Interesting that you and the morons who modded you up are all conspiracy theorists.
I don't know much about conspiracy theories, but the notion of "authorized approved-by-manufacturer purposes only" attitude is quite prevalent in tech, and the PC is more of an aberration in that respect than the norm. Phones, music players, game consoles, games in general all try to put as many roadblocks in the way to general purpose computing as they can. Media companies have tried to push the closed paradigm onto the PC world, whether it's DRM-protected content, Sony's stupid rootkits, streaming content only playable with specific players, and HDPC. Over time, they take two steps forward toward that goal, then one step back.
Which raises an interesting question. What was it about Uber that got them the investors over companies like Lyft and others?. I've only used one of those jitney services once and it wasn't either Uber or Lyft and I don't recall their name.
Well, in the case of Uber vs Lyft, Uber was simply first. They launched their modern service in SF in 2011, it was 2013 that Zimride changed its name to Lyft and basically started competing with Uber. Lyft also started out in Cornell, while Uber was a Bay Area company, and being so close to the California tech scene probably gave Uber an initial boost.
The original phrase is "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." To this day, that is still banned in the US. That is, false speech directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (IE, a riot). Now, it's a tortured leap of logic to say that justifiably banned speech also justifies banning anti-war advocacy, as the 1919 verdict held. It was the latter ban that was struck down decades later, not the former.
But hey, you continue to think that Margaret Sanger's provision of birth control to women in her own Jewish-American neighborhood was racist. After all, women having autonomy over their own bodies is totally discriminatory.
We have no evidence that Sanger was actually racist (certainly her writings and her actions did not reflect that), but she was very classist, and overlapped with eugenicists that the stupid should not reproduce. She believed in forced sterilization for the profoundly retarded and strongly recommended that the reckless and destitute limit their populations, because she believed that environmentally-acquired traits were inherited. Basically, if you were too poor and "reckless" to properly raise healthy children, then those children who lived would grow up to be the same. But she explicitly rejected race and ethnicity as factors.
That's crap. In fact Prop 13 was necessary to keep folks from losing their homes due to a massive planned property tax hike by the progressive democrats in charge of California
Oh sure, Prop 13 was necessary. But it's totally possible to go way overboard in "correcting" a problem.
But don't you want to get stabbed in London? Or have acid thrown on you in Italy? Or get beheaded beneath the great pyramids of Egypt?
Xenophobe!
I always wanted to visit Iran so I could appreciate the thousands of years of Persian culture before getting thrown off the top of a building like the rest of the gay people who don't exist in that country.
Who in the recent decade of depression saw numerous companies a) let workers go with little to no warning and no compensation or b) witnessed the extremely common scenario where an employee informs their employer they are taking a new job, gives their two weeks notice, and are immediately escorted out the building and left with no job for two weeks.
Unless you're working at the company from Office Space, you tend to actually be told that you're fired. You have the obligation to tell them you quit, just like they have the obligation to tell you you're fired.
I don't think the standard for "should we ever invest in emerging markets" should be "yes, but only as long as none of them fails, ever." Unlike many an investment, the company had real revenues and real sales, and was doing well because their panels were innovative in reducing the amount of polysilicon needed for a solar array. That gave them a leg up on their competition, since polysilicon was rare and expensive.. until the price fell by 89%. All of a sudden, Solyndra's competitive advantage had entirely disappeared. Now, there were some other financial concerns about the company that the Justice Department raised, but I'm still trying to figure out why this has been used as a major rallying cry.
That's because those are the movies that don't cost as much for Netflix to carry. The big content companies detest Netflix's payment model ("$15/month for all you can watch? People spend that much on tickets for ONE movie at the theater!"). They hate Netflix in general, blaming it for their decline in DVD sales (due to cheap rentals), and now that they compete directly with Netflix in streaming they want to kill the company completely. So, high prices. They also charge huge amounts that Netflix couldn't pay unless they double/tripled/whatever subscription fees. The content companies want pay per view. That's why you can rent a low-rez version on Youtube for "only" $3. They're betting they can get a ton of money from you in the long term, at least a lot more than with Netflix.
Google is contributing to the problem by requiring location services be turned on for a lot of bluetooth and Wifi Functions.
