My guess would be that because diamonds have sp3 bonding, that they would burn with a hot sooty fire like acetylene would, so theoretically would could tell diamonds from CZ by burning them!
They do burn. The girls of the Moulin Rouge used to receive so many diamonds from their admirers that they'd throw the less impressive ones into the fireplace to watch them burn. Thus were known as the "Diamond Dogs".
I think a lot of guys just have a problem with the idea that a skinny guy with perfect hair could kick their ass up one side of Rivendell and down the other.
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads.
Run-length-encoding is just plain better for images with areas of solid color, like cartoons. JPEG-type compression sucks for images with areas of solid colors and hard transitions. Sure, I could find some variant of PNG that would work, but could I be sure that it would work on every browser? The great part about GIF is that I know it will appear, and I don't have to worry that some browser out there might not impliment the pallette-based part of PNG.
Professional web designers would probably be required to put a little more thought into their work.
HAH! Most of them don't know that there is anything other than JPEG or TIFF, from what I've seen.
Since all the actors are older, how are they going to portray them as younger looking?
The same way Ian McKellen was made to look 20 years younger in X-Men III. The technique was invented for making music video divas look younger (reportedly it's been in use for 10 years - Madonna?), can be applied after shooting and doesn't even require tracking dots.
Yes, that's the theory, but in reality it seems to be the less intelligent people who are having all the kids while smarter professional couples have less or no children...
Too, too true. The people having the most children are those who either can't figure out how to use contraceptives, or follow some religous teaching that forbids it. Regardless of whether one believes in nature or nuture, stupid people are not likely to be parents of smart children - either through genetic inheritance or not offering a stimulating childhood environment.
I used to buy into the "defense mechanism" garbage but not anymore. It used to be that stoic people are looked up to, but, really, using jokes to deal with September 11th?
Yes, people were using jokes to deal with September 11. See the Onion's utterly brilliant 1st issue after the attack. As Mark Twain said:
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Something this revolutionary in biology has a significant "ick factor". But you'll get over it. At some point, probably within the next ten years, most fast food burgers will be be vat grown meat. Either that, or vegatables will be genetically modified to enhance their "meaty" qualities. Take an eggplant or a shitake mushroom and add genes to produce beef proteins. I'm willing to accept either. Every farmed animal, fruit and vegatable we eat currently is the result of endless "slow" genetic modification...I don't see how speeding that modification up makes the result less palatable.
The difference being that the place where the suspect vote fixing supposedly happened, Chicago, was one place where a Democratic victory was never in question. Florida and Ohio, on the other hand were were "swing" states, and changing the outcome there was significant.
Just because someone opposes the government forcefully taking their money to fund an inefficient, ineffective, dependency-creating social program does not mean they are greedy.
The assumption that government social programs are inefficient is not supported by the facts. Medicare, for instance, is the most efficient insurer. Less than 3% of Medicare's total costs go to administration. 97% of what comes in goes back out in medical care. Of course private insurers don't publish their numbers, but there is no doubt that any insurance company that had a profit level of only 3%, let alone total costs of doing business, would not remain in business long. Their shareholders would riot!
I suspect that Republicans and Libertarians willingly donate to private charities, or other, similar programs, as much as or more than Democrats.
It's a nice sentiment, but it's just not true. The vast majority of rich Republicans only give money to charities if they get a fancy party out of it. If you want to get a real perspective on it, read Arriana Huffington's essay on her transformation from Republican conservative to Democratic liberal. She had believed that the rich would willingly give to help the poor and set up a charity to try to get them to do so. No luck. They are happy to attend expensive parties that cost nearly as much as they collect, but as for just giving because it's a good idea or a social obligation? Not gonna happen.
Did you know that John Kerry is a Communist Traitor? That is not conservative rhetoric or anybody's opinion - it is the official position of the Communist Government of Vietnam who in 1983 while Kerry was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts awarded him as a "Hero of Communist Victory" for his actions on their behalf during the Vietnam War.
Here's the problem. You're adding 2 and 2 and getting 97. I'm willing to accept that the government of Vietnam may well have "awarded" everyone who participated in Vietnam Veterans Against The War. So? If it happened, it was done without his knowledge or consent. Did he go there to pick the medal up? Of course not. Anyone can "award" anyone anything.
