Shouldn't Peter Parker own the patent to this device?
Heh, gives a whole new meaning to "prior art", doesn't it?
But you see, Spider-Man's tracers didn't use GPS; they generated a signal that was only detectable by his "spider-sense". So the patent is unencumbered. Besides, J. Jonah Jameson has already asserted that Spider-Man has no legal identity.
"Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
He's got a point, tho. Many people take those photos and either print them out as snapshots or stick them on the Internet. With a 4x6 snapshot, you only really need 2-3 megapixels of data, after cropping--and there's only so much you can crop before you get a fuzzy image on a consumer-grade lens. In a web browser, you need less than one megapixel.
For snapshot-type cameras, then, 5 megapixels is usually plenty and 7-8 is bordering on overkill. Until someone comes up with a good use for the extra resolution, those higher-rez cameras will be a waste of storage.
Bah! I've been reading Richard K. Morgan's newest, "Woken Furies", and I have to admit the idea of having a body with genetically-engineered gecko grips in the fingers and toes has enormous appeal. Shame on Bush for denying us biological enhancements in our future bodies!
and mistakenly believe the entire crew was borne in one location.
I think that word "crew" is central to the issue. IIRC, slaves on boats weren't often given such luxuries as food and water that wasn't strictly necessary for survival. Of course, that may be more applicable to the later slave trading boats than the early ones.
Look at Disney's animated output over the last ten years. Then look at Pixar's. They may hypothetically be doing the same thing, but in reality Pixar's in an entirely different league.
That has nothing to do with the monopoly/duopoly argument I was replying to. The fact that they are, as you say, doing the same thing is the only issue.
If, for 90 minutes, you can believe that little plastic toys are actually animate and sentient then there's a chance that you could also be made to believe that there is a good reason to ship a silly little toy back to the manufacturer.
Wow, I never thought of it that way... you're right! It IS much easier to enjoy fiction if I just assume there doesn't need to be any underlying logic to the plot at all!
The trick is to avoid delivering "tells" that are physiologic manifestations of deception.
IANAD, but an episode of "House, M.D." covered this at the end of last season and I do remember reading about the same thing elsewhere in the past. Basically (in the TV show), it was pointed out that lying is a much more creative process than telling the truth and doing so causes completely different parts of the brain to show activity, which can be detected easily by an MRI taken at the same time.
It failed to work, on the episode, because while the patient wasn't telling the truth, he wasn't lying either -- he was having delusions and actually believed he was giving true information. Which, I guess, only goes to underscore the fact that witnesses are never as useful as hard evidence.
According to talk in Hollywood, Disney was struggling with a script in which Buzz Lightyear, one of the two stars, developed a fault and had to be recalled to Taiwan for repairs.
That sounds like a reasonably good premise, actually.
Except for the fact that it would probably be cheaper to replace a $15 (retail) electronic action figure than to ship it halfway around the world for repairs.
I think it's time for the internet to stop catering to the past.
Why?
Can you imagine our interstates if we still catered to stage coaches, horse drawn carriages, and Model T's?
But we do still cater to them. That why we have a non-interstate road system.
Can you imagine television if we still catered to black and white TV's?
Last I checked, all major TV broadcasts did still work on b&w.
Change happens. Get over it. It's not like Firefox cost's [sic]$3,995.00 per copy.
No, but a new computer that can run it just might cost some people a thousand dollars they don't have.
There are limits to backwards compatibility, true. But seeing as the entire internet is only about ten years old, and seeing as many people who don't read Slashdot actually have computer that are at least five years old and still running Windows 95/98, it is in fact not only considerate but good marketing to keep your sites compatible with those machines whenever possible.
Now it's happening to cars. But all those who are trolling on the teaser trailer will be in for a surprise.
The premise, if you haven't read about it yet, sounds clever -- a racing stock car and an old rusty country pickup truck buddy up and go on a road trip down Route 66. The stock car lives fast, flashy and rich -- but until now hasn't ever seen much of life outside the racetrack. The pickup has been everywhere, man, but doesn't know much of life outside of the rural Midwest.
Now that I type it, it sounds a lot like "Finding Nemo" with cars. The fact that Owen Wilson is voicing the stock car is a plus; I've always like his character (singular) in other comedies.
