It was that episode where the Enterprise entered a strange area of space. Mr. Data generated a theory that correctly explained what it was they were experiencing. Riker used a metaphor to describe the phenomenon so bumpkins like me could understand it. Mr. La Forge set up some strange energy thingy to fire at it, but that didn't work. Worf suggested battle stations, but Picard didn't want to appear aggressive. Wesley knew all along what to do but nobody listened to him. Troi said people were scared. I forget how they got out of it but the effect was pretty neat. The most notable aspect of this episode was that the Holodeck was in perfect working order.
Oh.. ouch, wish I had talked to you before. The pool and the engine room was where we wanted to visit, but now they've got some dumb ass 'ghost experience' attraction there. Was that there when you visited? Just curious if they're permenantly blocked off.
"I don't quite see how "wearing a skirt" equates with "being gay". Just as one example, plenty of Scots men wore kilts back in the day. Some still do. I doubt they were all gay."
Kilts are not skirts. Nor are they effeminate. The point was that it wasn't the sort of thing that'd get a dude a section 8.
"Star Trek would have been much more progressive if Roddenberry wasn't teathered by NBC."
Hehe. I have a book about the artwork done for the various Star Trek series. They designed a short skirt for some of the female staff in STNG. They even suggested that in the future, males could wear them too. There actually is a shot somewhere early in the series with a man wearing one of those skirts. They didn't dwell on it. From reading the book, I got the impression that being gay was something that would be around in the 24th century, but not something anybody particularly cared about. They wanted to indicate that it was there, but not have a big dazzling fireworks show about it. The book was vague enough about it, though, that I don't know that I quite interpreted that correctly. Still, it seems fitting.
Buffy and Xena are sci-fi? At least Tomb Raider had robots! Hehe.
My girlfriend isn't too interested in sci-fi. She doesn't hate it, just bores her. She did get into Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker's Guide, though. Comedy aside, I think she liked seeing characters react more than plots about investigating whispy wibbly warbly things in space. I think the main difference between men and women in this field is that the guys tend to be more interested in the technical stuff (what guy wouldn't want to pilot a Viper and blow the shit out of some toasters?) and the women are more interested in the lives of the characters. Of course, it isn't fair for me to generalize, but I do find it interesting that shows like Quantum Leap seemed to have a lot of female fans.
"One of the elevators, apparently, will fill with an unbearable stench -- some riders have been known to nearly vomit when they smell it -- while others are unable to smell it at all."
Last week I took my girlfriend down to the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach, California. This ship is supposed to be haunted, but nobody can really tell these days since it's full of tourists all the time now. We both had an experience fairly similar to the one you described. When I boarded the ship, I detected a strong odor near one of the exhibits. I asked my gf if she could smell it. She said no and suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, it was gone. What's weird about it is that I don't have much of a sense of smell. I rarely detect anything unless I'm seriously looking for it. The fact that I smelled anything at all was alarming, hehe. Anyway, later on the ship my girlfriend thought she noticed something. Same story. She detected it for a moment but instantly it was gone. She was rather puzzled by it. After she had smelled it, she noticed a plaque in the room that claimed there were ghost sightings in that particular room. (just aft of the bridge on the starboard side if anybody's curious. Opposite of the navigator's quarters.)
Honestly, it very easily could have been just a random smell on the ship. But it did make for an interesting discussion on the way home. Hehe.
I've had a couple of 'spooky' occurances at my previous job. I was often the last one to leave, so it was up to me to turn out all the lights and lock up. There was a spot in the hallway where if I came around the corner at the right speed, I'd see the outline of a human figure for a brief moment. The weird thing was, I could almost recognize the form. Somehow I recognized it as a coworker that had left the company long before that! I hadn't been in touch with him for over a year. Was he coming back to tell me something? Well, at least he was smiling, just as I always remembered him.
Another night... same thing, doing my rounds, turning out the lights. Then I noticed the building across the street. There was a figure in the window that was standing perfectly still. I could barely see it, but I could definitely see its eyes. It freaked me out. This was in downtown Portland. This is an area of town full of 'historic' buildings, including the one I was working in. Was some spectre looming around? Well, it was easy to believe that considering it was night time and nobody else was about. Very creepy.
