That one I could try to answer, but as I noted - I was a tourist there, so I wouldn't know the various (federal, state, county, etc.) laws in&out to be able to say which rights would be waived by merely getting into a car:)
I have, and I know how to put distance between novels/comics/movies - otherwise the movies always tend to disappoint anyway.
I'm not saying "reboot Starship Troopers" as envisioned by Heinlein. I'm saying "reboot Starship Troopers as it was laid out in the movie" - as regardless of the obvious disconnects between the movie and the book, it was still a very enjoyable movie and could have had excellent sequels/prequels... when instead it got completely f'ed over by the direct-to-dvd movies' executions../nokarma as this is one heck of an old thread to reply to;)
The fade-in is nice. Not so much because it's a fade-in (which is just visually more pleasant than an instant-display), but because you can visit www.google.com and get a very clean page (google logo, search field, and currently a Haiti relief notice), and just type away (as focus is set to the search field) and be done with it. This is very much like how google.com -was- in the very early days.
If you want to access any of the other services that google have started to offer since then, you can move your mouse anywhere within the screen and hey presto those options become available to you. If you don't need them - why clutter up the screen with them?
You can always customize your own google page and set that as your bookmark/start page/whatever and display exact what you want to have displayed from the get-go.
I'd much prefer they put the actual URL in the link, and let their redirect flow through an onClick.. yeah, they'd lose the javascript-disabled lot.. tough.
http://www.gerloeffen.nl/data/1788/70286-x.jpg Note narrow road.. without any bicycle lane... o0o0o danger! Not really.. it's so common in NL that motorists do tend to actually look out for cyclists and drive responsibly around them.
Indeed, as GP notes.. it's often the cyclists in cities that tend to be more dangerous for cars, than the cars are for the cyclists. Running red lights is pretty much the norm, one-way roads tend to be one-way for motorists only as well so don't be surprised if a cyclist comes head-on at you, signaling (by extending your arm) is something that went out of fashion in the late 80's - so be prepared to be cut off by a cyclist, etc.
The only people worse are the pedestrians.. who will cross wherever and whenever they damn well please.. even if there's a pedestrian crossing, with or without traffic lights, only 10 yards over:) ( Pedestrians are almost 'untouchable' by law in NL.. if a motorist hits a pedestrian, the motorist is gonna have to have some damn good evidence that there's nothing (s)he could've done to avoid the accident not to be the one 'in the wrong'. )
Folding bikes -are- often crap.. but only because people buy crap folding bikes.
I see them in NL trains in a lot of varieties, thanks to folding bikes being allowed at all hours and at no extra charge (regular bikes only at an extra charge and only outside of rush hours)... - the cheap student: take an existing bike, cut the frame in half, weld industrial-strength door hinges to the two halves. Voila - 'folding bike'. - the noob: buy the bike that folds the smallest... which also has wheels not much larger than a pair of inline skates' wheels. Have fun pedaling and steering. Fail.
If it's a bit smaller, though, so that folded up it could still fit into the trunk of a car as well, it would be quite nice. Drive near where you need to go (if the train/bus can't take you there conveniently), park on the outskirts, take the bike to the exact place / a guarded bicycle parking place.
I ride a 'female' design bike - it's much easier to get up on / off of, which is rather useful when you're doing any off-roading and need a speedy dismount (I prefer my bike crashing without me on it). Just watch some off-road biking accidents footage.. guys trying to jump off their bikes only to have their foot get caught behind that crossbeam. funny stuff.
The only -practical- downside I've found is that you can't rest it against lightposts/thin trees - it'll just fall over:)
Overall, though, the 'male' model is pretty much going extinct outside of sports bikes (be that the aforementioned off-road or tour-de-france style skinnies)
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 4, Informative
Having been to Houston as a tourist, I find parents' notes to be absolutely true.
Not only do motorists freak out if there's somebody on a bicycle on their streets (and unless it's a highway/etc., that should be perfectly legal - share the road, dammit) and use any existing bicycle lanes as just more room for them to zigzag all over the place......there's almost no sidewalks! Okay, that's not true, there's plenty. But a lot of them just suddenly end with nowhere in particular to go next. I couldn't legally walk from my hotel to The Galleria (just 1.6 miles) because the sidewalk just -ends- after the last commercial store (a garden center)'s plot it straddles. The -only- way to walk there via the 1.6 mile route was by crossing freeways, walking through an interstate (I-10) underpass, crossing a road on a bend (speeding car surprise special *every time*) then walking through a bunch of muddy (sprinkler over-use) grass (by a rug store), before finally there were businesses again and - surprise, surprise - sidewalks. If I were to maximize actual sidewalk usage instead - ignoring the spots where there's no sidewalk - it's a 4.3 mile route. wtf. ( virtual cookies for whoever can identify the spot on google maps )
People thought I was nuts for even attempting to walk there... suggesting that I should go rent a car. "For 1.7 miles? really? holy crap.", I thought. Then I started looking more closely as I was driven around by friends and it became clear to me as well that Houston was practically built around the idea that everybody and-I-do-mean-EVERYBODY has a car. It's evident from the clear lack of respect for cyclists and pedestrians - both by the majority of the people and by the city itself, courtesy of its lack of proper infrastructure for these groups. I mentioned that there are plenty of sidewalks... well, of sorts anyway; they were all concrete abominations that were crooked, cracked, and grown through by weeds.. so those who do like to walk are probably discouraged from that as well as you're likely to eventually trip and faceplant.
