Re:I have plenty of reasons to dislike Microsoft..
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The BBC's Honeypot PC
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· Score: 1
Strictly, they said the attack was aimed at IIS, not that the attack was successful.
In fact, it's not clear from the article that ANY of the attacks were successful. If that's true, it doesn't really matter how many attacks there were, and it doesn't make Windows any less safe than Linux or VMS, for that matter. Only the successful attacks matter. (You've got to shut down the Messenger, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure that comes turned off now, and it was a stupid feature in the first place.)
Sure, it sucks that there are still so many infected machines out in the universe, and it's time to start tracking them down and turning them off (or at least getting their ISPs to shut down their connections until the users learn to wear a condom). Blaming new Windows for failures of old ones is just scaremongering.
Cluster bombs are banned against civilian targets because they are generally anti-personnel weapons. You can use regular bombs in civilian areas to take out infrastructure, but deliberately targeting the people is forbidden. A cluster bomb is useless against buildings; each individual charge is too small.
Also, so many fuzes will contain some unreliable ones. So individual armed bomblets have a tendency to hang around causing damage after the war, creating a kind of minefield.
All of these rules, of course, were designed for the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, where large armies moved around and shot at each other, generally away from their own civilians. Civilians were killed, especially those who lived near military infrastructure, but usually it wasn't strategically profitable. It remains to be seen if new rules will be developed for the new asymmetrical wars (if "war" is even a good name for it).
* Gun owners (63%) * People with $200k+ incomes (63%) * Evangelicals (78%) * More-than-weekly churchgoers (64%) * Married-with-children (59%)
The military clocks in at 57%, which I wouldn't call "overwhelming", but I'd call "decisive". It may not seem all that big, but in politics 60% is called a "landslide".
It kinda sucks that a 40% minority could be considered to have a negligible opinion. (That's exactly what the President means when he calls for a "simple up or down vote" on a judicial candidate; he knows that he can get 51% but not the 60% required to end a filibuster.) We may see in January if the Democrats would be any more polite when they have 51%, but I'm betting the answer is "no".
I think that may be because the music industry targets teenagers. I'm not entirely certain why; teenagers don't have as much money as the 20-and-ups. Perhaps because they're more homogeneous: rather than produce 20 indie bands to hit 20 million 30-year-olds, they can produce 1 band to hit 15 million teenagers with easily-led tastes.
Recipes are usually treated as trade secrets rather than patents. If they'd patented it, everybody could do it by now, if they wanted.
But the secret isn't a big deal. According to William Poundstone's analysis, their "seven secret herb and spices" are (1) salt (2) pepper. Which isn't entirely surprising: KFC chicken doesn't taste particularly spicy or herbaceous. You really don't need anything else for good fried chicken; it's more about technique than ingredients (a though buttermilk marinade doesn't hurt, done properly).
There is, at least in theory, a bright line between the courts and the executive branch. Supposedly it's why judges are appointed for life: it lets them base their decisions on their own judgment, not what will get them re-elected. (In practice that just makes the nominations more partisan, and the fights over them more bitter.)
It just so happens that the Supreme Court at the moment is as closely divided as the rest of the country. The last presidential election was 51-48, and even the heavily lopsided Senate is 55-45 (technically 55-44-1). The Supreme Court has four reliably conservative justices (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito), four reliably liberal ones (Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, Stevens) and one swing (Kennedy).
That last is generally counted among the conservatives, havign been appointed by Reagan, but he has voted to curtail the President on various issues, e.g. Hamdan (the one that forced Bush to change his plan on tribunals for the Guantanamo inmates).
So the answer to your question is that yes, there is a vague chance of the lawsuit being effective, though it's a close call, and it's probably up to one guy.
(Though just to get political for a second, the most reliable liberal is 86 year old Justice Stevens. If he retires or dies before January, a Republican Senate will probably replace him with a young conservative, and that would make the court 5-3-1 for the next several decades. Should the Democrats win the Senate in November, and he retires/dies in the next two years, the President will send over conservative candidates until he either sends over a moderate the Democrats can't oppose without looking stupid, or they crack under the pressure of having an empty seat for too long. The upshot is that my "yes" above may be temporary.)
I wonder if Google thinks that Google Video is having a hard time getting traction because of YouTube's strong brand name. I see a lot of links passed around to YouTube when Google Video has the same vid, in better resolution, and I think that people just think "YouTube" first.
