You could contribute to Ogre, Crystal Space, Blender Game Engine, or Erlicht. Or physics frameworks such as Bullet; or if AI is your interest - Recast and Detour. Or sound openal. If you are interested in the 'tool' side - then write importers/exporters for Blender; add tools that make rigging; skinning; modeling; texturing; animating; etc easier. You might also try writing importers/exporters for non opensource projects - ie Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, ZBrush - one taskthat would benefit blender users and build your knowledge of scripting and APIs for commercial 3d Apps would be to expand the.bullet importer to handle a wider variety of data. (Bullet format is the.blend format with the parser rewritten to be BSD compatible but not all of blenders features are currently handled).
You can also find a volunteer team and program some actual games.
You can also use commercial frameworks (Unity, etc.).
If you are a student you could apply for 'Google Summer of Code' for one of the projects listed above and add one of the items for their wishlist if they get accepted.
Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly, while Google dismisses that idea and tries to make theirs into an emotion-less Star Trek computer
The inventors of Siri, NOT Apple implemented 'attitude' for Siri, when Apple bought them out they didn't undo that decision. Also Google naming the software with a nod to the historical popularization of the idea, does not mean that the implementation will be similar in nature to popularization. You would likely have greater success in persuasion if you would check your facts and make sure that your assumptions are valid.
I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
It increases intensity and frequency of both droughts and floods - it is divergence from 'moderate' climate that is what you are looking for.
If you have a basic understanding of physics it should be obvious that increased warmth would cause more floods and droughts - increased total temperature causes faster evaporation both over land and ocean - for those areas where the clouds tend to not drift (and hence low rain fall historically) this will lead to more droughts; for areas of historical high rain fall - the greater ocean evaporation leads to more rain and hence more flooding.
But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
Actually flooding and droughts have been expected from the beginning. There is greater total energy which results in greater evaporation both over land and over ocean. Thus those areas that recieve modest rain fall historically end up with higher rates of evaporation leading to more frequent droughts, and those areas that have high rain fall historically get more frequent and stronger rains leading to more flooding.
The only ones who thought it was just droughts that would happen had little or no understanding of the science.
Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.
So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.
They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.
Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.
AFAIC ruthless capitalists do much more good for society than any charities or politicians. Ruthless capitalists actually push products that make them rich while making the society wealthy
Actually the ruthless kind of capitalist can often be of net negative. They most often find it easier to prevent competition (lawsuits, preventing suppliers from selling to them, preventing customers from purchasing from them) than to innovate; or they buy out competitors as it becomes obvious that the competitor will become successful.
Nearly everything he did (or bought and used, like the gUI, mouse etc.) in principle could have been done by anyone. But he did it, the others did not. Unix on the Desktop... where is it? Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
First the ideas from Xerox PARC that were in the Macintosh he tried to kill multiple times, Raskin finally arranged the trip to Xerox so that Jobs could see the value of the technology they were integrating and would quit trying to kill it - so the Macintosh happened in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.
Android was bought by google before the first iPhone was announced. So yes it would have existed. A few different capactivie touch phones existed prior to the Apples - and one quite similar to the iPhone was demoed about a half year before the iPhone existed and was announced as a product around the same time as the public revealing of the iPhone.
Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world.
Actually most of the industrial practices came from other folks - Oldsmobile did the first assembly line for cars. The contribution of Ford was the automated conveyor belts to the assembly line. He also made it a point to adopt best practices from other companies to improve efficiency. He was an inventor - his inventions were improvements on certain automobile parts.
[quote]Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words and we're moving towards a world where everyone carries a personal Internet-enabled device at all times, and all the technological and social change that entails. That's already shaped 21st century society more than any other person in the technology (or fashion) industry has to date.[quote]
We were already moving to everyone having a internet enabled smartphone. Everyone had RAZRs or better phones before the iPhone. The big difference is that instead of smartphones with slide out keyboards, we have smartphones with touch interfaces. It is quite possible that touch enabled smart phones would have happened anyway - indeed one quite similar to the iPhone went to market around the same time as the iPhone (and the founder claimed that the idea might have been copied from them).
With Jobs making it fashionable the spread of capacative touch phones probably spread more quickly, but probably only by a year or so.
It takes a while to get a patent. But it's not like you have to have your patents before you show off your invention. You'll still be protected by your patent when it's granted. If this gives off significant amounts of energy, then what's the harm of giving a demonstration?
If you reveal the mechanism before it before it is patented (or patent pending) it becomes unpatentable in most of the world.
He has done energy demonstrations and thus far the scientists who have observed haven't spotted any obvious fraud.
