You thought wrong, but don't feel bad. A lot of people come out of their undergraduate years with a lot of stupid misunderstandings about the principles of libertarianism.
When it was *released* it was out of date. And it's still the best-selling games console. So what makes you think that the graphics/performance have any effect on *sales* at all?
Since when were we talking about sales?
Oh, sorry, *sales*?
His criticism is all about why he doesn't want to own a Wii. It's also why I'm not interested. I don't care if there's one in every home in the world. It's still a weak gaming platform with a gimmicky controller and a limited library of games which mostly feature childish cartoon artwork. No thank you.
Which part of smoking pot is the part that makes it worth criminalizing?
The part where we are a democratic country full of stuffy neo-puritans.
Statistically, a majority of Americans have tried pot. Also, a majority of Americans are opposed to legalization.
Which means there are a significant number of assholes in this country who think it's perfectly fine if they use pot and get away with it, but YOU should go to jail if you get caught doing the same thing.
Most libertarian crackpots like me are painfully aware that "live and let live" is not actually a majority philosophy, and we've got an uphill battle to sell our political views to the rest of society.
It probably would have been possible for you to make the case for the utility of such a device without resorting to personal attacks. You had some good points wedge in there between the cheap shots.
Perhaps not, but I find it hard to fathom why anybody would want a 7-inch tablet from ANY company.
There are situations where I don't mind carrying a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, a small laptop is FAR superior in almost every way.
There are situations where I would rather not carry a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, an iPhone or Blackberry slips in your pocket and can do pretty much everything a tablet can do (and then some).
Tablets & eBooks are neither fish nor foul. Too big for a pocket or purse, but very limited compared to laptops or even netbooks.
If you can give me real 3d from a old 2d source you'll be richer than Bill gates and the Dow chemical family combined.
"Real 3D"? No, but you could probably fake it pretty well, given enough resources. You just need to compose "blank" backgrounds using (more or less) the same sort of trickery that the Fark Photoshop contest geeks use, then mat out the "objects" you want to have appear closer, and decide how much closer you want to place them.
Can someone translate whatever industry's jargon this is to geek English, please?
A "fade" is a technique in TV and film for changing from one scene to another. The simplest (and laziest) is a "jump cut", in which the image one your screen abruptly changes. Sometimes a fade is done by juxtaposing objects of similar geometry (i.e., pan the camera to a woman's circular parasol, cut to a shot of the sun in the same position on the screen, then pan down to the scene below.) Another option is to fade to black and then fade in the next scene (Tarantino has been doing that for his chapter breaks, and a lot of TV shows, such as LOST, like to fade from black coming out of commercials.)
A "crossfade" or "wipe", is when the image of the next scene is "wiped" over the previous one, like somebody sliding one painting in front of another. George Lucas used them A LOT when making the Star Wars movies.
The problem that Dr. Manhattan was talking about is, when you do a crossfade, you briefly have two images on the screen at once, which really messes up the stereoscopic 3D effect. For that reason, re-mastering a movie like Star Wars to be a 3D feature would be nearly impossible without major edits. If fact, you'd probably need to go back to the original raw footage and re-cut the entire movie.
You have got to be kidding!!! Blu-Ray gives you the time you need to make popcorn, go to the bathroom, mix a drink, and make yourself comfortable - all in the time it takes to load the menu screen.
Many conventional DVDs also possess this "feature."
I have a 119" projection system, but my reluctance to adopt Blu-Ray has everything to do with the fact that I find little plastic disks inconvenient. What few movies I buy, I rip to a computer hard drive (using HandBrake), and everything else is either downloaded or streamed. Blu-Ray rips take up A LOT more space.
The result of this is that almost nothing I watch is in full 1080p or even 1080i. The stuff I download or stream is typically 720p, at best, and my DVD rips are usually 480p (anamorphic)... and I don't care.
It still looks damn good, and I've yet to have somebody visit and ask me "why is the resolution so low?" while watching a movie on my system.
A company with 45% turnover on 11000 employees means approximately 4950 employees get churned out in a year. That still isn't very good...
A call-center job, no matter how fun and rewarding it might be, is still an entry-level position. When most of your workforce is already planning on being somewhere else in a few years while you are training them in, a 45% turnover rate is OUTSTANDING.
If you're still holding the exact same position at the exact same company which you took right after graduation, that's not an "entry-level" job, but a "dead-end" job.
A call center is where you work while you take night classes in network administration, computer programming, or towards your MBA, which will prep you for whatever your REAL career will be. Nobody dreams about growing up to deal with angry customers for a living until retirement, unless you mean "deal with" them in the mafia sense of the word.
Come the fuck on. You cannot honestly believe that the US government, which depends on tax revenue from American businesses and their employees, would intentionally handicap said businesses?
Hi, welcome to America. I'm assuming this is your first visit.
