If he thinks mexico will let him fly...
on
To the Moon, Alice
·
· Score: 1
From a friend who actually knows something:
"if he thinks he can get permission from AST he's out of his mind. And if he thinks Mexico will let him if the FAA says no, he's living in a fantasy world because the first thing the Mexicans will do is call the FAA and ask if they've given him permission to fly and if not, why not."
Aparrantly:
"_Everyone_ has tried to talk to this guy and he won't listen. Yes, he's nuts and he's probably just smart enough to get himself killed."
This feels exactly like Richard C. Hoagland's work about the mars face. When I first read 'The Face on Mars' book, I actually wanted to believe it. Later, after discovering his website, The Enterprise Mission, I concluded he was an absolute loon. He may have been sane at one point, but he certainly has lost whatever marbles he used to have, especially after the second-go-round of mars photographs were released recently. As I find more and more examples of 'pseudo-math' it all becomes clearer and clearer.
An aquaintence of mine wrote a small program that will search the entire text of the bible and will find any phrase you give it hidden as 'bible code', similar to to the book of the same name which pruports to find all kinds of hidden messages. My aquaintence wrote it as a method of debunking such claims.
The problem with debunking absolutely everything is that there are probably some very genuine mathematical puzzles out there left to us by older civilizations, that may well be 'pooh poohed' and grouped with the rest of the nonsense, and we will have missed learning some interesting information about that civilization or religious context.
Precious truth may have been dilluted with an ocean of gibberish. Finding those gems and getting people to believe you is not going to be easy.
Mike Massee
> How many people around the world do you think
> paid for their copy of Windows vs. the number
> who did pay?
How many people think that mediocre OS is worth the sticker price? If the product is worth paying for, more people will pay. Not all, but more.
I know a good number of movies I think are worth paying $20 for. Sure, people are always going to pirate because they can, but they'll pirate far less if they feel like they're getting a good value. So again, I say, just keep the price of DVD's reasonable, and you'll earn more money than you will have saved after subtracting the costs of copy protection from the very small number of pirates it stops.
(Drat, pressed the enter key in the subject line!)
Does not the sheer number of copy protection schemes on a single disc strike anyone as ludicrous?
So, on my copy of Star Wars Episode III, I'll have:
* Macrovision
* CSS
* Watermarking
and none of that can prevent me from making an easy copy in any way. A modified player disables macrovision. It decodes CSS when it plays the movie back, and the watermark is irrelevent to an unaware format (pick one, there's tons of them out there and they aren't magically going away)
If I as an individual person can so easily copy a disc, how are any of those things supposed to stop pirates? As mentioned previously, bit-by-bit copies circumvent any means of digital protection. Copy protection is a huge waste of money that threatens to drive the price of DVDs higher.
That's the best anti-piracy tool that the industry has going for it - most DVD's are priced reasonably. Sure I can make a copy, but why would I want to? I'm going to buy movies that I like. The price is right. That's all they have to do, is keep prices reasonable. Mike Massee
Art of any kind is a learned skill. A few people in the world have a very natural inclation towards it, but most of the time, whether it's programming or painting, anyone can learn to do it. Some people have a 'knack' for the abstract, and some have an innate grasp of logic and numbers. People who claim they are un-artistic are usually underestimating the human capacity to create and have never been encouraged to do so themselves.
If you define an art as a skilled trade - then yes, programmers are always artists, especially programmers who can finish an entire piece of code that is both useful and elegant.
In my profession as a 3D animator, it is required that the artisan have a very rare combination of skills, both technical computer literacy and a very thorough understanding of perception, color, light, composition and aesthetics - the kind of thing that you learn as a student of the fine arts.
3D Animators and 2D compositors vary widely between those that have more technical than aesthetic skills, and some who have an amazing quantity of both. Some of the most useful and valuable animators and programmers are shader writers. This is the point at which nature and math come crashing together, for nature is really a series of deeply interwoven, extremely complex and infinitely repeatable mathematical patterns. Some examples of shader writers are people who author fur shaders, complex particle systems, nature shaders such as fractal plant, tree and undergrowth geometry generators, liquid particle systems and volumetric alg implementations for clouds, smoke, water and fire.
These programmer/animators not only understand the math behind these phenomena, they can also tweak the effect to look correct to the eye and make it applicable to use on screen. The raw math behind natural phenomena doesn't always give you the indended result, so you still need to know what it's supposed to 'look' like to the human eye, and why.
I myself am not a programmer, I use other people's programs and shaders to create things, but my 'art' would not be possible without their end of the equation.
