"Whereas if you simply had a realtime view from many angles - there's no real chance I'd be able to dodge you seeing me - and possibly identifying me."
Why do people always believe that their home is always somehow a target for burglars? You don't have to secure your possessions with cameras and robots and laser tripwires, you just need to make the house across the street look like less of a hassle to get into.
The easiest way to not get burgled it to make your house look, from the street, to not be worth a burglar's time. The cheapest way to do this is to buy a dog house and put it in your front yard. The second cheapest way to do this is to buy a dog house, put it in your front yard, and put a dog in it.
Or here's something my Grandfather taught me: leave a different light on in a different room every night. I defy you to find a security system cheaper than the 10 dollars a year the electricity will cost you.
Moral of the story: you're not that special, and if you get burgled, you spun a d20 and rolled low. There are other things more worthy of being thought about than that.
Yes, it is, and frankly, young Middle Eastern men have damned good reason to be nervous at a security checkpoint.
Or, as happened to my friend Kamal a few years ago, merely being of Middle-Eastern complexion was enough to get him hassled every day on the way into the subway station to get to work. Never mind that he was a typical middle-class American kid with Indian parents, born and raised in New Jersey and putting himself through college in a used bookstore.
Profiling is abhorrent. Let's not go (any farther) there; hell, a couple steps back to sensibility would be nice.
"I remember when I saw Toy Story, thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool if, in addition to a normal DVD release, they released a version with all of the model, action, sound and lighting information, but where you could grab the "camera" and move it anywhere in the story's defined universe?""
The rendering process occurs after the movie's shot script is finalized, the reason for this being there's no reason to texture / shade / colorize / animate objects that aren't in-frame for any given shot. It would be a monstrous waste of time and resources.
A perfect example of this is, at Blizzcon this year the WoW dev team spotlighted the new login screen, then rotated the camera 180 degrees through the Z-axis to show you how it was all put together; you realized that all of that beautiful animation, from the back, was held together with placeholder images, JPGs and, essentially, toothpicks and gum.
Believe me. You don't WANT to see all the other stuff. Be hapy with being shown the stuff they wanted you to see.
The movie theaters in my area screen 3D movies at a 3:1 ratio to their 2D versions, and the 2D versions are most often shown at less convenient times. Scheduling my entire day around a movie is asinine and more often than not means waiting for it to come out on DVD....and I live in a city with a population of 100,000 or so. So suck it.
Good. Get rid of them. I'm sick to death of trying to find a theater playing movies in 2D - the annoyances associated with the fight between my glasses and the stereoscopic ones and the nausea induced by the movie essentially forcing me to look at it cross-eyed to figure it out completely destroy any immersion I may have experienced. I want my suspension of disbelief back.
Dollhouse's plotting was more like a compressed Buffy and less like Firefly. The first 5 episodes or so were awful, the middle half of the first season was decent, and the last 1/4 of the first season and the entirety of the second season was amazingly good.
I'm just sayin' - if you didn't stick it out for a bit, you're missing out.
"Van Gogh had to make his own paint because he was so poor he couldn't afford to buy it."
Ugh. God. This turns my stomach a bit.
Paint in a tube is a relatively modern invention; it had been around for, oh, 40 years or so when Van Gogh hit his stride, which is modern considering the history of oil paint goes back a millennium. It made painting a portable affair, something Monet and Seurat undoubtedly appreciated. It was wonderful stuff; still is.
But. It isn't necessary. It's a convenience, and the implication that the poor, misguided, slightly insane Vincent would have begged at your feet for a tube of burnt umber is entirely unfair.
Artists, at least the artists I know, are compelled to make art. They do it all the time, and a lack of prepackaged materials doesn't stop them. They make art on walls, on rooftops, on curbstones, in parks, on trees, on torn up shirts and rags, with puddle water and sweat and pencil shavings and ashes. If they really need yellow, they find a way to make yellow.
If you gave Van Gogh a sack of coins and told him to spend it on whatever he wanted, I'm willing to bet (not that we could ever really know, but) that he would buy a couple bottles of wine and maybe something to eat - stuff to paint on, and with, is absurdly easy. Eating, less so.
My point, I guess, is that art doesn't come in a tube, and that it's a disservice to believe that it does.
Why do I get the feeling this study was conceived purely as a way to get a bunch of nerds into a room with some hot chicks and to cover their leering as "scientific curiosity."
I tried to use Boxee on the Mini attached to my TV for a good month before giving up in frustration - it was buggy as hell, crashed daily, refused to recognize any of my media without them being named in a maddeningly specific way and without them being organized in a manner that IMDB would be able to parse without any manual override. Practically every fix required a keyboard and mouse to implement which completely defeats my assumption of how a media center is supposed to work.
