Trademark and copyright holders tend to look the other way regarding use of their characters and other IP in school projects. Fair Use doctrine explicitly gives some leeway for non-commercial and educational uses, which gives them some signficant wiggle room.
To be sure, Time-Warner would stomp on this school like a bug if they were giving away copies of "Batman Begins" (or even "Batman and Robin") "for educational purposes", but doing something like this isn't a clear-cut case of infringement. It's also conceivable (given some of the talent involved) that they had permission.
Or just accelerate your webcam enough (toward the object you wish to photograph) to blue-shift the infra-red into the visible frequencies. Put it on a really-high-speed ferris wheel or merry-go-round and synchronise the snapshots to its rotation if you want to keep it "stationary". Compensating for the doppler shift in the signal from the camera is left as an exercise for the reader. But no disassembly or modification of the camera needed!
I don't think that terraforming Mars would help here.
Right. We'd be so preoccupied rewriting all the books about stellar physics to explain how it's possible for our star to go supernova, that we wouldn't have time to move everyone from the "atomize" zone (Earth's orbit) to the "atomize a few minutes later" zone (Mars' orbit).
To make the atomsphere more earth like, we'd probably send some plants over, such as algae, and maybe grasses. As it grows, it may cover artifacts that could be interesting.
We can't get grasses to grow in Tuscon, let alone Valles Marineris. Even terran algae would have a tough time of it, with so little CO2 and sunlight. So I don't think there's much danger of them obscuring the geography, and even less chance of them covering up any artifacts... since it's already pretty clear that there was never any civilisation capable of creating any artifacts.
Mars is just a huge rock, with some water and vapors clinging to it. An astonishingly fascinating rock, but still just a rock. If we ever undertake terraforming it, that will be so far enough in the future that I think we'll have a pretty good opportunity between now and then to give that big rock a good studying... long enough to make an informed judgment of whether to proceed with Project Genesis or not. Worrying about the introduction of interplanetary kudzu at this point is a bit premature.
Will the next batch of rovers be equipped with windsocks,
I'm just hoping they'll be equipped with a Winsock, so they can run nifty TCP/IP apps like Mosaic and WS-FTP, and maybe even a web server like ZBServer!
Calling it an "animation" is stretching it pretty far. The second frame isn't even on-register with the first one, so it's really just a pair of "with" and "without" snapshots.
In some situations, using the Japanese (or whatever foreign language) term makes sense, because the foreign version of the thing in question is different from the domestic. For example, people say "manga" or "bande dessinée" (the Japanese and French terms for comics) because Japanese comics and European comics are traditionally different from the North American kind. If Japanese cell phones are different enough from the American variety, then maybe it's worthwhile.
Yeah, there's bit of showing-off involved in saying "anime" instead of "Japanese animation", but it also carries the same amount of information in fewer syllables, so it's not without practical justifications. And I don't think it's a Bad Thing for people to learn a little of another language.
I don't collect music over P2P, so it hasn't influenced me one bit. In high school and college I did that home-LP-taping thang that kids used to do, but becoming "executive producer" (translation: I provided the money) for an album made by some college friends changed my perspective a bit. Since then I've been scrupulous about paying for all the music I "own".
I don't listen to commercial radio, either. No explanation for that should be needed, beyond the fact that the music is soullessly pre-programmed and the non-music parts (commercials, jock patter, etc.) are apparently aimed at people with half my IQ. {shrug}
I get introduced to new music these days by listening to community radio. Real people, playing music they like, without regard for genre. I used to think I had eclectic taste in music, but it turns out everything I was listening to was just another kind of rock. Now I listen to and enjoy everything from jazz to folk to world beat to blues to a whole geology of rock and even a little country. And all over that new-fangled wireless broadcasting network invented by Marconi.
If you live in a city, there's probably a small, probably-struggling community broadcaster in your area. If you care about music and open access, try tossing some cash their way. And instead of illegally "sharing" music you like to a broadband-only audience via P2P, why not take a few hours a week to legally share it over the airwaves where anyone in your community with a radio can hear it?