What I think we should be more worried about is the creation of the most vertically integrated entertainment duopoly since paramount case of 1948 [cobbles.com] broke up the old vertical monopolists.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Disney acquiring Pixar only means that they acquire a whole lot of proven talent and technology in a field they were already in. The only thing Pixar did that Disney didn't (besides profit) was sell their Renderman software.
There's no new "duopoly" here. Disney has bought a company that does exactly what Disney was doing anyway.
Google news is rather dubious. There's no real insight into how it selects headlines.
Too be fair, though, there's no real insight as to how any other online news source selects its headlines, either. You're either leaving it up to the whims of the editor(s), or the whims of an automated database.
Re:Ok, what happens to Renderman now?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
Honestly, has anyone really seen anything coming out that even remotely looks interesting? Chicken Little(already out last year)? Ice Age 2? Cars? Open Season? Over the Hedge? Any of these really grabbing you?
I look forward to anything Pixar makes, which includes Cars. Over The Hedge has always been a good comic strip, and after being thoroughly amused by Madagascar (so what if it wasn't deep? It was the best homage I've seen to Tex Avery since Animaniacs went off the air) I'm genuinely looking forward to it.
Both Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music were done as animated series a few years back; they're available on DVD now - not at all bad.
You're kidding, right? The "Wyrd Sisters" animated (mini)series was utterly dreadful. I never even finished watching it, my eyes hurt that badly. The quality of animation was lousy even by BBC standards, and it was such a literal translation of the novel that it utterly failed as a screenplay. In fact, I'd hold it up as justification for every screenwriter and director who changes the plot of a popular novel against the howls and protests of fans.
Pratchett makes great books, but I'm not in any more of a hurry to see the Discworld on the big screen than he is himself. As "H2G2" vividly showed, satire that works astonishingly well on paper is rarely as effective on screen.
Ultimately SUSB saw it my way and they gave me an A a I never went back but I'll bet a lot of kids forced into that class just got bullied or thrown out of it....
Do you job....
If a professor is doing their job they have nothing to worry about.
And since your English professor was clearly not doing his job...?
The key is that the doctors can control the amount of sensory stimulation. If big fat hairy spiders sends the patient into the red, they can display a circle with 8 legs and then work up from there. The doctors also use 'crude' physical props to aid in the experience.
Serious question: how would this therapy apply for those who have been suffering post-traumatic stress disorder due to rape?
Yes, Freecycle is about free stuff, but the same finding and shipping issues apply.
But that's the advantage of a local emphasis: "shipping" just becomes a matter of deciding who can drive to the other guy's house to pick up or deliver the item.
Example: My wife's a subscriber to the Peoria, Illinois freecycle group. Lots of traffic, but it's managable, on the order of a large rec.arts.* newsgroup back in the heyday of Usenet, and like those newsgroups members use descriptive subject lines to others don't have to read every friggin' message. We get, and give, a lot of kids' stuff as our toddlers grow into preschoolers and kindergarteners. It's like a thrift shop without the shop.
That's a textbook definition of a straw man argument. Nobody who wants the right to make money off of their ideas also wants people to starve. Shame on you for even implying that.
Thank you. The fundamental hole in this argument is that there is a free, open-source OS out there, and it will even run on Apple's hardware if you like (or it will soon, anyway). Apple is doing nothing to prevent people from using free software and operating systems just because they don't want their own software to be free.
Why not package the new iMac guts in a case without a monitor?
Because then it wouldn't be an iMac; it would be a Mac Mini. The whole point of an iMac is the all-in-one design. If you don't want that, buy a Mini or a PowerMac.
Anyone have thoughts on why there were no Mac mini, iBook, or eMac updates ( or Intel conversions ) today ? What is going to happen there ?
According to Jobs' keynote, it'll happen in the next twelve months.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't Peter Parker own the patent to this device?
Heh, gives a whole new meaning to "prior art", doesn't it?
But you see, Spider-Man's tracers didn't use GPS; they generated a signal that was only detectable by his "spider-sense". So the patent is unencumbered. Besides, J. Jonah Jameson has already asserted that Spider-Man has no legal identity.
"Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
He's got a point, tho. Many people take those photos and either print them out as snapshots or stick them on the Internet. With a 4x6 snapshot, you only really need 2-3 megapixels of data, after cropping--and there's only so much you can crop before you get a fuzzy image on a consumer-grade lens. In a web browser, you need less than one megapixel.
For snapshot-type cameras, then, 5 megapixels is usually plenty and 7-8 is bordering on overkill. Until someone comes up with a good use for the extra resolution, those higher-rez cameras will be a waste of storage.
Bah! I've been reading Richard K. Morgan's newest, "Woken Furies", and I have to admit the idea of having a body with genetically-engineered gecko grips in the fingers and toes has enormous appeal. Shame on Bush for denying us biological enhancements in our future bodies!
and mistakenly believe the entire crew was borne in one location.
I think that word "crew" is central to the issue. IIRC, slaves on boats weren't often given such luxuries as food and water that wasn't strictly necessary for survival. Of course, that may be more applicable to the later slave trading boats than the early ones.
Could you survive a 50-foot fall into a snow bank like Luke Skywalker did?
Sure you could. You could fall up to 130 feet if there was enough snow.
If you oust the original founders of the company, it's almost always a death sentence.
Sometimes literally.
Look at Disney's animated output over the last ten years. Then look at Pixar's. They may hypothetically be doing the same thing, but in reality Pixar's in an entirely different league.
That has nothing to do with the monopoly/duopoly argument I was replying to. The fact that they are, as you say, doing the same thing is the only issue.
If, for 90 minutes, you can believe that little plastic toys are actually animate and sentient then there's a chance that you could also be made to believe that there is a good reason to ship a silly little toy back to the manufacturer.
Wow, I never thought of it that way... you're right! It IS much easier to enjoy fiction if I just assume there doesn't need to be any underlying logic to the plot at all!
New Windows Installer version
With all the other changes/improvements you listed, I think you could have left this one out as too trivial to mention.
The trick is to avoid delivering "tells" that are physiologic manifestations of deception.
IANAD, but an episode of "House, M.D." covered this at the end of last season and I do remember reading about the same thing elsewhere in the past. Basically (in the TV show), it was pointed out that lying is a much more creative process than telling the truth and doing so causes completely different parts of the brain to show activity, which can be detected easily by an MRI taken at the same time.
It failed to work, on the episode, because while the patient wasn't telling the truth, he wasn't lying either -- he was having delusions and actually believed he was giving true information. Which, I guess, only goes to underscore the fact that witnesses are never as useful as hard evidence.
According to talk in Hollywood, Disney was struggling with a script in which Buzz Lightyear, one of the two stars, developed a fault and had to be recalled to Taiwan for repairs.
That sounds like a reasonably good premise, actually.
Except for the fact that it would probably be cheaper to replace a $15 (retail) electronic action figure than to ship it halfway around the world for repairs.
I think it's time for the internet to stop catering to the past.
Why?
Can you imagine our interstates if we still catered to stage coaches, horse drawn carriages, and Model T's?
But we do still cater to them. That why we have a non-interstate road system.
Can you imagine television if we still catered to black and white TV's?
Last I checked, all major TV broadcasts did still work on b&w.
Change happens. Get over it. It's not like Firefox cost's [sic]$3,995.00 per copy.
No, but a new computer that can run it just might cost some people a thousand dollars they don't have.
There are limits to backwards compatibility, true. But seeing as the entire internet is only about ten years old, and seeing as many people who don't read Slashdot actually have computer that are at least five years old and still running Windows 95/98, it is in fact not only considerate but good marketing to keep your sites compatible with those machines whenever possible.
I don't know if they counted dynamic pages, but I guess they did. In dynamic pages, an empty table is quite normal.
I doubt it. This is from Google, which only searches the server's output, not the uncompiled code.
Now it's happening to cars. But all those who are trolling on the teaser trailer will be in for a surprise.
The premise, if you haven't read about it yet, sounds clever -- a racing stock car and an old rusty country pickup truck buddy up and go on a road trip down Route 66. The stock car lives fast, flashy and rich -- but until now hasn't ever seen much of life outside the racetrack. The pickup has been everywhere, man, but doesn't know much of life outside of the rural Midwest.
