I would hardly be surprised. There's an old (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso, a woman brought him some drawings to authenticate and asked if they were his work. He signed them and said "Now they are!"
If you really like a painting, you can get a print. Want more? You can get reproductions [huntfor.com], done brushstroke, by brushstroke. 99% of humanity couldn't tell the difference, your freinds might know you don't have the bucks for the original. In 200 years will an antique 20th century reproduction of a 19th century masterpiece be worth much less than the original?
I hope you realize that those "reproductions" are painted in sweatshops in China. No I'm not kidding.
The reason why an original is more prized than a reproduction is twofold:
1. The original work is done by an artist who is trying to advance his own work and skills, and by doing that, he is advancing the arts as a whole. A reproduction copies the work and skills of another artist, and the reproducer has nothing to contribute to the advancement of the arts, he is actively retarding progress by the promotion of old works.
2. Scarcity. This applies to printed reproductions as well, that's why artists put an edition number on a print. You often see a little number like "12/50" on a print, which indicates it is the twelfth print in an edition of 50, and there will never be any more printed beyond that 50. A print from an edition of 50, for example, will be more valuable than a print from an edition of 50,000. I often see "limited edition prints" at crappy mass-market galleries that have edition numbers indicating there are 100,000 copies of this print. Hell, there are phone books that have smaller print runs than that! This quantity of printing always exceeds demand, it is phony scarcity.
True scarcity is not artificial. Most artworks are lost or destroyed due to the ravages of time, a scarce work will always become more scarce over time. You cannot go back in time and create more 200 year old paintings. But scarcity does not always create value. Scarcity plus demand creates value. Many artists fail to sell their full editions, there is no demand for their works because they are unknown.
There are two conventional approaches to authentication: provenance and catalog raisonne.
The provenance of a work is a detailed history of every owner to possess the work since its creation. If you can establish an unbroken, verified provenance, the work is presumed to be authentic. The only problem with this scheme is that a provenance may also be forged or broken. For example, some recent works that were stolen by the Nazis during WWII have forged provenances that reassigned the works through sham owners. It is sometimes possible to reconstruct the history of a work, and indeed, recently the provenance of a work by Gustav Klimt was reconstructed, proving it was stolen and not sold to a gallery, and the rightful owner regained ownership of the painting, and it sold at auction for the highest price ever paid for a painting: $135 Million.
A catalog raisonne is a complete catalog of every known work by an artist, preferably compiled within the artist's lifetime, with his cooperation. If an artist says he created the work, who is anyone to dispute it? Of course, many catalogs raisonne are compiled after the death of the artist, and rely on expert's opinions and provenances. Some of these decisions are quite controversial, for example, the Rembrandt Research Committee has recently removed several works from the catalog, deauthenticating them based on new technologies and scholarship, or on new research that broke the provenance. This is horrifying for an owner of a deauthenticated work, who can only sit and watch his multimillion dollar painting become worthless.
Anyway, in an ideal world, all works would have well established provenances and cataloguing. Indeed, I used to work for a major art institution which had the goal of establishing a provenance for EVERY known artwork in the world, putting it all into a computer catalog, to be housed in a nuclear-blastproof vault. But this is just a pipe dream of a few crazy art historians with more money than sense.
Sorry, this software does not detect fakes, as claimed. All it can possibly do is detect whether or not a painting resembles other paintings by an individual artist. Speaking as a painter myself, I know that most artists undergo radical changes through their career, and painting styles may change radically due to such simple factors as buying a different brand of oil paint. Some artists never repeat the same style twice. Some artists create works in a unique style and then abandon that style after only a few works. Some artists emulate the style of their teachers so closely that even experts can't tell their works apart. Software is not likely to help these situations.
And to further complicate the problem, the biggest problem in the art market is not forged oil paintings, it is forged prints. I know one famous atelier that keeps the plates from famous artists works they've printed (they are supposed to be destroyed at the end of a printmaking edition) and once in a while they'll reprint a few, forge the artist's signature, and sell them under the table as unnumbered Artist's Proofs. These forgeries sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and are undetectable from image analysis, they are printed from the same plates as the originals and are 100% identical. But they're fakes by any standard, since they were not authorized by the artist and are not numbered.
Conventional analysis is more than sufficient to deal with fakes. Chemical analysis of pigments or grounds, and IR, UV, or XRay imaging, etc. are well developed techniques for identification of forgeries. I know of some Matisse fakes that were identified because an art historian looked at the thread count in the canvas and determined this type of machine-woven canvas was not manufactured until after Matisse's death. You can't teach this to a computer, it requires experience and long study.
Only the government, state or law-enforcement officials may "demand" your Social Security Number.
No.
Apparently everyone is overlooking the incredibly obvious reason why SSNs even exist. It is your SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT NUMBER. Your employer MUST have your SSN, or it cannot send your Social Security tax withholding to the US Treasury, the number is used to direct those funds to your personal retirement benefits account. Additionally, it is your Taxpayer ID Number, so it is used for other tax withholding, which is reported to the IRS and your state tax office under that number.
