Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
I'm not saying that in the future, a GPLvN -will- exist that includes terms regarding sale of GPL(vN)'ed software - but in the given case, why wouldn't there be.
Sure, the source to this game is available. Hooray for every other iPhone developer. However, if you're not a developer, you can't just install it on your device even if you compile it.
In addition, -if- a developer were to pick up the code and compile it.. they, in turn, can't distribute it outside of the iTunes store. ( I seem to recall Apple being okay with source code distribution when it concerns GPL - but a Google search seems to bring up lots of (old) blog posts about it being prohibited. )
On top of that, there's probably little chance that it would be accepted into the iTunes store, seeing as it's a 1:1 duplicate of an existing app.
While they're at it, they could make Alien and Aliens non-canon and just start anew!
They could choose to completely ignore everything that's ever come before without any explanation whatsoever (hello Batman Begins)
Or maybe they could do some time travel thing and claim it's now an alternate universe (hi Star Trek)
Better yet, they could make it -seem- like it should be canon, but make it so utterly different from the other movies to the point of being confusing and having to leave the theater thinking "Well.. it had an Alien.. and they mentioned the Nostromo.. I *guess* that makes it canon?" (howdy, Terminator 4)
So many options when you're trying to re-boot/re-imagine/re-fuck-up a franchise.
Here's a thought.. maybe they could ditch the whole Alien idea and use their newfound funding to just make a kick-ass *relevant* movie. That way nobody can whine about how it killed their childhood memories, and if it ends up being -good-, they can actually pat themselves on the back instead of realizing that most people only saw it 'cos they liked the original (first two) movies.
completely off-topic - but if they could make her look rather appealing in Galaxy Quest (1999, 20 year after the first Alien movie), then I'm sure they shouldn't have any problems now - a mere 10 years later.
This is hollywood, people. Push comes to shove, they scan her face, digitally de-age it, and slap it on a stand-in actor.
That said - I do second the hope that they will not be trying to tie into characters of the 'future' movies; how would they have known about those characters? Tying into the existing storyline, however, would actually be rather nice.. though getting away with that without opening up giant plot issues in the 'later' movies seems rather tough.
Provided the ruling stands in appeals (and they could appeal all the way up to the EU courts, of course), you're right.. the judges can be told to blow themselves until the Swedish authorities hand down the rulings.
However, in the mean time... - if they appear in The Netherlands, they can be arrested. - if they continue to not block the Dutch, then BREIN may have a case for Dutch -ISPs- to block TPB as alternative means of getting TPB blocked.
Foreign sites have been blocked before - think gambling sites - based on Dutch law and court cases, so it's not entirely unthinkable.
In point 1.2 the judge established that the defendants had written an undated letter saying that the defendants will not be showing up in court. In point 1.3 the judge established that seeing as they wrote the letter, it is ridiculous to claim that they were in fact -not- aware of the proceedings before them, and the motions for dismissal thus be struck down; after all, they could have either been present just fine or have sent representation.
Further, they judge accepts the evidence by BREIN, that they followed: - the official paths of notification (point 2.3; going through swedish authorities, and through a Swedish bailiff) - unofficial paths (point 2.4) -- e-mail to the defendants' e-mail address --- (the judge and accepted the evidence by BREIN that one of the defendants -had- replied from one of the e-mail addresses written to as late as May 6th, in response to a notification about this very case (again, point 2.4) ) -- e-mail the domain holder's e-mail address) -- wrote to the lawyers who had represented the defendants in a recent court case -- registered mail, containing the subpoena in Swdish) to each of the defendants addresses. --- (the judge accepted evidence by BREIN, from the courier service, that the mail was delivered) -- a Twitter post -- a Facebook post --- (for the curious: whether or not these are reasonable venues for notification has yet to be determined. In the case a defendant can't be found, the posting in newspapers and such -is- acceptable. It is likely that the above two are found to be acceptable as well)
As a result, the judge once again surmises (still in point 2.4) that it is not likely that the defendants were -not- (timely) aware of these proceedings, and most certainly -could- have been present, or represented, in court.
uploading is -not- allowed, downloading is. More accurately: distribution is not allowed, downloading is.
The distinction is a bit vague, as B downloading from A inherently means A is uploading to B, but quite technically a download and an upload are separate processes, hinging mostly on who initiated what.