Still $1.6 billion seems an awful lot to pay for something with no solid income stream and a vicious lawsuit waiting to happen. Google might just redirect youtube.com to video.google.com, or it may turn it into youtube.google.com with a lot of the lawsuit-prone videos taken out. That instant marketing would buy Google a big lead over whatever Microsoft's version is, but $1.6B is an awful lot to pay for that.
That's correct: al Qaeda members have done things that put them outside of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
However, although that's true of al Qaeda in general, there is currently no way to appeal a claim that one is not a member of al Qaeda. Wearing civilian clothes is in fact a terrible crime in a terrorist, since it puts civilians at risk, but it's something that civilians do all the time.
Under the current interpretations, the mere accusation that one is a terrorist is enough to put one forever beyond the possibility of release. There is no court to whom you can appeal your innocence. Making it legal for the US government to put you away forever, merely on somebody's say-so, is a very dangerous legal precedent, whether the Geneva Convention applies or not.
It doesn't matter if al Qaeda is a signatory: we're bound by it. We adopted the treaty, that makes it the law of the land.
The loophole is that the GC applies to "legal combatants", who do things like wear uniforms, follow a chain of command, etc. Member of al Qaeda don't do that, so the GC arguably doesn't apply to them.
It gets tricky from there. The supposedly "illegal combatants" have not been proven to be illegal in any court, and the way the Bush administration has read it, the mere charge is sufficient to prevent a court from changing that determination. That's not exactly unusual on a battlefield, where snap legal decisions have to be made under fire, but Guantanamo is hardly "under fire". These may be innocent bystanders but there is no court to which they can appeal that claim, and some would say that this sort of catch-22 is illegal no matter what the laws say.
Really? I was under the impression that corporate governance was a serious problem. Management has considerable authority to run shareholders meetings, and it's very difficult for even majority shareholders to remove members of the board of directors.
My source for a lot of this is an article from The Economist back in May (link, but you'll probably have to pay to read it.) Basically, it says that although shareholders have considerable rights in theory, in practice the rules are set up to favor management. This is considered a good thing in some circles, who believe that professional management should trump non-expert shareholders, but in at least some cases it makes accountability difficult.
Well, that one's still got the Supreme Court to get past. There's a chance that that it will be ruled unconstitutional, at least to the degree that it applies to Americans. But non-citizens never had any rights under the Constitution.
They do have some rights under the Geneva Convention, which is the law of the land of the US, and it's possible that the Supreme Court could find the two laws incompatible and chuck the Military Commissions Act. But you won't find that out for at least two years; the wheels of justice grind pretty damn slow.
There's an explicit statement that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." (the tenth amendment).
Unfortunately, that's been rendered effectively null by a vigorous reading of the Commerce Clause, "The Congress shall have Power... to regulate Commerce... among the several States". (Ellipses are for clarity, not to torture the syntax.)
Just about everything has been crammed into that. The original civil rights laws were justified on the idea that merchants have to sell you stuff no matter what your race because you might be from out of state (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States et al. (1964)). California's in-state medical marijuana laws were overturned because legal marijuana, even in-state, affects the flow of marijuana elsewhere (marijuana being a fungible commodity).
So you can pretty much stick a fork in the idea that the 10th Amendment reserves you any rights that Congress can't take away. There are other places where you might derive a right to privacy (say, Amendment IV, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"), but Amendment X won't help.
Thanks. I just assumed they were done in LA, where it's cheaper, but I guess nothing is cheap in LA, either. But it sure is easy to find actors there, as well as prop makers/costumers/camera equipment/etc.
I'm from the DC/Baltimore area. "Homicide" was shot entirely in B'more, but West Wing was done mostly in LA, with just the occasional exterior done here. Nonetheless, I see a LOT of resumes cross my desk from people who have done acting work on both series (largely as extras, of course.)
I do partly wonder if George will find that producing for HDTV is more expensive than he expects. I know that TV news shows had to chuck their old sets and build new ones when they went to HDTV, and the network anchors spend more time in makeup chairs than they used to.
Still, Lucas is right that TV is cheaper to produce than movies. It is astonishing that even an expensive show like Lost runs only $3-5 million per episode, even though it's 1/2 to 1/3 the length of a full movie. Some of the difference is set-up costs, but even the pilot, where they had to put out all of the one-time costs, cost a measley $10 million, and that was full of fancy effects and explosions.