Look, you're apparently one of those veterens who remain unwilling to accept that your service and sacrifice was done for a pointless war. Possibly you did things in that war that you are not proud of, and to avoid dealing with that, you've chosen to demonize those who chose to assuage their guilt by trying to stop the war.
Watch "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" and "Winter Soldier" to get the liberal viewpoint. At the time, one of his closest friends told him "You know that by doing this you've given up any hope of ever being President". It was a sacrifice to try to save the lives of the other soldiers.
BTW, you're wrong about the political leanings of the Slashdot crowd. If polled, I suspect most of them will identify themselves as "Libertarians" (i.e. the greed and selfishness of Republicans combined with the clear-headed rationality of the Area 51 fanatics)
Assuming that he is in fact dead, aren't we forgetting something? Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being. He doubtless had people who cared about him, who will be mourning his death.
And how many people's lives did "Kenny-Boy" (GW Bush's nickname for him) destroy with his evil fun? How many people died of heat stroke because their manipulation of energy prices? How many committed suicide because their savingand retirement was wiped out?
He was evil. And the theft he committed was so senseless because he HAD millions, and wanted billions. This was not a man stealing to feed his family, this was an already rich man stealing and more importantly building a huge criminal enterprise and corrupting others to steal far more than any person could ever possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.
He was an evil troll, and I think the possibility exists that his death was faked is credible. He hurt more Americans than Zarqawi, and an honest tally would likely show that he was responsible for more deaths. Pissing on his grave is the least of the insults he deserves. Until these bastards who steal billions actually face the death penalty "business ethics" will remain an oxymoron.
I don't think "tits" is on the list anymore (at least after 9 PM, 8 Central), and neither is "piss". I'm betting on "shit" being the next one of the "Seven Words" to become acceptable on commercial TV.
Besides, Carlin himself never claimed the list was canonical. It was just seven he picked on which to riff.
Elemantary schools may be trying emphasizing soccer over football, but Universities and many High Schools are still completely focused on football.
Sure...currently. But the kids currently in elementery schools will enter junior high and then high school never having played American football and with a decided preference for the football the rest of the world plays.
Granted I went to Texas Tech...
Oh...OK. I wasn't talking about Texas, I was talking about the US. As the TV ads say "Texas. It's like a whole other country."
American Football has peaked and will only decline in popularity from now on.
Why?
One word: liability.
American Football is too dangerous to continue. That's why so many schools have emphasized "soccer" over American-style football (and the Title IX need to offer sports to both sexes). The possibility that a student will suffer a paralyzing injury is too great a risk for a school to bear. Injuries happen in soccer, but rarely as devastating. If kids don't grow up playing American football, there will be a smaller pool of players at the college level and subsequently the pro level. The NLF is already feeling the crunch and has started their own "farm team" system according to a friend who is the official photographer for an NFL team.
I don't understand why people buy super-high-end performance laptops. You pay a huge power, weight and cost premium for a laptop that will be top-o-the-line for very little time, and you can't upgrade it when that time passes.
This is perfectly suited for two jobs: video editing and 3D "pre-ziv". This is going to be the hot laptop on movie sets everywhere, especially with the dual display and dual hard disks. These folks need all the power for video editing and rendering available, need huge screens but also need to move from place to place as the film shoot moves from place to place. The mediocre battery life is not really an issue, as there will always be some place to plug in.
Yeah, if I were still editing video or doing pre-viz every day, this is exactly what I'd want.
Well... yes, the graphics were quite impressive, however the animation looks very clunky at times. Although the static and slow-moving graphics looked fine, the walking motion and some of the fast action looked very bad (I actually checked to see if my player was skipping frames).
Agreed. With human characters, you have to work extra hard to make their motion human. The walking lacked weight, and the feet had a tendency to glide along the surfaces. The animators need to spend a lot more time working with simple characters. When you can give a stick-figure animation weight and believable movement, then you can go do a big project.
"Welcome to Pacific Tech's "Smart People on Ice!"
on
Favorite Film Scientists?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) from "Real Genius".
Too often, smart people are portraied as humorless drones, when a good sense of humor is usually a mark of intelligence.
...listing of the changes between thr original Star Wars and the 2004 "digitally enhanced" version.