Namely The Amiga, which I used faithfully (and profitably!) for 5 years, just about every single model manufactured for the U.S. market, Zepplins, which I have a special love for, perhaps because I'm a big Miyazake fan, and push mowers, which my dad used exclusively to mow the lawn at our house.
What I didn't see was anything remotely controversial, such as the works of Nikola Tesla. Over half of his research papers are still classified by the U.S. government. The man did amazing and revolutionary things with energy conversion, and we have yet to see the benefit of many of his ideas. Food for thought...
When the Ask Jeeves commercials first started airing on the radio, there was one about a young teenage girl asking about french kissing. Well, just for yuks, I typed in 'French Kissing' and got all kinds of porn sites back on the outside links listing. Yyyyyyes! Corrupting youth! Back then, those outside links appeared right on your main search results. I just tried it today and those links no longer appear on the first page that comes back. The most 'adult' thing that is returned is a search from Momma.com - Lesbian Lilly Lickers.:)
---Mike
(Not -really- the kinda guy who would try to dial 867-5309 after hearing Tommy Tutone...)
In the broadcast relm...With the Advent of Digital Betacam (lossless all-digital D1 tape format), Discreet Logic has come up with a great way to back up your editing projects on their non-compressed nonlinear editor.
In addition to archiving the video on the drives to the tape as regular video, it encodes your timeline, edit bins, preferences etc. as data in the video area of the digital signal. It ends up looking like snow - random white blocks signifying data bits. Only with digital betacam, since it's lossless and noiseless, it can be done at a much higher data rate than using, say, VHS, without tape noise and much less fear of degredation or tape hits. (as long as the heads on the deck are clean)
I think this is probably the most advanced example to date of backing up data inside of a video signal. (in this case the video signal is all digital and uncompressed from end-to-end, so it's really just a data stream...but still, you can watch it on a monitor!)
Before you run out and get a deck and an D1 encoder...the deck costs $40,000 alone!:)
The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved by Joseph Davidovits. Amazon link here
Davidovits also runs www.geopolymer.org, and is extremely knowledgable in geopolymer technology, which is what led him to do Pyramid research. Afer reading his straightforward and forthright facts about the physics of scale in carving and hauling massive blocks, one can see why the conventional theories of pyramid building fall apart very quickly.
He suggests that the Pyramids are made of agglomerated, man-made stone. A very very quick gloss over of his theory is available on his website here.
While the book doesn't go into detail about the astronomical alignment, many other theories brought up in the followup threads are questioned and addressed, including the dangerously stupid "brothers from space" idea.
This issue really ruffles a lot of feathers with fine art nude photographers such as myself. Of all the potential for abitrary discrimination, people like me stand to take the worst blows.
In this particular case, it comes down to whether I decided to shoot in B&W or color that day.
As usual, the issue isn't what it is now, but what it has the potential to become. In as little as 10 years to two decades, we may have algs that are good enough to discern between hardcore pr0n and what most people consider to be 'art' photos. But in many cases, the line between art and pornography doesn't even exist.
I just visted a fantastic art gallery in San Francisco featuring very expensive large format laser holography. In addition to gorgeous fine art nude holograms, he also had amazing holographic prints of various sex acts in action. Closeups of oral fellatio with both sexes and other interesting subject material. I consider these prints to be extremely beautiful, capturing a freeze frame of raw human lust in a way that has never been seen before. Point being, I very much consider these prints to be 'fine art' even though if you were to see the same thing on a 2D color photograph, you might deem it to be only of purely purrient interest. The only difference is the medium used.
If I were to take some well-lit B&W's of two girls going at each other with their tongues, would it be art? Would the same thing be art if it was in color? Depending on who you are, how you were raised and where you are from, you might say that any picture depicting copulation is pornography. Others might say that sex is virulently beautiful in many forms.
A good way to define art: Does it quicken your pulse? Does it turn you on? Then it's art for you. If you consider it tasteless and it doesn't do anything for you, then it's not very artistic in your eyes.
More importantly: The whole idea of suing over email is a little ludicrous...if you are receiving pr0n images in email, who sent them? A friend of yours who accidentally put you in the CC? Does that warrant suing your COMPANY for failing to block it? Is ruffling through your personal mail looking for objectionable material part of a companies' responsibility? Do you want it to be? Does a whole company have to suffer out of fear that one or two people might be offended and lawsuit crazy? Have we completely lost out all our rights to the lawyers, who clean up on both sides of the equation?
The question is, who is writing this software, and what are their beliefs? Do you want someone else deciding for you what is 'art'? What else are they going to decide is not in your best interests to view?
