I suspect they got the cash infusion because they just got a very general patent on social networking. They could force just about every other social networking site to pay them lots and lots of money.
The stuff about "resurrecting" Friendster seems to be more of a PR move. They'll try to compete, but pretty soon, they'll claim they can't compete because other sites have stolen their patented ideas. Then Friendster can sue these sites and claim even more damage.
It's also much easier for a government agency to get those documents from Google than to get a warrant to search your home computer for the same documents.
My first job ever was programming job costing apps for a company that had an Altair 8000b.
My first personal computer was a Honeywell 6000. (Actually Honeywell owned it, my dad worked for them developing Gecos & Multics -- we had a TTY in the den)
Canada has about 32 million people, and the US has almost 300 million.
Sure we have more people... but we would also have more people counting. If the same percentage of citizens count the ballots, the results come in at the same rate for both countries, regardless of population.
human tallying is more error prone than computer tallying.
Not necessarily. One error in a computer tally can lose thousands of votes. In addition, one corrupt person with access to a tabulator can change the results of an entire election.
When people count, it is in a room filled with other people. So, one corrupt person cannot change an election because he/she is being watched. In addition, the votes are counted two or three times by different individuals. If the counts don't match, they count again until they do match... kind of like error checking but with meat-based CPUs.
Again - it's more about the confidence in the results. When people count, there are many witnesses to the count and high confidence that the count was performed properly. When a computer counts, nobody witnesses the count, and no confidence.
After reading through some of these... it's very apparent that securing these machines is an uphill battle. Do we really want to double seal the machines, tamper-proof the ROMS and secure the machines against a 20,000 volt discharge? Why do we need to jump through all these hoops? it's insane.
Good old-fashioned paper is the solution. It's cheap, it ensures a paper audit trail, and it's counted in public by thousands of real people who witness the count.
Creating faces that look as good as the real ones is nearly impossible
But if your task is to create faces that look completely real... why not just use real faces? Hiring an actor is a heck of a lot cheaper than creating one in CG.
The best use of CG is when the shot supposed to look different and/or better than reality. If you want reality, step away from the computer and go outside... it's all around you.
As an animtor, I may be biased, but I have to take exception with the basic premise of the article. Motion capture still has a lot of problems. Not that I'm against mocap, it's great for making Tiger Woods swing the golf club like Tiger Woods in his latest game, and it's terrific for other types of realistic human motion.
But when it comes to acting, there is nothing to replace the frame by frame attention that an animator can give to a scene. Polar Express proved that humans acting using mocap still look like humans wearing rubber masks. Gollum in LOTR was a good exception, yet the basic mocap of Andy Serkis was gone over by real animators who could use their knowledge and skill to truly bring the character to life.
There's also the issue of character design. If you mocap a real human and put that data on something that isn't really human, you lose a lot. The musculature of a human face might not quite match up to that reptillian monster (or whatever) and the result will appear soft and lifeless. If the body geometry is different, you might be able to compensate in software, but the underlying motion will still be that of a human. If you mocapped a human and put in on Godzilla, you'd have what looks like a human in a Godzilla suit (which may actually be a good thing if you're doing an homage to the old Japanese films)
Mocap is cool, and I'm sure Tom Hanks loved putting on that nifty mocap suit... but the best acting on CG characters today is still the result of animators working one frame at a time
even though they are getting paid very little in comparison to bloated unionized factories in North America.
Not to get on too much of a rant... but we can thank unions for a lot of things... like weekends off and decent salaries. Without unions, we'd still be working seven days a week in sweatshops.
Sadly, China has no unions, so they do have sweatshops and low wages. I'd argue that China's workers would be better off if they did form unions.
(and... before everyone here starts moaning about their employers, yes, I know many of you do work very long work weeks in the tech business. I've worked for several startups myself)
I think the thurst of the paranoia would be better suited looking at how the towers fell as if internal explosions took them down, and the planes were just for drama.
Why use airplanes if the building is already "rigged?" There's way too many variables in that scenario. It's not very plausible.
Rigging a building for a controlled demolition is not a trivial task, it requires miles of wire and access to the structural components of the building.
Then have to actually hijack some airplanes - not a trivial task.
Then, once you have control of the planes, the airplanes would have had to hit the buildings at the floor where the explosives were placed. Not easy - those pilots have to be good.
Then the impact would have to not set off or destroy the "planted" explosives.
Then the explosives would also have to survive thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel being poured on them -- and the fires could not destroy the wiring/detonators to those explosives.