If the USA took all of its money from defense and put it into Healthcare or "Green Tech," then yes, we'd be able to claim advances in those areas.
Man, that sure is a lot of defending we've been doing in Iraq for the last six goddamn years. People whine about Obama spending a trillion dollars to bail out the American economy, when we've spent three times that much bailing out Iraq socially, and it hasn't worked; it just makes no sense to me.
1. Your numbers are not even close to being correct.
2. Obama still has us mired in Iraq. He's sticking to Bush's time-table for the withdrawl. Furthermore, he's ramping up pointless "nation-building" efforts in Afghanistan.
If we wanted out of Iraq, we should have elected a REAL anti-war candidate, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. A little late now. We settled on Yet Another Empty Shirt representing the powers that be. Only the rhetoric has changed.
Click on the "discussion" tab of that page, and you'll see that somebody already beat me to the punch on submitting a correction:
The page says that Les Paul's 1947 recording of "Lover, When You're Near Me" was the first time multi-tracking had been used on a recording." Not true. On April 18, 1941, Sidney Bechet recorded "The Sheik of Araby," playing all the instruments and overdubbing them -- soprano and tenor sax, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. There may have been others.
I think it needs to be made more clear to the older generation that, no matter how much they don't like it, the fact is that the day is rapidly approaching when the person who doesn't spend *enough* time on the Internet will be the socially dysfunctional one.
They didn't talk about the qualifications of the people who run this place, only that they are:
Two friends -- Cosette Rae, a clinical social worker, and author Hilarie Cash
Now, these people could be people devastated by personal loss due to too much World of Warcraft by a loved one... or they could be two people who are fearmongerers desperately trying to leech cash out of rich Microsoft yuppie parents who can't figure out how to pull the plug on their kid's computerboxstation360.
All I'm saying is the article doesn't mention anything about them, and given the lack of PhD or even MD behind the names... I'll say nothing to see here, move along.
Are you perhaps referencing that crackpot lady who started a WoW rehab clinic (based loosely on a book she read about 12-step programs) after her clinically-depressed kid who played a lot of WoW tragically took his own life?
If so, it seems that her biggest mistake in doing so wasn't the misdirected rage at her "patients", nor the self-righteous religious mumbo-jumbo, but rather that she didn't charge high enough prices to get people's attention and evoke a sense of legitimacy.
As with many new ventures, it can sometimes be a mistake not to "go big."
Yeah, but the "Buffy" musical would have been impossible without it.
You're absolutely right, though. Just like how the "click-track" has replaced the need for solid time-keeping in the studio, even GOOD singers rely on a smidge of auto-tune in order to meet modern audience expectations.
"Sheik of Araby" by Sydney Bichet is the first multitrack recording of the same artist. Les Paul was just the first major artist to do it with magnetic tape.
Townsend also played/smashed a lot of Fender Stratocasters.
If there's any rock artist closely associated with the Les Paul, it's Jimmy Page. He played the occasional Telecaster on some album tracks, but almost never played live with anything other than an LP.
Which is kind of a silly thing to bring up when talking about the inventions of Les Paul anyway. His total contribution to that design consists of a tailpiece (which they ended up not using), and his signature. Everything else about the guitar was designed by other people.
Drawing down a war slowly is different from starting on unnecessarily. And it's a lesser of evils comparison often; McCain likely would have invaded Iran and set any hope of social progression there back another 30 years.
Far be it from me to rush to the defense of anybody as batshit-crazy as McCain, but Obama seems at least as likely to drag us into war in Darfur or Honduras or $DEITY-knows-where out of neocon-ish motives as McCain would be to go into Iran. He's certainly already done a fair amount of saber-rattling in his short stint in office so far.
Obama sounds thoughtful when he discusses foreign policy, but the actual actions of his administration so far are pretty much an exact continuation of Bush's, with the exception of being much more friendly to Central American communist despots.
All this is beside the fact that I'm not talking about the "lesser of evils" comparison of the last election (which was a false choice that I'm proud to have rejected). I'm saying that the war which was regarded as an ATROCITY which MUST END NOW by teaming throngs of silver-haired protesters every single day on the busy corner near my home, which is still going on (and still drawing down in Iraq on the same time-table... while escalating in Afghanistan), is suddenly no big deal and not worth standing around with a cardboard sign over anymore.
If I were a cynical person, I would suspect that the motivation for many of these "war protesters" was entirely about getting their favorite party elected, and not really about the war at all. Now that their guy is finally in office, what's a few dead soldiers?
Slashdot Mirror
You thought wrong, but don't feel bad. A lot of people come out of their undergraduate years with a lot of stupid misunderstandings about the principles of libertarianism.
You give your own criticism to your own comment.
When it was *released* it was out of date. And it's still the best-selling games console. So what makes you think that the graphics/performance have any effect on *sales* at all?