---Mike
Watching the war over what combination of pixels we can look at and what combinations of pixels are 'bad' for us...
Of COURSE it's not safe...it's unencrypted and easily readable by a snoopy admin.
I do all my private email and IRC via SSH when at work. I also do use ICQ because many friends are on it, and I do realize that it is unsafe, so I watch what I say if it's something I don't want anyone else to hear.
Wouldn't it be great if all those silly little chat clients were encrypted? How long is it going to take for someone to develop one and have it catch on enough to where all your friends are using it? That'd be nice. (the second part is the hardest part for sure)
In the mean time, I'll stick with SSH and my shell account. Of course, I'm lucky enough to work at a place where the port is open through the firewall...the last place I was at had the great firewall of china. Only way to telnet was through a gateway. If it wasn't HTTP it didn't leave the place...
Check out this article on space.com entitled 'Rocket Men' by Larry Niven, which covers the showings of private industry at the eighth 'Access to Space" convention this past April.
Also, for the political and Economic musings related to getting in space, check out this article, also on space.com.
-------------
...then we watched mankind set twelve human beings
on the moon for a few days at a time, come home,
and stop.
We saw our space station built in Houston, orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.
Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon, celebrated by grumbling.
My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture
of Freedom space station and the legend,
"Nine years, nine billion dollars,
and all we got was this lousy shirt,"
and it's years old and wearing out.
Well, obviously there is still a size issue. 8gb is peanuts for video storage, especially if you're doing all noncompressed like I am. When it's 50 gigs or 100 gigs, it will serve the purpose well. Not only will rendered transitions happen faster, but it will eliminate the data throughput bottleneck in programs like After Effects. For simple compositions, most of the rendering time is spent in I/O, which is why I have an LVD ultra wide array for data storage.
It will also be a boon for renderfarms, where many many machines are writing huge files all at once.
PNG uses a (albiet very good) losless compression format, similar to LZW or RLE. In my photoshop saver, it also has a number of extra filter options for adaptive sampling and dithering, to decrease the size in a lossy manner. However, I am willing to bet that the compression ratio on larger images isn't nearly as good as JPEG for photographic, non-flat art images with lots of detail, where every pixel is a random value.
What I always wanted was an addition to the tag in html where you specify an identically sized greyscale JPEG as your alpha channel, so that img tag loads two jpegs, one with fill, one with alpha, since JPEG doesn't support alpha channels (it should.)
is there any other format that supports jpeg compression and alpha channels? (besides.PSD, which was never meant for -really- small file sizes...)
Also, what kind of keying is it doing? Is it premultiplied over black or straight? It's harder to avoid the fringies on normal images when keying straight, you have to overfill areas with solid colors and key inside those areas so that there's no black bleed on the edges.
The JPEG hack may seem like a pain to most, but I work in television graphics all day long and we use a lot of seperated alpha/fill elements, in both custom hardware and desktop software, like After Effects, for reasons of control and flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
From a friend who actually knows something:
"if he thinks he can get permission from AST he's out of his mind. And if he thinks Mexico will let him if the FAA says no, he's living in a fantasy world because the first thing the Mexicans will do is call the FAA and ask if they've given him permission to fly and if not, why not."
Aparrantly:
"_Everyone_ has tried to talk to this guy and he won't listen. Yes, he's nuts and he's probably just smart enough to get himself killed."
Mike Massee
An aquaintence of mine wrote a small program that will search the entire text of the bible and will find any phrase you give it hidden as 'bible code', similar to to the book of the same name which pruports to find all kinds of hidden messages. My aquaintence wrote it as a method of debunking such claims.
The problem with debunking absolutely everything is that there are probably some very genuine mathematical puzzles out there left to us by older civilizations, that may well be 'pooh poohed' and grouped with the rest of the nonsense, and we will have missed learning some interesting information about that civilization or religious context.
Precious truth may have been dilluted with an ocean of gibberish. Finding those gems and getting people to believe you is not going to be easy.
Mike Massee
> How many people around the world do you think
> paid for their copy of Windows vs. the number
> who did pay?
How many people think that mediocre OS is worth the sticker price? If the product is worth paying for, more people will pay. Not all, but more.
I know a good number of movies I think are worth paying $20 for. Sure, people are always going to pirate because they can, but they'll pirate far less if they feel like they're getting a good value. So again, I say, just keep the price of DVD's reasonable, and you'll earn more money than you will have saved after subtracting the costs of copy protection from the very small number of pirates it stops.
Mike Massee
(Drat, pressed the enter key in the subject line!)
Does not the sheer number of copy protection schemes on a single disc strike anyone as ludicrous?