Didn't read the article, and I don't know how it's setup, but I don't expect them to be legit. But if I had really invented the real thing, I'd totally give some other scientists and engineers the chance to verify my measurements concerning the amount of electricity being produced by the machine and verify that there was no funny business going on.
He has done so quite a few times with smaller scale demonstrations.
I imagine the venture capitalists who would consider investing in such a project will demand some sort of demonstration before any money changes hand.
He isn't seeking funding. He plans to completely self finance, only selling the device and money is to change hands only after the device has been running satisfactorily for a long enough period of time to satisfy the customer.
You are trying to argue both sides of the fence here. If you had a potentially world-altering invention, you would be racing to the patent office at each stage of the invention to prevent competition. That is how is works for 99% of the people out there. Otherwise, you would eventually be giving your work away for free.
So where are the patents? If there are no patents, and this thing (through some miracle) is legitimate, then it is now ripe for someone else to swoop in and patent it (first to file wins; former publication, which this would qualify as, is mostly irrelevant nowadays). That would make this guy the dumbest inventor on Earth.
He has patents in Italy and patents pending in the US. He has had some of his US patent filings rejected since the US patent office has determined that fusion by unknown means is impossible and therefore unpatentable. So the US system puts inventors of these devices in a bit of a quandry - either don't try and patent and rely on trade secret, or file but try and describe it in such a way that you can get past the US patent office automatic rejection of anything that involves fusion that isn't well known how it happens.
Businesses are not people, they don't have any rights against warrantless search.
This is one of the few times on this type of issue where the government isn't overreaching and violating the constitution.
We also already have inspections of other industrys for illegal practices (food industrys, chemical industrys, etc.) So why should replication businesses have any special status.
There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies
Lightwave is not an industry leader for particles. I'd put them 5th or 6th. Rought order would be Houdini, Maya, XSI, 3DSMax, Lightwave, Blender, Cinema4D.
I think the original poster over states things, while certainly a lot easier to use and learn. There is still definitely a learning curve and a few counter intuitive hotkey and mouse button choices.
Why not just block uploading/download attachments from those services. That seems like it would solve the problem for the most part, even if you could hand type or copy/paste sensitive informtiation the time to do so would be prohibative.
If you are a talented coder who has an interested in graphics; simulation; animation; painting; video editing; digital compositing; game engines; AI; or just about anything else related to 3D animation; video editing and compositing; or games you might consider applying for Blender.
Here is a preliminary list of ideas, we are open to suggestions (in general only half of the proposals we recieve are items on the list) especially if it is something that you worked on for a school project.
[quote]Contrary to popular science fiction, electronics and radiation don't mix well. The robots they tried to use at Chernobyl stopped working almost immediately.[/quote]
Electronics can be hardened to 10,000 krad tolerance and you can use boron and lead shielding. Robotics have been sucessfully used to explore inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus. We have the technological capabilities to do the required hardware.
Yes, MIT, which brought us the widely quoted "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors" blog post early on. What's that? You can't find "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors?" Oh, it seems mitnse.com has taken that highly rosy, bright and shiny optimistic tract down.
Still seems to be there. (The original was posted at the blog mortagesatlarge since it was an email to freinds and family - it moved to the MIT blog since the original author found ou it had been publically posted, and asked them to check it for accuracy and if they would be willing to host it)
Probably because the disaster that it dismissed has slowly happened. You can read that original post with a little googling. Pay close attention to the "worst-case-scenario" at the end.
I've read it, the worst case scenario was with respect to the reactors. The problems we are seeing, which was not discussed in the original post (and at the time of the articles writing were not known to be an issue), are with the cooling beds for spent fuel, not the reactors.
But let me put your central assertion to the most obvious test. I write the Great American Novel. It's an awesome novel. It's breathtaking, ground-breaking, and lots of other "aking" things. But I'm eccentric. So I write it entirely as a C++ comment block, and in a file called "GreatAmericanNovel.hpp".
Your comments are expressive, so would be copyrightable. The parts of a header file that are not copyrightable are the 'merely functional' parts - which likely would generally be held to be function prototypes and typical stuff in a header.
A comment that describes the function might or might not be copyrightable but I think it probably would be - depends on the comment.
I read your source - he doesn't really address the 'functional' clause which addresses what is excluded from possible copyright, which is rather critical to this discussion.
The majority of the linux kernel headers ARE copyrighted. Look for yourself. Perhaps you are trying to make a claim that "headers are not copyrightable", but that would be crazy.
Having a copyright notice does not mean something is copyrighted, it just means a copyright claim is being asserted. In US law 'merely functional' elements are not copyrightable. It is argued that headers are 'merely functional' and hence not subject to copyright. (That doesn't mean that a header could not contain some copyrightable elements such as comments describing the function, but the core of header files - function definitions - are 'merely functional' and thus not copyrightable).