For me, within a city, it is absolutely insane that it would be an easier and shorter trip for a motorist than for a pedestrian.
Now, Seattle on the other hand.. completely different story - and with the odd hill here and there, and longer treks to get around the sound/bay, I suspect the e-bike could come in quite handy and not be a death-magnet.
Some things are best left in print, lest they suffer the same fate as Heinlein's Starship Troopers
And what was wrong with Starship Troopers?
I know what was wrong with the follow-up direct-to-DVD movies, but the original? I wasn't a big fan of the campy commercials - would've been better had they been proper propaganda ads - but other than that..
Heck, hereby my vote... reboot Starship Troopers.. that is to say... do a prequel, and then do some sequels to the first movie.. consider the other movies as having not existed.
Trust me when I say there is a LOT of interest in OSS alternatives (or any alternatives at all) to Avid, Final Cut Pro or Pro Tools
Too true, and this goes for many commercial closed-source programs. I daresay that open source - or at least open standards - is actually one of the bigger reasons for the interest, certainly in the media companies.
Unfortunately, however...
a lot of money in support contracts
But virtually none in actual development, unless you're an in-house coder.
if you were able to build the solution.
Which they would if they were more familiar with the subject at hand.
But alas, Linux devs
I presume this was a generalization, but even as a generalization.. see the above. You can't just expect every Tom, Dick and Harriette coder to be familiar with established workflows in the higher-end segment of the market. What they -are- familiar with...
are constantly reinventing iMovie.
...is exactly what they re-invent.
At the same time, those coders who are in fact familiar with the established workflows are rare - and are more than likely already hired by some of the bigger editing and VFX shops as in-house coders. Where -they- re-invent tools all the time, specific to their team and even specific to a particular project, after which code often gets abandoned (there's not as much re-use as people like to think - beyond the wealth of knowledge in the coder's head) and that's that.
There isn't really anything stopping a bunch of production companies to pool together resources - by that I do mean cold hard cash *and* hand-holding to educate the coders about what users need and why the existing tools fall short - and creating a kick-ass editing suite. Except for the lack of will, and the lack of project greenlighting from the higher-ups; after all, why would they give the competitor such a benefit? The industry is pretty cut-throat and having an advantage of your competitors is a good thing.. thus largely keeping in-house tools in-house.
That said... babysteps. Get an iMovie done and with any luck you've at least got a framework to build upon, to learn mistakes from, and to do better with in the future.
He probably did - though any polarizing method should be using a circular polarizing technique.. in which case 180 degrees is correct.. just that you have to take an axis perpendicular to the spin axis (so that clockwise becomes counterclockwise).
That wasn't his original question, though - not sure why he wrote that as 'restate'.. the answer to his new question is simple enough.. electronically. The answer to his original question is another matter entirely. You do lose intensity and probably contrast.. I don't think there's any convenient way around that other than simply increasing the brightness and contrast of the display underneath the polarizing mask. That doesn't change that it will be diminished, but at least it could be on-par with regular ol' consumer displays in terms of brightness/contrast.
Maybe some research fellow will come up with a better method to polarize... or everybody adopts the shutter technique instead.. etc.
"Consumers will have to buy brand new television"
on
Hot Or Not — 3D TV
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· Score: 1
Uhm.. no. Just no.
For shutter technology - if your television set can refresh itself cleanly in at least 48Hz* - congratulations, you've got all that you realistically need to get a 3D set going on for film content (24fps). You'll need an emitter and the glasses to sync with, and you'll still need a player to output the alternating left/right streams to your television in sync with the emitter (or make the emitter sync with whatever the output is), but that's not a whole new TV set. ( * You'll want more to make it not be quite so flickery, of course - but a 96Hz set will do just fine.. 240Hz is just that more relaxed. )
For polarized technology - expect aftermarket polarization screens.. from cheap linear polarizations in horizontal/vertical, to CW/CCW polarization. Fitting them onto your existing set will be annoying as all hell (like trying to laminate something by hand without getting bubbles trapped), but paying some dude $50 to do it for you is still cheaper than a whole new set.
For red/green - all you need is a feed-through device that takes the signal and makes it red/green. Or red/blue. Or chromadepth - whatever is your fancy, although chromadepth takes additional processing and you lose parallax.. but that's neither here nor now.
For side-by-side (be that cross-eyed or 'stare into the distance and try to defy your own eye muscles - lol') - again, feed-through device will do.. bit of a waste of your screen's real estate, though.
There's no *absolute need* to get a new television set - aftermarket options are there for the taking by anybody willing to jump into that market. Heck, the only real obstacle I'm seeing is with those technologies where you'd need to use a feed-through device.. whether those would be allowed (i.e. they'd probably have to output encrypted data again after decrypting the original stream to be in compliance with HDCP blabla) is something worth pondering.
Push comes to shove? Ditch the television set, grab a pair of VR goggles like NVidia's, and watch it straight on those. Still cheaper than a new television and as an added perk it'll work pretty much automatically with most PC 3D games (specific 3D-considerations aside).
Aside from a few gimmicky effects - tire boinging right at the camera and the like - the entire rest of the movie was completely not in-your-face 3D and I thought it was rather well done; for most of the movie, the fact that it was '3D' was just not obvious.