Most Lost episodes are only that expensive because they involve location shooting in Hawaii, which is expensive, and it's done to keep the location secret, which makes it more expensive. They do most of the back-story and interiors in LA, and they end up flying people back and forth. It's amazing that they can do that. But they make up for it with clever management: they're shooting several episodes in parallel, and they don't fly people back and forth to Hawaii every single week.
It takes less than two weeks to shoot primary photography on an episode of Lost, compared to 30 to as much as 60 days for a movie. It's not really that there are fewer takes, although there sometimes are, but it takes so much less time to get each take ready. Standing around a set waiting for the light guys to remove every single damn shadow is incredibly tedious. (People rarely wear hats on TV because it's hard to light your face properly. They even forbid certain hair styles in TV shows; a movie director expects more flexibility.) And God forbid you should have to do it outside, where the lights look completely different at 2 PM as at 6 PM, even with the supplemental light. Audiences notice that in movies when they don't on TV.
The effects are cheaper on TV. The resolution is higher on HDTV than on NTSC, but it's still lower than full movie resolution. The actual pixel content may not be much higher, but the color reproduction on film is better, and it would take many pixels to compensate for that. The better the final picture, the more time it takes to make it look realistic: you have to have an artist shade every single pixel, or it ends up looking like the Babylon 5 effects. (Miniatures are easier, but not as flexible.)
What effects they do shoot on Lost would look cheesy on a movie screen. Audiences wouldn't pay $10 a seat for them. They expect more from a movie. Even where they do have good effects, you're often seeing less than you think you are. A movie is expected to be a big-budget affair, and producers say "yes" to a movie when they'd say "work around it" to the same request for a TV show.
That'll save Lucas a lot of money, and arguably we'll get better work. The man DOES know how to tell a good story, when he doesn't let the effects take up his whole life. Sometimes less is more, and the work-arounds make for better drama.
Explosions are really, really expensive. A film crew is the size of a mid-sized company. Sit through the credits some time, and see the names of the script girl and the second second assistant director and the backup plasterer. Each camera takes several people (camera operator, loader, focus puller, and sometimes more), and for an explosion you're going to have to catch it from several angles because otherwise all that work ends up as only a fraction of a second of screen time. They call cost money, not just in salary but in insurance, craft service, studio rental, the rental of the camera equipment they're holding, etc.
And every single one of them is sitting around while the explosives rigger is making 200% certain that none of them get hurt when the explosion goes off. And another 200% certain that the explosion is going to do the right thing the first time, because otherwise you'll have to start from scratch.
It's literally tens of thousands of dollars to make even something simple blow up. If you want something big to blow up, it'll cost you a few hundred thousand. Add a few dozen explosions into the movie, and suddenly you're talking about real money.
If they're on location, they have to have bathrooms, and hauling a porta-john into the desert isn't cheap, either. It's not any one thing that makes it pricey. It's eight million little things.
Plus the eight million little things that go into the digital effects (light matching, wire frame artists, shading artists, data center ops, plus a studio to put them all in, usually close to the studio which means the high-rent district).
Why bother? If you don't do all of that, your movie comes off looking cheap. Scrimp on the continuity girl, and the lack of continuity becomes glaring to the audience. It works for indie movies, which the audience expects to look cheap, but your summer blockbuster is going to look corny, and audiences won't enjoy it if it looks corny.
Lucas figures that the small screen is cheaper. The low resolution means that makeup that used to take two hours now takes only half an hour. Sets are built to a far lower level of detail; even where the audience can see the difference [e.g. Firefly vs. Serenity] you have lower expectations. (It used to be that you could save money shooting with three cameras rather than one, which means you can do in one take what used to take three, but these days quality dramas are usually shot movie-style with just one camera.)
It can all be done cheaper than it is. As in any organization a lot of money goes to waste between the cracks. Better organization means less wasted time and unnecessary equipment, but it's like at your office: you have a spare printer or ethernet cable sitting around not doing anything. It cost money to buy, but if you need it you'll be glad you have it, especially if the lack of it drives the entire company to a standstill. When those resources are people, though, it gets pricey fast.
In fact, isn't The Daily Show a lot funnier if you already know the news? I don't get to watch it terribly often (no cable) but from what I've seen, Stewart generally seems to assume that you've got at least the gist of the major events of the day.
(Some of that could be sampling error: I only watch it when friends send me a YouTube link after some major event.)