Of course, just because your employer is legally required to use your SSN in its internal accounting and payroll system, doesn't mean they have to use it for external ID purposes.
Wow, the EFF won a case for Steve Jackson Games about 15 years ago. What a great track record.
Lobbying and "consciousness-raising" doesn't mean squat, when the battleground is Federal Court. And every time the EFF loses in Federal Court, the Government has a new legal precedent AGAINST the rights the EFF was trying to protect. With friends like the EFF, who needs enemies?
Does anybody have numbers on the chances to win a lawsuit against our Big Brother?
Well, if it's the EFF suing, the chances of winning are 0.00% And in the process of losing, they'll permanently establish the government's ability to squash another civil right.
I saw an interesting article in a Japanese newspaper, it relies upon a relatively unique cultural circumstance, but I think you'll be inspired to think of how it can be adapted. The device was invented for one guy's family, but after it got some writeups in the newspapers, the idea was so popular that it went into production, and now lots of people have them.
There are many elderly Japanese people who live alone, some are deaf and can't use the phone, etc. so it's hard to get a way to check in on them to see if they're still alive. But almost every home has a hot-pot, an insulated pot with an electric heater used to keep water near the boiling point, to make tea every day. So some clever guy put a sensor in the hot-pot, if nobody picks it up within a day, it phones a preprogrammed number to alert someone to check in on them. Yeah, these people drink a lot of tea, it was the only thing they could think of that elderly people did EVERY day.
Of course this only checks in once a day, but you could probably think of other ways to adapt this idea.
Well, I'm trying to max quality with modest equipment, but the basics are always the same. You still need some sort of support like a camera stand, lighting, and something like glass to hold down the documents. Lighting and reflections will always be a problem. I've done this for real quickie jobs using camera on a tripod, and the results sucked. A flatbed scanner is still a much quicker, cheaper, and better way to do the job.
BTW, I have privately circulated a few of my PDFs amongst some online punk communities, and they went nuts over them. The old school punks love them for the nostalgia, but to the new punks who weren't even born in the 1970s it might as well be Elizabethan English, they don't get it at all. Ha! Some of these magazines are still around, and even have major online websites, but none of this old material is available through the official sites. It's a shame, since they presumably have high quality reproductions in their archives, I just have 30 year old mouldering newsprint. They could probably never re-release this material, it all depends on context, half the fun is the advertisements next to the articles, and they could probably never get all the rights and sort out all the royalties to reproduce all the trademarks in the ads. But I could probably get away with circulating my scans openly, I don't think a British court could touch me here in the US. And some of these magazines don't exist anymore and no company has any financial interests in the content, so there's nobody left to file a lawsuit.
Hmm.. I didn't believe that 11x17 scanner prices had dropped so much, the last I'd seen was the Epson scanners for $3000 and $4000. But I checked it out and found Epson now makes a low-end 11x17 scanner for $1500 MSRP. Where did you find something for $1000? A $1500 scanner could finally make my project affordable, but $1000 would be better. Since I'm not making any money on this project, it's all expenses out of pocket, so I'm trying to keep it cheap. And quality isn't such an issue, these old tabloid magazines are printed so cheaply, the print quality is horrible, so even a poor scanner would be able to do a good job.
I have some experience doing what you're trying to do. I've even done this type of work in professional labs with serious pro equipment (it was my job). It's a huge pain in the butt.
I'm currently digitizing my collection of old tabloid punk magazines from the 1970s. I had to use a digital camera because flatbed scanners that do 11x17 or larger are extremely expensive, they're like $3000 or more. So I did some experiments with my consumer-grade 5 megapixel digital camera. The results were adequate, barely (and I have an art degree in Photography, this stuff is easy for me, YMMV). I've currently suspended my project until I can afford a higher rez digital camera, mostly because 5Mp is barely enough to capture the little 6 point type that is used in large sections of the magazines. But let me tell you more generally what I've learned.
First off, you'll need a copy stand. This is a fairly standard photo accessory, but a good copy stand is fairly expensive. You need something that is easily adjustable, so you can raise and lower the camera to get the document to fill the frame, without using too much zooming. The copy stand keeps the camera parallel to the target at all distances. It is important to have quick adjustability in height, rather than zooming. You'd be much better off using a "prime lens" rather than a zoom, as zooms tend to have barrel and keystone distortion.
Secondly, you need lights. If you only want to copy written documents (or B&W magazines like me) you can use cheap spotlights. If you want to do color, you need much better lighting, something with a fixed color temperature, or a flash system. Spotlights are really hot, and when I work in my small office, it gets intolerably hot when I spend about an hour photographing. For better, more repeatable results, you'd be better off getting a flash system. BUT...
Here is the sticking point. You need something to keep the documents flat. That means placing them under a sheet of glass. So you are going to get reflections from the lights, and flash is high intensity lighting which makes it even more difficult to control reflections. The usual method is to put polarizing filters over the lights and the lens, to cancel out the reflections. This is a rather complex method, and a LOW END professional copystand with polarized lighting will set you back about $2500.
