if the simulation is poorly written, which we can't assume. It is not conceptually difficult to imagine that the "zoomed in" parts of reality exactly match the approximation to a fine enough level of detail that we can not tell the difference, even in principle.
So observation doesn't affect anything in any coarse way, it just affects the depth of the simulation, and there's no experiment you can run from the inside to tell what's going on. Simulation or no, the double-slit experiment will behave the same, or the simulation is broken.
The original formulation was "the author deserves the opportunity to benefit from their work". Only in recent times has our understanding of copyright become sick enough that "the opportunity" has increasingly become "the right". I don't find the original formulation so objectionable.
Also, it's not about "fair", it's about incentive to create. Few people will create things that require lots of hard work without some reason to do so ("free software" is by far the exception, not the rule, and even then doesn't cover all the software many people would want to use), even fewer will be able to do things that require work without at least some form of support. Given the authors the right to benefit helps much of this stuff get made.
The original view was OK, it's only the later distortion that is causing trouble.
But at the same time it's not so easy to pass a serialized type from one system to another without rolling your own solution. Int and String will have no problem but what happens when you try to pass a custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in .net to a j2ee system.
.net" to a "j2ee" system because there isn't a general one-to-one correspondence between any two data structures.
You have to face facts... there isn't a way to pass a "custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in
You can't create a system that automagically coerces all possible types between even two languages, let alone all possible languages like SOAP and XML-RPC support. Such a thing does not even theoretically exist. How do you pass an arbitrary Python object into a C++ program? It's not even possible (at run time), the closest you can get is the use of accessor functions but that's not the same as having actual language support for the object.
More complex types will always have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Of course standard software engineering practices can mitigate that (extensions to allow same-language communication more efficiently, extensions to support This-to-That so you don't personally have to write it), but that's not a problem that can be solved at the protocol level. It's good that the protocol makers knew this and built it right into the protocol; when protocol makers don't realize that they typically make things that tie the hands of the user too much to be useful outside of the narrow domain it was originally specified for. (Same for APIs.)
SOAP actually supports more complex types through the standard XML namespace extensions; this additional flexibility over XML-RPC has also contributed to the difficulty of getting all the implementations to interoperate, though as I understand it difficulties are the exception rather then the rule.