Yes, but even if you scale it up to 7 gs (impractical for anybody except very healthy people) you're still talking about building something thousands of kilometers across. There are very few places on earth you can put such a thing. You can't route it around stuff, either: it's got to be a perfect circle. Maybe there are some deserts where you could try.
I'm not sure there's enough room. If you're trying to get to LEO you need to get to 8km/s. If you want to subject people to no more than 1 additional g (remember, they're still on the ground, so you get 1 g for free), that's a radius of 6,400 km, if I do the math right, and that's just about the radius of the entire earth.
Having done all that math, it's not a coincidence. LEO is essentially the same as the surface of the earth, so velocity to LEO is just about the same as at the surface, which is always going to be (g*r)^1/2.
Once your ring was that big you woudln't actually be subjected to the gravity down as well. You'd actually be in free fall. But if you scaled down the ring, your vectors would no longer be opposite, and you'd start to feel the combinations of the weight again.
You could reduce the ring and scale up the gravity, but you're still talking about considerable fractions of the radius of the earth, all built with the kind of precision to handle an object moving faster than a speeding bullet.
The scientific prizes are almost always split. The last time the physics prize was unsplit was '92. Even the second prize they gave was split. The chemistry prize was solo as recently as '99, but split every time since, and often before.
Science is never just some guy working alone in a lab. People publish every accomplishment, and every other lab is working on the same thing you are, with slight variations. Often the first guy with the insight shares the prize with the guy(s) who completed the explanation and performed the experiments to demonstrate that the explanation is correct. Science is always both theory and experimentation, and it's rare to find one lab capable of doing both exceptionally well.
Even the guy who does win it by himself has an army of grad students and colleagues who busted their butts to make it happen.
I hardly think Annan is a "thug or despot", but your point certainly holds. The Peace prize is given far more swiftly than any of the other prizes, usually for work only a few years old, without any knowledge of whether their work will survive the test of time or even whether it was really beneficial at all.
Since we're dealing with measurements (or at least simulated measurements) of the real world, the numbers are always going to be inaccurate. Even in fixed point, errors accumulate. They just accumulate in different ways.
One problem with floating point is that it risks being unrepeatable. If you don't carefully define the terms of rounding, you'll have two different machines arrive at different results on the same calculation. But as long as you pick a standard (e.g. IEEE 754), your results are repeatable. Not any more accurate, but repeatability can be important, too, when you're dealing with potentially chaotic systems.
Now, if the GPU hardware doesn't inherently support your rounding standard you'll have a hard time getting repeatable answers out of it. You can compensate but it's a pain in the nuts, and it undoes a lot of the advantage of having your math engine in hardware.
Precision is purely a matter of the number of bits you throw at the problem. Fixed point is not inherently more precise; in fact, if the numbers you're working with aren't in the middle of the range of your chosen fixed point it'll be wildly imprecise.
They may well want to use integer operations rather than floating point or fixed point. When you can redesign your operations for integer arithmetic, you get repeatable results and the operations are very, very fast. But integers can be very imprecise, for the same reason fixed-point operations are.
It's not gambling, it's investing. You're actually selling something: the right to buy oil. The value of the thing you're selling is determined by an actual, real-world object: once it all settles out a real barrel of oil actually goes somewhere.
You'd get into all kinds of trouble, not because it's gambling but because it's investing. The SEC would want to have a word with you. You'd have to explain how you're planning on tracking all those lottery tickets, when they can just bypass you as the middle man and invest directly. And you'd better be prepared to fill out a lot of forms to make sure you're not skimming more than you say you will.
You're right that options are closer to gambling than regular stocks are, because what you're selling there is "risk". The real purpose of options is to manage risk. Some farmer has a bunch of oranges coming in, and he'd like to sell the juice today for a set price rather than risk the weather ruining his crop. You buy the option; you're assuming the risk and possibly getting the reward. You're helping some farmer out.
Unlike gambling risk, though, the risk isn't artificial, and the margin isn't going to the house. This is weather risk, or risk that they won't find oil, or other kinds of real-world risk on real-world objects. It's not for fun, the way gambling is. It's serious business, and farmers would be a lot worse off if it weren't for agricultural commodities hedging. (It applies just as well to spreading the risk of other investments, but it's clearest with agricultural ones.)
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Strictly, they said the attack was aimed at IIS, not that the attack was successful.