Well, actually Lucas was fiddling with it during the very first release, well before the special editions. My wife saw the original "Star Wars" (not "A New Hope") in the theater more than 100 times (yeah, she's almost as big a geek as me). There were two versions during that release. Her pet peeve was that they re-dubbed the actress who played Luke's aunt. The first version had the real actress' voice and the later release had...someone else's. And, the very first version had the audio from the other ships during the attack on the Death Star that sounded reasonably clear. Only in the later release was the "flanging" effect added. She's always thought that was pretty stupid. They have faster-than-light travel, but can't make a decent ship-to-ship radio?
Anyway, she gets quite worked up about this. I saw it in the theater first run as well, but some 90 times less than her.
Slashdot Mirror
They do burn. The girls of the Moulin Rouge used to receive so many diamonds from their admirers that they'd throw the less impressive ones into the fireplace to watch them burn. Thus were known as the "Diamond Dogs".
I think a lot of guys just have a problem with the idea that a skinny guy with perfect hair could kick their ass up one side of Rivendell and down the other.
Hard to believe that I'm the only Slashdot reader who saw a series of films called "The Lord of the Rings".
Legolas the Elf was probably the #1 badass in those films.
Run-length-encoding is just plain better for images with areas of solid color, like cartoons. JPEG-type compression sucks for images with areas of solid colors and hard transitions. Sure, I could find some variant of PNG that would work, but could I be sure that it would work on every browser? The great part about GIF is that I know it will appear, and I don't have to worry that some browser out there might not impliment the pallette-based part of PNG.
HAH! Most of them don't know that there is anything other than JPEG or TIFF, from what I've seen.
The same way Ian McKellen was made to look 20 years younger in X-Men III. The technique was invented for making music video divas look younger (reportedly it's been in use for 10 years - Madonna?), can be applied after shooting and doesn't even require tracking dots.
Too, too true. The people having the most children are those who either can't figure out how to use contraceptives, or follow some religous teaching that forbids it. Regardless of whether one believes in nature or nuture, stupid people are not likely to be parents of smart children - either through genetic inheritance or not offering a stimulating childhood environment.
Devo was right.
Yes, people were using jokes to deal with September 11. See the Onion's utterly brilliant 1st issue after the attack. As Mark Twain said:
Something this revolutionary in biology has a significant "ick factor". But you'll get over it. At some point, probably within the next ten years, most fast food burgers will be be vat grown meat. Either that, or vegatables will be genetically modified to enhance their "meaty" qualities. Take an eggplant or a shitake mushroom and add genes to produce beef proteins. I'm willing to accept either. Every farmed animal, fruit and vegatable we eat currently is the result of endless "slow" genetic modification...I don't see how speeding that modification up makes the result less palatable.
When I saw the subject line, I thought that maybe, just maybe, "The Wizard of Speed and Time" had been released.
The difference being that the place where the suspect vote fixing supposedly happened, Chicago, was one place where a Democratic victory was never in question. Florida and Ohio, on the other hand were were "swing" states, and changing the outcome there was significant.
The assumption that government social programs are inefficient is not supported by the facts. Medicare, for instance, is the most efficient insurer. Less than 3% of Medicare's total costs go to administration. 97% of what comes in goes back out in medical care. Of course private insurers don't publish their numbers, but there is no doubt that any insurance company that had a profit level of only 3%, let alone total costs of doing business, would not remain in business long. Their shareholders would riot!
It's a nice sentiment, but it's just not true. The vast majority of rich Republicans only give money to charities if they get a fancy party out of it. If you want to get a real perspective on it, read Arriana Huffington's essay on her transformation from Republican conservative to Democratic liberal. She had believed that the rich would willingly give to help the poor and set up a charity to try to get them to do so. No luck. They are happy to attend expensive parties that cost nearly as much as they collect, but as for just giving because it's a good idea or a social obligation? Not gonna happen.
Here's the problem. You're adding 2 and 2 and getting 97. I'm willing to accept that the government of Vietnam may well have "awarded" everyone who participated in Vietnam Veterans Against The War. So? If it happened, it was done without his knowledge or consent. Did he go there to pick the medal up? Of course not. Anyone can "award" anyone anything.
Look, you're apparently one of those veterens who remain unwilling to accept that your service and sacrifice was done for a pointless war. Possibly you did things in that war that you are not proud of, and to avoid dealing with that, you've chosen to demonize those who chose to assuage their guilt by trying to stop the war.