OK, so what I did is I adapted my old disused photo enlarger. It was a huge monster for 4x5 negatives, I took off the enlarger head, and used a Bogen photo clamp with a ball-head joint attached to the motorized arm that goes up and down. It does a fairly good job as an improvised copy stand, but it is pretty cramped, the baseboard is only designed to make max 20x24 prints. Also it is a HUGE pain in the ass getting the camera leveled with the baseboard, I use a bubble level. Then I attached a cheap set of tungsten photofloods to the wings of the enlarger, so the light hits the baseboard at a 45 degree angle, to reduce glare. Note that it is best to point each light at the far side of the document, so the light paths cross each other. This gives the light a little distance to fan out and eliminate hot spots. I don't put my documents under glass, they're newspaper pages, so I flatten them for several weeks (!!!) under weights, then if there's a little curl, I use weights (like heavy metal rulers) at the edges, or hold the edges down with post-it notes. That eliminates the need for a glass plate to hold them down, and I don't have to deal with reflections. However, it takes a LOT of time and effort to get the documents positioned and flattened correctly, it is not a quick process. I use a Canon camera, so I use the Canon Camera Remote to my laptop to preview and take the shot. Even with the lights and some fill flash, I can end up with exposures of 1 or 2 seconds, so I can use a narrow f-stop. This shouldn't be necessary for a flat object, which requires no depth of field, but I find that the lens is sharper stopped down. It takes quite a bit of fiddling to get the optimal
Yes, that is precisely my point. Doug Jones' site is full of papers with the history of voting systems. The current US system (well, in theory) is the result of a long history of evolution of voting systems, as they changed to eliminate corruption. Most of the corruption seemed to come from officials bent on subverting the vote, and operated at precinct levels, a corrupt election official could only corrupt the voting results in one precinct, and since precincts were never controlled universally by one party, it was presumed that petty corruption would cancel out across multiple precincts. But now with the power of modern computer technology, one corrupt voting official can subvert a whole state's election.
My understanding of the theory of voting systems is that some of your ideas would be illegal. Specifically, it would be illegal to keep records of which voter used a specific e-ballot. This would allow precinct staff to track a single vote to a single voter. This is specifically illegal, as it would allow "pay for vote" scams where a politician (perhaps in collusion with precinct staff) would pay voters upon proof they voted for him.
For more explanation of the theory of voting systems, I highly recommend Computer Science professor Douglas Jones' fine paper "Voting on Paper Ballots." There are rational reasons for some of the obscure aspects of our voting system, all of them could be solved by scrapping the high-tech crap and just using paper ballots.
OK, thanks for the clarification. This was totally unclear from the description on the Halogen website, which described the project merely as a Halo mod. I searched all over the site, perhaps there was more info but it was taken down.
Yeah, if it was Halo concepts copied on another game engine, the company would be within its rights to stomp on it.
OK, do I understand this correctly, this was about fan-created maps and skins for Halo? This is a complete change of direction for Bungee, the creator of Halo. Bungee always encouraged user mods and maps for the earlier products like Marathon, they even released their internal development tools to assist users in creating maps and mods, even releasing the source code once the product was well obsolete. And now that Bungee is owned by Microsoft, they are stomping on user-created mods? You would think that even a monopoly like Microsoft would recognize the value of devoted fans that enhance their product, that's what made Bungee into a property worth acquiring in the first place. But no, they view Halo as a property to leverage against the competition, it's just another tool of the monopoly. That's why Halo is no longer available on the Mac, even though it was originally developed for the Mac. Now Bungee products are XBox first, PC second, Mac never.
Re:Dowsing for bad RAM chips.
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The real mystery is why you did a binary search. Why not replace one at a time with known-good chips?
Well, the short answer is, because that was Apple's official service procedure.
The binary search method is theoretically the fastest way to identify the bad chip. This is a basic comp sci search algorithm, if I remember the it right, with 24 chips, you can identify the bad chip in 4 swaps. Replacing chips one at a time is, on average, the worst way to find one bad chip. Of course you could get lucky and it was the first chip you replace, row 1 socket 1. How often is that ever going to happen? Also consider that the RAM diagnostic program could run for hours to run before a chip faulted, so swapping chips was not always the most time-consuming part of the test procedure. I sometimes used to speed up the process by gently heating up the motherboard with a hair dryer, on the theory that intermittent chips were more prone to failure when they were hot, but this was not usually effective. Also consider how expensive RAM chips were back around 1980. We were NOT going to just replace every chip until we got the bad one, we only replaced known bad chips, if we pulled out chips, once they were ruled out as not the cause of the problem, they went back into the customer's machine. Otherwise we would have ended up with drawers full of suspect chips, and customers would have had to pay for every single chip we replaced. Labor was much cheaper than parts, back in those days. Now I'll tell you what REALLY hurt.. when I had to service a machine that had TWO bad chips.. but fortunately, that rarely happened. They almost always went bad one at a time.
Dowsing for bad RAM chips.