Forget "attractive". Sketches are only hard if you're doing them wrong. The whole point of sketching is that you do it quickly, with really simple shapes. You seem to be reading the word "sketch" and substituting "artist's rendering", which is not what he was talking about.
You don't have to be good at art or whatever other crap someone has fed you to be good in design. It's a discipline like any other and skills can be developed with time and effort.
That may be true in theory, but (in 8 years at a art & design school) I've never seen someone who wasn't already "good at art" on some level go on to succeed at graphic design. Probably because someone who doesn't already exhibit some facility with it is going to hate doing it, so they won't put in the time and effort. I mean, I could be a concert pianist... except that I hate practising the piano.
It depends profoundly on the job. In some fields that only thing a Master's is good for is if you want to teach it. In others it's an automatic move to the top of the resume pile and/or a $10K salary bump.
Besides, most CS grads would make horrible lawyers in general for one significant reason: they have horrible communication skills. Lawyers have to be intelligent and very analytical (a trait many with CS degrees have), but also be able to effectively communicate ideas with others (a trait very few CS holders have in my experience).
I can back this up. I have a few lawyers in my family, including my father, so I know pretty well what kind of person succeeds at it. I'm a geek/designer, but just for grins a couple years ago I took the LSAT (cold, no prep) and scored in the 90th percentile, which is good enough for some decent law schools, I gather... but there's no way I'm going, because I also know that I'd be horrible at litigating, negotiating, competing, or just about any other person-to-person aspect of lawyering.
I graduated... with the intention of someday going back and getting that MBA. Dang, I wish I'd followed up..... I've told my kids... that they can get a degree in whatever interests them, but they must also get a degree in business.
You sound a bit like the guy who didn't make the football team, insisting that his boy train harder than he did... whether the kid likes the game or not. And maybe he'd rather be experimenting with his Li'l Perfesser chemistry set.
Your kids are different people from you. Don't make them miserable by forcing them to compensate for your regrets. Give them advice, but let them make their own choices based on their own priorities, and develop their own regrets from their own mistakes (because they will have some regrets, either way).
Which would you rather risk hearing 25 years from now: "Dad, you were right: I should've gotten an MBA," (from a kid who didn't do what you advised) or "Dad, you were wrong: business school was a waste of what could have been my most productive years as a ______," (from a kid who did what you insisted)?
If your downsized out of a position, that's usually a decent time to take the plunge back into school:)
It's also a good strategy if you get fired. If you immediately try to get a new job, you'll inevitably be asked why you already left the last one, and you'll either have to tell them, or lie to them (which is worse, because they probably won't believe you, and it's grounds for termination if they find out later). If you instead go back to school, prospective employers may just figure you wanted to go back to school, and not ask, or you can pre-emptively explain "I decided to go back to school" which neatly deflects the question of what your other option was (i.e. begging for crappy jobs).
Someone very, very close to me did this when he got canned* in his early 30's, and it worked out fairly well. All it took was a decent part-time gig (and some savings) to pay the basics of life for a few years, financial aid to pay for school (which is easy to get if you make only enough to pay the basics of life), and the enthusiasm to do it. Presto: one resumé, neatly laundered, with a shiny new degree added on.
*Did you know that religious institutions can legally practise religious discrimination?
Industrial Design is a good answer, but for the wrong reason. ID isn't about how to make something look good; it is interface design. An industrial designer is a GUI designer who works in 3D, with some structural engineering thrown in. Graphic Design programs these days (except Print Media concentrations, which are more akin to Illustration or Fine Art) are also about GUI design, because the media they're dealing wiht are becoming increasingly interactive as well as visual. And yes, there's a substantial swath of Psych going through them.
"Art" is a very broad subject, even if you confine it to the visual arts. (I've got a whole college with a dozen different majors in "art" surrounding me at the moment.) Studies in Illustration, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Interior Design, Digital Media, etc. aren't going to apply very much directly to one's work in the field of Comp Sci. (However a background in Comp Sci can apply pretty well to most of them.) Graphic Design and Industrial Design are the two that will give you the most new skills to bring back to Geeksville.