On top of that... you'd have to have some person or mechanism in a position to trigger the explosives 30-45 minutes later -- probably from a significabnt distance, because the area is quarrantined and the building is being evacuated.
Sorry... way too complex. The airplanes took down the buildings, not explosives.
If there's a conspiracy, it's in how 19 people (some of them on terrorist watch lists) got into the country, took flight lessons and boarded the planes without being detected.
I love my Tivo and it's one of the main reasons I dumped Adelphia (that and Adelphia's abysmal service.)
If I ever went back to cable, the deal would have to include a Tivo that had the same features as DirecTV's implementation (including the ability to record two streams)...and no, I'm not into a standalone Tivo, mostly because of the subscription and the fact that it needs a separate receiver. Too complex. I like the simplicity of having two tuners built into the Tivo itself. DirecTV has a great solution.
Family Guy is CHEAP to produce. It's cheap-o animation plus voice overs
I work in animation. Believe me, Family Guy is not cheap to produce. The animation is actually good quality for television. I don't know the exact numbers, but a show like that costs upwards of a half million an episode at the very least - and my guess is it costs a lot more than that because of creators fees and voice talent.
Voice actors are also not cheap. They can be one of the biggest expenses in an animated show. Simpsons actors make several hundred thousand per episode. Multiply that by six actors and you're topping a million per episode just for the talent. Factor in top-shelf writers, producers and directors and you're talking a lot of money.
We can print ballots in many languages. We can print them large or in braille for the sight impaired. For other impaired citizens, a friend or neutral poll worker can help them vote. This has been done successfully for hundreds of years, btw...
2. Counting speed.
I'd much rather have the count be accurate and secure than fast.
I use computers and even have a degree in computer science, but I cannot think of one reason why you would trust a computer to count votes. Why would you give one person (the machine operator) control of all those votes?
To reduce the potential for fraud, you need to distribute the load and run the ballots past many people. Voting should be done on paper so you have a record of the votes. Vote counting should be done by citizens hands and in plain view so you have many witnesses to the count.
They won't "win" by rigging touch screens... but they have many other tricks up their sleeve, (all of which have been done in Ohio and Florida, btw)
-- Hacking the optical tabulators. -- Hacking punch card tablulators -- Removing "felons" (i.e. valid voters) from the voting rolls. -- Cancelling voter registrations of democrats. -- Counting votes in secret due to "national security" issues -- Allocating too few voting machines to Democratic districts, causing long lines. -- Voter intimidation -- Calling voters and telling them the polling place has moved
Optical scanner machines are a huge part of the problem, as is the central tabulator these scanners feed. They both are wide open for hacking and vote fixing.
Here's an article on how the optical scan machines can be hacked:
Optical scan is also full of problems because the ballots are still counted by computers. There have been numerous reports of the Diebold Accu-scan system having a back door into the central tabulator, as was shown recently in Leon county, Florida. Optical does have the advantange of retaining a paper record of the vote, but it's still not the most secure method of couinting the votes...
By far, the most secure method of counting votes is by hand. Several hundred people counting the votes (and witnessing the count) is far more secure than one guy in a backroom counting votes with a computer. The more people witness the count, the better.
We need to have total transparency in the process. Hand counts ensure that.
The moon is only the third other body in the Solar System - Earth, Jupiter's moon Io and possibly Neptune's moon Triton are the others - known to have active volcanic processes, researchers said.
Volcanoes are hot and provide energy.
Energy and water are two very important things life needs to survive. This puts Enceladus towards the top of the list of places where life may also exist in our solar system.
Even though Google seems to be a decent company, there's so much potential for abusing that data. If this becomes a service, the average non-tech person will probably just back up his/her entire hard drive to Google - including things like credit card numbers and other sensitive data. I'm sure rogue employee could skim out some data. On top of that, the current Attorney general seems hell-bent on data mining and has already hit places like Yahoo and AOL. I'm sure something like GDrive (or whatever it will be called) would be his wet dream. If this becomes a service, the government will be very keen to rifle through all of that data.
Personally, I'm not willing to put my files in anyone else's hands, even Google.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't work, so I reached through the dog door and opened it from the other side.
Yeah, we're really secure around here.
...was the introduction of the Big Mac.
I suspect they got the cash infusion because they just got a very general patent on social networking. They could force just about every other social networking site to pay them lots and lots of money.
The stuff about "resurrecting" Friendster seems to be more of a PR move. They'll try to compete, but pretty soon, they'll claim they can't compete because other sites have stolen their patented ideas. Then Friendster can sue these sites and claim even more damage.
My 1992 Sony Trinitron TV still looks great.