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 4, Funny
True story: I used to identify bad RAM chips in old Apple II units with a dowsing rod. Finding one bad RAM chip out of 24 was a horrible pain in the ass, the normal procedure was to remove half of them, replace those with known-good RAM chips, see if the mem diagnostic passed, ok, it wasn't in the half I removed, put those back. Take out half of the chips that weren't removed before, replace with known good chips, repeat, etc. in a binary search pattern. This was horribly unproductive, particularly if the memory fault was intermittent. And even worse, once in a while, due to all the handling and insertion/extraction, or maybe just from static discharges, you'd ruin a chip in the known-good set, which really screwed things up, you could go back and forth for HOURS.
I remember when I was a little kid, I used to watch the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow show on late night TV, and some weird guy demonstrated how to dowse using a couple of bent wires made from coat hangers. I was skeptical, but eventually I became known for some rather startling dowsing stunts, I used to challenge people to hide my keys in a location I was unfamiliar with, in houses or buildings I'd never been to, and could find them 4 times out of 5. So when I became a computer tech, I figured, what the hell, it couldn't hurt, it couldn't possibly take MORE time to try dowsing than to do the elaborate binary search method. And to my astonishment, it was a LOT faster. Sometimes it took me a couple of tries, but pulling just a couple of individual chips was a lot faster than pulling 12 chips at a time, and my results were way above the expected average of just pulling a chip at random. BUT.. I made absolutely sure that nobody ever saw me dowsing on their machines. This is Computer SCIENCE, after all, it isn't computer VOODOO. Ha!
This silly idea for recycled sidewalks is totally stupid, it completely ignores the basic facts: you're not taking garbage out of the environment, you're just distributing it in different spots, like EVERYWHERE. So instead of old rubber rotting away in a massive pile in a dump, it's rotting away in everyone's front yard. I think this is infinitely LESS preferable to concrete, at least you can rip up old concrete, break it down into gravel, and use it to make NEW concrete, and even in a dump, concrete is totally inert. But a recycled rubber sidewalk is just going to decompose and end up as hydrocarbon pollution that enters the ground and groundwater. If you dispose of tires in a dump, maybe you can put it in a clay-lined dig, where the decomposition products won't run into the ground water, but if it's in everyone's front yard, it won't take long before the pollution ends up in the land, water, and in our bodies.
There is a fixed limit on the max bit rate, some older DVD players don't have the horsepower to decode and play high bitrate files. You can lay down high bitrate files just fine, but the player might not be able to play them. This is especially problematic for PCM files, you really should encode them as AC3, which are far lower bitrates but are essentially the same quality. There is a fixed limit on the total (audio + video) bitrate in the DVD spec, don't exceed it or you end up with stuttering files just as you described.
Watch a few Andy Warhol flicks and then say that with a straight face.
Challenge accepted. Ever seen "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein?" I saw the original theatrical release, in 3D. Now THAT was a film that took some risks. I took a date to the film, she never spoke to me again.
I've taken more film studies classes than I care to remember. But what do I know? I was only a script consultant in Hollywood for a mere decade, and only a few of the writers I worked with won any Oscars. So pardon my ignorance.
You're right, I neglected the price of actors, I sort of assumed that people realized how out of hand they are. There's a big backlash about overpriced actors, I think I just read about a film with Jim Carrey getting canceled even though they'd already spent $20mil on preproduction, because the budget (mostly Carrey's salary, something like $50mil) was getting out of hand, total budget started at like $100 mil and expected to pass $200mil. There is also a backlash about directors who negotiated a cut off the top, instead of a cut of profits (and of course in Hollywood accounting rules, there are never any profits). This insistence on "brand name" actors and directors is killing the movies.
I dealt with the tech stuff upthread. But note that the movie that really started the CG 3D ball rolling was "The Last Starfighter." The movie flopped in the theaters, and they thought they'd never make back the millions they spent on CG. But then it turned out to be a breakout hit in the new videotape rental market, and made back their money several times over. Hard to believe it, it was something like a $12mil CG budget, that was considered insanely expensive at the time, and after the initial flop, most studios canceled upcoming CG productions, they figured audiences weren't interested. But then after the surprise in the video rental market, they started them up again, and CG budgets have grown constantly ever since.
Movies have completely changed technologically over the past 25 years. Look at mainstream movies from the early 1970s and compare them with what they make today. I don't mean look at them on a DVD or TV, look at them in a theater. Everything has changed. Lenses and cameras are sharper, film stock is lower grain, sound production has gone from simple stereo to surround sound, even the lighting is better. Go look at a film from the 1970s, some film about filmmaking, like Truffaut's "Day for Night." Compare what they use to the kind of equipment is used on today's films. A typical modern film spends more renting ONE camera than they used to spend on their whole equipment budget.
I watched all this stuff change when I worked in Hollywood in the 1980s. Everyone talked about how the "bean counters" were taking over Hollywood, and how expensive productions were. I think the breaking point was the big Writer's Strike in 1988, the writers saw how much money producers, directors, and actors were getting, and they wanted a piece of the pie. Of course they didn't get squat.