In fact, it's not clear from the article that ANY of the attacks were successful. If that's true, it doesn't really matter how many attacks there were, and it doesn't make Windows any less safe than Linux or VMS, for that matter. Only the successful attacks matter. (You've got to shut down the Messenger, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure that comes turned off now, and it was a stupid feature in the first place.)
Sure, it sucks that there are still so many infected machines out in the universe, and it's time to start tracking them down and turning them off (or at least getting their ISPs to shut down their connections until the users learn to wear a condom). Blaming new Windows for failures of old ones is just scaremongering.
Cluster bombs are banned against civilian targets because they are generally anti-personnel weapons. You can use regular bombs in civilian areas to take out infrastructure, but deliberately targeting the people is forbidden. A cluster bomb is useless against buildings; each individual charge is too small.
Also, so many fuzes will contain some unreliable ones. So individual armed bomblets have a tendency to hang around causing damage after the war, creating a kind of minefield.
All of these rules, of course, were designed for the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, where large armies moved around and shot at each other, generally away from their own civilians. Civilians were killed, especially those who lived near military infrastructure, but usually it wasn't strategically profitable. It remains to be seen if new rules will be developed for the new asymmetrical wars (if "war" is even a good name for it).
You want data? We got data.
Some groups who voted overwhelingly for Bush:
* Gun owners (63%)
* People with $200k+ incomes (63%)
* Evangelicals (78%)
* More-than-weekly churchgoers (64%)
* Married-with-children (59%)
The military clocks in at 57%, which I wouldn't call "overwhelming", but I'd call "decisive". It may not seem all that big, but in politics 60% is called a "landslide".
It kinda sucks that a 40% minority could be considered to have a negligible opinion. (That's exactly what the President means when he calls for a "simple up or down vote" on a judicial candidate; he knows that he can get 51% but not the 60% required to end a filibuster.) We may see in January if the Democrats would be any more polite when they have 51%, but I'm betting the answer is "no".
I think that may be because the music industry targets teenagers. I'm not entirely certain why; teenagers don't have as much money as the 20-and-ups. Perhaps because they're more homogeneous: rather than produce 20 indie bands to hit 20 million 30-year-olds, they can produce 1 band to hit 15 million teenagers with easily-led tastes.
Salt, pepper, and flour. Flour didn't count as a spice.
Recipes are usually treated as trade secrets rather than patents. If they'd patented it, everybody could do it by now, if they wanted.
But the secret isn't a big deal. According to William Poundstone's analysis, their "seven secret herb and spices" are (1) salt (2) pepper. Which isn't entirely surprising: KFC chicken doesn't taste particularly spicy or herbaceous. You really don't need anything else for good fried chicken; it's more about technique than ingredients (a though buttermilk marinade doesn't hurt, done properly).
There is, at least in theory, a bright line between the courts and the executive branch. Supposedly it's why judges are appointed for life: it lets them base their decisions on their own judgment, not what will get them re-elected. (In practice that just makes the nominations more partisan, and the fights over them more bitter.)
It just so happens that the Supreme Court at the moment is as closely divided as the rest of the country. The last presidential election was 51-48, and even the heavily lopsided Senate is 55-45 (technically 55-44-1). The Supreme Court has four reliably conservative justices (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito), four reliably liberal ones (Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, Stevens) and one swing (Kennedy).
That last is generally counted among the conservatives, havign been appointed by Reagan, but he has voted to curtail the President on various issues, e.g. Hamdan (the one that forced Bush to change his plan on tribunals for the Guantanamo inmates).
So the answer to your question is that yes, there is a vague chance of the lawsuit being effective, though it's a close call, and it's probably up to one guy.
(Though just to get political for a second, the most reliable liberal is 86 year old Justice Stevens. If he retires or dies before January, a Republican Senate will probably replace him with a young conservative, and that would make the court 5-3-1 for the next several decades. Should the Democrats win the Senate in November, and he retires/dies in the next two years, the President will send over conservative candidates until he either sends over a moderate the Democrats can't oppose without looking stupid, or they crack under the pressure of having an empty seat for too long. The upshot is that my "yes" above may be temporary.)
I wonder if Google thinks that Google Video is having a hard time getting traction because of YouTube's strong brand name. I see a lot of links passed around to YouTube when Google Video has the same vid, in better resolution, and I think that people just think "YouTube" first.