With 90% of the content I watch still plain old 4:3 NTSC, I see no reason to upgrade to a widescreen Plasma or LCD.
I know it was the Bahamas but isn't that technically part of the US?
No. It's a separate country... separate government... separate law enforcement.
Bringing the perps to justice would require extradition and lots of red tape.
It's also much easier for a government agency to get those documents from Google than to get a warrant to search your home computer for the same documents.
My first job ever was programming job costing apps for a company that had an Altair 8000b.
My first personal computer was a Honeywell 6000. (Actually Honeywell owned it, my dad worked for them developing Gecos & Multics -- we had a TTY in the den)
Canada has about 32 million people, and the US has almost 300 million.
Sure we have more people... but we would also have more people counting. If the same percentage of citizens count the ballots, the results come in at the same rate for both countries, regardless of population.
human tallying is more error prone than computer tallying.
Not necessarily. One error in a computer tally can lose thousands of votes. In addition, one corrupt person with access to a tabulator can change the results of an entire election.
When people count, it is in a room filled with other people. So, one corrupt person cannot change an election because he/she is being watched. In addition, the votes are counted two or three times by different individuals. If the counts don't match, they count again until they do match... kind of like error checking but with meat-based CPUs.
Again - it's more about the confidence in the results. When people count, there are many witnesses to the count and high confidence that the count was performed properly. When a computer counts, nobody witnesses the count, and no confidence.
Electronic tallying is useful because it can determine results fast. Very fast.
I'd much rather have confidence in the results than a fast turnaround.
Besides, hand counts don't take that much longer. Canada gets their results overnight.
After reading through some of these... it's very apparent that securing these machines is an uphill battle. Do we really want to double seal the machines, tamper-proof the ROMS and secure the machines against a 20,000 volt discharge? Why do we need to jump through all these hoops? it's insane.
Good old-fashioned paper is the solution. It's cheap, it ensures a paper audit trail, and it's counted in public by thousands of real people who witness the count.
Of course you knew that.
Yeah... all that -- and Karl Rove worked the camera.
Creating faces that look as good as the real ones is nearly impossible
But if your task is to create faces that look completely real... why not just use real faces? Hiring an actor is a heck of a lot cheaper than creating one in CG.
The best use of CG is when the shot supposed to look different and/or better than reality. If you want reality, step away from the computer and go outside... it's all around you.
As an animtor, I may be biased, but I have to take exception with the basic premise of the article. Motion capture still has a lot of problems. Not that I'm against mocap, it's great for making Tiger Woods swing the golf club like Tiger Woods in his latest game, and it's terrific for other types of realistic human motion.
But when it comes to acting, there is nothing to replace the frame by frame attention that an animator can give to a scene. Polar Express proved that humans acting using mocap still look like humans wearing rubber masks. Gollum in LOTR was a good exception, yet the basic mocap of Andy Serkis was gone over by real animators who could use their knowledge and skill to truly bring the character to life.
There's also the issue of character design. If you mocap a real human and put that data on something that isn't really human, you lose a lot. The musculature of a human face might not quite match up to that reptillian monster (or whatever) and the result will appear soft and lifeless. If the body geometry is different, you might be able to compensate in software, but the underlying motion will still be that of a human. If you mocapped a human and put in on Godzilla, you'd have what looks like a human in a Godzilla suit (which may actually be a good thing if you're doing an homage to the old Japanese films)
Mocap is cool, and I'm sure Tom Hanks loved putting on that nifty mocap suit... but the best acting on CG characters today is still the result of animators working one frame at a time
even though they are getting paid very little in comparison to bloated unionized factories in North America.
Not to get on too much of a rant... but we can thank unions for a lot of things... like weekends off and decent salaries. Without unions, we'd still be working seven days a week in sweatshops.
Sadly, China has no unions, so they do have sweatshops and low wages. I'd argue that China's workers would be better off if they did form unions.
(and... before everyone here starts moaning about their employers, yes, I know many of you do work very long work weeks in the tech business. I've worked for several startups myself)
They can only steal it if it's close.
Thanks to the swift boat crap, it was...
I think the thurst of the paranoia would be better suited looking at how the towers fell as if internal explosions took them down, and the planes were just for drama.
Why use airplanes if the building is already "rigged?" There's way too many variables in that scenario. It's not very plausible.
Rigging a building for a controlled demolition is not a trivial task, it requires miles of wire and access to the structural components of the building.
Then have to actually hijack some airplanes - not a trivial task.
Then, once you have control of the planes, the airplanes would have had to hit the buildings at the floor where the explosives were placed. Not easy - those pilots have to be good.