Again this applies only to music and video (tv/movies). This doesn't apply to e.g. software* and books.
* yes, you're allowed to distribute linux distros and such. Please read these posts within the appropriate context.
it's for advertising. If that isn't obvious to somebody who saw the top-most picture in the project page, then they need to think inside the box more.
Nobody's going to use this for barcodes-as-we-know-them. They *might* replace something like a QR code encoding lots of information (rather than effectively a link to more information), but for almost anything worth describing, it's worth putting it there in plaintext. ( what, I'm going to go to a museum of modern art, and 'admire' a sculpture from 20 yards away just because the bokode can be read from that distance? I think not. )
No, this is gonna be for advertising. Imagine you're taking some casual pictures of some friends in a night out in town. You just snap the shots, come home, and whoa - the entire out-of-focus background is laden with Coca~Cola, McDonald's, Ford and whatnot logos and other texts.
The beauty of it is that they could combine it with existing light-based advertising displays. Every LED in the matrix displays at Times Square could easily have this bokode applied so that even if somebody's taking a picture of a competitor's matrix display making yours out of focus - yours will still stand out.
( I sure -hope- this won't actually be the case, but you know them wiley advertising people. )
It's not illegal unless you're on that 'do not call' list, or have previously indicated to them that you wish for them to stop calling you.
We've got similar lists and practices in the E.U., so I doubt it's any fundamental reason for anything:)
On the other hand, if I dial a wrong number, the person I called is only inconvenienced by the call itself - not by any inherent cost in being called in the first place. Ditto prank calls and whatnot.
Sure, it might cost $0.20 here vs $0.10 (caller) + $0.20 (callee) there, but I don't see any problem with that. Just means you won't waste as much money placing calls in the first place. If you -have- to make that many calls, I'm sure the bill's worth paying.
I do wish more browsers would support it, though. It'd be great for those dreadful multipage articles (okay, I use AutoPager now, so whatever) as well as things like photo galleries; no need to go hunting for the next/previous buttons/links/hovery whatnots.
But, alas... hardly any browser supports the darn things, let alone make use of them smartly (i.e. as per the w3c spec, a browser might pre-cache the 'next' document so that you can browse faster; tough luck seeing that implemented anywhere, though.)
Apparently I can't just walk into any ol' country club. I have to show my membership card. I get my membership card by applying. Part of the application process is showing some form of ID, another part is laying down a bunch of moneys, being in good standing, blabla. How come that is legal, then?
As a result - and I know the answer is 'no', but I'm curious as to -why- it is 'no' - couldn't any ol' bar simply offer 'guest membership' by means of, say, a stamp / wrist band, where the 'membership process' includes showing some form of ID, costs the patron, say, $2 (which goes toward a complimentary membership drink), and the membership duration lasting the entirety of the patron's stay?
If the premise looks good and the dev team -is-... then sure, why not?
Personally I don't like my game choices to be largely at the whim of financial investors ( publishers and distributors, largely ) who have very little connection with the game at all and are only looking for 'sure fire success stories'.
Thankfully even the big publishers do try new concepts from time to time - often using chunks of the money they got from the 'sure fire success stories' - but it can't hurt to have more developers try to innovate instead of producing [licensed sports title] 2010, 2011, 2012,...
If being able to privately and -directly- invest in a title increases the odds of that title being made, I don't mind putting a small amount of money in, and risk losing/breaking even/making some profit off of it.
Wouldn't that be reasonably solved by using two raids?
i.e. say you're using a (mirrored) RAID setup as your 'live' setup in order to prevent any data loss from e.g. surface degradation or even total failure of a drive's electronics. This doesn't guard against user error (zap a file and it's gone on the mirror just as well) and viruses and such, of course.
So you also make backups -of- this live system to a backup drive. Now if that's a single drive.. sure, that could die, and that would suck. But if that is -also- a mirrored raid (with proper controllers and whatnot).. wouldn't you decrease the odds of that backup being dead quite a bit? especially if you backup regularly, as any problems identified with one of the drives in the raid setup should be alerted so you can go slot in a spare?