Compare this to Beowulf 3D. Ouch, man. Ouch. 2D version much preferred.
Well, the complications GP notes are ones that are not so easily overcome.
I use a rig with two cameras, myself - mostly because it affords me exaggerated depth perceptions - or even narrowed - by changing the distance between the two cameras. You can compare this to viewing through big binoculars - even surfaces far away seem to be divided into 'layers' of depth while you can perceive no such depth with the naked eye. ( another reason is that I just happened to get the 2nd camera to replace the 1st one as a regular use camera, as the 1st one has developed some issues that make in unreliable in general use, but it works fine for stereo shoots with a remote shutter and all - so it was simply a cheap option )
Synchronizing the shutters is easy enough - at least to within a few thousandths of a second, these circuits are all the same.
But zooming is a right pain in the behind.. one of my camera's motors is simply a little bit slower than the other. Thus, I just don't zoom while shooting, leaving any zooming to a post-effect crop+scale. If I need a more extreme zoom I'm pretty much f'ed unless I want to manually match them together in post.
The same applies to many other processes.. white balance, for example. Both set to the same setting, yet one comes out with a lightly bluer cast - but only in the darker regions. I've been meaning to get a calibration chart so that I can derive a LUT to make one match the other, but - as you do note - the eyes do tend to just blend things together a bit so it's not really a huge issue there.
But, all in all, a single-camera system with two lenses is superior *except* for the potential loss of resolution/frame rate -and- the lack of freedom in choosing depth perception. As the 3D 'revolution' (the 4th one now in video history, I reckon) is well underway, I'm sure there will be ingenious rigs dealing with just such a thing, using prismas and lenses to even dynamically alter the interocular distance for dramatic effect (similar to how dolly zooms (googe it, reader, if you're unfamiliar with the term - you're likely familiar with the effect) are used).
There's a reason professional cameras have mic in lines - sometimes even two. You can't stuff a little piezo mic into the camera body and then think you're going to get marvellous sound quality; and most people aren't going to care either.
The people who would use these types of (semi-)professional (3D or otherwise) HD cameras are going to have a boom mic dangling above the people they need to get on track - you could try and stick directional microphones to your camera with duct tape and you still wouldn't get anywhere near the quality.
It's not the first, either. Several stereoscopic video systems already exist - although I'm not sure if they do HD, it would surprise me if at least one of them didn't already. In addition, this is a twin lens system. That means that unless it records at twice the frame rate and records LRLRLR or to two separate streams, you'll either lose half the frame rate for each eye, or you lose half the resolution somewhere due to recording of both views onto the same virtual frame (left/right or top/bottom as in HDMI 1.4).
People who use dSLRs can go google '3d lens in a cap' for existing solutions for stereo photography and - as the summary mentions - video recording if the dSLR supports video recording.
Most film cameras don't have a 'shutter speed'.
on
Framerates Matter
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· Score: 5, Informative
more accurately - most film cameras don't have a notion of a shutter 'speed'.
The film roll still goes by at 24fps, but the actual shutter is a wheel. That wheel can have various sizes of gaps (to increase/decrease exposure *time*) and sizes (to produce specific motion blur effects; e.g. an object leading its own motion blur path requires a small shutter opening at first, ending in a large shutter opening). You use fairly sensitive film and a small shutter gap, and you'll get nearly motion blur-less shots like that of Saving Private Ryan (watch explosions in that film and every speck of dirt that gets thrown about appears almost razor-sharp; some find this objectionable). Heck, you can even expose twice per frame if you want to get all experimental and stuff.
That said.. you can't - short of electronic shutters - expose for -more- than the film's fps, though. A bit under 1/24th of a second is the most you'll get (that 'bit' being required to transport the film to the next frame).
I can only guess that it's a rule to flag e-mails as being spammy (all of my new years' wishes to brits and americans I got replies to with the subject tagged "{Spam?}") when they are 'sent from the future'.
I can also only guess that this is done via a regex on the date with the date being somewhere far into the future (but that future kinda crept up on us the other day, right?) so as not to burden CPUs with actual date conversions to universal time and doing comparisons on that, and flagging e-mails sent greater than a 24 hour period or so into the future.
But given that
1. such e-mails hardly exist in the first place (In my archives, I just found 2*.. out of 19,836 and counting)
2. spammers will be readily aware of this rule and really why would they make an effort to inject a future date anyway when their mail daemons will happily use the -current date-
3. in case of an actual entity from the future informing us of impending doom with instructions on how to stave it off, we'll have seriously fucked ourselves?
I just don't see why this rule exists at all, and why it needs to be 'fixed'. Maybe somebody can inform me of a very good reason for the rule existing. If not: I say the rule doesn't need fixing.. it needs removing.
* E-mail number 1: A travel itinerary auto-sent from expedia back in May 2004. It has a date of February 7th, 2101. E-mail number 2: An e-mail from a friend back in June 2005. It inexplicably has a date of June 26th, 2165. ThunderBird oddly enough reports a date in the search results reading May 21st, 2029 - though that's nowhere to be found in the mail's source. Display bug? Neither are spam, regardless. (yes, I know, there's no telling how many (spam) e-mails from the future I never received because they were spam-flagged in the first place. I think I'd rather take my chances.)