Still $1.6 billion seems an awful lot to pay for something with no solid income stream and a vicious lawsuit waiting to happen. Google might just redirect youtube.com to video.google.com, or it may turn it into youtube.google.com with a lot of the lawsuit-prone videos taken out. That instant marketing would buy Google a big lead over whatever Microsoft's version is, but $1.6B is an awful lot to pay for that.
That's correct: al Qaeda members have done things that put them outside of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
However, although that's true of al Qaeda in general, there is currently no way to appeal a claim that one is not a member of al Qaeda. Wearing civilian clothes is in fact a terrible crime in a terrorist, since it puts civilians at risk, but it's something that civilians do all the time.
Under the current interpretations, the mere accusation that one is a terrorist is enough to put one forever beyond the possibility of release. There is no court to whom you can appeal your innocence. Making it legal for the US government to put you away forever, merely on somebody's say-so, is a very dangerous legal precedent, whether the Geneva Convention applies or not.
It doesn't matter if al Qaeda is a signatory: we're bound by it. We adopted the treaty, that makes it the law of the land.
The loophole is that the GC applies to "legal combatants", who do things like wear uniforms, follow a chain of command, etc. Member of al Qaeda don't do that, so the GC arguably doesn't apply to them.
It gets tricky from there. The supposedly "illegal combatants" have not been proven to be illegal in any court, and the way the Bush administration has read it, the mere charge is sufficient to prevent a court from changing that determination. That's not exactly unusual on a battlefield, where snap legal decisions have to be made under fire, but Guantanamo is hardly "under fire". These may be innocent bystanders but there is no court to which they can appeal that claim, and some would say that this sort of catch-22 is illegal no matter what the laws say.
Really? I was under the impression that corporate governance was a serious problem. Management has considerable authority to run shareholders meetings, and it's very difficult for even majority shareholders to remove members of the board of directors.
My source for a lot of this is an article from The Economist back in May (link, but you'll probably have to pay to read it.) Basically, it says that although shareholders have considerable rights in theory, in practice the rules are set up to favor management. This is considered a good thing in some circles, who believe that professional management should trump non-expert shareholders, but in at least some cases it makes accountability difficult.
Well, that one's still got the Supreme Court to get past. There's a chance that that it will be ruled unconstitutional, at least to the degree that it applies to Americans. But non-citizens never had any rights under the Constitution.
They do have some rights under the Geneva Convention, which is the law of the land of the US, and it's possible that the Supreme Court could find the two laws incompatible and chuck the Military Commissions Act. But you won't find that out for at least two years; the wheels of justice grind pretty damn slow.
There's an explicit statement that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." (the tenth amendment).
... to regulate Commerce ... among the several States". (Ellipses are for clarity, not to torture the syntax.)
Unfortunately, that's been rendered effectively null by a vigorous reading of the Commerce Clause, "The Congress shall have Power
Just about everything has been crammed into that. The original civil rights laws were justified on the idea that merchants have to sell you stuff no matter what your race because you might be from out of state (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States et al. (1964)). California's in-state medical marijuana laws were overturned because legal marijuana, even in-state, affects the flow of marijuana elsewhere (marijuana being a fungible commodity).
So you can pretty much stick a fork in the idea that the 10th Amendment reserves you any rights that Congress can't take away. There are other places where you might derive a right to privacy (say, Amendment IV, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"), but Amendment X won't help.
Thanks. I just assumed they were done in LA, where it's cheaper, but I guess nothing is cheap in LA, either. But it sure is easy to find actors there, as well as prop makers/costumers/camera equipment/etc.
I'm from the DC/Baltimore area. "Homicide" was shot entirely in B'more, but West Wing was done mostly in LA, with just the occasional exterior done here. Nonetheless, I see a LOT of resumes cross my desk from people who have done acting work on both series (largely as extras, of course.)
I do partly wonder if George will find that producing for HDTV is more expensive than he expects. I know that TV news shows had to chuck their old sets and build new ones when they went to HDTV, and the network anchors spend more time in makeup chairs than they used to.
Still, Lucas is right that TV is cheaper to produce than movies. It is astonishing that even an expensive show like Lost runs only $3-5 million per episode, even though it's 1/2 to 1/3 the length of a full movie. Some of the difference is set-up costs, but even the pilot, where they had to put out all of the one-time costs, cost a measley $10 million, and that was full of fancy effects and explosions.