I realize that there's always a chance that both drives die, or the raid controller itself dies.. but it still seems much better than using a single drive backup... or worse, blu-rays, DVDs, etc. ( I don't really trust online backup services enough to use them for backup of important things; but I suppose they -should- be a reasonable alternative for those willing to pay for them )
Note that there's one major problem with using 2 separate cameras; getting them to use the same settings. One might whitebalance/expose/etc. one way, the other another way, and poof... there goes the illusion.
My real question is, why don't they just give up on this 3D crap already?
Money.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some stereographic 3D (actual 3D is even nicer but well out of reach).
But the only motivator for 3D content right now is money. Money spent on 3D projection systems, the glasses, eventually special Blu-Ray (or beyond) features, displays (in the news a lot lately), cameras*, etc. etc.
Eventually stereographic 3D will become mainstream, as there's a -huge- push behind it. Eventually, smell-o-vision will be tried again as well.
Not particularly new. There have been stereographic 3D photo cameras before that you'd get developed at a special lab that'd stick a lenticular sheet over it. Those usually had 3-5 lenses, too, for even greater effect (some perspective shift): http://www.lenticulations.com/images_stereogram/nimslo.jpg ( creating output a la: http://www.lenticulations.com/#1 )
There's several reasons why you may not find them all that '3D'...
starting with the obvious: it's not 3D, it's stereographic. We still call that '3D' because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.
also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn't change. For 2D, your brain doesn't care so much* as it's been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it'll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it's used to from actual 3D environments.
less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close... something silly like the sword in Beowulf... right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you're at the mercy of whatever focus the film's producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera's distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus... e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.
There's a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.
It bugs me as well, but for some movies it's absolutely worth seeing the '3D' version.
* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.
For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily. Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You'll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.
Human visual system is fun - and that's without going into any optical illusion stuff:)
The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display
Slow down, cowboy...
There's many ways in which you can present stereographic content. Personally I prefer the side-by-side method as it allows for full color and no special display; and then specifically the cross-eyed method. This does take up twice the horizontal space; though for most webcam purposes you could re-orient the camera so that it records in a portrait projection, and you'd lose much less (though requiring more vertically - unless cropped).
Other methods include things like chromadepth ( color matching doesn't matter there, but you have to pre-process the two images into a single image of varying hues so that e.g. red appears close and blue appears further away ), polarized display of both images into the same 2D space (requires special screen/projector and glasses), lenticular displays (both images appear interlaced vertically with eachother.. e.g. one image in the odd-numbered columns of pixels, the other in the even-numbered columns).. destroys half the horizontal resolution, requires a special display but not special glasses), '3d glasses' (a la VR shutter glasses, simply presenting the 'left' image in front of your left eye, and the right image in front of the right; requires special glasses, drivers, etc.).
Personally I don't know -why- this company went with the anaglyphic method as it's fraught with problems.. color filters are only the beginning... messing your eyes up like you wouldn't believe it for the next 5 minutes after you take the glasses off is a more serious issue. At least shutter glasses only give you a headache, rather than the entire world appearing to fade between red/blue or red/green or cyan/magenta, etc. in front of you in swirly clouds of freakiness.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say there, as it's completely unrelated to the question asked - but just to point something out...
I don't think they are broadcasting, they're narrowcasting - as far as terminology in radio/tv-world goes*. Note that in various nations there are in fact legal definitions to separate the two, or at least to define the former. Not sure about the U.S., however.
If you're trying to say "stop abusing a frequency / bandwidth slot for narrowcasting and free it for broadcasts"... well, sure. Except that you'd have to adjust legislation rather than tell (or beg) the companies what to do; they're not doing anything illegal, they pay what they need to pay for the right to use the frequency / bandwidth.. they're certainly free to use it for either broadcasting or narrowcasting, and free to use encryption on that or not. That's not abuse, that's simply 'use'.
* In network communication terms, it might be broadcasting (one-to-many without intermediate routing) regardless of intended audience.
If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
"Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages." I'm not a philosopher, but it seems to me that being lost is not so fleeting at all.
For example, if I misplace my keys, I could claim they are 'lost'. I could search for 10 seconds and find them, or I could search all week, or a month, or even a year before finding them. If I misplaced them well enough, I might -never- find them and they will be, forever, lost. Even if somebody else finds them, unless they are then presented to me, they remain lost to me.