Since when were we talking about sales?
Oh, sorry, *sales*?
His criticism is all about why he doesn't want to own a Wii. It's also why I'm not interested. I don't care if there's one in every home in the world. It's still a weak gaming platform with a gimmicky controller and a limited library of games which mostly feature childish cartoon artwork. No thank you.
Which part of smoking pot is the part that makes it worth criminalizing?
The part where we are a democratic country full of stuffy neo-puritans.
Statistically, a majority of Americans have tried pot.
Also, a majority of Americans are opposed to legalization.
Which means there are a significant number of assholes in this country who think it's perfectly fine if they use pot and get away with it, but YOU should go to jail if you get caught doing the same thing.
Most libertarian crackpots like me are painfully aware that "live and let live" is not actually a majority philosophy, and we've got an uphill battle to sell our political views to the rest of society.
It probably would have been possible for you to make the case for the utility of such a device without resorting to personal attacks. You had some good points wedge in there between the cheap shots.
You apparently cared enough to reply. Just not enough to explain.
I would mostly be using it in a bed to read something or surf the web and so on.
You can just come out and say that you want it for porn. It's okay.
Perhaps not, but I find it hard to fathom why anybody would want a 7-inch tablet from ANY company.
There are situations where I don't mind carrying a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, a small laptop is FAR superior in almost every way.
There are situations where I would rather not carry a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, an iPhone or Blackberry slips in your pocket and can do pretty much everything a tablet can do (and then some).
Tablets & eBooks are neither fish nor foul. Too big for a pocket or purse, but very limited compared to laptops or even netbooks.
I stand corrected. For some reason, I was thinking of wipes rather than dissolves. Still, the challenges to 3D rendering remain for both methods.
If you can give me real 3d from a old 2d source you'll be richer than Bill gates and the Dow chemical family combined.
"Real 3D"? No, but you could probably fake it pretty well, given enough resources. You just need to compose "blank" backgrounds using (more or less) the same sort of trickery that the Fark Photoshop contest geeks use, then mat out the "objects" you want to have appear closer, and decide how much closer you want to place them.
Can someone translate whatever industry's jargon this is to geek English, please?
A "fade" is a technique in TV and film for changing from one scene to another. The simplest (and laziest) is a "jump cut", in which the image one your screen abruptly changes. Sometimes a fade is done by juxtaposing objects of similar geometry (i.e., pan the camera to a woman's circular parasol, cut to a shot of the sun in the same position on the screen, then pan down to the scene below.) Another option is to fade to black and then fade in the next scene (Tarantino has been doing that for his chapter breaks, and a lot of TV shows, such as LOST, like to fade from black coming out of commercials.)
A "crossfade" or "wipe", is when the image of the next scene is "wiped" over the previous one, like somebody sliding one painting in front of another. George Lucas used them A LOT when making the Star Wars movies.
The problem that Dr. Manhattan was talking about is, when you do a crossfade, you briefly have two images on the screen at once, which really messes up the stereoscopic 3D effect. For that reason, re-mastering a movie like Star Wars to be a 3D feature would be nearly impossible without major edits. If fact, you'd probably need to go back to the original raw footage and re-cut the entire movie.
You have got to be kidding!!! Blu-Ray gives you the time you need to make popcorn, go to the bathroom, mix a drink, and make yourself comfortable - all in the time it takes to load the menu screen.
Many conventional DVDs also possess this "feature."
I have a 119" projection system, but my reluctance to adopt Blu-Ray has everything to do with the fact that I find little plastic disks inconvenient. What few movies I buy, I rip to a computer hard drive (using HandBrake), and everything else is either downloaded or streamed. Blu-Ray rips take up A LOT more space.
The result of this is that almost nothing I watch is in full 1080p or even 1080i. The stuff I download or stream is typically 720p, at best, and my DVD rips are usually 480p (anamorphic)... and I don't care.
It still looks damn good, and I've yet to have somebody visit and ask me "why is the resolution so low?" while watching a movie on my system.
A company with 45% turnover on 11000 employees means approximately 4950 employees get churned out in a year. That still isn't very good...
A call-center job, no matter how fun and rewarding it might be, is still an entry-level position. When most of your workforce is already planning on being somewhere else in a few years while you are training them in, a 45% turnover rate is OUTSTANDING.
If you're still holding the exact same position at the exact same company which you took right after graduation, that's not an "entry-level" job, but a "dead-end" job.
A call center is where you work while you take night classes in network administration, computer programming, or towards your MBA, which will prep you for whatever your REAL career will be. Nobody dreams about growing up to deal with angry customers for a living until retirement, unless you mean "deal with" them in the mafia sense of the word.
Come the fuck on. You cannot honestly believe that the US government, which depends on tax revenue from American businesses and their employees, would intentionally handicap said businesses?