That "technical process" looks like it refers to an automated filter that it ran the standard Linux header files through, resulting in part of the API for the non-GPL Bionic Library used in application development. One reading of copyright law could determine that the Bionic Library is a direct derivative of the Linux Kernel and therefore must be GPLv2 and open source. This library is essential for Android application development, therefore it would become legally impossible to develop a closed-source Android app.
Personally, my reading of GPLv2 tells me that simply including GPLv2 header files does not mean that your application must also be GPLv2 (otherwise a large part of the embedded market simply wouldn't exist). So I'm marking this one down as FUD.
As pointed out above - header files are likely not copyrightable in the US.
Also something that violates the GPL does not mean that the remedy is to make any work that violates the copyright of a GPLed work also GPLed. If you violate the GPL, then it terminates your right to distribute and makes you a copyright violator - the remedy for which is typically economic damages.
IANAL - but I'm fairly sure that your post is mostly incorrect.
My suspicion is that it's especially common in managers used to environments where there is always a bit of "flexibility" (if an employee says "it can't be done" it means "it will be hard to do", if an employee says "three weeks" it means "two weeks with less time in the break room") who end up managing developers and IT people and don't understand that when their "The decision has already been made by management, we will [foo]" gets a "That's not possible, not just with the current state of computing but most likely not with our current understanding of the laws of physics" that's generally not negotiable, it really means that it's impossible.
Well sometimes 'that's impossible' just means that they don't know how to do it or misunderstood the request or they track their mind went down when they tried to think of a solution was the wrong track. I've had three or four times where programmers I've been working with have told me something is 'impossible' then I give a few hours thought and provide them with an algorithm for it. (These are highly skilled programmers too, not html monkeys but top 1% C and python programmers).
The important part was Motionbuilder. Right now Blender doesn't have the tools for dealing with motion capture to give 'clean' results from mocap data. Thus until such time as our tools for mocap improve Blender won't be a suitable choice. Maya can import easily the files output by Maya.
Slashdot Mirror
You could contribute to Ogre, Crystal Space, Blender Game Engine, or Erlicht. Or physics frameworks such as Bullet; or if AI is your interest - Recast and Detour. Or sound openal. If you are interested in the 'tool' side - then write importers/exporters for Blender; add tools that make rigging; skinning; modeling; texturing; animating; etc easier. You might also try writing importers/exporters for non opensource projects - ie Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, ZBrush - one taskthat would benefit blender users and build your knowledge of scripting and APIs for commercial 3d Apps would be to expand the .bullet importer to handle a wider variety of data. (Bullet format is the .blend format with the parser rewritten to be BSD compatible but not all of blenders features are currently handled).
You can also find a volunteer team and program some actual games.
You can also use commercial frameworks (Unity, etc.).
If you are a student you could apply for 'Google Summer of Code' for one of the projects listed above and add one of the items for their wishlist if they get accepted.
Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly, while Google dismisses that idea and tries to make theirs into an emotion-less Star Trek computer
The inventors of Siri, NOT Apple implemented 'attitude' for Siri, when Apple bought them out they didn't undo that decision. Also Google naming the software with a nod to the historical popularization of the idea, does not mean that the implementation will be similar in nature to popularization. You would likely have greater success in persuasion if you would check your facts and make sure that your assumptions are valid.
I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
It increases intensity and frequency of both droughts and floods - it is divergence from 'moderate' climate that is what you are looking for.
If you have a basic understanding of physics it should be obvious that increased warmth would cause more floods and droughts - increased total temperature causes faster evaporation both over land and ocean - for those areas where the clouds tend to not drift (and hence low rain fall historically) this will lead to more droughts; for areas of historical high rain fall - the greater ocean evaporation leads to more rain and hence more flooding.
But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
Actually flooding and droughts have been expected from the beginning. There is greater total energy which results in greater evaporation both over land and over ocean. Thus those areas that recieve modest rain fall historically end up with higher rates of evaporation leading to more frequent droughts, and those areas that have high rain fall historically get more frequent and stronger rains leading to more flooding.
The only ones who thought it was just droughts that would happen had little or no understanding of the science.
Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.
So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html
They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.
Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html
AFAIC ruthless capitalists do much more good for society than any charities or politicians. Ruthless capitalists actually push products that make them rich while making the society wealthy
Actually the ruthless kind of capitalist can often be of net negative. They most often find it easier to prevent competition (lawsuits, preventing suppliers from selling to them, preventing customers from purchasing from them) than to innovate; or they buy out competitors as it becomes obvious that the competitor will become successful.