After several years doing the sorts of jobs one gets with a bachelors in Comp Sci, I went back to college with a different approach: I went to art school. This didn't come out of nowhere; I'd always liked art. But I'd become fascinated with computers in high school, and since then had been nuturing mostly the left side of my brain. Going to art school gave me a chance to more fully develop the right side as well.
I figured that it might also help me professionally, since I'd be a one-person web-site-designing-and-coding powerhouse. Maybe, but after the dot-bubble burst, no one was interested. So if you're asking what combo would be the most profitable, a BFA ain't the answer. But if you're asking what you might get the most enrichment out of, it might be.
My suggestion is to think back to whatever your second choice would have been back when you were a picking a major your freshman year, and get a bachelor's degree in that.
No, the only underlying metaphysical principle of most MBA programs is "why not?" The people who enroll in them already know what ends they're $eeking; they go there to learn the best means.
On the other hand, if you really want to understand "why?", find a good liberal arts school and major in philosophy, or maybe psych or sociology. Heck, even an Intro to World Religions will teach you more about "why" than an MBA.
I wouldn't do it, but that's because A) I took a substantial pay cut when I accepted this job so I'm having trouble making ends meet, and B) my office is a mostly-enjoyable and productive work environment only a couple miles away.
If I were financially secure and didn't like going in to the office (i.e. my last job), I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I frequently wonder why Utah joined the United States. They had to give up polygamy, and the local culture has shown more than a little opposition to equal-treatment, full-faith-and-credit, anti-establishement, and free-speech requirements in the U.S. Constitution. Wouldn't they have been happier as the independent Republic of Utah?
One of the things I dislike about winter is that the inadequately plowed roads make it impractical to ride my bike to work, and the frequently unshoveled sidewalks make the 2-mile walk unpleasant, so I have to ride the bus. Still less polluting and more cost-effective than driving and parking a car downtown, though.
Since it's winter I almost forgot: In the summer, I open the windows at night, and close them during the day. My house usually stays cool enough that way that I don't need an air conditioner, and when it doesn't I just use an electric fan or two. And my lawn mower is a push-powered reel mower: a better cut, much lower cost, profoundly quieter... unfortunately it's not that hard to push, so I don't get the work-out I thought I would when I replaced the fume-belcher.
At what point (price of gasoline, electricity, etc) will you start to change your behavior?"
I started around the time when gas hit a dollar a gallon. The first time. Nice of y'all to finally join me. {smile}
I've always considered 30mi/gal a minimum fuel efficiency for a car, and 40mi/gal is what I drive now (1999 Chevy Metro; a new hybrid's out of my price range).
But I don't drive it much. Just to the grocery store and laundromat, and to a once-a-month meeting out of town. To get to work or go to the movies and for most simple errands, I ride my bike or I take the bus if it's cold and/or wet. Pizza/beer/sub/hotdog/burrito/video/cash runs and coffee-house/bar visits are all done on foot; I chose to live in a mixed-use neighborhood where I can do that. (There's a gas station nearby as well, but I kinda need to drive the car to use it.)
A simple low-tech way to reduce my water-heating costs was to dial the furnace down to showering temperature. It takes less energy to maintain that temperature, and I don't have to add cold water to my shower to then bring the temp back down. (The dishwasher heats itself, so the plates still get a good scalding.)
Plus there's the compact fluoros and LCDs wherever shiny things are needed, socks and sweats instead of 70+F heating, and all the other usual energy-conservation tips.
It doesn't appear that any of the strips have to actually be good. Me and my stick-figure-guy could win this one.
Don't knock stick figures. Matt Feazell's strips are some of the best comix done in the past quarter century, and they're done entirely in stick figures. (And the much-loved-around-here Scott Adams has never been what one would call a "great illustrator".) What makes a good comic is (mostly) good writing.