Welp, now for the anti-climactic bit. Niether were ghosts. The outline of a figure I saw? Trick of the eye. That corner had some boxes and loose stuff piled up. Looking straight on at the pile, it didn't look anything remotely like my coworker. I think what happened was a trick of my peripheral vision. As most of you know, the outer areas of human eyes are keen on detecting motion more than they are with recognizing images. Can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but I think the human brain is constantly looking to recongize patterns, and when it finds one that seems to be relevent, it fills in the blanks. Hence, I saw my coworker. If anybody's curious, he's alive and well.
I suppose I could go into a little more detail about my theory here. There's a technique called 'EVP'. It's used to record the voices of ghosts. If you ever get bored one night, do a search for EVP and find some samples. It isn't definitive proof of the existance of ghosts, but at the very least it's a fun way to kill an evening. (usually there are stories attached to these sounds...) I visited a site once that had a number of EVP samples. Unfortunately, ghost speech isn't terribly easy to make out. Though it does sound human, it's barely more than garbled garbage. What they did was they presented a sound and said "first you listen to it and then try to work out what it's saying, then click on this link to see suggestions of what people think they've heard." The reason they do this is to prevent you from being 'suggested' into believing what you're hearing. After listening to a bit, I worked out why. The sound file downloaded and looped over and over again. I couldn't make it out. Then I read the first suggestion. Suddenly, I was hearing it! Neat! Then I read the second suggestion. And.. wait.. now I'm hearing that one. They were two very different sentences. As a matter of fact, I thought I could hear a different inflection in the words used by the 'ghost' that time around! It was the same sound looping over and over again, but now it was sounding different. Okay, I took the scenic route to this point, but I think what I was hearing was not the sound directly, but my perception of the sound. My brain thought it heard a particular sentence, so that's exactly what made it into my conscience mind. I think the sight of my coworker was a similar phenomenon.
And the figure across the street? Somebody with an odd sense of humor. It's a cardboard cutout. For whatever reason, they put it up against the window on the 3rd story of the building. The light was dim enough that it was very tough to make out, but the next day I was able to see it quite clearly. I mentioned seeing his eyes. It felt like they were following me almost. Again, trick of the eye.
I don't know what I think about ghosts. I can't say I firmly believe they exist, I can't say they don'
"Dear Mods, I think that this was supposed to be sarcastic, not insightful..."
Dear Hellad, I think he struck right on the point of what makes this thing useful, this making his point 'insightful'. But if you're riding a bus that's actually more fun than watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, I'd really like to hear about this magical bus. That'd be a hell of a tourist trap.
Erm. Isn't 'grasping at facts to make a broad declaration' what's annoying everybody about the creation fanatics?
I'm sorry, but if people around here are going to shout "that proves God doesn't exist" with every science story around here, then gee, guess what you've turned into.
" Many of these older television shows only need to be encoded in greyscale and given a mono soundtrack. This could be a great, yet, inexpensive way to give the itunes video store some credibility."
Hmm... I have a concern about that. Those old B&W shows were also noisy. Noise is the worst thing to encode. (not just video noise, but depending on the period they used film etc...) They may actually have a hard time encoding those shows at a lower data rate because of the added artifacts that the technology of that era added to the video.
My first thought when you mentioned monochrome encoding was that they'd shave off 2/3rds of the video data right away. But now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. As I understand it, MPEG'ish encoding starts with the green channel and tries to retain as much of the data it can for it since that's where most of the luminance of the data occurs. Red is less important, so it often gets pixelated. Blue is destroyed the worst in the process. Since monochrome data is just luminance, the bulk of the data needed to generate the image is still there.
That said, I've never tried to encode monochrome footage. I don't know that either of the codecs supported by the iPod have a special B&W mode that would encode it with significantly less data. If somebody knows more about this, I'd love to hear from them.
"...which pretty well guarantees a non-representative sample, even if the responses are interesting. I wish they'd done a real live survey."
Not that a real live survey would be all that useful anyway. At best it'd give us an idea of just how loud mouthed the fanatics are. I just love the idea that all I have to do is say I'm American, and it'll be assumed that I'm fanatically christian, overweight, driving an SUV, talking on my cell phone, extremely lazy even though I'm a workaholic that never takes vacations, over medicated, under educated, over paid, militaristically agressive, and out of touch with nature.
"As for Trauma Center, I, personally, use my hand held consoles on buses and trains, though. So I'm not all that keen to play a game of steady-handedness on public transportation."
Trauma is more of a puzzle game than a surgeon simulator. You don't have to be super accurate with it. I haven't played it on a bus, but I imagine it's not that B of D.