However... IF I find them, then I found them. In that one single moment it goes from having been lost, to no longer being lost. Finding something... now that's fleeting - there's simply no time span between 'finding' and 'having found' whatsoever.
So "NASA has the found tapes" is even sillier if you go by that metric - and by your logic, the title would have become "NASA has the tapes" - rather ambiguous (perhaps even ominous to those donning foil hats).
"NASA Has the Lost Tapes" is still an awful title... "NASA Found the Tapes that were Lost" may be more accurate. But as others have pointed out, the tapes in question themselves have come to colloquially be known as "The Lost Tapes". So "NASA has The Lost Tapes" wouldn't have been so bad; a simple change of case for two letters.
"God wants us to learn these things, that is why we are here" If only more people believed in that same God.. or at least that said same God wants these same things, there'd be a whole lot less problems.
However, I take issue even with that statement, due to the second half. It seems like it is meant to be an answer to the question "Why are we here?"
To illustrate why I take issue with that.. I saw a cute little German book about gemstones earlier today. I opened it up somewhere in the middle, only to find references to where the gemstone is mentioned in the bible and whatnot (something about 12 breastplate stones? my memory of The Bible is entirely too vague to recall the details). So I flipped to the first page of text and it had this question and answer (from iffy memory from a translation from German):
Q. Why do gemstones exist? A. God put them on the Earth for mankind to admire them.
That answer seemed silly to me (I'm agnostic-ish) at first... it doesn't answer the question of why they exist, it answers the question 'why did God put them on Earth', which wasn't asked. But then I realized that I wouldn't ever ask the original question anyway. I would ask what gemstones are made of, how they are formed, chemical composition, color ranges, any special characteristics (asterism? chatoyance?) etc. and simply admire the photos in the book taking them for what they are.. pretty sparklies. I wouldn't ask -why- a gemstone exists any more than I would ask why a grain of sand exists.
Similarly, no scientist would ask -why- we are here any more than -why- a gemstone exists; that's material best left to philosophers and, indeed, theologians.
When you say that "there is a lot of science that cannot be shown/demonstrated/repeated", you're not really talking about science - although there are certainly elements that we can't just 'show' (such as stating that a certain star contains much iron though we're not able to just scoop some up and show you), we can certainly scientifically infer them with high probability (spectral lines etc.) and more plausibility ("'cos God made it so"). Now if you move into the realm of where scientists say "we don't know (yet)", that's where you can certainly have room for "God did it"-type arguments. I'm not a big fan of those, but quite likely there's no way that we'll ever determine what caused the Big Bang event and saying "God did it" makes perfectly good sense to me - though it certainly doesn't mean I think we shouldn't try and figure it out anyway... which is where I'm glad your University taught you "God wants us to learn these things", even if I disagree with the second half.
Visit the outskirts of northern London for a week, and see if you still feel the same. Just because we tend to refer to them as 'gangs' doesn't make it much less of a tribal society.
The U.K. has just as much 'freedom of speech' as the U.S. There's just more of that speech which comes with consequences, per the law, should you (ab)use that freedom. The same goes for the U.S., but in a much less government- and status-driven manner. I.e. there may not be much legal discourse* against e.g. the Westboro Baptist Church's (ab)use of the freedom of speech, but I'm sure several of its members have gotten their sentencing in the public court.
* Note that said bunch is an interesting example, as there are now laws in a few states where it is, in fact, illegal to demonstrate within a particular distance of a funeral event, and exercising one's freedom of speech in a manner that would break said law is likely to land you the consequences (month of jailtime and whatnot? fuzzy on the details and wikipedia seems to be dead.. or my DNS is, which means when I hit submit, this post will be lost. curses. *copies to clipboard*)
Slashdot Mirror
For now, anyway.
Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
I'm not saying that in the future, a GPLvN -will- exist that includes terms regarding sale of GPL(vN)'ed software - but in the given case, why wouldn't there be.
Sure, the source to this game is available. Hooray for every other iPhone developer. However, if you're not a developer, you can't just install it on your device even if you compile it.