Nearly everything he did (or bought and used, like the gUI, mouse etc.) in principle could have been done by anyone. But he did it, the others did not. ... where is it? Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Unix on the Desktop
First the ideas from Xerox PARC that were in the Macintosh he tried to kill multiple times, Raskin finally arranged the trip to Xerox so that Jobs could see the value of the technology they were integrating and would quit trying to kill it - so the Macintosh happened in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.
Android was bought by google before the first iPhone was announced. So yes it would have existed. A few different capactivie touch phones existed prior to the Apples - and one quite similar to the iPhone was demoed about a half year before the iPhone existed and was announced as a product around the same time as the public revealing of the iPhone.
Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world.
Actually most of the industrial practices came from other folks - Oldsmobile did the first assembly line for cars. The contribution of Ford was the automated conveyor belts to the assembly line. He also made it a point to adopt best practices from other companies to improve efficiency. He was an inventor - his inventions were improvements on certain automobile parts.
[quote]Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words and we're moving towards a world where everyone carries a personal Internet-enabled device at all times, and all the technological and social change that entails. That's already shaped 21st century society more than any other person in the technology (or fashion) industry has to date.[quote]
We were already moving to everyone having a internet enabled smartphone. Everyone had RAZRs or better phones before the iPhone. The big difference is that instead of smartphones with slide out keyboards, we have smartphones with touch interfaces. It is quite possible that touch enabled smart phones would have happened anyway - indeed one quite similar to the iPhone went to market around the same time as the iPhone (and the founder claimed that the idea might have been copied from them).
With Jobs making it fashionable the spread of capacative touch phones probably spread more quickly, but probably only by a year or so.
It takes a while to get a patent. But it's not like you have to have your patents before you show off your invention. You'll still be protected by your patent when it's granted. If this gives off significant amounts of energy, then what's the harm of giving a demonstration?
If you reveal the mechanism before it before it is patented (or patent pending) it becomes unpatentable in most of the world.
He has done energy demonstrations and thus far the scientists who have observed haven't spotted any obvious fraud.
Didn't read the article, and I don't know how it's setup, but I don't expect them to be legit. But if I had really invented the real thing, I'd totally give some other scientists and engineers the chance to verify my measurements concerning the amount of electricity being produced by the machine and verify that there was no funny business going on.
He has done so quite a few times with smaller scale demonstrations.
I imagine the venture capitalists who would consider investing in such a project will demand some sort of demonstration before any money changes hand.
He isn't seeking funding. He plans to completely self finance, only selling the device and money is to change hands only after the device has been running satisfactorily for a long enough period of time to satisfy the customer.
You are trying to argue both sides of the fence here. If you had a potentially world-altering invention, you would be racing to the patent office at each stage of the invention to prevent competition. That is how is works for 99% of the people out there. Otherwise, you would eventually be giving your work away for free.
So where are the patents? If there are no patents, and this thing (through some miracle) is legitimate, then it is now ripe for someone else to swoop in and patent it (first to file wins; former publication, which this would qualify as, is mostly irrelevant nowadays). That would make this guy the dumbest inventor on Earth.
He has patents in Italy and patents pending in the US. He has had some of his US patent filings rejected since the US patent office has determined that fusion by unknown means is impossible and therefore unpatentable. So the US system puts inventors of these devices in a bit of a quandry - either don't try and patent and rely on trade secret, or file but try and describe it in such a way that you can get past the US patent office automatic rejection of anything that involves fusion that isn't well known how it happens.
Businesses are not people, they don't have any rights against warrantless search.
This is one of the few times on this type of issue where the government isn't overreaching and violating the constitution.
We also already have inspections of other industrys for illegal practices (food industrys, chemical industrys, etc.) So why should replication businesses have any special status.
There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies
Lightwave is not an industry leader for particles. I'd put them 5th or 6th. Rought order would be Houdini, Maya, XSI, 3DSMax, Lightwave, Blender, Cinema4D.
I think the original poster over states things, while certainly a lot easier to use and learn. There is still definitely a learning curve and a few counter intuitive hotkey and mouse button choices.
Why not just block uploading/download attachments from those services. That seems like it would solve the problem for the most part, even if you could hand type or copy/paste sensitive informtiation the time to do so would be prohibative.
If you are a talented coder who has an interested in graphics; simulation; animation; painting; video editing; digital compositing; game engines; AI; or just about anything else related to 3D animation; video editing and compositing; or games you might consider applying for Blender.