One thing that I will say about it that's kinda annoying is that you do spend a bunch of time going through the 'story mode'. I really wish the developers had more of a 'get to the damn point' motivation while developing it. It'd certainly make it more bus friendly in that regard. It reminds me of playing FFIII and having to talk to every single person in every single city when you really wanna hit the 'attack' button.
"When the SuperNES came out, it wasn't long before the issue of blood and gore came up, especially in the light of the SuperNES's new graphics capabilities. But Nintendo pushed back at game creators and kept that era of gaming fun. Even more so because Nintendo didn't approve games that didn't meet their playtester approval."
On a more interesting note, Nintendo backed down at the right time. The first Mortal Kombat game for the SNES didn't have blood. Instead, the 'blood' was white, indicating that you were knocking sweat off of the other character. There was a lot of bitching and moaning about that change. Nintendo was firm about their commitment to family gaming, but a number of people stood up and said "What a sec, what about our needs?" Nintendo mulled it over, and they said ok. MK2 came out and featured all of the blood.
"Yeah, I parsed this thing as "Remote Control [designed] for Humans." I was thinking "Great! Finally I can program that VCR." Sadly, it's just another tool for turning excess humans into golems. Sigh."
Only on Slashdot would people think an easier to program VCR is cooler than turning humans into golems.
"How do you know that their program doesn't look for webpages which talk about hacking WoW (such as what your viewing now as you post) and searching for specific keywords?"
Well, I can think of a few reasons:
a. It'd be a big fat fucking waste of time. b. It wouldn't work. c. It'd piss everybody off. d. It'd take too much work. e. Blizzard isn't actually run by an evil super villain that happens to have a doctorate in something.
" He was a part of the movies success but id hardly say that the "acting" performed was realy of any great difficulty."
Actually that's bull. Arnie went through a great deal of effort to make the Terminator scary. Actually scary, not scary-like, which is what most 'robots' were back then. It would have been very easy for another actor to take the Terminator, make him walk stiffly, talk in some bizarre "does not compute" sort of dialect, and be rather questionable as a deadly robot. Didn't happen. There actually was a good deal of subtlety fairly unique to Arnold brought into that movie. I know it's difficult to imagine given his less than broad range of acting ability, to that I say "I don't think James Cameron regrets that choice."
"there's no talented, out of work actors in los angeles, ready, willing and able to put in a 20 hour day for a million bucks is there?"
Ah, that's the fun bit. First, there are lots of talented out of work actors in LA. There are many times more rather untalented actors out of work in LA. The fun part is finding the talented ones. This, of course, leads into my second point: Experience. To be a talented actor, you have to act. Once you've attained that valuable experience, you then have to be noticed. Having both interviewed/auditioned actors and software programmers, I can tell you from experience that this sort of thing ain't so easy. Worse is knowing whether or not the actor (or programmer) is truely worth gambling on. That's where raising the stakes and hiring a more trusted name takes place. Then the price goes up, yadda yadda yadda.
"acting isn't even really that hard. everybody is good at it, only they call it lying instead of acting."
This is such a horribly wrong statement that I'm not even sure I should go into why. I really don't think you're grasping the nature of what acting really is. I certainly don't think you're in the mood to hear about it from me. So here's what I suggest: Spend a few bucks and get a book called "The Illusion of Life". (note: I may have the title slightly wrong, but it's easy to find.) It's a humungoid book about Disney's development of animation as an art form. Why animation and not acting? a.) The book is essentially about acting, only it's presented in the form of animation. b.) It's described on a technical enough level that I think you'll understand that making an emotion or an action convincing on screen isn't a simple task by any stretch of the imagination. c.) I haven't read any acting books so I cannot recommend one.
I dare you to go get that book and read it. The worst case scenario is that you'll learn about a rather interesting art form and you'll be able to tell me with some sort of authority that I'm wrong.
"Yeah, they might even rush out and buy a ton of books. Or hold conversations with their family members around the dinner table. Sign me up, I'm converted."
I hear ya, man. I'd love it if I could make everybody conform to my standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which episode was that?"
It was that episode where the Enterprise entered a strange area of space. Mr. Data generated a theory that correctly explained what it was they were experiencing. Riker used a metaphor to describe the phenomenon so bumpkins like me could understand it. Mr. La Forge set up some strange energy thingy to fire at it, but that didn't work. Worf suggested battle stations, but Picard didn't want to appear aggressive. Wesley knew all along what to do but nobody listened to him. Troi said people were scared. I forget how they got out of it but the effect was pretty neat. The most notable aspect of this episode was that the Holodeck was in perfect working order.