Unless the driver was saying "you know, I couldn't make out the shape at all.. it just looked like -a- green light, and that was good enough for me", of course.
Okay, I get it, the iPhone is really, really, really popular... it's like this shiny toy and everybody wantses it. Good for them.
But why isn't the real story that apparently AT&T feels they can't sell any further iPhones with presumably the lack of coverage/network bandwidth as their argument, but *every other phone* is just fine?
If it's a coverage issue - this should affect every phone, unless the iPhone were to have notoriously bad reception in the first place. If it's a bandwidth issue - this should affect every phone, period. Maybe iPhone users tend to browse the interwebs more often but if they're having actual bandwidth issues then this should affect even the lowliest of use on any other 3G phone.
Top that off with the Apple Stores still selling the things - even though presumably they should be aware of their *exclusive partner*'s potential issues actually supporting the things, and I see far more interesting stories than "can't buy the iPhone from the AT&T website if I enter a NY zip code:("
I vomit a little bit when I think about the state of copyright.
By that do you mean... A. the fact that things that should have fallen into the public domain long ago, aren't due to copyright term extensions B. the fact that most people really don't care and will copy it anyway...?
It's funny, really... laws regarding copyrights are getting ever more restricting.. while the public mindset thinks ever more loosely about copyrights, and ignores those laws.
Surely this is advancing the collective cultural repository?
Option A: not so much - short of arguing that without copyrights, nobody will have any incentive to create any works anymore, consequently don't, and nothing new enters the regulated collective cultural repository. Option B: yes - short of arguing that without copyrights, nobody will have any incentive to create any works anymore, consequently don't, and thus there's nothing new to copy from the regulated collective cultural repository into the unregulated collective cultural repository.
From practically every discussion I've seen on this, the selective quoting from the e-mails.. a lot of damage has been done.
Quite frankly this has 2 causes, at least in NL: 1. We're cheap bastards. Lowering our co2 emissions, investing in green energy, etc. etc. is all costing us money.. on the individual and government level. So anything that challenges the notions that 'threaten to' invoke plans regulating going green is welcomed with wide open arms.
2. We, and I daresay most people around the world, have short attention spans and are lazy. A person like Glenn Beck opens his mouth reading those choice quotes off an autocue, and outrage ensues. A shitton of scientists then tackle those quotes, what they mean, what the underlying data is, and so forth and so on.. and 5 seconds in the person watching the TV will have already zapped away to one of 7 variants of "American Idol" (well, their NL equivalents). Unfortunately, there is no soundbite cookiecut easily consumed way of educating people beyond the level of an 8 year old - and the matter at hand is far too complex for most 8 year olds to comprehend.
The reason it works for the rocket in question is because it's rather big, has lots of propellant, which it ejects at a fairly high velocity relative to its rate of rotation (spinning), which coupled with the fact that it's rather high up allows for a large vapor trail.
If you compare that to existing consumer glass fireworks which -does- have spinners.. and I'll link to a little home-made thing (don't try this at home, etc.)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7WSEmXA6s4...then you'll see that the effect extinguishes very quickly and you never really see much of a spiral. You would essentially have to 1. replace the little fountain with a smoke bomb instead and 2. get that smoke to be ejected quickly (perhaps through a nozzle).
Unfortunately, that doesn't get rid of the scale of turbulence in air and - if performed outside - wind etc. which will affect these small scale effects much more than that of the rocket.
In short... I don't think it can be done at a small scale while keeping the effect. You *might* be able to get it reasonably going with non-consumer class fireworks. But I'll leave that for the chaps at freakpyromaniacs.com and such to figure out.
They may not have been allowed to dirt up the cars; although you'd have to strangle that out of an employee as they're bound to be under NDAs regarding the exact contracts.
Compare that to car manufacturers not allowing damage models on 'their' cars, or dictating exactly what damage models would be allowed (e.g. a bent fender.. sure. an engine dying.. hell no.)
Ahhh to remember the early 90's when every racing game just tossed in whatever car they da*n well liked at a splendid 50 polygons and car manufacturers were off-the-record just glad for the free advertising.
Well that depends on the wording. If the wording is that you are allowed to make a backup copy of the DVD - then surely that *includes* the lead-in area and any other areas not normally 'accessible. If it says you're allowed to make a backup of the movie, then that'd be a different thing altogether (and would technically also exclude such things as deleted scenes, director's commentary, the menus, etc.)
Personally I've never seen a DVD state that you're allowed to even make a backup copy; our laws say I'm allowed to, but every DVD that I have seen explicitly forbids me to (the law supersedes What the DVD says, of course) do so by way of an annoying typically unskippable warning message.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/search?q=suspicionless+checkpoints
What valid suspicions?
granted, they may not be 'the police', quite technically
That one I could try to answer, but as I noted - I was a tourist there, so I wouldn't know the various (federal, state, county, etc.) laws in&out to be able to say which rights would be waived by merely getting into a car :)
I have, and I know how to put distance between novels/comics/movies - otherwise the movies always tend to disappoint anyway.
