First off, they failed at getting passed the "uncanny valley". That video is still creepy looking.
Second, this isn't computer animation. It's just video processing. If you still need to do high resolution motion capture to produce your images, you haven't replaced the actor. You've merely edited their appearance in the performance. They didn't even bother to go so far as to take the captured motion and paste key bits of it together into the speech. They just had her sit there and say the whole thing, then "rendered" it.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
For starters, square miles of earth is a poor choice of units for either. The answer in both cases is "less than one".
Depending on how you obtain your uranium (seawater extraction, for example, which should be economically viable given a 50% increase in the price of uranium), you're right... You have to tear up orders of magnitude less ground to obtain uranium than silicon...
But it's still a silly comparison, since you need hundreds of times as much purified silicon to generate the energy you would get from your hundred pounds of uranium. The balance only shifts the other way after incredibly long periods of time using the silicon for photovoltaics.
Plus you missed most of the point of my comment. You don't just "scoop up" silicon. You need high purity silica, which is mined in a limited number of places where material of sufficient purity is available. In an open pit. And the dust makes silica mining every bit as dangerous for the workers as uranium mining. (Look up Silicosis).
I think you misread my comment as having partisan bias.
Neither party has cornered the market on stupidity. If you look at other comments in my thread, you'll see that I've picked on them for having such a direct democracy... Not for being a bastion of socialism.
In California, you live/do business at the whim of the voters. There is no other state that operates that way. We have a representative republic for good reason.
California is special though. They do something like that approximately once a week.
Also, you should check your math. Since California only accounts for just over 10% of the US economy, it's not just unlikely... It's mathematically impossible for California's economy to be larger than the US economy.
Solar will be self-limiting economically anyway. People fool themselves with "economies of scale"... In the case of solar, you'll likely see the price get driven up with large scale adoption as the price of resources used to make the panels jumps due to the increased demand...
That's the great thing about "economically recoverable supplies". As the price goes up the supply gets larger.
Many mines were shut down in the late '80s as the price dropped below what could sustain the profitability of operating them. As the price increases and the glut of existing supplies decreases, all of those resources which ceased to be considered economically recoverable will again be added to the tally.
We do currently face the issue that it may take longer to bring that production back online than we have existing supply, but that's another issue entirely.
California essentially has a direct democracy. That means the majority of the people making any given decision aren't experts on the subject. The results are conveniently public, which means we can all point and laugh.
I know. When you don't know how something works, but everybody tells you it's wonderful and easy and the solution to all our problems it can seem like they just "scoop some up"...
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the [nuclear] fuel box is a good thing.
Is it? That doesn't seem to be so clear outside of that gut-feeling/conventional-wisdom mindset. Is preventing sunlight from reaching the ground for hundreds of acres (now, and tens of thousands in the future) worse than running some nuclear power plants?
You don't know it's there unless you have any moderately advanced CD or DVD authoring tools installed... In which case playing games becomes hell, and your options are to cripple your system configuration (likely involving a re-install) or crack the game.
It's gotten to the point, for me, where I just don't buy a game if it's copy protected and there isn't a crack for it. No matter how badly I'd like to play it. I'd rather skip the game than be angered for hours by the copy protection while I figure out how to get it to run.
Luckily, the most popular games don't seem to include CD based copy protection. I wonder if there's some sort of connection there...
Most of what is wrong with the web could be trivially fixed if every browser started randomly offsetting the position of each element it renders by one pixel either up, down, left, or right. Any Javascript APIs should deny that the element has been offset.
It's hard because there are so many talented programmers out there, and most of the problems are already very well defined. Most of the roles for major contributions are already filled. Many new roles are filled by people who get into that position because they have early access to hardware, etc...
It's hard because it's not enough to be good (which is fairly easy), it's hard because you also have to be dedicated and political.
No, that's *exactly* the sense I'm using "enforce" in, and that's *exactly* what they don't do.
Sure, they'll help you put a lein on the other guy's property... Or if he's got income they might (maybe) garnish wages for you... But they *don't* ensure the other guy pays up. Collections is your responsibility.