So, on my copy of Star Wars Episode III, I'll have:
* Macrovision
* CSS
* Watermarking
and none of that can prevent me from making an easy copy in any way. A modified player disables macrovision. It decodes CSS when it plays the movie back, and the watermark is irrelevent to an unaware format (pick one, there's tons of them out there and they aren't magically going away)
If I as an individual person can so easily copy a disc, how are any of those things supposed to stop pirates? As mentioned previously, bit-by-bit copies circumvent any means of digital protection. Copy protection is a huge waste of money that threatens to drive the price of DVDs higher.
That's the best anti-piracy tool that the industry has going for it - most DVD's are priced reasonably. Sure I can make a copy, but why would I want to? I'm going to buy movies that I like. The price is right. That's all they have to do, is keep prices reasonable.
Mike Massee
Art of any kind is a learned skill. A few people in the world have a very natural inclation towards it, but most of the time, whether it's programming or painting, anyone can learn to do it. Some people have a 'knack' for the abstract, and some have an innate grasp of logic and numbers. People who claim they are un-artistic are usually underestimating the human capacity to create and have never been encouraged to do so themselves.
If you define an art as a skilled trade - then yes, programmers are always artists, especially programmers who can finish an entire piece of code that is both useful and elegant.
In my profession as a 3D animator, it is required that the artisan have a very rare combination of skills, both technical computer literacy and a very thorough understanding of perception, color, light, composition and aesthetics - the kind of thing that you learn as a student of the fine arts.
3D Animators and 2D compositors vary widely between those that have more technical than aesthetic skills, and some who have an amazing quantity of both. Some of the most useful and valuable animators and programmers are shader writers. This is the point at which nature and math come crashing together, for nature is really a series of deeply interwoven, extremely complex and infinitely repeatable mathematical patterns. Some examples of shader writers are people who author fur shaders, complex particle systems, nature shaders such as fractal plant, tree and undergrowth geometry generators, liquid particle systems and volumetric alg implementations for clouds, smoke, water and fire.
These programmer/animators not only understand the math behind these phenomena, they can also tweak the effect to look correct to the eye and make it applicable to use on screen. The raw math behind natural phenomena doesn't always give you the indended result, so you still need to know what it's supposed to 'look' like to the human eye, and why.
I myself am not a programmer, I use other people's programs and shaders to create things, but my 'art' would not be possible without their end of the equation.
---Mike
Mike Massee
Namely The Amiga, which I used faithfully (and profitably!) for 5 years, just about every single model manufactured for the U.S. market, Zepplins, which I have a special love for, perhaps because I'm a big Miyazake fan, and push mowers, which my dad used exclusively to mow the lawn at our house.
What I didn't see was anything remotely controversial, such as the works of Nikola Tesla. Over half of his research papers are still classified by the U.S. government. The man did amazing and revolutionary things with energy conversion, and we have yet to see the benefit of many of his ideas. Food for thought...
Mike Massee
Mike Massee
---Mike
(Not -really- the kinda guy who would try to dial 867-5309 after hearing Tommy Tutone...)
Mike Massee
In addition to archiving the video on the drives to the tape as regular video, it encodes your timeline, edit bins, preferences etc. as data in the video area of the digital signal. It ends up looking like snow - random white blocks signifying data bits. Only with digital betacam, since it's lossless and noiseless, it can be done at a much higher data rate than using, say, VHS, without tape noise and much less fear of degredation or tape hits. (as long as the heads on the deck are clean)
I think this is probably the most advanced example to date of backing up data inside of a video signal. (in this case the video signal is all digital and uncompressed from end-to-end, so it's really just a data stream...but still, you can watch it on a monitor!)
Before you run out and get a deck and an D1 encoder...the deck costs $40,000 alone! :)
--Mike
Mike Massee
Davidovits also runs www.geopolymer.org, and is extremely knowledgable in geopolymer technology, which is what led him to do Pyramid research. Afer reading his straightforward and forthright facts about the physics of scale in carving and hauling massive blocks, one can see why the conventional theories of pyramid building fall apart very quickly.
He suggests that the Pyramids are made of agglomerated, man-made stone. A very very quick gloss over of his theory is available on his website here.
While the book doesn't go into detail about the astronomical alignment, many other theories brought up in the followup threads are questioned and addressed, including the dangerously stupid "brothers from space" idea.
--Mike
Mike Massee
In this particular case, it comes down to whether I decided to shoot in B&W or color that day.