Oh.. ouch, wish I had talked to you before. The pool and the engine room was where we wanted to visit, but now they've got some dumb ass 'ghost experience' attraction there. Was that there when you visited? Just curious if they're permenantly blocked off.
"I don't quite see how "wearing a skirt" equates with "being gay". Just as one example, plenty of Scots men wore kilts back in the day. Some still do. I doubt they were all gay."
Kilts are not skirts. Nor are they effeminate. The point was that it wasn't the sort of thing that'd get a dude a section 8.
"Star Trek would have been much more progressive if Roddenberry wasn't teathered by NBC."
Hehe. I have a book about the artwork done for the various Star Trek series. They designed a short skirt for some of the female staff in STNG. They even suggested that in the future, males could wear them too. There actually is a shot somewhere early in the series with a man wearing one of those skirts. They didn't dwell on it. From reading the book, I got the impression that being gay was something that would be around in the 24th century, but not something anybody particularly cared about. They wanted to indicate that it was there, but not have a big dazzling fireworks show about it. The book was vague enough about it, though, that I don't know that I quite interpreted that correctly. Still, it seems fitting.
Buffy and Xena are sci-fi? At least Tomb Raider had robots! Hehe.
My girlfriend isn't too interested in sci-fi. She doesn't hate it, just bores her. She did get into Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker's Guide, though. Comedy aside, I think she liked seeing characters react more than plots about investigating whispy wibbly warbly things in space. I think the main difference between men and women in this field is that the guys tend to be more interested in the technical stuff (what guy wouldn't want to pilot a Viper and blow the shit out of some toasters?) and the women are more interested in the lives of the characters. Of course, it isn't fair for me to generalize, but I do find it interesting that shows like Quantum Leap seemed to have a lot of female fans.
"One of the elevators, apparently, will fill with an unbearable stench -- some riders have been known to nearly vomit when they smell it -- while others are unable to smell it at all."
Last week I took my girlfriend down to the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach, California. This ship is supposed to be haunted, but nobody can really tell these days since it's full of tourists all the time now. We both had an experience fairly similar to the one you described. When I boarded the ship, I detected a strong odor near one of the exhibits. I asked my gf if she could smell it. She said no and suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, it was gone. What's weird about it is that I don't have much of a sense of smell. I rarely detect anything unless I'm seriously looking for it. The fact that I smelled anything at all was alarming, hehe. Anyway, later on the ship my girlfriend thought she noticed something. Same story. She detected it for a moment but instantly it was gone. She was rather puzzled by it. After she had smelled it, she noticed a plaque in the room that claimed there were ghost sightings in that particular room. (just aft of the bridge on the starboard side if anybody's curious. Opposite of the navigator's quarters.)
Honestly, it very easily could have been just a random smell on the ship. But it did make for an interesting discussion on the way home. Hehe.
I've had a couple of 'spooky' occurances at my previous job. I was often the last one to leave, so it was up to me to turn out all the lights and lock up. There was a spot in the hallway where if I came around the corner at the right speed, I'd see the outline of a human figure for a brief moment. The weird thing was, I could almost recognize the form. Somehow I recognized it as a coworker that had left the company long before that! I hadn't been in touch with him for over a year. Was he coming back to tell me something? Well, at least he was smiling, just as I always remembered him.
... same thing, doing my rounds, turning out the lights. Then I noticed the building across the street. There was a figure in the window that was standing perfectly still. I could barely see it, but I could definitely see its eyes. It freaked me out. This was in downtown Portland. This is an area of town full of 'historic' buildings, including the one I was working in. Was some spectre looming around? Well, it was easy to believe that considering it was night time and nobody else was about. Very creepy.
Another night
Welp, now for the anti-climactic bit. Niether were ghosts. The outline of a figure I saw? Trick of the eye. That corner had some boxes and loose stuff piled up. Looking straight on at the pile, it didn't look anything remotely like my coworker. I think what happened was a trick of my peripheral vision. As most of you know, the outer areas of human eyes are keen on detecting motion more than they are with recognizing images. Can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but I think the human brain is constantly looking to recongize patterns, and when it finds one that seems to be relevent, it fills in the blanks. Hence, I saw my coworker. If anybody's curious, he's alive and well.