Yeah, there's always the exception of some ultra-low budget movie that breaks big, but those never come from Hollywood, they're always from outsiders. The Studio system produces BIG movies because they believe that's the way to make big money. That's what pandering to the masses is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
I would hardly be surprised. There's an old (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso, a woman brought him some drawings to authenticate and asked if they were his work. He signed them and said "Now they are!"
I hope you realize that those "reproductions" are painted in sweatshops in China. No I'm not kidding.
The reason why an original is more prized than a reproduction is twofold:
1. The original work is done by an artist who is trying to advance his own work and skills, and by doing that, he is advancing the arts as a whole. A reproduction copies the work and skills of another artist, and the reproducer has nothing to contribute to the advancement of the arts, he is actively retarding progress by the promotion of old works.
2. Scarcity. This applies to printed reproductions as well, that's why artists put an edition number on a print. You often see a little number like "12/50" on a print, which indicates it is the twelfth print in an edition of 50, and there will never be any more printed beyond that 50. A print from an edition of 50, for example, will be more valuable than a print from an edition of 50,000. I often see "limited edition prints" at crappy mass-market galleries that have edition numbers indicating there are 100,000 copies of this print. Hell, there are phone books that have smaller print runs than that! This quantity of printing always exceeds demand, it is phony scarcity.
True scarcity is not artificial. Most artworks are lost or destroyed due to the ravages of time, a scarce work will always become more scarce over time. You cannot go back in time and create more 200 year old paintings. But scarcity does not always create value. Scarcity plus demand creates value. Many artists fail to sell their full editions, there is no demand for their works because they are unknown.
There are two conventional approaches to authentication: provenance and catalog raisonne.
The provenance of a work is a detailed history of every owner to possess the work since its creation. If you can establish an unbroken, verified provenance, the work is presumed to be authentic. The only problem with this scheme is that a provenance may also be forged or broken. For example, some recent works that were stolen by the Nazis during WWII have forged provenances that reassigned the works through sham owners. It is sometimes possible to reconstruct the history of a work, and indeed, recently the provenance of a work by Gustav Klimt was reconstructed, proving it was stolen and not sold to a gallery, and the rightful owner regained ownership of the painting, and it sold at auction for the highest price ever paid for a painting: $135 Million.
A catalog raisonne is a complete catalog of every known work by an artist, preferably compiled within the artist's lifetime, with his cooperation. If an artist says he created the work, who is anyone to dispute it? Of course, many catalogs raisonne are compiled after the death of the artist, and rely on expert's opinions and provenances. Some of these decisions are quite controversial, for example, the Rembrandt Research Committee has recently removed several works from the catalog, deauthenticating them based on new technologies and scholarship, or on new research that broke the provenance. This is horrifying for an owner of a deauthenticated work, who can only sit and watch his multimillion dollar painting become worthless.
Anyway, in an ideal world, all works would have well established provenances and cataloguing. Indeed, I used to work for a major art institution which had the goal of establishing a provenance for EVERY known artwork in the world, putting it all into a computer catalog, to be housed in a nuclear-blastproof vault. But this is just a pipe dream of a few crazy art historians with more money than sense.
Sorry, this software does not detect fakes, as claimed. All it can possibly do is detect whether or not a painting resembles other paintings by an individual artist. Speaking as a painter myself, I know that most artists undergo radical changes through their career, and painting styles may change radically due to such simple factors as buying a different brand of oil paint. Some artists never repeat the same style twice. Some artists create works in a unique style and then abandon that style after only a few works. Some artists emulate the style of their teachers so closely that even experts can't tell their works apart. Software is not likely to help these situations.
And to further complicate the problem, the biggest problem in the art market is not forged oil paintings, it is forged prints. I know one famous atelier that keeps the plates from famous artists works they've printed (they are supposed to be destroyed at the end of a printmaking edition) and once in a while they'll reprint a few, forge the artist's signature, and sell them under the table as unnumbered Artist's Proofs. These forgeries sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and are undetectable from image analysis, they are printed from the same plates as the originals and are 100% identical. But they're fakes by any standard, since they were not authorized by the artist and are not numbered.
Conventional analysis is more than sufficient to deal with fakes. Chemical analysis of pigments or grounds, and IR, UV, or XRay imaging, etc. are well developed techniques for identification of forgeries. I know of some Matisse fakes that were identified because an art historian looked at the thread count in the canvas and determined this type of machine-woven canvas was not manufactured until after Matisse's death. You can't teach this to a computer, it requires experience and long study.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
No.
Apparently everyone is overlooking the incredibly obvious reason why SSNs even exist. It is your SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT NUMBER. Your employer MUST have your SSN, or it cannot send your Social Security tax withholding to the US Treasury, the number is used to direct those funds to your personal retirement benefits account. Additionally, it is your Taxpayer ID Number, so it is used for other tax withholding, which is reported to the IRS and your state tax office under that number.