The lawyer won't help. They're right to fire him if he refuses to perform his job. "I don't agree with US law" is likely not going to go over well as an excuse when you tell the judge why you're morally opposed to the task they gave you.
Regardless of you opinion on software patents, they're a fact of business these days. This guy should get over himself and file it. Then he should go home and work on getting software patents invalidated. His other option is waiting around until one of his employers competitors files the patent.
What does year to date have to do with this? You think investors are going to bid up the price of the stock to get the expected rate of return down to the 9 month average based on a 36 month projection?
Here's what I'm saying. I'm saying that the poster you initially responded to listed numbers (3.9% growth over 12 months. 12% over 36 months that line up with exactly where your post claimed the returns should be in line with. In other words, his numbers are right and the price of the stock based on what you asserted is right where it should be to confirm that.
Again. 12% annualized return three years from now, 3.9% annualized return now.
Let me see if I can put this more simply. You took his projected numbers from three years from now and mistakenly made the rest of your analysis on the basis that the numbers were for today. If the numbers do, in fact, play out that way, then the price of the stock will be bid up further as the results play out. But for now, the price has already "increase[d] to the point where the expected rate of return is equal to that of alternative investments", and his numbers were appropriate.
You speak of straw men, and then use one yourself? Classy. (Or are you going to go back after the fact and claim your broad generalizations were really meant to be narrowly focused?)
You *did* make those assumptions, and they *are* wrong. Profit is neither necessary, nor necessarily relevant when litigating a civil case, much less a civil copyright case. You specifically said that without profit the court may "actually assume there is no damage to the plantiff". However if the creator's assertion of copyright is for reasons other than profit (happens all the time), would you then say that they have no right to litigate? You better hope that there aren't any GPL zealots reading this thread, or they'll pounce!
Show me one single case, anywhere in the whole wide world since international copyright law accords began for a given country, where a commercial rights holder sued where there was alleged sale for profit, and did not ask for damages.
Aah, the straw man. What does that have to do with anything?
The fact of the matter is that copyright violation is copyright violation is copyright violation. Profit or not. If the infringer made a profit through their actions, that may be relevant in terms of monetizing the damages it's not a factor at all in determining guilt.
Creators who don't profit from their work should be equally intelligible for protection of their work even against infringers who don't profit monetarily from said infringement. Hence the reason "damages" and "profit" should not be requirements or considerations in determining infringement.
IF what you say is true -- that the market expects a growth from 3.9% to 12% in 3 years, then the market price would have already increased enough to bring that return rate much, much lower.
Your argument is based on false assumptions. One is that litigation is solely to recover "damages". Which isn't always the case. The other is that "damage" must have occurred for the defendant to be in violation of a civil law.
Since both of those assumptions are incorrect, the rest of your post is irrelevant.
For starters, the government isn't sufficiently aware of private contracts to proactively enforce civil laws. They instead rely on one of the parties involved to either file suit, or request the aid of the government in investigation (which may be denied based on a set of criteria). Then, once a decision is found in favor of one of the parties, the government doesn't enforce the judgment. They provide services and tools to help with collections, but they don't do the actual enforcement work.
One must wonder if you've ever been on either end of civil litigation....
No, they're afraid a few parents will buy the game for their kids anyway. People in a group like this are more interested in forcing other parents to raise kids in a way they approve of than any other bullshit reason they care to lie about.
Profit shouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement.
Nor does it have anything to do with compensation, or sales.
"They" shouldn't go after anybody for what is a civil law issue. It is not for the government to enforce. If you violate somebody's copyright, and they sue, that should be it.
What really needs to happen is that terms should be sane, criminalization should be undone, and penalties should be realistic and proportional.
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First off, they failed at getting passed the "uncanny valley". That video is still creepy looking.
Second, this isn't computer animation. It's just video processing. If you still need to do high resolution motion capture to produce your images, you haven't replaced the actor. You've merely edited their appearance in the performance. They didn't even bother to go so far as to take the captured motion and paste key bits of it together into the speech. They just had her sit there and say the whole thing, then "rendered" it.
Lame.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
You're right. Oops.
Who's the wise ass?
For starters, square miles of earth is a poor choice of units for either. The answer in both cases is "less than one".