Granted, there's nothing in the rules for this contest that says the writing has to be any good, either. But the challenge of ongoing timeliness is a serious one, especially for cartooning. It sounds easy, but coming up with something new every day is actually pretty difficult. (Just look at all the syndicated professional strips that keep recycling the same jokes.) If you think you could do it... then put your stylus where your mouth is and do it!
As a tech support generalist by day and freelance hacker/designer by night, I move pretty much at random between Linux (KDE, bash), Windows, OS X (Aqua, bash), and EPOC, and I feel pretty productive in all of them, doing the sorts of things I do with each. They each have their lovely shortcuts and annoying quirks, and I do have to slow down enough at all times to think about how things work on this system. It's like I'm running in an interpreter instead of having been compiled.
About 10 years ago I worked in a carefuly homogenous environment (both home and office Windows machines had the same versions of the same software and all the same Ctrl-Alt keyboard shortcuts defined in ProgMan or the Start Menu), which I'm sure was more productive most of the time. But when I sat down in front of a Quadra or a Vax terminal, it was like I was moving in slow motion... like running in emulation.
Lately, if I spend a lot of time using just one of system, I do find myself speeding up to take advantage of it. Maybe I'm doing some incremental compilation of often-used routines?
Anyway, I guess you could say that I've ported myself from running in Win-only machine code, to running in cross-platform Perl. Whether that's an improvement or not is left up to the reader... but I'm happy this way.
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To be sure, Time-Warner would stomp on this school like a bug if they were giving away copies of "Batman Begins" (or even "Batman and Robin") "for educational purposes", but doing something like this isn't a clear-cut case of infringement. It's also conceivable (given some of the talent involved) that they had permission.
Or just accelerate your webcam enough (toward the object you wish to photograph) to blue-shift the infra-red into the visible frequencies. Put it on a really-high-speed ferris wheel or merry-go-round and synchronise the snapshots to its rotation if you want to keep it "stationary". Compensating for the doppler shift in the signal from the camera is left as an exercise for the reader. But no disassembly or modification of the camera needed!
But how much atmosphere? 95% of "not very much" is still "not very much".
I don't think that terraforming Mars would help here.
Right. We'd be so preoccupied rewriting all the books about stellar physics to explain how it's possible for our star to go supernova, that we wouldn't have time to move everyone from the "atomize" zone (Earth's orbit) to the "atomize a few minutes later" zone (Mars' orbit).
We can't get grasses to grow in Tuscon, let alone Valles Marineris. Even terran algae would have a tough time of it, with so little CO2 and sunlight. So I don't think there's much danger of them obscuring the geography, and even less chance of them covering up any artifacts... since it's already pretty clear that there was never any civilisation capable of creating any artifacts.
Mars is just a huge rock, with some water and vapors clinging to it. An astonishingly fascinating rock, but still just a rock. If we ever undertake terraforming it, that will be so far enough in the future that I think we'll have a pretty good opportunity between now and then to give that big rock a good studying... long enough to make an informed judgment of whether to proceed with Project Genesis or not. Worrying about the introduction of interplanetary kudzu at this point is a bit premature.
I'm just hoping they'll be equipped with a Winsock, so they can run nifty TCP/IP apps like Mosaic and WS-FTP, and maybe even a web server like ZBServer!
Calling it an "animation" is stretching it pretty far. The second frame isn't even on-register with the first one, so it's really just a pair of "with" and "without" snapshots.
Yeah, there's bit of showing-off involved in saying "anime" instead of "Japanese animation", but it also carries the same amount of information in fewer syllables, so it's not without practical justifications. And I don't think it's a Bad Thing for people to learn a little of another language.
I don't listen to commercial radio, either. No explanation for that should be needed, beyond the fact that the music is soullessly pre-programmed and the non-music parts (commercials, jock patter, etc.) are apparently aimed at people with half my IQ. {shrug}
I get introduced to new music these days by listening to community radio. Real people, playing music they like, without regard for genre. I used to think I had eclectic taste in music, but it turns out everything I was listening to was just another kind of rock. Now I listen to and enjoy everything from jazz to folk to world beat to blues to a whole geology of rock and even a little country. And all over that new-fangled wireless broadcasting network invented by Marconi.