Of course, just because your employer is legally required to use your SSN in its internal accounting and payroll system, doesn't mean they have to use it for external ID purposes.
Wow, the EFF won a case for Steve Jackson Games about 15 years ago. What a great track record.
Lobbying and "consciousness-raising" doesn't mean squat, when the battleground is Federal Court. And every time the EFF loses in Federal Court, the Government has a new legal precedent AGAINST the rights the EFF was trying to protect. With friends like the EFF, who needs enemies?
Well, if it's the EFF suing, the chances of winning are 0.00% And in the process of losing, they'll permanently establish the government's ability to squash another civil right.
Yeah, but that's $6000 in worthless Canadian dollars.
I saw an interesting article in a Japanese newspaper, it relies upon a relatively unique cultural circumstance, but I think you'll be inspired to think of how it can be adapted. The device was invented for one guy's family, but after it got some writeups in the newspapers, the idea was so popular that it went into production, and now lots of people have them.
There are many elderly Japanese people who live alone, some are deaf and can't use the phone, etc. so it's hard to get a way to check in on them to see if they're still alive. But almost every home has a hot-pot, an insulated pot with an electric heater used to keep water near the boiling point, to make tea every day. So some clever guy put a sensor in the hot-pot, if nobody picks it up within a day, it phones a preprogrammed number to alert someone to check in on them. Yeah, these people drink a lot of tea, it was the only thing they could think of that elderly people did EVERY day.
Of course this only checks in once a day, but you could probably think of other ways to adapt this idea.
Well, I'm trying to max quality with modest equipment, but the basics are always the same. You still need some sort of support like a camera stand, lighting, and something like glass to hold down the documents. Lighting and reflections will always be a problem. I've done this for real quickie jobs using camera on a tripod, and the results sucked. A flatbed scanner is still a much quicker, cheaper, and better way to do the job.
BTW, I have privately circulated a few of my PDFs amongst some online punk communities, and they went nuts over them. The old school punks love them for the nostalgia, but to the new punks who weren't even born in the 1970s it might as well be Elizabethan English, they don't get it at all. Ha! Some of these magazines are still around, and even have major online websites, but none of this old material is available through the official sites. It's a shame, since they presumably have high quality reproductions in their archives, I just have 30 year old mouldering newsprint. They could probably never re-release this material, it all depends on context, half the fun is the advertisements next to the articles, and they could probably never get all the rights and sort out all the royalties to reproduce all the trademarks in the ads. But I could probably get away with circulating my scans openly, I don't think a British court could touch me here in the US. And some of these magazines don't exist anymore and no company has any financial interests in the content, so there's nobody left to file a lawsuit.
Hmm.. I didn't believe that 11x17 scanner prices had dropped so much, the last I'd seen was the Epson scanners for $3000 and $4000. But I checked it out and found Epson now makes a low-end 11x17 scanner for $1500 MSRP. Where did you find something for $1000? A $1500 scanner could finally make my project affordable, but $1000 would be better. Since I'm not making any money on this project, it's all expenses out of pocket, so I'm trying to keep it cheap. And quality isn't such an issue, these old tabloid magazines are printed so cheaply, the print quality is horrible, so even a poor scanner would be able to do a good job.
I have some experience doing what you're trying to do. I've even done this type of work in professional labs with serious pro equipment (it was my job). It's a huge pain in the butt.
I'm currently digitizing my collection of old tabloid punk magazines from the 1970s. I had to use a digital camera because flatbed scanners that do 11x17 or larger are extremely expensive, they're like $3000 or more. So I did some experiments with my consumer-grade 5 megapixel digital camera. The results were adequate, barely (and I have an art degree in Photography, this stuff is easy for me, YMMV). I've currently suspended my project until I can afford a higher rez digital camera, mostly because 5Mp is barely enough to capture the little 6 point type that is used in large sections of the magazines. But let me tell you more generally what I've learned.
First off, you'll need a copy stand. This is a fairly standard photo accessory, but a good copy stand is fairly expensive. You need something that is easily adjustable, so you can raise and lower the camera to get the document to fill the frame, without using too much zooming. The copy stand keeps the camera parallel to the target at all distances. It is important to have quick adjustability in height, rather than zooming. You'd be much better off using a "prime lens" rather than a zoom, as zooms tend to have barrel and keystone distortion.
Secondly, you need lights. If you only want to copy written documents (or B&W magazines like me) you can use cheap spotlights. If you want to do color, you need much better lighting, something with a fixed color temperature, or a flash system. Spotlights are really hot, and when I work in my small office, it gets intolerably hot when I spend about an hour photographing. For better, more repeatable results, you'd be better off getting a flash system. BUT...
Here is the sticking point. You need something to keep the documents flat. That means placing them under a sheet of glass. So you are going to get reflections from the lights, and flash is high intensity lighting which makes it even more difficult to control reflections. The usual method is to put polarizing filters over the lights and the lens, to cancel out the reflections. This is a rather complex method, and a LOW END professional copystand with polarized lighting will set you back about $2500.