I'm assuming they've fixed these problems? Because as it stands, you'd be flat-out nuts to lay down 200 bucks for something like that.
It does Netflix streaming, which is limited by DVD availability - if you want to watch The Daily Show while it's still even remotely current, Netflix won't help you, and even if you're okay waiting, TDS isn't released as full seasons on DVD.
Apple will seriously have to convince people that their service is worth it considering how locked down, even for apple, the appleTV is. No web streaming (aside from youtube) means no hulu, no network websites, no thedailyshow.com. As a cable replacement it just might be viable on a per-show basis once more networks sign up, but as of now it's a $99 box that apple's selling to let them sell you stuff you most likely can get legitimately on the web for free.
If it wasn't so damned restricted I might give it a look, but it would take some heavy convincing. And this is coming from a Mac user of almost 2 decades now.
Protip: if visiting friends in NYC, don't ask them to take you to the World Trade Center site. If you feel the need to go hang out at a giant pit in the ground, find it yourself; if you DO manage to get your friend to take you downtown, don't insist they take your picture in front of the fence.
And don't call it "Ground Zero," either. Just...don't.:/
If a movie is so horribly unoriginal, or cliche, or badly acted, or badly written, that it keeps me from suspending my disbelief or drops me back to reality over and over, then it's a bad movie.
It doesn't have to be thought-provoking or artsy or complicated, but if I keep remembering that I'm watching a movie while I'm in the theater then there's something wrong with it.
You're making a false association by assuming older translations are more in-line with the original. It's usually quite the opposite - older translations that are out-of-copyright aren't necessarily, in fact aren't usually, more accurate in spirit to the language of the original just by having the virtue of near-synchronous publication under their belts. If anything they were belted out fast to cash in on the popularity of the original without so much (or any) concern for accuracy or scholarship in a time when (here's an irony for you considering what it is we're talking about) authors had no real recourse to the unapproved publication of editions/translations/modifications of their works after it left their hands. A century to mellow and gain some historical perspective along with a translator who cares about the thing go a long way in terms of fostering enjoyment and textual accuracy.
My point was that an older, PD edition of a translation of a classic might turn off somebody who has to more actively fight through the language than something translated more recently with some book-learnin' and scholarship behind it.
But hey, man. Whatever floats your boat. Read how you like.:)
Hear hear. Project Gutenberg has been the source of all of my eBooks -- I've really been enjoying reading through Jules Verne, HG Wells, Dante, Don Quixote, and all sorts of classics that have been on my list for years.
You need to remember, though, that for books translated from their original language, the translation is also a copyrighted work and different translations impart a radically different flavor - I remember in college a newish professor made the mistake of not specifying a translation for a collection of Greek plays and the edition I picked up was translated into colloquial 70's American English. It was effectively in Jive.
This isn't to say that older, public domain translations can't be good, but there's something to be said for a current take on it - if the editions a person ends up reading are all translated pre-1936 (or whatever) they're missing out on 70+ years of progress. It's like a time capsule within a time capsule.
Freeze tag is a game where, if you're tagged by whoever's "it," you can't move until somebody else touches you to unfreeze you. Get tagged 3 times and you become it.
He's talking about using "Pause" to stop the action - untied shoelace, mom's calling, car in the road, whatever. It's synonymous with "Time Out."
a 7" portable media viewer would have screen dimensions of 5.6" x 4.2". That's slightly smaller than a Kindle but with a larger screen - just the right size for a jeans pocket but easier to read than an iPod touch and not as showy / cumbersome as an iPad.
That reference is from Star Trek: Enterprise, a show Okuda didn't have anything to do with other than in spirit (or unofficially, I guess.) If we're talking about what he had in mind when designing the thing for Next Gen, it's irrelevant.
I'll take the point, though. My knowledge of Enterprise is a passing one.
There's ONE concrete example of a PADD being used for anything other than reading text in that article (two if you count the "predictive text input" thing, which I'm not sure I buy as a stand-alone app) and it's from DS9, and it was a plot-point - Sisko was using it as an Identikit to piece together the face of a woman he thought he saw. The rest of it is Okuda talking about how he envisioned PADDs being used rather than how they were portrayed.
I'm just sayin' - most of the time they were used to further the plot in a paperless future-world. The rest isn't especially canonical as it wasn't actually shown on-screen.
What Okuda envisioned with what was actually shown on-screen are different things. While he says it should have been possible to control the Enterprise from a PADD, you never actually seen it done. At least, not so far as I remember.
Slashdot Mirror
"Whereas if you simply had a realtime view from many angles - there's no real chance I'd be able to dodge you seeing me - and possibly identifying me."
Why do people always believe that their home is always somehow a target for burglars? You don't have to secure your possessions with cameras and robots and laser tripwires, you just need to make the house across the street look like less of a hassle to get into.