I'm not saying "reboot Starship Troopers" as envisioned by Heinlein. I'm saying "reboot Starship Troopers as it was laid out in the movie" - as regardless of the obvious disconnects between the movie and the book, it was still a very enjoyable movie and could have had excellent sequels/prequels... when instead it got completely f'ed over by the direct-to-dvd movies' executions. ./nokarma as this is one heck of an old thread to reply to ;)
The fade-in is nice. Not so much because it's a fade-in (which is just visually more pleasant than an instant-display), but because you can visit www.google.com and get a very clean page (google logo, search field, and currently a Haiti relief notice), and just type away (as focus is set to the search field) and be done with it. This is very much like how google.com -was- in the very early days.
If you want to access any of the other services that google have started to offer since then, you can move your mouse anywhere within the screen and hey presto those options become available to you. If you don't need them - why clutter up the screen with them?
You can always customize your own google page and set that as your bookmark/start page/whatever and display exact what you want to have displayed from the get-go.
If anything, the change from direct URLs to google redirects at some point is what I find most annoying. I guess it's what enables them to track clicks better / present "We believe this page is dangerous for your health"-warnings, etc. and I can see how that can be good for them as a business, and for users who go clickhappy on fluffy little bunnies promising them cash. But it annoys me that I can't just 1. google for something, 2. recognize the right place, 3. right-click the result and get the basic URL out of it anymore. Now, I just get this (for slashdot):
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CBgQFkAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2F&rct=j&q=slashdot&ei=KAtXS8CCLeLMQAeSx8CbDg&usg=AFQjClHLEL_tF-6ZxylM44KJH54-gaJRnQ&s1g2=U223qDAEXHFbHyOw_p2PzQ
wtf.
I'd much prefer they put the actual URL in the link, and let their redirect flow through an onClick.. yeah, they'd lose the javascript-disabled lot.. tough.
(emphasis mine)
You don't honestly think that, do you?
I think you meant "you are free not to come here in the first place".
It's perfectly normal - albeit dangerous (one gust of wind and wheeeeee off-course smack-dab into a car).
Then again.. it's NL (and BE).. where we like to take little babies onto the front/rear of our bikes.. without helmets :D
http://s296.photobucket.com/albums/mm173/nannet1973/?action=view¤t=Zeelandjuni200876.jpg
http://www.gerloeffen.nl/data/1788/70286-x.jpg
Note narrow road.. without any bicycle lane... o0o0o danger! Not really.. it's so common in NL that motorists do tend to actually look out for cyclists and drive responsibly around them.
Indeed, as GP notes.. it's often the cyclists in cities that tend to be more dangerous for cars, than the cars are for the cyclists.
Running red lights is pretty much the norm, one-way roads tend to be one-way for motorists only as well so don't be surprised if a cyclist comes head-on at you, signaling (by extending your arm) is something that went out of fashion in the late 80's - so be prepared to be cut off by a cyclist, etc.
The only people worse are the pedestrians.. who will cross wherever and whenever they damn well please.. even if there's a pedestrian crossing, with or without traffic lights, only 10 yards over :)
( Pedestrians are almost 'untouchable' by law in NL.. if a motorist hits a pedestrian, the motorist is gonna have to have some damn good evidence that there's nothing (s)he could've done to avoid the accident not to be the one 'in the wrong'. )
Folding bikes -are- often crap.. but only because people buy crap folding bikes.
I see them in NL trains in a lot of varieties, thanks to folding bikes being allowed at all hours and at no extra charge (regular bikes only at an extra charge and only outside of rush hours)...
- the cheap student: take an existing bike, cut the frame in half, weld industrial-strength door hinges to the two halves. Voila - 'folding bike'.
- the noob: buy the bike that folds the smallest... which also has wheels not much larger than a pair of inline skates' wheels. Have fun pedaling and steering. Fail.
Here's a pretty good one for a 'fair' price:
http://www.foldingbikes.co.uk/dahon_roo.htm
These are considered among the best still affordable options:
http://www.brompton.co.uk/
And here's an electric one: .. though that seems a bit like the 'cheap student' variety :)
http://www.ezeebike.com/Quando_product.htm
If it's a bit smaller, though, so that folded up it could still fit into the trunk of a car as well, it would be quite nice. Drive near where you need to go (if the train/bus can't take you there conveniently), park on the outskirts, take the bike to the exact place / a guarded bicycle parking place.
I ride a 'female' design bike - it's much easier to get up on / off of, which is rather useful when you're doing any off-roading and need a speedy dismount (I prefer my bike crashing without me on it). Just watch some off-road biking accidents footage.. guys trying to jump off their bikes only to have their foot get caught behind that crossbeam. funny stuff.
The only -practical- downside I've found is that you can't rest it against lightposts/thin trees - it'll just fall over :)
Overall, though, the 'male' model is pretty much going extinct outside of sports bikes (be that the aforementioned off-road or tour-de-france style skinnies)
That said - there's certainly male models of e-bikes;
http://www.ezeebike.com/Forte_product.htm (seriously slow website)
http://www.sparta.nl/NL/Fiets.aspx?Id=4414442 (change the 'Dames' dropdown to 'Heren')
Having been to Houston as a tourist, I find parents' notes to be absolutely true.
Not only do motorists freak out if there's somebody on a bicycle on their streets (and unless it's a highway/etc., that should be perfectly legal - share the road, dammit) and use any existing bicycle lanes as just more room for them to zigzag all over the place... ...there's almost no sidewalks! Okay, that's not true, there's plenty. But a lot of them just suddenly end with nowhere in particular to go next.