If you live in a city, there's probably a small, probably-struggling community broadcaster in your area. If you care about music and open access, try tossing some cash their way. And instead of illegally "sharing" music you like to a broadband-only audience via P2P, why not take a few hours a week to legally share it over the airwaves where anyone in your community with a radio can hear it?
Forget "attractive". Sketches are only hard if you're doing them wrong. The whole point of sketching is that you do it quickly, with really simple shapes. You seem to be reading the word "sketch" and substituting "artist's rendering", which is not what he was talking about.
That may be true in theory, but (in 8 years at a art & design school) I've never seen someone who wasn't already "good at art" on some level go on to succeed at graphic design. Probably because someone who doesn't already exhibit some facility with it is going to hate doing it, so they won't put in the time and effort. I mean, I could be a concert pianist... except that I hate practising the piano.
It depends profoundly on the job. In some fields that only thing a Master's is good for is if you want to teach it. In others it's an automatic move to the top of the resume pile and/or a $10K salary bump.
I can back this up. I have a few lawyers in my family, including my father, so I know pretty well what kind of person succeeds at it. I'm a geek/designer, but just for grins a couple years ago I took the LSAT (cold, no prep) and scored in the 90th percentile, which is good enough for some decent law schools, I gather... but there's no way I'm going, because I also know that I'd be horrible at litigating, negotiating, competing, or just about any other person-to-person aspect of lawyering.
You sound a bit like the guy who didn't make the football team, insisting that his boy train harder than he did... whether the kid likes the game or not. And maybe he'd rather be experimenting with his Li'l Perfesser chemistry set.
Your kids are different people from you. Don't make them miserable by forcing them to compensate for your regrets. Give them advice, but let them make their own choices based on their own priorities, and develop their own regrets from their own mistakes (because they will have some regrets, either way).
Which would you rather risk hearing 25 years from now: "Dad, you were right: I should've gotten an MBA," (from a kid who didn't do what you advised) or "Dad, you were wrong: business school was a waste of what could have been my most productive years as a ______," (from a kid who did what you insisted)?
It's also a good strategy if you get fired. If you immediately try to get a new job, you'll inevitably be asked why you already left the last one, and you'll either have to tell them, or lie to them (which is worse, because they probably won't believe you, and it's grounds for termination if they find out later). If you instead go back to school, prospective employers may just figure you wanted to go back to school, and not ask, or you can pre-emptively explain "I decided to go back to school" which neatly deflects the question of what your other option was (i.e. begging for crappy jobs).
Someone very, very close to me did this when he got canned* in his early 30's, and it worked out fairly well. All it took was a decent part-time gig (and some savings) to pay the basics of life for a few years, financial aid to pay for school (which is easy to get if you make only enough to pay the basics of life), and the enthusiasm to do it. Presto: one resumé, neatly laundered, with a shiny new degree added on.
*Did you know that religious institutions can legally practise religious discrimination?
Industrial Design is a good answer, but for the wrong reason. ID isn't about how to make something look good; it is interface design. An industrial designer is a GUI designer who works in 3D, with some structural engineering thrown in. Graphic Design programs these days (except Print Media concentrations, which are more akin to Illustration or Fine Art) are also about GUI design, because the media they're dealing wiht are becoming increasingly interactive as well as visual. And yes, there's a substantial swath of Psych going through them.
"Art" is a very broad subject, even if you confine it to the visual arts. (I've got a whole college with a dozen different majors in "art" surrounding me at the moment.) Studies in Illustration, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Interior Design, Digital Media, etc. aren't going to apply very much directly to one's work in the field of Comp Sci. (However a background in Comp Sci can apply pretty well to most of them.) Graphic Design and Industrial Design are the two that will give you the most new skills to bring back to Geeksville.