In addition, -if- a developer were to pick up the code and compile it.. they, in turn, can't distribute it outside of the iTunes store. ( I seem to recall Apple being okay with source code distribution when it concerns GPL - but a Google search seems to bring up lots of (old) blog posts about it being prohibited. )
On top of that, there's probably little chance that it would be accepted into the iTunes store, seeing as it's a 1:1 duplicate of an existing app.
and now for a maglev that uses the earth's magnetic field, rather than a (mostly) fixed-path track.
While they're at it, they could make Alien and Aliens non-canon and just start anew!
They could choose to completely ignore everything that's ever come before without any explanation whatsoever (hello Batman Begins)
Or maybe they could do some time travel thing and claim it's now an alternate universe (hi Star Trek)
Better yet, they could make it -seem- like it should be canon, but make it so utterly different from the other movies to the point of being confusing and having to leave the theater thinking "Well.. it had an Alien.. and they mentioned the Nostromo.. I *guess* that makes it canon?" (howdy, Terminator 4)
So many options when you're trying to re-boot/re-imagine/re-fuck-up a franchise.
Here's a thought.. maybe they could ditch the whole Alien idea and use their newfound funding to just make a kick-ass *relevant* movie. That way nobody can whine about how it killed their childhood memories, and if it ends up being -good-, they can actually pat themselves on the back instead of realizing that most people only saw it 'cos they liked the original (first two) movies.
completely off-topic - but if they could make her look rather appealing in Galaxy Quest (1999, 20 year after the first Alien movie), then I'm sure they shouldn't have any problems now - a mere 10 years later.
This is hollywood, people. Push comes to shove, they scan her face, digitally de-age it, and slap it on a stand-in actor.
That said - I do second the hope that they will not be trying to tie into characters of the 'future' movies; how would they have known about those characters?
Tying into the existing storyline, however, would actually be rather nice.. though getting away with that without opening up giant plot issues in the 'later' movies seems rather tough.
Provided the ruling stands in appeals (and they could appeal all the way up to the EU courts, of course), you're right.. the judges can be told to blow themselves until the Swedish authorities hand down the rulings.
However, in the mean time...
- if they appear in The Netherlands, they can be arrested.
- if they continue to not block the Dutch, then BREIN may have a case for Dutch -ISPs- to block TPB as alternative means of getting TPB blocked.
Foreign sites have been blocked before - think gambling sites - based on Dutch law and court cases, so it's not entirely unthinkable.
The judge can, and will, do this.
In point 1.2 the judge established that the defendants had written an undated letter saying that the defendants will not be showing up in court. In point 1.3 the judge established that seeing as they wrote the letter, it is ridiculous to claim that they were in fact -not- aware of the proceedings before them, and the motions for dismissal thus be struck down; after all, they could have either been present just fine or have sent representation.
Further, they judge accepts the evidence by BREIN, that they followed:
- the official paths of notification (point 2.3; going through swedish authorities, and through a Swedish bailiff)
- unofficial paths (point 2.4)
-- e-mail to the defendants' e-mail address
--- (the judge and accepted the evidence by BREIN that one of the defendants -had- replied from one of the e-mail addresses written to as late as May 6th, in response to a notification about this very case (again, point 2.4) )
-- e-mail the domain holder's e-mail address)
-- wrote to the lawyers who had represented the defendants in a recent court case
-- registered mail, containing the subpoena in Swdish) to each of the defendants addresses.
--- (the judge accepted evidence by BREIN, from the courier service, that the mail was delivered)
-- a Twitter post
-- a Facebook post
--- (for the curious: whether or not these are reasonable venues for notification has yet to be determined. In the case a defendant can't be found, the posting in newspapers and such -is- acceptable. It is likely that the above two are found to be acceptable as well)
As a result, the judge once again surmises (still in point 2.4) that it is not likely that the defendants were -not- (timely) aware of these proceedings, and most certainly -could- have been present, or represented, in court.
To answer your question: no, it doesn't.
uploading is -not- allowed, downloading is. More accurately: distribution is not allowed, downloading is.
The distinction is a bit vague, as B downloading from A inherently means A is uploading to B, but quite technically a download and an upload are separate processes, hinging mostly on who initiated what.
Again this applies only to music and video (tv/movies). This doesn't apply to e.g. software* and books.
* yes, you're allowed to distribute linux distros and such. Please read these posts within the appropriate context.
it's for advertising. If that isn't obvious to somebody who saw the top-most picture in the project page, then they need to think inside the box more.