I couldn't legally walk from my hotel to The Galleria (just 1.6 miles) because the sidewalk just -ends- after the last commercial store (a garden center)'s plot it straddles. The -only- way to walk there via the 1.6 mile route was by crossing freeways, walking through an interstate (I-10) underpass, crossing a road on a bend (speeding car surprise special *every time*) then walking through a bunch of muddy (sprinkler over-use) grass (by a rug store), before finally there were businesses again and - surprise, surprise - sidewalks.
If I were to maximize actual sidewalk usage instead - ignoring the spots where there's no sidewalk - it's a 4.3 mile route. wtf.
( virtual cookies for whoever can identify the spot on google maps )
People thought I was nuts for even attempting to walk there... suggesting that I should go rent a car. "For 1.7 miles? really? holy crap.", I thought. Then I started looking more closely as I was driven around by friends and it became clear to me as well that Houston was practically built around the idea that everybody and-I-do-mean-EVERYBODY has a car. It's evident from the clear lack of respect for cyclists and pedestrians - both by the majority of the people and by the city itself, courtesy of its lack of proper infrastructure for these groups. I mentioned that there are plenty of sidewalks... well, of sorts anyway; they were all concrete abominations that were crooked, cracked, and grown through by weeds.. so those who do like to walk are probably discouraged from that as well as you're likely to eventually trip and faceplant.
For me, within a city, it is absolutely insane that it would be an easier and shorter trip for a motorist than for a pedestrian.
Now, Seattle on the other hand.. completely different story - and with the odd hill here and there, and longer treks to get around the sound/bay, I suspect the e-bike could come in quite handy and not be a death-magnet.
And what was wrong with Starship Troopers?
I know what was wrong with the follow-up direct-to-DVD movies, but the original? I wasn't a big fan of the campy commercials - would've been better had they been proper propaganda ads - but other than that..
Heck, hereby my vote... reboot Starship Troopers.. that is to say... do a prequel, and then do some sequels to the first movie.. consider the other movies as having not existed.
Too true, and this goes for many commercial closed-source programs. I daresay that open source - or at least open standards - is actually one of the bigger reasons for the interest, certainly in the media companies.
Unfortunately, however...
But virtually none in actual development, unless you're an in-house coder.
Which they would if they were more familiar with the subject at hand.
I presume this was a generalization, but even as a generalization.. see the above. You can't just expect every Tom, Dick and Harriette coder to be familiar with established workflows in the higher-end segment of the market. What they -are- familiar with...
At the same time, those coders who are in fact familiar with the established workflows are rare - and are more than likely already hired by some of the bigger editing and VFX shops as in-house coders. Where -they- re-invent tools all the time, specific to their team and even specific to a particular project, after which code often gets abandoned (there's not as much re-use as people like to think - beyond the wealth of knowledge in the coder's head) and that's that.
There isn't really anything stopping a bunch of production companies to pool together resources - by that I do mean cold hard cash *and* hand-holding to educate the coders about what users need and why the existing tools fall short - and creating a kick-ass editing suite. Except for the lack of will, and the lack of project greenlighting from the higher-ups; after all, why would they give the competitor such a benefit? The industry is pretty cut-throat and having an advantage of your competitors is a good thing.. thus largely keeping in-house tools in-house.
That said... babysteps. Get an iMovie done and with any luck you've at least got a framework to build upon, to learn mistakes from, and to do better with in the future.
He probably did - though any polarizing method should be using a circular polarizing technique.. in which case 180 degrees is correct.. just that you have to take an axis perpendicular to the spin axis (so that clockwise becomes counterclockwise).
That wasn't his original question, though - not sure why he wrote that as 'restate'.. the answer to his new question is simple enough.. electronically. The answer to his original question is another matter entirely. You do lose intensity and probably contrast.. I don't think there's any convenient way around that other than simply increasing the brightness and contrast of the display underneath the polarizing mask. That doesn't change that it will be diminished, but at least it could be on-par with regular ol' consumer displays in terms of brightness/contrast.
Maybe some research fellow will come up with a better method to polarize... or everybody adopts the shutter technique instead.. etc.
Uhm.. no. Just no.
For shutter technology - if your television set can refresh itself cleanly in at least 48Hz* - congratulations, you've got all that you realistically need to get a 3D set going on for film content (24fps). You'll need an emitter and the glasses to sync with, and you'll still need a player to output the alternating left/right streams to your television in sync with the emitter (or make the emitter sync with whatever the output is), but that's not a whole new TV set.
( * You'll want more to make it not be quite so flickery, of course - but a 96Hz set will do just fine.. 240Hz is just that more relaxed. )
For polarized technology - expect aftermarket polarization screens.. from cheap linear polarizations in horizontal/vertical, to CW/CCW polarization. Fitting them onto your existing set will be annoying as all hell (like trying to laminate something by hand without getting bubbles trapped), but paying some dude $50 to do it for you is still cheaper than a whole new set.
For red/green - all you need is a feed-through device that takes the signal and makes it red/green. Or red/blue. Or chromadepth - whatever is your fancy, although chromadepth takes additional processing and you lose parallax.. but that's neither here nor now.
For side-by-side (be that cross-eyed or 'stare into the distance and try to defy your own eye muscles - lol') - again, feed-through device will do.. bit of a waste of your screen's real estate, though.