Most Lost episodes are only that expensive because they involve location shooting in Hawaii, which is expensive, and it's done to keep the location secret, which makes it more expensive. They do most of the back-story and interiors in LA, and they end up flying people back and forth. It's amazing that they can do that. But they make up for it with clever management: they're shooting several episodes in parallel, and they don't fly people back and forth to Hawaii every single week.
It takes less than two weeks to shoot primary photography on an episode of Lost, compared to 30 to as much as 60 days for a movie. It's not really that there are fewer takes, although there sometimes are, but it takes so much less time to get each take ready. Standing around a set waiting for the light guys to remove every single damn shadow is incredibly tedious. (People rarely wear hats on TV because it's hard to light your face properly. They even forbid certain hair styles in TV shows; a movie director expects more flexibility.) And God forbid you should have to do it outside, where the lights look completely different at 2 PM as at 6 PM, even with the supplemental light. Audiences notice that in movies when they don't on TV.
The effects are cheaper on TV. The resolution is higher on HDTV than on NTSC, but it's still lower than full movie resolution. The actual pixel content may not be much higher, but the color reproduction on film is better, and it would take many pixels to compensate for that. The better the final picture, the more time it takes to make it look realistic: you have to have an artist shade every single pixel, or it ends up looking like the Babylon 5 effects. (Miniatures are easier, but not as flexible.)
What effects they do shoot on Lost would look cheesy on a movie screen. Audiences wouldn't pay $10 a seat for them. They expect more from a movie. Even where they do have good effects, you're often seeing less than you think you are. A movie is expected to be a big-budget affair, and producers say "yes" to a movie when they'd say "work around it" to the same request for a TV show.
That'll save Lucas a lot of money, and arguably we'll get better work. The man DOES know how to tell a good story, when he doesn't let the effects take up his whole life. Sometimes less is more, and the work-arounds make for better drama.
More explosions, mostly.
Explosions are really, really expensive. A film crew is the size of a mid-sized company. Sit through the credits some time, and see the names of the script girl and the second second assistant director and the backup plasterer. Each camera takes several people (camera operator, loader, focus puller, and sometimes more), and for an explosion you're going to have to catch it from several angles because otherwise all that work ends up as only a fraction of a second of screen time. They call cost money, not just in salary but in insurance, craft service, studio rental, the rental of the camera equipment they're holding, etc.
And every single one of them is sitting around while the explosives rigger is making 200% certain that none of them get hurt when the explosion goes off. And another 200% certain that the explosion is going to do the right thing the first time, because otherwise you'll have to start from scratch.
It's literally tens of thousands of dollars to make even something simple blow up. If you want something big to blow up, it'll cost you a few hundred thousand. Add a few dozen explosions into the movie, and suddenly you're talking about real money.
If they're on location, they have to have bathrooms, and hauling a porta-john into the desert isn't cheap, either. It's not any one thing that makes it pricey. It's eight million little things.
Plus the eight million little things that go into the digital effects (light matching, wire frame artists, shading artists, data center ops, plus a studio to put them all in, usually close to the studio which means the high-rent district).
Why bother? If you don't do all of that, your movie comes off looking cheap. Scrimp on the continuity girl, and the lack of continuity becomes glaring to the audience. It works for indie movies, which the audience expects to look cheap, but your summer blockbuster is going to look corny, and audiences won't enjoy it if it looks corny.
Lucas figures that the small screen is cheaper. The low resolution means that makeup that used to take two hours now takes only half an hour. Sets are built to a far lower level of detail; even where the audience can see the difference [e.g. Firefly vs. Serenity] you have lower expectations. (It used to be that you could save money shooting with three cameras rather than one, which means you can do in one take what used to take three, but these days quality dramas are usually shot movie-style with just one camera.)
It can all be done cheaper than it is. As in any organization a lot of money goes to waste between the cracks. Better organization means less wasted time and unnecessary equipment, but it's like at your office: you have a spare printer or ethernet cable sitting around not doing anything. It cost money to buy, but if you need it you'll be glad you have it, especially if the lack of it drives the entire company to a standstill. When those resources are people, though, it gets pricey fast.
In fact, isn't The Daily Show a lot funnier if you already know the news? I don't get to watch it terribly often (no cable) but from what I've seen, Stewart generally seems to assume that you've got at least the gist of the major events of the day.
(Some of that could be sampling error: I only watch it when friends send me a YouTube link after some major event.)