As usual, the issue isn't what it is now, but what it has the potential to become. In as little as 10 years to two decades, we may have algs that are good enough to discern between hardcore pr0n and what most people consider to be 'art' photos. But in many cases, the line between art and pornography doesn't even exist.
I just visted a fantastic art gallery in San Francisco featuring very expensive large format laser holography. In addition to gorgeous fine art nude holograms, he also had amazing holographic prints of various sex acts in action. Closeups of oral fellatio with both sexes and other interesting subject material. I consider these prints to be extremely beautiful, capturing a freeze frame of raw human lust in a way that has never been seen before. Point being, I very much consider these prints to be 'fine art' even though if you were to see the same thing on a 2D color photograph, you might deem it to be only of purely purrient interest. The only difference is the medium used.
If I were to take some well-lit B&W's of two girls going at each other with their tongues, would it be art? Would the same thing be art if it was in color? Depending on who you are, how you were raised and where you are from, you might say that any picture depicting copulation is pornography. Others might say that sex is virulently beautiful in many forms.
A good way to define art: Does it quicken your pulse? Does it turn you on? Then it's art for you. If you consider it tasteless and it doesn't do anything for you, then it's not very artistic in your eyes.
More importantly: The whole idea of suing over email is a little ludicrous...if you are receiving pr0n images in email, who sent them? A friend of yours who accidentally put you in the CC? Does that warrant suing your COMPANY for failing to block it? Is ruffling through your personal mail looking for objectionable material part of a companies' responsibility? Do you want it to be? Does a whole company have to suffer out of fear that one or two people might be offended and lawsuit crazy? Have we completely lost out all our rights to the lawyers, who clean up on both sides of the equation?
The question is, who is writing this software, and what are their beliefs? Do you want someone else deciding for you what is 'art'? What else are they going to decide is not in your best interests to view?
---Mike
Watching the war over what combination of pixels we can look at and what combinations of pixels are 'bad' for us...
Mike Massee
I do all my private email and IRC via SSH when at work. I also do use ICQ because many friends are on it, and I do realize that it is unsafe, so I watch what I say if it's something I don't want anyone else to hear.
Wouldn't it be great if all those silly little chat clients were encrypted? How long is it going to take for someone to develop one and have it catch on enough to where all your friends are using it? That'd be nice. (the second part is the hardest part for sure)
In the mean time, I'll stick with SSH and my shell account. Of course, I'm lucky enough to work at a place where the port is open through the firewall...the last place I was at had the great firewall of china. Only way to telnet was through a gateway. If it wasn't HTTP it didn't leave the place...
--Mike
harlock@raindrop.com
www.raindrop.com
Also, for the political and Economic musings related to getting in space, check out this article, also on space.com.
-------------
on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.
We saw our space station built in Houston,
orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.
Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon,
celebrated by grumbling.
My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture
of Freedom space station and the legend,
"Nine years, nine billion dollars,
and all we got was this lousy shirt,"
and it's years old and wearing out.
Now is economics interesting?
-------------
---Mike
harlock@raindrop.com
Well, obviously there is still a size issue. 8gb is peanuts for video storage, especially if you're doing all noncompressed like I am. When it's 50 gigs or 100 gigs, it will serve the purpose well. Not only will rendered transitions happen faster, but it will eliminate the data throughput bottleneck in programs like After Effects. For simple compositions, most of the rendering time is spent in I/O, which is why I have an LVD ultra wide array for data storage.
It will also be a boon for renderfarms, where many many machines are writing huge files all at once.
--M
This is excellent news...however, a question...
.PSD, which was never meant for -really- small file sizes...)
PNG uses a (albiet very good) losless compression format, similar to LZW or RLE. In my photoshop saver, it also has a number of extra filter options for adaptive sampling and dithering, to decrease the size in a lossy manner. However, I am willing to bet that the compression ratio on larger images isn't nearly as good as JPEG for photographic, non-flat art images with lots of detail, where every pixel is a random value.
What I always wanted was an addition to the tag in html where you specify an identically sized greyscale JPEG as your alpha channel, so that img tag loads two jpegs, one with fill, one with alpha, since JPEG doesn't support alpha channels (it should.)
is there any other format that supports jpeg compression and alpha channels? (besides
Also, what kind of keying is it doing? Is it premultiplied over black or straight? It's harder to avoid the fringies on normal images when keying straight, you have to overfill areas with solid colors and key inside those areas so that there's no black bleed on the edges.
The JPEG hack may seem like a pain to most, but I work in television graphics all day long and we use a lot of seperated alpha/fill elements, in both custom hardware and desktop software, like After Effects, for reasons of control and flexibility.
I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this.
---Mike
harlock@raindrop.com