Nobody's going to use this for barcodes-as-we-know-them.
They *might* replace something like a QR code encoding lots of information (rather than effectively a link to more information), but for almost anything worth describing, it's worth putting it there in plaintext.
( what, I'm going to go to a museum of modern art, and 'admire' a sculpture from 20 yards away just because the bokode can be read from that distance? I think not. )
No, this is gonna be for advertising. Imagine you're taking some casual pictures of some friends in a night out in town. You just snap the shots, come home, and whoa - the entire out-of-focus background is laden with Coca~Cola, McDonald's, Ford and whatnot logos and other texts.
The beauty of it is that they could combine it with existing light-based advertising displays. Every LED in the matrix displays at Times Square could easily have this bokode applied so that even if somebody's taking a picture of a competitor's matrix display making yours out of focus - yours will still stand out.
( I sure -hope- this won't actually be the case, but you know them wiley advertising people. )
so no robocalls, just real human beings allowed? sounds easily worked around with current technology.
It's not illegal unless you're on that 'do not call' list, or have previously indicated to them that you wish for them to stop calling you.
We've got similar lists and practices in the E.U., so I doubt it's any fundamental reason for anything :)
On the other hand, if I dial a wrong number, the person I called is only inconvenienced by the call itself - not by any inherent cost in being called in the first place. Ditto prank calls and whatnot.
Sure, it might cost $0.20 here vs $0.10 (caller) + $0.20 (callee) there, but I don't see any problem with that. Just means you won't waste as much money placing calls in the first place. If you -have- to make that many calls, I'm sure the bill's worth paying.
I do wish more browsers would support it, though. It'd be great for those dreadful multipage articles (okay, I use AutoPager now, so whatever) as well as things like photo galleries; no need to go hunting for the next/previous buttons/links/hovery whatnots.
But, alas... hardly any browser supports the darn things, let alone make use of them smartly (i.e. as per the w3c spec, a browser might pre-cache the 'next' document so that you can browse faster; tough luck seeing that implemented anywhere, though.)
Apparently I can't just walk into any ol' country club. I have to show my membership card. I get my membership card by applying. Part of the application process is showing some form of ID, another part is laying down a bunch of moneys, being in good standing, blabla.
How come that is legal, then?
As a result - and I know the answer is 'no', but I'm curious as to -why- it is 'no' - couldn't any ol' bar simply offer 'guest membership' by means of, say, a stamp / wrist band, where the 'membership process' includes showing some form of ID, costs the patron, say, $2 (which goes toward a complimentary membership drink), and the membership duration lasting the entirety of the patron's stay?
If the premise looks good and the dev team -is-... then sure, why not?
Personally I don't like my game choices to be largely at the whim of financial investors ( publishers and distributors, largely ) who have very little connection with the game at all and are only looking for 'sure fire success stories'.
Thankfully even the big publishers do try new concepts from time to time - often using chunks of the money they got from the 'sure fire success stories' - but it can't hurt to have more developers try to innovate instead of producing [licensed sports title] 2010, 2011, 2012, ...
If being able to privately and -directly- invest in a title increases the odds of that title being made, I don't mind putting a small amount of money in, and risk losing/breaking even/making some profit off of it.
Wouldn't that be reasonably solved by using two raids?
i.e. say you're using a (mirrored) RAID setup as your 'live' setup in order to prevent any data loss from e.g. surface degradation or even total failure of a drive's electronics. This doesn't guard against user error (zap a file and it's gone on the mirror just as well) and viruses and such, of course.
So you also make backups -of- this live system to a backup drive. Now if that's a single drive.. sure, that could die, and that would suck. But if that is -also- a mirrored raid (with proper controllers and whatnot).. wouldn't you decrease the odds of that backup being dead quite a bit? especially if you backup regularly, as any problems identified with one of the drives in the raid setup should be alerted so you can go slot in a spare?
I realize that there's always a chance that both drives die, or the raid controller itself dies.. but it still seems much better than using a single drive backup... or worse, blu-rays, DVDs, etc.
( I don't really trust online backup services enough to use them for backup of important things; but I suppose they -should- be a reasonable alternative for those willing to pay for them )
I've seen at least the approach of using 2 webcams pretty much as early as the first webcams existed.