There's no *absolute need* to get a new television set - aftermarket options are there for the taking by anybody willing to jump into that market.
Heck, the only real obstacle I'm seeing is with those technologies where you'd need to use a feed-through device.. whether those would be allowed (i.e. they'd probably have to output encrypted data again after decrypting the original stream to be in compliance with HDCP blabla) is something worth pondering.
Push comes to shove? Ditch the television set, grab a pair of VR goggles like NVidia's, and watch it straight on those. Still cheaper than a new television and as an added perk it'll work pretty much automatically with most PC 3D games (specific 3D-considerations aside).
Aside from a few gimmicky effects - tire boinging right at the camera and the like - the entire rest of the movie was completely not in-your-face 3D and I thought it was rather well done; for most of the movie, the fact that it was '3D' was just not obvious.
Compare this to Beowulf 3D. Ouch, man. Ouch. 2D version much preferred.
Well, the complications GP notes are ones that are not so easily overcome.
I use a rig with two cameras, myself - mostly because it affords me exaggerated depth perceptions - or even narrowed - by changing the distance between the two cameras. You can compare this to viewing through big binoculars - even surfaces far away seem to be divided into 'layers' of depth while you can perceive no such depth with the naked eye.
( another reason is that I just happened to get the 2nd camera to replace the 1st one as a regular use camera, as the 1st one has developed some issues that make in unreliable in general use, but it works fine for stereo shoots with a remote shutter and all - so it was simply a cheap option )
Synchronizing the shutters is easy enough - at least to within a few thousandths of a second, these circuits are all the same.
But zooming is a right pain in the behind.. one of my camera's motors is simply a little bit slower than the other. Thus, I just don't zoom while shooting, leaving any zooming to a post-effect crop+scale. If I need a more extreme zoom I'm pretty much f'ed unless I want to manually match them together in post.
The same applies to many other processes.. white balance, for example. Both set to the same setting, yet one comes out with a lightly bluer cast - but only in the darker regions. I've been meaning to get a calibration chart so that I can derive a LUT to make one match the other, but - as you do note - the eyes do tend to just blend things together a bit so it's not really a huge issue there.
But, all in all, a single-camera system with two lenses is superior *except* for the potential loss of resolution/frame rate -and- the lack of freedom in choosing depth perception. As the 3D 'revolution' (the 4th one now in video history, I reckon) is well underway, I'm sure there will be ingenious rigs dealing with just such a thing, using prismas and lenses to even dynamically alter the interocular distance for dramatic effect (similar to how dolly zooms (googe it, reader, if you're unfamiliar with the term - you're likely familiar with the effect) are used).
There's a reason professional cameras have mic in lines - sometimes even two. You can't stuff a little piezo mic into the camera body and then think you're going to get marvellous sound quality; and most people aren't going to care either.
The people who would use these types of (semi-)professional (3D or otherwise) HD cameras are going to have a boom mic dangling above the people they need to get on track - you could try and stick directional microphones to your camera with duct tape and you still wouldn't get anywhere near the quality.
It's not the first, either. Several stereoscopic video systems already exist - although I'm not sure if they do HD, it would surprise me if at least one of them didn't already. In addition, this is a twin lens system. That means that unless it records at twice the frame rate and records LRLRLR or to two separate streams, you'll either lose half the frame rate for each eye, or you lose half the resolution somewhere due to recording of both views onto the same virtual frame (left/right or top/bottom as in HDMI 1.4).
People who use dSLRs can go google '3d lens in a cap' for existing solutions for stereo photography and - as the summary mentions - video recording if the dSLR supports video recording.
more accurately - most film cameras don't have a notion of a shutter 'speed'.
The film roll still goes by at 24fps, but the actual shutter is a wheel. That wheel can have various sizes of gaps (to increase/decrease exposure *time*) and sizes (to produce specific motion blur effects; e.g. an object leading its own motion blur path requires a small shutter opening at first, ending in a large shutter opening). You use fairly sensitive film and a small shutter gap, and you'll get nearly motion blur-less shots like that of Saving Private Ryan (watch explosions in that film and every speck of dirt that gets thrown about appears almost razor-sharp; some find this objectionable). Heck, you can even expose twice per frame if you want to get all experimental and stuff.
That said.. you can't - short of electronic shutters - expose for -more- than the film's fps, though. A bit under 1/24th of a second is the most you'll get (that 'bit' being required to transport the film to the next frame).
Anyway.. wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter
I can only guess that it's a rule to flag e-mails as being spammy (all of my new years' wishes to brits and americans I got replies to with the subject tagged "{Spam?}") when they are 'sent from the future'.
I can also only guess that this is done via a regex on the date with the date being somewhere far into the future (but that future kinda crept up on us the other day, right?) so as not to burden CPUs with actual date conversions to universal time and doing comparisons on that, and flagging e-mails sent greater than a 24 hour period or so into the future.
But given that
1. such e-mails hardly exist in the first place (In my archives, I just found 2*.. out of 19,836 and counting)
2. spammers will be readily aware of this rule and really why would they make an effort to inject a future date anyway when their mail daemons will happily use the -current date-
3. in case of an actual entity from the future informing us of impending doom with instructions on how to stave it off, we'll have seriously fucked ourselves?
I just don't see why this rule exists at all, and why it needs to be 'fixed'. Maybe somebody can inform me of a very good reason for the rule existing. If not: I say the rule doesn't need fixing.. it needs removing.