I suppose I could go into a little more detail about my theory here. There's a technique called 'EVP'. It's used to record the voices of ghosts. If you ever get bored one night, do a search for EVP and find some samples. It isn't definitive proof of the existance of ghosts, but at the very least it's a fun way to kill an evening. (usually there are stories attached to these sounds...) I visited a site once that had a number of EVP samples. Unfortunately, ghost speech isn't terribly easy to make out. Though it does sound human, it's barely more than garbled garbage. What they did was they presented a sound and said "first you listen to it and then try to work out what it's saying, then click on this link to see suggestions of what people think they've heard." The reason they do this is to prevent you from being 'suggested' into believing what you're hearing. After listening to a bit, I worked out why. The sound file downloaded and looped over and over again. I couldn't make it out. Then I read the first suggestion. Suddenly, I was hearing it! Neat! Then I read the second suggestion. And.. wait.. now I'm hearing that one. They were two very different sentences. As a matter of fact, I thought I could hear a different inflection in the words used by the 'ghost' that time around! It was the same sound looping over and over again, but now it was sounding different. Okay, I took the scenic route to this point, but I think what I was hearing was not the sound directly, but my perception of the sound. My brain thought it heard a particular sentence, so that's exactly what made it into my conscience mind. I think the sight of my coworker was a similar phenomenon.
And the figure across the street? Somebody with an odd sense of humor. It's a cardboard cutout. For whatever reason, they put it up against the window on the 3rd story of the building. The light was dim enough that it was very tough to make out, but the next day I was able to see it quite clearly. I mentioned seeing his eyes. It felt like they were following me almost. Again, trick of the eye.
I don't know what I think about ghosts. I can't say I firmly believe they exist, I can't say they don'
"Dear Mods, I think that this was supposed to be sarcastic, not insightful..."
Dear Hellad, I think he struck right on the point of what makes this thing useful, this making his point 'insightful'. But if you're riding a bus that's actually more fun than watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, I'd really like to hear about this magical bus. That'd be a hell of a tourist trap.
"God is dead."
Erm. Isn't 'grasping at facts to make a broad declaration' what's annoying everybody about the creation fanatics?
I'm sorry, but if people around here are going to shout "that proves God doesn't exist" with every science story around here, then gee, guess what you've turned into.
" Many of these older television shows only need to be encoded in greyscale and given a mono soundtrack. This could be a great, yet, inexpensive way to give the itunes video store some credibility."
Hmm... I have a concern about that. Those old B&W shows were also noisy. Noise is the worst thing to encode. (not just video noise, but depending on the period they used film etc...) They may actually have a hard time encoding those shows at a lower data rate because of the added artifacts that the technology of that era added to the video.
My first thought when you mentioned monochrome encoding was that they'd shave off 2/3rds of the video data right away. But now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. As I understand it, MPEG'ish encoding starts with the green channel and tries to retain as much of the data it can for it since that's where most of the luminance of the data occurs. Red is less important, so it often gets pixelated. Blue is destroyed the worst in the process. Since monochrome data is just luminance, the bulk of the data needed to generate the image is still there.
That said, I've never tried to encode monochrome footage. I don't know that either of the codecs supported by the iPod have a special B&W mode that would encode it with significantly less data. If somebody knows more about this, I'd love to hear from them.
So... would you say Slashdot is a social solution to this problem?
"...which pretty well guarantees a non-representative sample, even if the responses are interesting. I wish they'd done a real live survey."
Not that a real live survey would be all that useful anyway. At best it'd give us an idea of just how loud mouthed the fanatics are. I just love the idea that all I have to do is say I'm American, and it'll be assumed that I'm fanatically christian, overweight, driving an SUV, talking on my cell phone, extremely lazy even though I'm a workaholic that never takes vacations, over medicated, under educated, over paid, militaristically agressive, and out of touch with nature.
"Yes. Any other stupid questions?!"
The wonderful thing about living in a country with a population of 300 million is every month I get lumped into a new stereotype.
Only on Slashdot would somebody hit the reply button after reading the headline, but not the summary.
"Should they be fined for knowingly allowing this machine to send spam?"
Microsoft just can't win, can they? If Google did this, everybody'd pump their hands in the air and occasionally twirl around.
Uh huh. Gee. I wonder if I was modded down for being blatantly wrong or for hitting a little too close to home.
"As for Trauma Center, I, personally, use my hand held consoles on buses and trains, though. So I'm not all that keen to play a game of steady-handedness on public transportation."