Sadly no records easily found, but here's one from 2004 (well post-webcam-introduction-era, of course:
http://www.callipygian.com/3dWebCam.htm
Note that there's one major problem with using 2 separate cameras; getting them to use the same settings. One might whitebalance/expose/etc. one way, the other another way, and poof... there goes the illusion.
Money.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some stereographic 3D (actual 3D is even nicer but well out of reach).
But the only motivator for 3D content right now is money. Money spent on 3D projection systems, the glasses, eventually special Blu-Ray (or beyond) features, displays (in the news a lot lately), cameras*, etc. etc.
Eventually stereographic 3D will become mainstream, as there's a -huge- push behind it. Eventually, smell-o-vision will be tried again as well.
*
stereoscopic video camera: http://dvice.com/archives/2009/04/panasonic-takes.php
( same in concept as sticking a big ol' 3D Lens in a Cap on your dSLR, fwiw )
stereoscopic photo camera: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1909457,00.html?CNN=YES
Not particularly new. There have been stereographic 3D photo cameras before that you'd get developed at a special lab that'd stick a lenticular sheet over it. Those usually had 3-5 lenses, too, for even greater effect (some perspective shift):
http://www.lenticulations.com/images_stereogram/nimslo.jpg ( creating output a la: http://www.lenticulations.com/#1 )
There's several reasons why you may not find them all that '3D'...
starting with the obvious: it's not 3D, it's stereographic. We still call that '3D' because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.
also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn't change. For 2D, your brain doesn't care so much* as it's been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it'll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it's used to from actual 3D environments.
less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close... something silly like the sword in Beowulf... right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you're at the mercy of whatever focus the film's producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera's distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus... e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.
There's a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.
It bugs me as well, but for some movies it's absolutely worth seeing the '3D' version.
* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.
For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily.
Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You'll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.
Human visual system is fun - and that's without going into any optical illusion stuff :)
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/tampering.html
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/publications/tr06a.html
Slow down, cowboy...
There's many ways in which you can present stereographic content. Personally I prefer the side-by-side method as it allows for full color and no special display; and then specifically the cross-eyed method. This does take up twice the horizontal space; though for most webcam purposes you could re-orient the camera so that it records in a portrait projection, and you'd lose much less (though requiring more vertically - unless cropped).
Other methods include things like chromadepth ( color matching doesn't matter there, but you have to pre-process the two images into a single image of varying hues so that e.g. red appears close and blue appears further away ), polarized display of both images into the same 2D space (requires special screen/projector and glasses), lenticular displays (both images appear interlaced vertically with eachother.. e.g. one image in the odd-numbered columns of pixels, the other in the even-numbered columns).. destroys half the horizontal resolution, requires a special display but not special glasses), '3d glasses' (a la VR shutter glasses, simply presenting the 'left' image in front of your left eye, and the right image in front of the right; requires special glasses, drivers, etc.).
Personally I don't know -why- this company went with the anaglyphic method as it's fraught with problems.. color filters are only the beginning... messing your eyes up like you wouldn't believe it for the next 5 minutes after you take the glasses off is a more serious issue. At least shutter glasses only give you a headache, rather than the entire world appearing to fade between red/blue or red/green or cyan/magenta, etc. in front of you in swirly clouds of freakiness.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say there, as it's completely unrelated to the question asked - but just to point something out...
I don't think they are broadcasting, they're narrowcasting - as far as terminology in radio/tv-world goes*. Note that in various nations there are in fact legal definitions to separate the two, or at least to define the former. Not sure about the U.S., however.
If you're trying to say "stop abusing a frequency / bandwidth slot for narrowcasting and free it for broadcasts"... well, sure. Except that you'd have to adjust legislation rather than tell (or beg) the companies what to do; they're not doing anything illegal, they pay what they need to pay for the right to use the frequency / bandwidth.. they're certainly free to use it for either broadcasting or narrowcasting, and free to use encryption on that or not. That's not abuse, that's simply 'use'.
* In network communication terms, it might be broadcasting (one-to-many without intermediate routing) regardless of intended audience.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
yes, the t-word!
-moz-table ...being fine examples of it.