I figured that it might also help me professionally, since I'd be a one-person web-site-designing-and-coding powerhouse. Maybe, but after the dot-bubble burst, no one was interested. So if you're asking what combo would be the most profitable, a BFA ain't the answer. But if you're asking what you might get the most enrichment out of, it might be.
My suggestion is to think back to whatever your second choice would have been back when you were a picking a major your freshman year, and get a bachelor's degree in that.
No, the only underlying metaphysical principle of most MBA programs is "why not?" The people who enroll in them already know what ends they're $eeking; they go there to learn the best means.
On the other hand, if you really want to understand "why?", find a good liberal arts school and major in philosophy, or maybe psych or sociology. Heck, even an Intro to World Religions will teach you more about "why" than an MBA.
If I were financially secure and didn't like going in to the office (i.e. my last job), I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I frequently wonder why Utah joined the United States. They had to give up polygamy, and the local culture has shown more than a little opposition to equal-treatment, full-faith-and-credit, anti-establishement, and free-speech requirements in the U.S. Constitution. Wouldn't they have been happier as the independent Republic of Utah?
One of the things I dislike about winter is that the inadequately plowed roads make it impractical to ride my bike to work, and the frequently unshoveled sidewalks make the 2-mile walk unpleasant, so I have to ride the bus. Still less polluting and more cost-effective than driving and parking a car downtown, though.
Since it's winter I almost forgot: In the summer, I open the windows at night, and close them during the day. My house usually stays cool enough that way that I don't need an air conditioner, and when it doesn't I just use an electric fan or two. And my lawn mower is a push-powered reel mower: a better cut, much lower cost, profoundly quieter... unfortunately it's not that hard to push, so I don't get the work-out I thought I would when I replaced the fume-belcher.
I started around the time when gas hit a dollar a gallon. The first time. Nice of y'all to finally join me. {smile}
I've always considered 30mi/gal a minimum fuel efficiency for a car, and 40mi/gal is what I drive now (1999 Chevy Metro; a new hybrid's out of my price range).
But I don't drive it much. Just to the grocery store and laundromat, and to a once-a-month meeting out of town. To get to work or go to the movies and for most simple errands, I ride my bike or I take the bus if it's cold and/or wet. Pizza/beer/sub/hotdog/burrito/video/cash runs and coffee-house/bar visits are all done on foot; I chose to live in a mixed-use neighborhood where I can do that. (There's a gas station nearby as well, but I kinda need to drive the car to use it.)
A simple low-tech way to reduce my water-heating costs was to dial the furnace down to showering temperature. It takes less energy to maintain that temperature, and I don't have to add cold water to my shower to then bring the temp back down. (The dishwasher heats itself, so the plates still get a good scalding.)
Plus there's the compact fluoros and LCDs wherever shiny things are needed, socks and sweats instead of 70+F heating, and all the other usual energy-conservation tips.
Don't knock stick figures. Matt Feazell's strips are some of the best comix done in the past quarter century, and they're done entirely in stick figures. (And the much-loved-around-here Scott Adams has never been what one would call a "great illustrator".) What makes a good comic is (mostly) good writing.
Granted, there's nothing in the rules for this contest that says the writing has to be any good, either. But the challenge of ongoing timeliness is a serious one, especially for cartooning. It sounds easy, but coming up with something new every day is actually pretty difficult. (Just look at all the syndicated professional strips that keep recycling the same jokes.) If you think you could do it... then put your stylus where your mouth is and do it!
About 10 years ago I worked in a carefuly homogenous environment (both home and office Windows machines had the same versions of the same software and all the same Ctrl-Alt keyboard shortcuts defined in ProgMan or the Start Menu), which I'm sure was more productive most of the time. But when I sat down in front of a Quadra or a Vax terminal, it was like I was moving in slow motion... like running in emulation.
Lately, if I spend a lot of time using just one of system, I do find myself speeding up to take advantage of it. Maybe I'm doing some incremental compilation of often-used routines?
Anyway, I guess you could say that I've ported myself from running in Win-only machine code, to running in cross-platform Perl. Whether that's an improvement or not is left up to the reader... but I'm happy this way.