Depending on how you obtain your uranium (seawater extraction, for example, which should be economically viable given a 50% increase in the price of uranium), you're right... You have to tear up orders of magnitude less ground to obtain uranium than silicon...
But it's still a silly comparison, since you need hundreds of times as much purified silicon to generate the energy you would get from your hundred pounds of uranium. The balance only shifts the other way after incredibly long periods of time using the silicon for photovoltaics.
Plus you missed most of the point of my comment. You don't just "scoop up" silicon. You need high purity silica, which is mined in a limited number of places where material of sufficient purity is available. In an open pit. And the dust makes silica mining every bit as dangerous for the workers as uranium mining. (Look up Silicosis).
I think you misread my comment as having partisan bias.
Neither party has cornered the market on stupidity. If you look at other comments in my thread, you'll see that I've picked on them for having such a direct democracy... Not for being a bastion of socialism.
In California, you live/do business at the whim of the voters. There is no other state that operates that way. We have a representative republic for good reason.
California is special though. They do something like that approximately once a week.
Also, you should check your math. Since California only accounts for just over 10% of the US economy, it's not just unlikely... It's mathematically impossible for California's economy to be larger than the US economy.
Solar will be self-limiting economically anyway. People fool themselves with "economies of scale"... In the case of solar, you'll likely see the price get driven up with large scale adoption as the price of resources used to make the panels jumps due to the increased demand...
That's the great thing about "economically recoverable supplies". As the price goes up the supply gets larger.
Many mines were shut down in the late '80s as the price dropped below what could sustain the profitability of operating them. As the price increases and the glut of existing supplies decreases, all of those resources which ceased to be considered economically recoverable will again be added to the tally.
We do currently face the issue that it may take longer to bring that production back online than we have existing supply, but that's another issue entirely.
The 80 year figure is based on a $130/kg price for uranium ore. At 2004 prices, about 1500 years worth of urianium is economically viable.
California essentially has a direct democracy. That means the majority of the people making any given decision aren't experts on the subject. The results are conveniently public, which means we can all point and laugh.
That's 'cause the bulk of the mining is coal to power the power plant used to generate the electricity used to purify it...
First they "scoop up" some silica. (Yeah, 25% of the crust is Silicon, but it's really really hard for us to use the bulk of that which is trapped in Silicate minerals like quartz for this purpose.) Then they purify it in an oxygen free environment. Then they heat the crap out of it in the presence of carbon (coal, or charcoal) to covert the oxide form into Silicon and Carbon Dioxide. Then they heat the crap out of it again using the Czochralski process to form a useable crystal. Then they cut, polish, and chemically etch it before it can become a cell.
I know. When you don't know how something works, but everybody tells you it's wonderful and easy and the solution to all our problems it can seem like they just "scoop some up"...
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the [nuclear] fuel box is a good thing.
Is it? That doesn't seem to be so clear outside of that gut-feeling/conventional-wisdom mindset. Is preventing sunlight from reaching the ground for hundreds of acres (now, and tens of thousands in the future) worse than running some nuclear power plants?
I question your premise.
You don't know it's there unless you have any moderately advanced CD or DVD authoring tools installed... In which case playing games becomes hell, and your options are to cripple your system configuration (likely involving a re-install) or crack the game.
It's gotten to the point, for me, where I just don't buy a game if it's copy protected and there isn't a crack for it. No matter how badly I'd like to play it. I'd rather skip the game than be angered for hours by the copy protection while I figure out how to get it to run.
Luckily, the most popular games don't seem to include CD based copy protection. I wonder if there's some sort of connection there...
Most of what is wrong with the web could be trivially fixed if every browser started randomly offsetting the position of each element it renders by one pixel either up, down, left, or right. Any Javascript APIs should deny that the element has been offset.
Nope.
It's hard because (ironically) it's easy.
It's hard because there are so many talented programmers out there, and most of the problems are already very well defined. Most of the roles for major contributions are already filled. Many new roles are filled by people who get into that position because they have early access to hardware, etc...
It's hard because it's not enough to be good (which is fairly easy), it's hard because you also have to be dedicated and political.
You were right on with #4 though.