-moz-table-cell
-moz-table-column
-moz-table-column-group
-moz-table-outer
-moz-table-row
-moz-table-row-group
Ahhh.. introducing CSS to make elements behave like tables did; but not -being- tables. We've almost come full-circle.
giveupandusetables.com indeed.
"Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages."
I'm not a philosopher, but it seems to me that being lost is not so fleeting at all.
For example, if I misplace my keys, I could claim they are 'lost'. I could search for 10 seconds and find them, or I could search all week, or a month, or even a year before finding them. If I misplaced them well enough, I might -never- find them and they will be, forever, lost. Even if somebody else finds them, unless they are then presented to me, they remain lost to me.
However... IF I find them, then I found them. In that one single moment it goes from having been lost, to no longer being lost. Finding something... now that's fleeting - there's simply no time span between 'finding' and 'having found' whatsoever.
So "NASA has the found tapes" is even sillier if you go by that metric - and by your logic, the title would have become "NASA has the tapes" - rather ambiguous (perhaps even ominous to those donning foil hats).
"NASA Has the Lost Tapes" is still an awful title... "NASA Found the Tapes that were Lost" may be more accurate. But as others have pointed out, the tapes in question themselves have come to colloquially be known as "The Lost Tapes". So "NASA has The Lost Tapes" wouldn't have been so bad; a simple change of case for two letters.
"God wants us to learn these things, that is why we are here"
If only more people believed in that same God.. or at least that said same God wants these same things, there'd be a whole lot less problems.
However, I take issue even with that statement, due to the second half. It seems like it is meant to be an answer to the question "Why are we here?"
To illustrate why I take issue with that.. I saw a cute little German book about gemstones earlier today. I opened it up somewhere in the middle, only to find references to where the gemstone is mentioned in the bible and whatnot (something about 12 breastplate stones? my memory of The Bible is entirely too vague to recall the details). So I flipped to the first page of text and it had this question and answer (from iffy memory from a translation from German):
That answer seemed silly to me (I'm agnostic-ish) at first... it doesn't answer the question of why they exist, it answers the question 'why did God put them on Earth', which wasn't asked. But then I realized that I wouldn't ever ask the original question anyway. I would ask what gemstones are made of, how they are formed, chemical composition, color ranges, any special characteristics (asterism? chatoyance?) etc. and simply admire the photos in the book taking them for what they are.. pretty sparklies. I wouldn't ask -why- a gemstone exists any more than I would ask why a grain of sand exists.
Similarly, no scientist would ask -why- we are here any more than -why- a gemstone exists; that's material best left to philosophers and, indeed, theologians.
When you say that "there is a lot of science that cannot be shown/demonstrated/repeated", you're not really talking about science - although there are certainly elements that we can't just 'show' (such as stating that a certain star contains much iron though we're not able to just scoop some up and show you), we can certainly scientifically infer them with high probability (spectral lines etc.) and more plausibility ("'cos God made it so").
Now if you move into the realm of where scientists say "we don't know (yet)", that's where you can certainly have room for "God did it"-type arguments. I'm not a big fan of those, but quite likely there's no way that we'll ever determine what caused the Big Bang event and saying "God did it" makes perfectly good sense to me - though it certainly doesn't mean I think we shouldn't try and figure it out anyway... which is where I'm glad your University taught you "God wants us to learn these things", even if I disagree with the second half.
Visit the outskirts of northern London for a week, and see if you still feel the same. Just because we tend to refer to them as 'gangs' doesn't make it much less of a tribal society.
The U.K. has just as much 'freedom of speech' as the U.S. There's just more of that speech which comes with consequences, per the law, should you (ab)use that freedom. The same goes for the U.S., but in a much less government- and status-driven manner. I.e. there may not be much legal discourse* against e.g. the Westboro Baptist Church's (ab)use of the freedom of speech, but I'm sure several of its members have gotten their sentencing in the public court.
* Note that said bunch is an interesting example, as there are now laws in a few states where it is, in fact, illegal to demonstrate within a particular distance of a funeral event, and exercising one's freedom of speech in a manner that would break said law is likely to land you the consequences (month of jailtime and whatnot? fuzzy on the details and wikipedia seems to be dead.. or my DNS is, which means when I hit submit, this post will be lost. curses. *copies to clipboard*)