Then the impact would have to not set off or destroy the "planted" explosives.
Then the explosives would also have to survive thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel being poured on them -- and the fires could not destroy the wiring/detonators to those explosives.
On top of that... you'd have to have some person or mechanism in a position to trigger the explosives 30-45 minutes later -- probably from a significabnt distance, because the area is quarrantined and the building is being evacuated.
Sorry... way too complex. The airplanes took down the buildings, not explosives.
If there's a conspiracy, it's in how 19 people (some of them on terrorist watch lists) got into the country, took flight lessons and boarded the planes without being detected.
I love my Tivo and it's one of the main reasons I dumped Adelphia (that and Adelphia's abysmal service.)
If I ever went back to cable, the deal would have to include a Tivo that had the same features as DirecTV's implementation (including the ability to record two streams)...and no, I'm not into a standalone Tivo, mostly because of the subscription and the fact that it needs a separate receiver. Too complex. I like the simplicity of having two tuners built into the Tivo itself. DirecTV has a great solution.
Coal dust was an early fuel, but the very first diesel engine ran on peanut oil.
http://www.cyberlipid.org/glycer/biodiesel.htm
Family Guy is CHEAP to produce. It's cheap-o animation plus voice overs
I work in animation. Believe me, Family Guy is not cheap to produce. The animation is actually good quality for television. I don't know the exact numbers, but a show like that costs upwards of a half million an episode at the very least - and my guess is it costs a lot more than that because of creators fees and voice talent.
Voice actors are also not cheap. They can be one of the biggest expenses in an animated show. Simpsons actors make several hundred thousand per episode. Multiply that by six actors and you're topping a million per episode just for the talent. Factor in top-shelf writers, producers and directors and you're talking a lot of money.
1. Accessibility.
We can print ballots in many languages. We can print them large or in braille for the sight impaired. For other impaired citizens, a friend or neutral poll worker can help them vote. This has been done successfully for hundreds of years, btw...
2. Counting speed.
I'd much rather have the count be accurate and secure than fast.
I use computers and even have a degree in computer science, but I cannot think of one reason why you would trust a computer to count votes. Why would you give one person (the machine operator) control of all those votes?
To reduce the potential for fraud, you need to distribute the load and run the ballots past many people. Voting should be done on paper so you have a record of the votes. Vote counting should be done by citizens hands and in plain view so you have many witnesses to the count.
They won't "win" by rigging touch screens... but they have many other tricks up their sleeve, (all of which have been done in Ohio and Florida, btw)
-- Hacking the optical tabulators.
-- Hacking punch card tablulators
-- Removing "felons" (i.e. valid voters) from the voting rolls.
-- Cancelling voter registrations of democrats.
-- Counting votes in secret due to "national security" issues
-- Allocating too few voting machines to Democratic districts, causing long lines.
-- Voter intimidation
-- Calling voters and telling them the polling place has moved
I'm sure there's more...
This is hardly a troll.
Optical scanner machines are a huge part of the problem, as is the central tabulator these scanners feed. They both are wide open for hacking and vote fixing.
Here's an article on how the optical scan machines can be hacked:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00381.htm
Optical scan is also full of problems because the ballots are still counted by computers. There have been numerous reports of the Diebold Accu-scan system having a back door into the central tabulator, as was shown recently in Leon county, Florida. Optical does have the advantange of retaining a paper record of the vote, but it's still not the most secure method of couinting the votes...
By far, the most secure method of counting votes is by hand. Several hundred people counting the votes (and witnessing the count) is far more secure than one guy in a backroom counting votes with a computer. The more people witness the count, the better.
We need to have total transparency in the process. Hand counts ensure that.
From the Space.com article on the same subject:
The moon is only the third other body in the Solar System - Earth, Jupiter's moon Io and possibly Neptune's moon Triton are the others - known to have active volcanic processes, researchers said.
Volcanoes are hot and provide energy.
Energy and water are two very important things life needs to survive. This puts Enceladus towards the top of the list of places where life may also exist in our solar system.
Even though Google seems to be a decent company, there's so much potential for abusing that data. If this becomes a service, the average non-tech person will probably just back up his/her entire hard drive to Google - including things like credit card numbers and other sensitive data. I'm sure rogue employee could skim out some data. On top of that, the current Attorney general seems hell-bent on data mining and has already hit places like Yahoo and AOL. I'm sure something like GDrive (or whatever it will be called) would be his wet dream. If this becomes a service, the government will be very keen to rifle through all of that data.
Personally, I'm not willing to put my files in anyone else's hands, even Google.
No thanks.