No, that's *exactly* the sense I'm using "enforce" in, and that's *exactly* what they don't do.
Sure, they'll help you put a lein on the other guy's property... Or if he's got income they might (maybe) garnish wages for you... But they *don't* ensure the other guy pays up. Collections is your responsibility.
The lawyer won't help. They're right to fire him if he refuses to perform his job. "I don't agree with US law" is likely not going to go over well as an excuse when you tell the judge why you're morally opposed to the task they gave you.
Regardless of you opinion on software patents, they're a fact of business these days. This guy should get over himself and file it. Then he should go home and work on getting software patents invalidated. His other option is waiting around until one of his employers competitors files the patent.
You should read the story again. I'm pretty sure the main topic was Tim Wei, and his research.
What does year to date have to do with this? You think investors are going to bid up the price of the stock to get the expected rate of return down to the 9 month average based on a 36 month projection?
Here's what I'm saying. I'm saying that the poster you initially responded to listed numbers (3.9% growth over 12 months. 12% over 36 months that line up with exactly where your post claimed the returns should be in line with. In other words, his numbers are right and the price of the stock based on what you asserted is right where it should be to confirm that.
Again. 12% annualized return three years from now, 3.9% annualized return now.
Let me see if I can put this more simply. You took his projected numbers from three years from now and mistakenly made the rest of your analysis on the basis that the numbers were for today. If the numbers do, in fact, play out that way, then the price of the stock will be bid up further as the results play out. But for now, the price has already "increase[d] to the point where the expected rate of return is equal to that of alternative investments", and his numbers were appropriate.
You speak of straw men, and then use one yourself? Classy. (Or are you going to go back after the fact and claim your broad generalizations were really meant to be narrowly focused?)
You *did* make those assumptions, and they *are* wrong. Profit is neither necessary, nor necessarily relevant when litigating a civil case, much less a civil copyright case. You specifically said that without profit the court may "actually assume there is no damage to the plantiff". However if the creator's assertion of copyright is for reasons other than profit (happens all the time), would you then say that they have no right to litigate? You better hope that there aren't any GPL zealots reading this thread, or they'll pounce!
Show me one single case, anywhere in the whole wide world since international copyright law accords began for a given country, where a commercial rights holder sued where there was alleged sale for profit, and did not ask for damages.
Aah, the straw man. What does that have to do with anything?
The fact of the matter is that copyright violation is copyright violation is copyright violation. Profit or not. If the infringer made a profit through their actions, that may be relevant in terms of monetizing the damages it's not a factor at all in determining guilt.
Creators who don't profit from their work should be equally intelligible for protection of their work even against infringers who don't profit monetarily from said infringement. Hence the reason "damages" and "profit" should not be requirements or considerations in determining infringement.
IF what you say is true -- that the market expects a growth from 3.9% to 12% in 3 years, then the market price would have already increased enough to bring that return rate much, much lower.
That part.
Your argument is based on false assumptions. One is that litigation is solely to recover "damages". Which isn't always the case. The other is that "damage" must have occurred for the defendant to be in violation of a civil law.
Since both of those assumptions are incorrect, the rest of your post is irrelevant.
It makes complete sense.
For starters, the government isn't sufficiently aware of private contracts to proactively enforce civil laws. They instead rely on one of the parties involved to either file suit, or request the aid of the government in investigation (which may be denied based on a set of criteria). Then, once a decision is found in favor of one of the parties, the government doesn't enforce the judgment. They provide services and tools to help with collections, but they don't do the actual enforcement work.
One must wonder if you've ever been on either end of civil litigation....
Hands out, yes. Enforces, not necessarily.
No, they're afraid a few parents will buy the game for their kids anyway. People in a group like this are more interested in forcing other parents to raise kids in a way they approve of than any other bullshit reason they care to lie about.
Profit shouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement.
Nor does it have anything to do with compensation, or sales.
"They" shouldn't go after anybody for what is a civil law issue. It is not for the government to enforce. If you violate somebody's copyright, and they sue, that should be it.
What really needs to happen is that terms should be sane, criminalization should be undone, and penalties should be realistic and proportional.
I could make you a list, but you be dismayed to find it full of countries that have already achieved outright fascism...