The easiest way to not get burgled it to make your house look, from the street, to not be worth a burglar's time. The cheapest way to do this is to buy a dog house and put it in your front yard. The second cheapest way to do this is to buy a dog house, put it in your front yard, and put a dog in it.
Or here's something my Grandfather taught me: leave a different light on in a different room every night. I defy you to find a security system cheaper than the 10 dollars a year the electricity will cost you.
Moral of the story: you're not that special, and if you get burgled, you spun a d20 and rolled low. There are other things more worthy of being thought about than that.
Or, as happened to my friend Kamal a few years ago, merely being of Middle-Eastern complexion was enough to get him hassled every day on the way into the subway station to get to work. Never mind that he was a typical middle-class American kid with Indian parents, born and raised in New Jersey and putting himself through college in a used bookstore.
Profiling is abhorrent. Let's not go (any farther) there; hell, a couple steps back to sensibility would be nice.
Why does everybody immediately jump to that answer? I can't wear them. But thanks for playing.
"I remember when I saw Toy Story, thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool if, in addition to a normal DVD release, they released a version with all of the model, action, sound and lighting information, but where you could grab the "camera" and move it anywhere in the story's defined universe?""
The rendering process occurs after the movie's shot script is finalized, the reason for this being there's no reason to texture / shade / colorize / animate objects that aren't in-frame for any given shot. It would be a monstrous waste of time and resources.
A perfect example of this is, at Blizzcon this year the WoW dev team spotlighted the new login screen, then rotated the camera 180 degrees through the Z-axis to show you how it was all put together; you realized that all of that beautiful animation, from the back, was held together with placeholder images, JPGs and, essentially, toothpicks and gum.
Believe me. You don't WANT to see all the other stuff. Be hapy with being shown the stuff they wanted you to see.
The movie theaters in my area screen 3D movies at a 3:1 ratio to their 2D versions, and the 2D versions are most often shown at less convenient times. Scheduling my entire day around a movie is asinine and more often than not means waiting for it to come out on DVD. ...and I live in a city with a population of 100,000 or so. So suck it.
Good. Get rid of them. I'm sick to death of trying to find a theater playing movies in 2D - the annoyances associated with the fight between my glasses and the stereoscopic ones and the nausea induced by the movie essentially forcing me to look at it cross-eyed to figure it out completely destroy any immersion I may have experienced. I want my suspension of disbelief back.
Dollhouse's plotting was more like a compressed Buffy and less like Firefly. The first 5 episodes or so were awful, the middle half of the first season was decent, and the last 1/4 of the first season and the entirety of the second season was amazingly good.
I'm just sayin' - if you didn't stick it out for a bit, you're missing out.
I imagine it to be much like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRcXULN6mp4
(can't believe that's actually relevant.)
Warning: robot gang fight.
"Van Gogh had to make his own paint because he was so poor he couldn't afford to buy it."
Ugh. God. This turns my stomach a bit.
Paint in a tube is a relatively modern invention; it had been around for, oh, 40 years or so when Van Gogh hit his stride, which is modern considering the history of oil paint goes back a millennium. It made painting a portable affair, something Monet and Seurat undoubtedly appreciated. It was wonderful stuff; still is.
But. It isn't necessary. It's a convenience, and the implication that the poor, misguided, slightly insane Vincent would have begged at your feet for a tube of burnt umber is entirely unfair.
Artists, at least the artists I know, are compelled to make art. They do it all the time, and a lack of prepackaged materials doesn't stop them. They make art on walls, on rooftops, on curbstones, in parks, on trees, on torn up shirts and rags, with puddle water and sweat and pencil shavings and ashes. If they really need yellow, they find a way to make yellow.
If you gave Van Gogh a sack of coins and told him to spend it on whatever he wanted, I'm willing to bet (not that we could ever really know, but) that he would buy a couple bottles of wine and maybe something to eat - stuff to paint on, and with, is absurdly easy. Eating, less so.
My point, I guess, is that art doesn't come in a tube, and that it's a disservice to believe that it does.
Why do I get the feeling this study was conceived purely as a way to get a bunch of nerds into a room with some hot chicks and to cover their leering as "scientific curiosity."
"This game was so awesome I didn't want it to end" isn't a fault. Try again. :)
"As awesome as a game as it is, it still had flaws just like every game ever made." ...yeah? Name one.
I tried to use Boxee on the Mini attached to my TV for a good month before giving up in frustration - it was buggy as hell, crashed daily, refused to recognize any of my media without them being named in a maddeningly specific way and without them being organized in a manner that IMDB would be able to parse without any manual override. Practically every fix required a keyboard and mouse to implement which completely defeats my assumption of how a media center is supposed to work.