I normally have location services turned off, and nothing on my phone has ever asked for them to be on besides Google Maps. Bluetooth and Wifi work just fine without them.
The tipping ice sword fight and cartoon physics 'falling away' from the goblins were clearly previews of intended game mechanics.
I think it's more of an indication that the effects guys had like.. five minutes to block out a scene, and animation never had much of a chance to even start. With each of the three movies, the previous movie ended a bit later in the schedule, so the next movie's production schedule was even more compressed. The further along the pipeline, the worse the crunch, and they already had a hard, unmoving date to reach. The couldn't just miss their December target and release the movie in January. You can see the effects get worse with each subsequent movie. Look at the eagles from the first movie and compare them to the third. The third's eagles are... noticeably worse. And neither of their eagles looked anywhere as good as those from the Return of the King, 11 years earlier. How can the special effects look WORSE, even though they have much better lighting, shading, texturing tools? They can look worse if you have no polish time at all.
I mean, I can't say that some producer wasn't thinking about video games, but I can speak with surety that the crew and director weren't really thinking about it. They had far costlier affairs to consider at the time, trying to make sure their spinning plates did not cause a 3/4 billion dollar budget to totally crash, which it almost did (IMO, they were unsuccessful..)
They've already got your movie ticket money, now they want your (or your kid's) game money. Not going to age well, game 'eye candy' never does.
Knowing Peter Jackson, when he was filming those he was NOT thinking about video games. I know we liked to suspect that since they were video-game-like, it had to be intentional, but that really was the last thing on his mind. Getting something you could show on screen at all was not a given. The production was incredibly rushed, and there were days when the actors couldn't do much of anything because Jackson was rewriting the script on set, so the crew had them just fight randomly on green screens in the hope that some of that footage would be usable when the screenplay could finally be blocked out.
If the action scenes look basic and lazy, it's because there was not much thought put into them, which is why so much of it is a montage of 3-shot sequences: 1) See a problem, 2) Reaction/devise solution, 3) Execute a solution. Those sequences could have been assembled in any order, because nothing depended on anything that came before it.
Yes you can... but then tolerance kicks in and beer just doesn't do it anymore, so you move on to something with more punch than 5% by volume...
I had an acquaintance who had an alcoholic mother, and the weekend when mom visited were a horrifying account. She went out brought back cases of beer (all to drink that weekend), and she always had to have an open can of beer on the bedside table "for sipping" to "comfort her." Naturally things went horribly, and it was just due to the amazing quantities of just beer!
All of 'The Hobbit' movies added whole scenes just to setup incredibly bad video game levels.
I follow a great channel on Youtube called Just Write. He focuses on different pop culture media (usually movies) from a writers' perspective, and posted a pretty good evaluation of what went wrong with the Hobbit movies (and their terrible terrible writing). The Hobbit movies are basically action movies, yet they contain the most tensionless and boring action sequences ever filmed. I liked his breakdown of the Mines of Moria escape from Fellowship of the Ring, a great sequence from Peter Jackson, with the Misty Mountains escape from the Hobbit.
I'm not defending 24fps cameras, but interpolation is not a higher framerate
If you're watching 24fps at 120fps with no interpolation, then you're still just watching 24fps. Interpolation will bump that up, but usually in a crappy way that's not worth it.
I remember watching the space station 3D IMAX film a while back. It was amazing, almost like being there. What ruined the immersion was the crappy 24fps, watching people judder across the screen.
You just mentioned the exact problem: 3D. 3D requires higher frame rates to have the same effect as 24fps due to the left/right strobing. It's not actually running at 12 fps, but it definitely looks to your eyes like it was. (Also, depending on the year, the brightness may have been halved) I watched the first Hobbit movie at 48fps 3D, and while I was still not convinced that 3D made it better in any way, I WAS convinced that high-frame-rate is the only way to do 3D. I avoid 24fps 3D whenever I can; I'll always prefer 24 fps 2D instead. It looks FAR better.
I detest Scientology, but you don't need to be a SeaOrg devotee to like an action actor who does excellent physical stunts. They LOOK better, and the audience notices the difference.
The last 10-15 years he cranks out endless derivative action films and sequels.