OK, so what I did is I adapted my old disused photo enlarger. It was a huge monster for 4x5 negatives, I took off the enlarger head, and used a Bogen photo clamp with a ball-head joint attached to the motorized arm that goes up and down. It does a fairly good job as an improvised copy stand, but it is pretty cramped, the baseboard is only designed to make max 20x24 prints. Also it is a HUGE pain in the ass getting the camera leveled with the baseboard, I use a bubble level. Then I attached a cheap set of tungsten photofloods to the wings of the enlarger, so the light hits the baseboard at a 45 degree angle, to reduce glare. Note that it is best to point each light at the far side of the document, so the light paths cross each other. This gives the light a little distance to fan out and eliminate hot spots. I don't put my documents under glass, they're newspaper pages, so I flatten them for several weeks (!!!) under weights, then if there's a little curl, I use weights (like heavy metal rulers) at the edges, or hold the edges down with post-it notes. That eliminates the need for a glass plate to hold them down, and I don't have to deal with reflections. However, it takes a LOT of time and effort to get the documents positioned and flattened correctly, it is not a quick process.
I use a Canon camera, so I use the Canon Camera Remote to my laptop to preview and take the shot. Even with the lights and some fill flash, I can end up with exposures of 1 or 2 seconds, so I can use a narrow f-stop. This shouldn't be necessary for a flat object, which requires no depth of field, but I find that the lens is sharper stopped down. It takes quite a bit of fiddling to get the optimal
Yes, that is precisely my point. Doug Jones' site is full of papers with the history of voting systems. The current US system (well, in theory) is the result of a long history of evolution of voting systems, as they changed to eliminate corruption. Most of the corruption seemed to come from officials bent on subverting the vote, and operated at precinct levels, a corrupt election official could only corrupt the voting results in one precinct, and since precincts were never controlled universally by one party, it was presumed that petty corruption would cancel out across multiple precincts. But now with the power of modern computer technology, one corrupt voting official can subvert a whole state's election.
My understanding of the theory of voting systems is that some of your ideas would be illegal. Specifically, it would be illegal to keep records of which voter used a specific e-ballot. This would allow precinct staff to track a single vote to a single voter. This is specifically illegal, as it would allow "pay for vote" scams where a politician (perhaps in collusion with precinct staff) would pay voters upon proof they voted for him.
For more explanation of the theory of voting systems, I highly recommend Computer Science professor Douglas Jones' fine paper "Voting on Paper Ballots." There are rational reasons for some of the obscure aspects of our voting system, all of them could be solved by scrapping the high-tech crap and just using paper ballots.
OK, thanks for the clarification. This was totally unclear from the description on the Halogen website, which described the project merely as a Halo mod. I searched all over the site, perhaps there was more info but it was taken down.
Yeah, if it was Halo concepts copied on another game engine, the company would be within its rights to stomp on it.
OK, do I understand this correctly, this was about fan-created maps and skins for Halo? This is a complete change of direction for Bungee, the creator of Halo. Bungee always encouraged user mods and maps for the earlier products like Marathon, they even released their internal development tools to assist users in creating maps and mods, even releasing the source code once the product was well obsolete. And now that Bungee is owned by Microsoft, they are stomping on user-created mods? You would think that even a monopoly like Microsoft would recognize the value of devoted fans that enhance their product, that's what made Bungee into a property worth acquiring in the first place. But no, they view Halo as a property to leverage against the competition, it's just another tool of the monopoly. That's why Halo is no longer available on the Mac, even though it was originally developed for the Mac. Now Bungee products are XBox first, PC second, Mac never.
Well, the short answer is, because that was Apple's official service procedure.
The binary search method is theoretically the fastest way to identify the bad chip. This is a basic comp sci search algorithm, if I remember the it right, with 24 chips, you can identify the bad chip in 4 swaps. Replacing chips one at a time is, on average, the worst way to find one bad chip. Of course you could get lucky and it was the first chip you replace, row 1 socket 1. How often is that ever going to happen?
Also consider that the RAM diagnostic program could run for hours to run before a chip faulted, so swapping chips was not always the most time-consuming part of the test procedure. I sometimes used to speed up the process by gently heating up the motherboard with a hair dryer, on the theory that intermittent chips were more prone to failure when they were hot, but this was not usually effective.
Also consider how expensive RAM chips were back around 1980. We were NOT going to just replace every chip until we got the bad one, we only replaced known bad chips, if we pulled out chips, once they were ruled out as not the cause of the problem, they went back into the customer's machine. Otherwise we would have ended up with drawers full of suspect chips, and customers would have had to pay for every single chip we replaced. Labor was much cheaper than parts, back in those days.
Now I'll tell you what REALLY hurt.. when I had to service a machine that had TWO bad chips.. but fortunately, that rarely happened. They almost always went bad one at a time.