Watch "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" and "Winter Soldier" to get the liberal viewpoint. At the time, one of his closest friends told him "You know that by doing this you've given up any hope of ever being President". It was a sacrifice to try to save the lives of the other soldiers.
BTW, you're wrong about the political leanings of the Slashdot crowd. If polled, I suspect most of them will identify themselves as "Libertarians" (i.e. the greed and selfishness of Republicans combined with the clear-headed rationality of the Area 51 fanatics)
And how many people's lives did "Kenny-Boy" (GW Bush's nickname for him) destroy with his evil fun? How many people died of heat stroke because their manipulation of energy prices? How many committed suicide because their savingand retirement was wiped out?
He was evil. And the theft he committed was so senseless because he HAD millions, and wanted billions. This was not a man stealing to feed his family, this was an already rich man stealing and more importantly building a huge criminal enterprise and corrupting others to steal far more than any person could ever possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.
He was an evil troll, and I think the possibility exists that his death was faked is credible. He hurt more Americans than Zarqawi, and an honest tally would likely show that he was responsible for more deaths. Pissing on his grave is the least of the insults he deserves. Until these bastards who steal billions actually face the death penalty "business ethics" will remain an oxymoron.
I don't think "tits" is on the list anymore (at least after 9 PM, 8 Central), and neither is "piss". I'm betting on "shit" being the next one of the "Seven Words" to become acceptable on commercial TV.
Besides, Carlin himself never claimed the list was canonical. It was just seven he picked on which to riff.
Sounds like the program is being run by the executive formerly in charge of the Sprint Ion system. Same business plan:
The question of course is, where does "Profit!" fit in here?
Sure...currently. But the kids currently in elementery schools will enter junior high and then high school never having played American football and with a decided preference for the football the rest of the world plays.
Granted I went to Texas Tech...Oh...OK. I wasn't talking about Texas, I was talking about the US. As the TV ads say "Texas. It's like a whole other country."
Besides, you can't own an Elf! They are their own people...skinny, pale, pointy-eared people!
American Football has peaked and will only decline in popularity from now on.
Why?
One word: liability.
American Football is too dangerous to continue. That's why so many schools have emphasized "soccer" over American-style football (and the Title IX need to offer sports to both sexes). The possibility that a student will suffer a paralyzing injury is too great a risk for a school to bear. Injuries happen in soccer, but rarely as devastating. If kids don't grow up playing American football, there will be a smaller pool of players at the college level and subsequently the pro level. The NLF is already feeling the crunch and has started their own "farm team" system according to a friend who is the official photographer for an NFL team.
To us, they look like white mice.
You see, they really were very clever hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings.
This is perfectly suited for two jobs: video editing and 3D "pre-ziv". This is going to be the hot laptop on movie sets everywhere, especially with the dual display and dual hard disks. These folks need all the power for video editing and rendering available, need huge screens but also need to move from place to place as the film shoot moves from place to place. The mediocre battery life is not really an issue, as there will always be some place to plug in.
Yeah, if I were still editing video or doing pre-viz every day, this is exactly what I'd want.
Agreed. With human characters, you have to work extra hard to make their motion human. The walking lacked weight, and the feet had a tendency to glide along the surfaces. The animators need to spend a lot more time working with simple characters. When you can give a stick-figure animation weight and believable movement, then you can go do a big project.
Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) from "Real Genius".
Too often, smart people are portraied as humorless drones, when a good sense of humor is usually a mark of intelligence.
If phones still weighed the same amount, Russell Crowe would be in prison for murder.
How about a classic one:
Well, actually Lucas was fiddling with it during the very first release, well before the special editions. My wife saw the original "Star Wars" (not "A New Hope") in the theater more than 100 times (yeah, she's almost as big a geek as me). There were two versions during that release. Her pet peeve was that they re-dubbed the actress who played Luke's aunt. The first version had the real actress' voice and the later release had...someone else's. And, the very first version had the audio from the other ships during the attack on the Death Star that sounded reasonably clear. Only in the later release was the "flanging" effect added. She's always thought that was pretty stupid. They have faster-than-light travel, but can't make a decent ship-to-ship radio?
Anyway, she gets quite worked up about this. I saw it in the theater first run as well, but some 90 times less than her.