*
E-mail number 1: A travel itinerary auto-sent from expedia back in May 2004. It has a date of February 7th, 2101.
E-mail number 2: An e-mail from a friend back in June 2005. It inexplicably has a date of June 26th, 2165. ThunderBird oddly enough reports a date in the search results reading May 21st, 2029 - though that's nowhere to be found in the mail's source. Display bug?
Neither are spam, regardless. (yes, I know, there's no telling how many (spam) e-mails from the future I never received because they were spam-flagged in the first place. I think I'd rather take my chances.)
http://www.worldofstock.com/slides/MES2459.jpg ...to make it appear as a circle, exactly?
Unless the driver was saying "you know, I couldn't make out the shape at all.. it just looked like -a- green light, and that was good enough for me", of course.
Okay, I get it, the iPhone is really, really, really popular... it's like this shiny toy and everybody wantses it. Good for them.
But why isn't the real story that apparently AT&T feels they can't sell any further iPhones with presumably the lack of coverage/network bandwidth as their argument, but *every other phone* is just fine?
If it's a coverage issue - this should affect every phone, unless the iPhone were to have notoriously bad reception in the first place.
If it's a bandwidth issue - this should affect every phone, period. Maybe iPhone users tend to browse the interwebs more often but if they're having actual bandwidth issues then this should affect even the lowliest of use on any other 3G phone.
Top that off with the Apple Stores still selling the things - even though presumably they should be aware of their *exclusive partner*'s potential issues actually supporting the things, and I see far more interesting stories than "can't buy the iPhone from the AT&T website if I enter a NY zip code :("
By that do you mean... ...?
A. the fact that things that should have fallen into the public domain long ago, aren't due to copyright term extensions
B. the fact that most people really don't care and will copy it anyway
It's funny, really... laws regarding copyrights are getting ever more restricting.. while the public mindset thinks ever more loosely about copyrights, and ignores those laws.
Option A: not so much - short of arguing that without copyrights, nobody will have any incentive to create any works anymore, consequently don't, and nothing new enters the regulated collective cultural repository.
Option B: yes - short of arguing that without copyrights, nobody will have any incentive to create any works anymore, consequently don't, and thus there's nothing new to copy from the regulated collective cultural repository into the unregulated collective cultural repository.
From practically every discussion I've seen on this, the selective quoting from the e-mails.. a lot of damage has been done.
Quite frankly this has 2 causes, at least in NL:
1. We're cheap bastards. Lowering our co2 emissions, investing in green energy, etc. etc. is all costing us money.. on the individual and government level. So anything that challenges the notions that 'threaten to' invoke plans regulating going green is welcomed with wide open arms.
2. We, and I daresay most people around the world, have short attention spans and are lazy. A person like Glenn Beck opens his mouth reading those choice quotes off an autocue, and outrage ensues. A shitton of scientists then tackle those quotes, what they mean, what the underlying data is, and so forth and so on.. and 5 seconds in the person watching the TV will have already zapped away to one of 7 variants of "American Idol" (well, their NL equivalents).
Unfortunately, there is no soundbite cookiecut easily consumed way of educating people beyond the level of an 8 year old - and the matter at hand is far too complex for most 8 year olds to comprehend.
This doesn't work so easily on a smaller scale.
The reason it works for the rocket in question is because it's rather big, has lots of propellant, which it ejects at a fairly high velocity relative to its rate of rotation (spinning), which coupled with the fact that it's rather high up allows for a large vapor trail.
If you compare that to existing consumer glass fireworks which -does- have spinners.. and I'll link to a little home-made thing (don't try this at home, etc.)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7WSEmXA6s4 ...then you'll see that the effect extinguishes very quickly and you never really see much of a spiral.
You would essentially have to 1. replace the little fountain with a smoke bomb instead and 2. get that smoke to be ejected quickly (perhaps through a nozzle).
Unfortunately, that doesn't get rid of the scale of turbulence in air and - if performed outside - wind etc. which will affect these small scale effects much more than that of the rocket.
In short... I don't think it can be done at a small scale while keeping the effect. You *might* be able to get it reasonably going with non-consumer class fireworks. But I'll leave that for the chaps at freakpyromaniacs.com and such to figure out.
They may not have been allowed to dirt up the cars; although you'd have to strangle that out of an employee as they're bound to be under NDAs regarding the exact contracts.
Compare that to car manufacturers not allowing damage models on 'their' cars, or dictating exactly what damage models would be allowed (e.g. a bent fender.. sure. an engine dying.. hell no.)
Ahhh to remember the early 90's when every racing game just tossed in whatever car they da*n well liked at a splendid 50 polygons and car manufacturers were off-the-record just glad for the free advertising.
Well that depends on the wording. If the wording is that you are allowed to make a backup copy of the DVD - then surely that *includes* the lead-in area and any other areas not normally 'accessible. If it says you're allowed to make a backup of the movie, then that'd be a different thing altogether (and would technically also exclude such things as deleted scenes, director's commentary, the menus, etc.)
Personally I've never seen a DVD state that you're allowed to even make a backup copy; our laws say I'm allowed to, but every DVD that I have seen explicitly forbids me to (the law supersedes What the DVD says, of course) do so by way of an annoying typically unskippable warning message.