Here is a preliminary list of ideas, we are open to suggestions (in general only half of the proposals we recieve are items on the list) especially if it is something that you worked on for a school project.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2011/Ideas
[quote]Contrary to popular science fiction, electronics and radiation don't mix well.
The robots they tried to use at Chernobyl stopped working almost immediately.[/quote]
Electronics can be hardened to 10,000 krad tolerance and you can use boron and lead shielding. Robotics have been sucessfully used to explore inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus. We have the technological capabilities to do the required hardware.
Yes, MIT, which brought us the widely quoted "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors" blog post early on. What's that? You can't find "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors?" Oh, it seems mitnse.com has taken that highly rosy, bright and shiny optimistic tract down.
You mean this post?
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/modified-version-of-original-post/
Still seems to be there. (The original was posted at the blog mortagesatlarge since it was an email to freinds and family - it moved to the MIT blog since the original author found ou it had been publically posted, and asked them to check it for accuracy and if they would be willing to host it)
Probably because the disaster that it dismissed has slowly happened. You can read that original post with a little googling. Pay close attention to the "worst-case-scenario" at the end.
I've read it, the worst case scenario was with respect to the reactors. The problems we are seeing, which was not discussed in the original post (and at the time of the articles writing were not known to be an issue), are with the cooling beds for spent fuel, not the reactors.
But let me put your central assertion to the most obvious test. I write the Great American Novel. It's an awesome novel. It's breathtaking, ground-breaking, and lots of other "aking" things. But I'm eccentric. So I write it entirely as a C++ comment block, and in a file called "GreatAmericanNovel.hpp".
Your comments are expressive, so would be copyrightable. The parts of a header file that are not copyrightable are the 'merely functional' parts - which likely would generally be held to be function prototypes and typical stuff in a header.
A comment that describes the function might or might not be copyrightable but I think it probably would be - depends on the comment.
I read your source - he doesn't really address the 'functional' clause which addresses what is excluded from possible copyright, which is rather critical to this discussion.
Not a lawyer, etc.
The majority of the linux kernel headers ARE copyrighted. Look for yourself. Perhaps you are trying to make a claim that "headers are not copyrightable", but that would be crazy.
Having a copyright notice does not mean something is copyrighted, it just means a copyright claim is being asserted. In US law 'merely functional' elements are not copyrightable. It is argued that headers are 'merely functional' and hence not subject to copyright. (That doesn't mean that a header could not contain some copyrightable elements such as comments describing the function, but the core of header files - function definitions - are 'merely functional' and thus not copyrightable).
That "technical process" looks like it refers to an automated filter that it ran the standard Linux header files through, resulting in part of the API for the non-GPL Bionic Library used in application development. One reading of copyright law could determine that the Bionic Library is a direct derivative of the Linux Kernel and therefore must be GPLv2 and open source. This library is essential for Android application development, therefore it would become legally impossible to develop a closed-source Android app.
Personally, my reading of GPLv2 tells me that simply including GPLv2 header files does not mean that your application must also be GPLv2 (otherwise a large part of the embedded market simply wouldn't exist). So I'm marking this one down as FUD.
As pointed out above - header files are likely not copyrightable in the US.
Also something that violates the GPL does not mean that the remedy is to make any work that violates the copyright of a GPLed work also GPLed. If you violate the GPL, then it terminates your right to distribute and makes you a copyright violator - the remedy for which is typically economic damages.
IANAL - but I'm fairly sure that your post is mostly incorrect.
My suspicion is that it's especially common in managers used to environments where there is always a bit of "flexibility" (if an employee says "it can't be done" it means "it will be hard to do", if an employee says "three weeks" it means "two weeks with less time in the break room") who end up managing developers and IT people and don't understand that when their "The decision has already been made by management, we will [foo]" gets a "That's not possible, not just with the current state of computing but most likely not with our current understanding of the laws of physics" that's generally not negotiable, it really means that it's impossible.
Well sometimes 'that's impossible' just means that they don't know how to do it or misunderstood the request or they track their mind went down when they tried to think of a solution was the wrong track. I've had three or four times where programmers I've been working with have told me something is 'impossible' then I give a few hours thought and provide them with an algorithm for it. (These are highly skilled programmers too, not html monkeys but top 1% C and python programmers).
Yes it is called 'full disclosure' - when reporting about a group you have financial ties to you are supposed to disclose that fact.
The important part was Motionbuilder. Right now Blender doesn't have the tools for dealing with motion capture to give 'clean' results from mocap data. Thus until such time as our tools for mocap improve Blender won't be a suitable choice. Maya can import easily the files output by Maya.
The Kings Speech, Black Swan, True Grit, were all top grossing film and all original and good work.
True Grit was a remake.