Hi, welcome to America. I'm assuming this is your first visit.
Man, that sure is a lot of defending we've been doing in Iraq for the last six goddamn years. People whine about Obama spending a trillion dollars to bail out the American economy, when we've spent three times that much bailing out Iraq socially, and it hasn't worked; it just makes no sense to me.
1. Your numbers are not even close to being correct.
2. Obama still has us mired in Iraq. He's sticking to Bush's time-table for the withdrawl. Furthermore, he's ramping up pointless "nation-building" efforts in Afghanistan.
If we wanted out of Iraq, we should have elected a REAL anti-war candidate, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. A little late now. We settled on Yet Another Empty Shirt representing the powers that be. Only the rhetoric has changed.
It's the Les Paul wiki that is incorrect.
Click on the "discussion" tab of that page, and you'll see that somebody already beat me to the punch on submitting a correction:
The page says that Les Paul's 1947 recording of "Lover, When You're Near Me" was the first time multi-tracking had been used on a recording." Not true. On April 18, 1941, Sidney Bechet recorded "The Sheik of Araby," playing all the instruments and overdubbing them -- soprano and tenor sax, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. There may have been others.
I think it needs to be made more clear to the older generation that, no matter how much they don't like it, the fact is that the day is rapidly approaching when the person who doesn't spend *enough* time on the Internet will be the socially dysfunctional one.
They didn't talk about the qualifications of the people who run this place, only that they are:
Two friends -- Cosette Rae, a clinical social worker, and author Hilarie Cash
Now, these people could be people devastated by personal loss due to too much World of Warcraft by a loved one... or they could be two people who are fearmongerers desperately trying to leech cash out of rich Microsoft yuppie parents who can't figure out how to pull the plug on their kid's computerboxstation360.
All I'm saying is the article doesn't mention anything about them, and given the lack of PhD or even MD behind the names... I'll say nothing to see here, move along.
Are you perhaps referencing that crackpot lady who started a WoW rehab clinic (based loosely on a book she read about 12-step programs) after her clinically-depressed kid who played a lot of WoW tragically took his own life?
If so, it seems that her biggest mistake in doing so wasn't the misdirected rage at her "patients", nor the self-righteous religious mumbo-jumbo, but rather that she didn't charge high enough prices to get people's attention and evoke a sense of legitimacy.
As with many new ventures, it can sometimes be a mistake not to "go big."
Yeah, but the "Buffy" musical would have been impossible without it.
You're absolutely right, though. Just like how the "click-track" has replaced the need for solid time-keeping in the studio, even GOOD singers rely on a smidge of auto-tune in order to meet modern audience expectations.
But so many have done it now. Why single out just one person to pick on?
If people don't like the puns, they should just tune them out.
"Sheik of Araby" by Sydney Bichet is the first multitrack recording of the same artist. Les Paul was just the first major artist to do it with magnetic tape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Bechet
No, he never played with Yes.
Clapton mostly plays Strats, and the occasional Gibson 335.
Niel Young is worth mentioning though. His Les Paul (with a Bigsby tailpiece attached) is iconic.
Townsend also played/smashed a lot of Fender Stratocasters.
If there's any rock artist closely associated with the Les Paul, it's Jimmy Page. He played the occasional Telecaster on some album tracks, but almost never played live with anything other than an LP.
Which is kind of a silly thing to bring up when talking about the inventions of Les Paul anyway. His total contribution to that design consists of a tailpiece (which they ended up not using), and his signature. Everything else about the guitar was designed by other people.
Drawing down a war slowly is different from starting on unnecessarily. And it's a lesser of evils comparison often; McCain likely would have invaded Iran and set any hope of social progression there back another 30 years.
Far be it from me to rush to the defense of anybody as batshit-crazy as McCain, but Obama seems at least as likely to drag us into war in Darfur or Honduras or $DEITY-knows-where out of neocon-ish motives as McCain would be to go into Iran. He's certainly already done a fair amount of saber-rattling in his short stint in office so far.
Obama sounds thoughtful when he discusses foreign policy, but the actual actions of his administration so far are pretty much an exact continuation of Bush's, with the exception of being much more friendly to Central American communist despots.
All this is beside the fact that I'm not talking about the "lesser of evils" comparison of the last election (which was a false choice that I'm proud to have rejected). I'm saying that the war which was regarded as an ATROCITY which MUST END NOW by teaming throngs of silver-haired protesters every single day on the busy corner near my home, which is still going on (and still drawing down in Iraq on the same time-table... while escalating in Afghanistan), is suddenly no big deal and not worth standing around with a cardboard sign over anymore.
If I were a cynical person, I would suspect that the motivation for many of these "war protesters" was entirely about getting their favorite party elected, and not really about the war at all. Now that their guy is finally in office, what's a few dead soldiers?