Trauma is more of a puzzle game than a surgeon simulator. You don't have to be super accurate with it. I haven't played it on a bus, but I imagine it's not that B of D.
One thing that I will say about it that's kinda annoying is that you do spend a bunch of time going through the 'story mode'. I really wish the developers had more of a 'get to the damn point' motivation while developing it. It'd certainly make it more bus friendly in that regard. It reminds me of playing FFIII and having to talk to every single person in every single city when you really wanna hit the 'attack' button.
I like the game, but that bit's frustrating.
"for the freedom to modify and fix problems instead of being at the whim of any other vendor."
For improving your karma on Slashdot!
"When the SuperNES came out, it wasn't long before the issue of blood and gore came up, especially in the light of the SuperNES's new graphics capabilities. But Nintendo pushed back at game creators and kept that era of gaming fun. Even more so because Nintendo didn't approve games that didn't meet their playtester approval."
On a more interesting note, Nintendo backed down at the right time. The first Mortal Kombat game for the SNES didn't have blood. Instead, the 'blood' was white, indicating that you were knocking sweat off of the other character. There was a lot of bitching and moaning about that change. Nintendo was firm about their commitment to family gaming, but a number of people stood up and said "What a sec, what about our needs?" Nintendo mulled it over, and they said ok. MK2 came out and featured all of the blood.
Yeah, Nintendo's arrogant, but they do listen.
"Yeah, I parsed this thing as "Remote Control [designed] for Humans." I was thinking "Great! Finally I can program that VCR."
Sadly, it's just another tool for turning excess humans into golems. Sigh."
Only on Slashdot would people think an easier to program VCR is cooler than turning humans into golems.
"A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire"
"Lisa, go to your room."
- Homer
"How do you know that their program doesn't look for webpages which talk about hacking WoW (such as what your viewing now as you post) and searching for specific keywords?"
Well, I can think of a few reasons:
a. It'd be a big fat fucking waste of time.
b. It wouldn't work.
c. It'd piss everybody off.
d. It'd take too much work.
e. Blizzard isn't actually run by an evil super villain that happens to have a doctorate in something.
" He was a part of the movies success but id hardly say that the "acting" performed was realy of any great difficulty."
Actually that's bull. Arnie went through a great deal of effort to make the Terminator scary. Actually scary, not scary-like, which is what most 'robots' were back then. It would have been very easy for another actor to take the Terminator, make him walk stiffly, talk in some bizarre "does not compute" sort of dialect, and be rather questionable as a deadly robot. Didn't happen. There actually was a good deal of subtlety fairly unique to Arnold brought into that movie. I know it's difficult to imagine given his less than broad range of acting ability, to that I say "I don't think James Cameron regrets that choice."
"there's no talented, out of work actors in los angeles, ready, willing and able to put in a 20 hour day for a million bucks is there?"
Ah, that's the fun bit. First, there are lots of talented out of work actors in LA. There are many times more rather untalented actors out of work in LA. The fun part is finding the talented ones. This, of course, leads into my second point: Experience. To be a talented actor, you have to act. Once you've attained that valuable experience, you then have to be noticed. Having both interviewed/auditioned actors and software programmers, I can tell you from experience that this sort of thing ain't so easy. Worse is knowing whether or not the actor (or programmer) is truely worth gambling on. That's where raising the stakes and hiring a more trusted name takes place. Then the price goes up, yadda yadda yadda.
"acting isn't even really that hard. everybody is good at it, only they call it lying instead of acting."
This is such a horribly wrong statement that I'm not even sure I should go into why. I really don't think you're grasping the nature of what acting really is. I certainly don't think you're in the mood to hear about it from me. So here's what I suggest: Spend a few bucks and get a book called "The Illusion of Life". (note: I may have the title slightly wrong, but it's easy to find.) It's a humungoid book about Disney's development of animation as an art form. Why animation and not acting? a.) The book is essentially about acting, only it's presented in the form of animation. b.) It's described on a technical enough level that I think you'll understand that making an emotion or an action convincing on screen isn't a simple task by any stretch of the imagination. c.) I haven't read any acting books so I cannot recommend one.
I dare you to go get that book and read it. The worst case scenario is that you'll learn about a rather interesting art form and you'll be able to tell me with some sort of authority that I'm wrong.
"Yeah, they might even rush out and buy a ton of books. Or hold conversations with their family members around the dinner table. Sign me up, I'm converted."
I hear ya, man. I'd love it if I could make everybody conform to my standard of living.