Now that I type it, it sounds a lot like "Finding Nemo" with cars. The fact that Owen Wilson is voicing the stock car is a plus; I've always like his character (singular) in other comedies.
What I think we should be more worried about is the creation of the most vertically integrated entertainment duopoly since paramount case of 1948 [cobbles.com] broke up the old vertical monopolists.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Disney acquiring Pixar only means that they acquire a whole lot of proven talent and technology in a field they were already in. The only thing Pixar did that Disney didn't (besides profit) was sell their Renderman software.
There's no new "duopoly" here. Disney has bought a company that does exactly what Disney was doing anyway.
Google news is rather dubious. There's no real insight into how it selects headlines.
Too be fair, though, there's no real insight as to how any other online news source selects its headlines, either. You're either leaving it up to the whims of the editor(s), or the whims of an automated database.
Honestly, has anyone really seen anything coming out that even remotely looks interesting? Chicken Little(already out last year)? Ice Age 2? Cars? Open Season? Over the Hedge? Any of these really grabbing you?
I look forward to anything Pixar makes, which includes Cars. Over The Hedge has always been a good comic strip, and after being thoroughly amused by Madagascar (so what if it wasn't deep? It was the best homage I've seen to Tex Avery since Animaniacs went off the air) I'm genuinely looking forward to it.
Both Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music were done as animated series a few years back; they're available on DVD now - not at all bad.
You're kidding, right? The "Wyrd Sisters" animated (mini)series was utterly dreadful. I never even finished watching it, my eyes hurt that badly. The quality of animation was lousy even by BBC standards, and it was such a literal translation of the novel that it utterly failed as a screenplay. In fact, I'd hold it up as justification for every screenwriter and director who changes the plot of a popular novel against the howls and protests of fans.
Pratchett makes great books, but I'm not in any more of a hurry to see the Discworld on the big screen than he is himself. As "H2G2" vividly showed, satire that works astonishingly well on paper is rarely as effective on screen.
Ultimately SUSB saw it my way and they gave me an A a I never went back but I'll bet a lot of kids forced into that class just got bullied or thrown out of it....
Do you job....
If a professor is doing their job they have nothing to worry about.
And since your English professor was clearly not doing his job...?
The key is that the doctors can control the amount of sensory stimulation. If big fat hairy spiders sends the patient into the red, they can display a circle with 8 legs and then work up from there. The doctors also use 'crude' physical props to aid in the experience.
Serious question: how would this therapy apply for those who have been suffering post-traumatic stress disorder due to rape?
Yes, Freecycle is about free stuff, but the same finding and shipping issues apply.
But that's the advantage of a local emphasis: "shipping" just becomes a matter of deciding who can drive to the other guy's house to pick up or deliver the item.
Example: My wife's a subscriber to the Peoria, Illinois freecycle group. Lots of traffic, but it's managable, on the order of a large rec.arts.* newsgroup back in the heyday of Usenet, and like those newsgroups members use descriptive subject lines to others don't have to read every friggin' message. We get, and give, a lot of kids' stuff as our toddlers grow into preschoolers and kindergarteners. It's like a thrift shop without the shop.
That's a textbook definition of a straw man argument. Nobody who wants the right to make money off of their ideas also wants people to starve. Shame on you for even implying that.
Thank you. The fundamental hole in this argument is that there is a free, open-source OS out there, and it will even run on Apple's hardware if you like (or it will soon, anyway). Apple is doing nothing to prevent people from using free software and operating systems just because they don't want their own software to be free.
Modems are no longer as nessary as they use to be.
Not entirely true; they're mighty useful if you want to fax something and don't feel like bothering with an eFax account.
MACBOOKPRO! ~ PC OR KABOOM!
Rico... enough with the dynamite already.
Why not package the new iMac guts in a case without a monitor?
Because then it wouldn't be an iMac; it would be a Mac Mini. The whole point of an iMac is the all-in-one design. If you don't want that, buy a Mini or a PowerMac.
Anyone have thoughts on why there were no Mac mini, iBook, or eMac updates ( or Intel conversions ) today ? What is going to happen there ?
According to Jobs' keynote, it'll happen in the next twelve months.