I'm assuming they've fixed these problems? Because as it stands, you'd be flat-out nuts to lay down 200 bucks for something like that.
It does Netflix streaming, which is limited by DVD availability - if you want to watch The Daily Show while it's still even remotely current, Netflix won't help you, and even if you're okay waiting, TDS isn't released as full seasons on DVD.
Apple will seriously have to convince people that their service is worth it considering how locked down, even for apple, the appleTV is. No web streaming (aside from youtube) means no hulu, no network websites, no thedailyshow.com. As a cable replacement it just might be viable on a per-show basis once more networks sign up, but as of now it's a $99 box that apple's selling to let them sell you stuff you most likely can get legitimately on the web for free.
If it wasn't so damned restricted I might give it a look, but it would take some heavy convincing. And this is coming from a Mac user of almost 2 decades now.
Protip: if visiting friends in NYC, don't ask them to take you to the World Trade Center site. If you feel the need to go hang out at a giant pit in the ground, find it yourself; if you DO manage to get your friend to take you downtown, don't insist they take your picture in front of the fence.
And don't call it "Ground Zero," either. Just...don't. :/
I see it like this:
If a movie is so horribly unoriginal, or cliche, or badly acted, or badly written, that it keeps me from suspending my disbelief or drops me back to reality over and over, then it's a bad movie.
It doesn't have to be thought-provoking or artsy or complicated, but if I keep remembering that I'm watching a movie while I'm in the theater then there's something wrong with it.
There was something wrong with Avatar.
"Blockbuster movie producers attempt to convince fans to buy a special edition that has little to no added value."
Whoa. Shocking.
Seriously, what were we expecting?
You're making a false association by assuming older translations are more in-line with the original. It's usually quite the opposite - older translations that are out-of-copyright aren't necessarily, in fact aren't usually, more accurate in spirit to the language of the original just by having the virtue of near-synchronous publication under their belts. If anything they were belted out fast to cash in on the popularity of the original without so much (or any) concern for accuracy or scholarship in a time when (here's an irony for you considering what it is we're talking about) authors had no real recourse to the unapproved publication of editions/translations/modifications of their works after it left their hands. A century to mellow and gain some historical perspective along with a translator who cares about the thing go a long way in terms of fostering enjoyment and textual accuracy. My point was that an older, PD edition of a translation of a classic might turn off somebody who has to more actively fight through the language than something translated more recently with some book-learnin' and scholarship behind it. But hey, man. Whatever floats your boat. Read how you like. :)
Hear hear. Project Gutenberg has been the source of all of my eBooks -- I've really been enjoying reading through Jules Verne, HG Wells, Dante, Don Quixote, and all sorts of classics that have been on my list for years.
You need to remember, though, that for books translated from their original language, the translation is also a copyrighted work and different translations impart a radically different flavor - I remember in college a newish professor made the mistake of not specifying a translation for a collection of Greek plays and the edition I picked up was translated into colloquial 70's American English. It was effectively in Jive.
This isn't to say that older, public domain translations can't be good, but there's something to be said for a current take on it - if the editions a person ends up reading are all translated pre-1936 (or whatever) they're missing out on 70+ years of progress. It's like a time capsule within a time capsule.
what? no.
Freeze tag is a game where, if you're tagged by whoever's "it," you can't move until somebody else touches you to unfreeze you. Get tagged 3 times and you become it.
He's talking about using "Pause" to stop the action - untied shoelace, mom's calling, car in the road, whatever. It's synonymous with "Time Out."
a 7" portable media viewer would have screen dimensions of 5.6" x 4.2". That's slightly smaller than a Kindle but with a larger screen - just the right size for a jeans pocket but easier to read than an iPod touch and not as showy / cumbersome as an iPad.
Sounds perfect to me. Sign me up.
That reference is from Star Trek: Enterprise, a show Okuda didn't have anything to do with other than in spirit (or unofficially, I guess.) If we're talking about what he had in mind when designing the thing for Next Gen, it's irrelevant.
I'll take the point, though. My knowledge of Enterprise is a passing one.
There's ONE concrete example of a PADD being used for anything other than reading text in that article (two if you count the "predictive text input" thing, which I'm not sure I buy as a stand-alone app) and it's from DS9, and it was a plot-point - Sisko was using it as an Identikit to piece together the face of a woman he thought he saw. The rest of it is Okuda talking about how he envisioned PADDs being used rather than how they were portrayed.
I'm just sayin' - most of the time they were used to further the plot in a paperless future-world. The rest isn't especially canonical as it wasn't actually shown on-screen.
What Okuda envisioned with what was actually shown on-screen are different things. While he says it should have been possible to control the Enterprise from a PADD, you never actually seen it done. At least, not so far as I remember.