The very first sentence of the article starts like this:
"When DirectX 10 rocks your PC with the release of Windows Vista early next year,"
I had to do a double-take to make sure I was reading the content and not an ad. (Although I'm not sure there's much difference between the two in this particular case.)
"The proposed HSR system would even be more expensive than driving."
Do the figures you cite include the massive governmental subsidies of highway systems? The Federal Highway Administration alone will spend more than $32 billion in FY 2005. This goes up to $36 billion next year and doesn't include the massive expenditures by state and local governments. That's tax money coming directly out of your pocket and mine.
High-speed rail is not necessarily the answer for California or anywhere else. Just remember that there is lot more to the cost of a car than the sticker price, insurance, repair costs, and fuel.
I don't personally agree with every single change that Jackson has made from Tolkien's books, either. I still think that Jackson should do what he wants -- not what you want, or I want, or some studio head wants, or what an actor wants.
I believe Jackson's primary obligation is to intepret Tolkien's story the very best way he can. That means making decisions and sacrifices and pissing some people off.
Trying to please every possible person is a receipe for absolute crap. Don't we already have more than enough produced-by-committee Hollywood pablum that tries to do this?
Everyone I know who owns a PVR (including me) says the same two things:
-1) I love it and will never, ever give it up. -2) It's nearly impossible to explain why I feel this way to anyone who doesn't own a PVR themselves.
IMO, #2 is the principal difficulty for SonicBlue and Tivo.
-Cal
Re:Someone posts a chess computer story...
on
Men vs. Machines
·
· Score: 1
I agree with most of your post, but I also think you overstate the case if you say that human players prepare to play versus a particular opponent in exactly the same manner that a computer program does. There are some similarities at a superficial level, but profound differences in how information is processed and in how changes are made to that information processing. (Human beings do not train to play a specific opponent by reprogramming their brains via neurosurgery.)
This concept is trivially obvious to most of the slashdot crowd, but many less computer-savvy people do not fundamentally understand how a computer program "plays" chess. It is easy for those people to read a statement such as "That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other," and mistakenly think that computing systems like Deep Blue process information in much the same way that humans do.
One of the major online travel sites will quite happily skew "lowest fare" flight search results towards a certain airline as long as said airline is willing to pay them a modest monthly fee. (I'm not going to say which one.)
The lowest fares (in an absolute, mathematical sense) are still there, just buried 40 pages deep into the search results. 99.999999% of all users won't bother to navigate past the first page, but the "complete results" are technically available for you to browse through.
This is just one real-life example -- there are endless, and I mean endless, types of games you can play by sorting of results. As long as the company has something to gain by skewing search results a certain way, some of the companies will choose to do so. (Yet another argument against any one private entity monopolizing access to a certain type of information.)
Slashdot Mirror
The very first sentence of the article starts like this:
"When DirectX 10 rocks your PC with the release of Windows Vista early next year,"
I had to do a double-take to make sure I was reading the content and not an ad. (Although I'm not sure there's much difference between the two in this particular case.)
Do the figures you cite include the massive governmental subsidies of highway systems? The Federal Highway Administration alone will spend more than $32 billion in FY 2005. This goes up to $36 billion next year and doesn't include the massive expenditures by state and local governments. That's tax money coming directly out of your pocket and mine.
There are many other non-obvious costs of cars, such as the fact that vast amounts of the space we live in is designed for use by cars instead of people.
High-speed rail is not necessarily the answer for California or anywhere else. Just remember that there is lot more to the cost of a car than the sticker price, insurance, repair costs, and fuel.
I don't personally agree with every single change that Jackson has made from Tolkien's books, either. I still think that Jackson should do what he wants -- not what you want, or I want, or some studio head wants, or what an actor wants.
I believe Jackson's primary obligation is to intepret Tolkien's story the very best way he can. That means making decisions and sacrifices and pissing some people off.
Trying to please every possible person is a receipe for absolute crap. Don't we already have more than enough produced-by-committee Hollywood pablum that tries to do this?
Everyone I know who owns a PVR (including me) says the same two things:
-1) I love it and will never, ever give it up.
-2) It's nearly impossible to explain why I feel this way to anyone who doesn't own a PVR themselves.
IMO, #2 is the principal difficulty for SonicBlue and Tivo.
-Cal
I agree with most of your post, but I also think you overstate the case if you say that human players prepare to play versus a particular opponent in exactly the same manner that a computer program does. There are some similarities at a superficial level, but profound differences in how information is processed and in how changes are made to that information processing. (Human beings do not train to play a specific opponent by reprogramming their brains via neurosurgery.)
This concept is trivially obvious to most of the slashdot crowd, but many less computer-savvy people do not fundamentally understand how a computer program "plays" chess. It is easy for those people to read a statement such as "That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other," and mistakenly think that computing systems like Deep Blue process information in much the same way that humans do.
One of the major online travel sites will quite happily skew "lowest fare" flight search results towards a certain airline as long as said airline is willing to pay them a modest monthly fee. (I'm not going to say which one.)
The lowest fares (in an absolute, mathematical sense) are still there, just buried 40 pages deep into the search results. 99.999999% of all users won't bother to navigate past the first page, but the "complete results" are technically available for you to browse through.
This is just one real-life example -- there are endless, and I mean endless, types of games you can play by sorting of results. As long as the company has something to gain by skewing search results a certain way, some of the companies will choose to do so. (Yet another argument against any one private entity monopolizing access to a certain type of information.)
Aloha,
-Cal
Not if you are under the "big rock"!
And a true ELE event would be much, much more than a "challenge".
To paraphrase e.e. cummings:
The chance of an ELE event is incredibly small, just as your individual chance of being struck by lightning is incredibly small.
But that's small consolation if you happen to be the guy that gets hit by the lightning.
Aloha,
-Cal