Yes, but even if you scale it up to 7 gs (impractical for anybody except very healthy people) you're still talking about building something thousands of kilometers across. There are very few places on earth you can put such a thing. You can't route it around stuff, either: it's got to be a perfect circle. Maybe there are some deserts where you could try.
I'm not sure there's enough room. If you're trying to get to LEO you need to get to 8km/s. If you want to subject people to no more than 1 additional g (remember, they're still on the ground, so you get 1 g for free), that's a radius of 6,400 km, if I do the math right, and that's just about the radius of the entire earth.
Having done all that math, it's not a coincidence. LEO is essentially the same as the surface of the earth, so velocity to LEO is just about the same as at the surface, which is always going to be (g*r)^1/2.
Once your ring was that big you woudln't actually be subjected to the gravity down as well. You'd actually be in free fall. But if you scaled down the ring, your vectors would no longer be opposite, and you'd start to feel the combinations of the weight again.
You could reduce the ring and scale up the gravity, but you're still talking about considerable fractions of the radius of the earth, all built with the kind of precision to handle an object moving faster than a speeding bullet.
The scientific prizes are almost always split. The last time the physics prize was unsplit was '92. Even the second prize they gave was split. The chemistry prize was solo as recently as '99, but split every time since, and often before.
Science is never just some guy working alone in a lab. People publish every accomplishment, and every other lab is working on the same thing you are, with slight variations. Often the first guy with the insight shares the prize with the guy(s) who completed the explanation and performed the experiments to demonstrate that the explanation is correct. Science is always both theory and experimentation, and it's rare to find one lab capable of doing both exceptionally well.
Even the guy who does win it by himself has an army of grad students and colleagues who busted their butts to make it happen.
Don't forget Henry Kissinger.
I hardly think Annan is a "thug or despot", but your point certainly holds. The Peace prize is given far more swiftly than any of the other prizes, usually for work only a few years old, without any knowledge of whether their work will survive the test of time or even whether it was really beneficial at all.
What, "God said it and *BANG* it happened" doesn't constitute "explanation" in your book?
Since we're dealing with measurements (or at least simulated measurements) of the real world, the numbers are always going to be inaccurate. Even in fixed point, errors accumulate. They just accumulate in different ways.
One problem with floating point is that it risks being unrepeatable. If you don't carefully define the terms of rounding, you'll have two different machines arrive at different results on the same calculation. But as long as you pick a standard (e.g. IEEE 754), your results are repeatable. Not any more accurate, but repeatability can be important, too, when you're dealing with potentially chaotic systems.
Now, if the GPU hardware doesn't inherently support your rounding standard you'll have a hard time getting repeatable answers out of it. You can compensate but it's a pain in the nuts, and it undoes a lot of the advantage of having your math engine in hardware.
Precision is purely a matter of the number of bits you throw at the problem. Fixed point is not inherently more precise; in fact, if the numbers you're working with aren't in the middle of the range of your chosen fixed point it'll be wildly imprecise.
They may well want to use integer operations rather than floating point or fixed point. When you can redesign your operations for integer arithmetic, you get repeatable results and the operations are very, very fast. But integers can be very imprecise, for the same reason fixed-point operations are.
It's not gambling, it's investing. You're actually selling something: the right to buy oil. The value of the thing you're selling is determined by an actual, real-world object: once it all settles out a real barrel of oil actually goes somewhere.
You'd get into all kinds of trouble, not because it's gambling but because it's investing. The SEC would want to have a word with you. You'd have to explain how you're planning on tracking all those lottery tickets, when they can just bypass you as the middle man and invest directly. And you'd better be prepared to fill out a lot of forms to make sure you're not skimming more than you say you will.
You're right that options are closer to gambling than regular stocks are, because what you're selling there is "risk". The real purpose of options is to manage risk. Some farmer has a bunch of oranges coming in, and he'd like to sell the juice today for a set price rather than risk the weather ruining his crop. You buy the option; you're assuming the risk and possibly getting the reward. You're helping some farmer out.
Unlike gambling risk, though, the risk isn't artificial, and the margin isn't going to the house. This is weather risk, or risk that they won't find oil, or other kinds of real-world risk on real-world objects. It's not for fun, the way gambling is. It's serious business, and farmers would be a lot worse off if it weren't for agricultural commodities hedging. (It applies just as well to spreading the risk of other investments, but it's clearest with agricultural ones.)
So do these interactions drive the formation of the fullerene or are they just an interesting outcome?
How will you go about finding out?