True story: I used to identify bad RAM chips in old Apple II units with a dowsing rod. Finding one bad RAM chip out of 24 was a horrible pain in the ass, the normal procedure was to remove half of them, replace those with known-good RAM chips, see if the mem diagnostic passed, ok, it wasn't in the half I removed, put those back. Take out half of the chips that weren't removed before, replace with known good chips, repeat, etc. in a binary search pattern. This was horribly unproductive, particularly if the memory fault was intermittent. And even worse, once in a while, due to all the handling and insertion/extraction, or maybe just from static discharges, you'd ruin a chip in the known-good set, which really screwed things up, you could go back and forth for HOURS.
I remember when I was a little kid, I used to watch the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow show on late night TV, and some weird guy demonstrated how to dowse using a couple of bent wires made from coat hangers. I was skeptical, but eventually I became known for some rather startling dowsing stunts, I used to challenge people to hide my keys in a location I was unfamiliar with, in houses or buildings I'd never been to, and could find them 4 times out of 5. So when I became a computer tech, I figured, what the hell, it couldn't hurt, it couldn't possibly take MORE time to try dowsing than to do the elaborate binary search method. And to my astonishment, it was a LOT faster. Sometimes it took me a couple of tries, but pulling just a couple of individual chips was a lot faster than pulling 12 chips at a time, and my results were way above the expected average of just pulling a chip at random. BUT.. I made absolutely sure that nobody ever saw me dowsing on their machines. This is Computer SCIENCE, after all, it isn't computer VOODOO. Ha!
This silly idea for recycled sidewalks is totally stupid, it completely ignores the basic facts: you're not taking garbage out of the environment, you're just distributing it in different spots, like EVERYWHERE. So instead of old rubber rotting away in a massive pile in a dump, it's rotting away in everyone's front yard. I think this is infinitely LESS preferable to concrete, at least you can rip up old concrete, break it down into gravel, and use it to make NEW concrete, and even in a dump, concrete is totally inert. But a recycled rubber sidewalk is just going to decompose and end up as hydrocarbon pollution that enters the ground and groundwater. If you dispose of tires in a dump, maybe you can put it in a clay-lined dig, where the decomposition products won't run into the ground water, but if it's in everyone's front yard, it won't take long before the pollution ends up in the land, water, and in our bodies.
There is a fixed limit on the max bit rate, some older DVD players don't have the horsepower to decode and play high bitrate files. You can lay down high bitrate files just fine, but the player might not be able to play them. This is especially problematic for PCM files, you really should encode them as AC3, which are far lower bitrates but are essentially the same quality. There is a fixed limit on the total (audio + video) bitrate in the DVD spec, don't exceed it or you end up with stuttering files just as you described.
Challenge accepted. Ever seen "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein?" I saw the original theatrical release, in 3D. Now THAT was a film that took some risks. I took a date to the film, she never spoke to me again.
I've taken more film studies classes than I care to remember. But what do I know? I was only a script consultant in Hollywood for a mere decade, and only a few of the writers I worked with won any Oscars. So pardon my ignorance.
You're right, I neglected the price of actors, I sort of assumed that people realized how out of hand they are. There's a big backlash about overpriced actors, I think I just read about a film with Jim Carrey getting canceled even though they'd already spent $20mil on preproduction, because the budget (mostly Carrey's salary, something like $50mil) was getting out of hand, total budget started at like $100 mil and expected to pass $200mil. There is also a backlash about directors who negotiated a cut off the top, instead of a cut of profits (and of course in Hollywood accounting rules, there are never any profits). This insistence on "brand name" actors and directors is killing the movies.
I dealt with the tech stuff upthread. But note that the movie that really started the CG 3D ball rolling was "The Last Starfighter." The movie flopped in the theaters, and they thought they'd never make back the millions they spent on CG. But then it turned out to be a breakout hit in the new videotape rental market, and made back their money several times over. Hard to believe it, it was something like a $12mil CG budget, that was considered insanely expensive at the time, and after the initial flop, most studios canceled upcoming CG productions, they figured audiences weren't interested. But then after the surprise in the video rental market, they started them up again, and CG budgets have grown constantly ever since.
Movies have completely changed technologically over the past 25 years. Look at mainstream movies from the early 1970s and compare them with what they make today. I don't mean look at them on a DVD or TV, look at them in a theater. Everything has changed. Lenses and cameras are sharper, film stock is lower grain, sound production has gone from simple stereo to surround sound, even the lighting is better. Go look at a film from the 1970s, some film about filmmaking, like Truffaut's "Day for Night." Compare what they use to the kind of equipment is used on today's films. A typical modern film spends more renting ONE camera than they used to spend on their whole equipment budget.
I watched all this stuff change when I worked in Hollywood in the 1980s. Everyone talked about how the "bean counters" were taking over Hollywood, and how expensive productions were. I think the breaking point was the big Writer's Strike in 1988, the writers saw how much money producers, directors, and actors were getting, and they wanted a piece of the pie. Of course they didn't get squat.
Yeah, there's always the exception of some ultra-low budget movie that breaks big, but those never come from Hollywood, they're always from outsiders. The Studio system produces BIG movies because they believe that's the way to make big money. That's what pandering to the masses is all about.