That's fine, that's your opinion. I think Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and Ghost Protocol are absolutely fantastic films. Now The Mummy on the other hand...
Au contraire, when you trash an already trashy image, the results are often very noticeable. If I make a decent JPG of a GIF image, the quality drop will be more noticeable than making a JPG out of uncompressed TIFF.
It could never hold a single trip to Costco for us.
How many households are you buying for?? I visited Costco a few times a month for three years when I owned a Leaf, and I didn't have any trouble fitting everything in there. The one and only time I couldn't was when I bought a person-height tool chest that wouldn't have fit in any passenger car (I borrowed my neighbor's pickup for that).
And if we bought one, we wouldn't have a reasonable vehicle for road trips
The Leaf's current range is much better than it was, but during those three years, I tried to force some long-range road trips. It wasn't pretty. 100 miles is just nowhere near the amount of range that people need.
That said, for everything other than the twice-a-year road trip, the Leaf served every purpose I threw at it, and I wasn't sorry I had it. I just wish I had a longer range vehicle as a backup, like I do now.
NOx is generated by natural processes and is critical for plant growth.
If a certain amount of a substance is beneficial, then enormous amounts of it should be waaaay more beneficial! There is no such thing as "too much of a good thing."
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that you and the morons who modded you up are all conspiracy theorists.
I don't know much about conspiracy theories, but the notion of "authorized approved-by-manufacturer purposes only" attitude is quite prevalent in tech, and the PC is more of an aberration in that respect than the norm. Phones, music players, game consoles, games in general all try to put as many roadblocks in the way to general purpose computing as they can. Media companies have tried to push the closed paradigm onto the PC world, whether it's DRM-protected content, Sony's stupid rootkits, streaming content only playable with specific players, and HDPC. Over time, they take two steps forward toward that goal, then one step back.
Which raises an interesting question. What was it about Uber that got them the investors over companies like Lyft and others?. I've only used one of those jitney services once and it wasn't either Uber or Lyft and I don't recall their name.
Well, in the case of Uber vs Lyft, Uber was simply first. They launched their modern service in SF in 2011, it was 2013 that Zimride changed its name to Lyft and basically started competing with Uber. Lyft also started out in Cornell, while Uber was a Bay Area company, and being so close to the California tech scene probably gave Uber an initial boost.
The original phrase is "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." To this day, that is still banned in the US. That is, false speech directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (IE, a riot). Now, it's a tortured leap of logic to say that justifiably banned speech also justifies banning anti-war advocacy, as the 1919 verdict held. It was the latter ban that was struck down decades later, not the former.
But hey, you continue to think that Margaret Sanger's provision of birth control to women in her own Jewish-American neighborhood was racist. After all, women having autonomy over their own bodies is totally discriminatory.
We have no evidence that Sanger was actually racist (certainly her writings and her actions did not reflect that), but she was very classist, and overlapped with eugenicists that the stupid should not reproduce. She believed in forced sterilization for the profoundly retarded and strongly recommended that the reckless and destitute limit their populations, because she believed that environmentally-acquired traits were inherited. Basically, if you were too poor and "reckless" to properly raise healthy children, then those children who lived would grow up to be the same. But she explicitly rejected race and ethnicity as factors.
If you like X so much, why don't you donate...yeah, that is a stupid argument. We don't operate society that way.
Yes, we absolutely do. That is the entire point of charities. We don't just shut down charities and say "yeah, the government is doing this now."
Just because it's a good idea does not mean that it's a job that should always be done by the public sector.
That's crap. In fact Prop 13 was necessary to keep folks from losing their homes due to a massive planned property tax hike by the progressive democrats in charge of California
Oh sure, Prop 13 was necessary. But it's totally possible to go way overboard in "correcting" a problem.
But don't you want to get stabbed in London? Or have acid thrown on you in Italy? Or get beheaded beneath the great pyramids of Egypt?
Xenophobe!
I always wanted to visit Iran so I could appreciate the thousands of years of Persian culture before getting thrown off the top of a building like the rest of the gay people who don't exist in that country.
Who in the recent decade of depression saw numerous companies a) let workers go with little to no warning and no compensation or b) witnessed the extremely common scenario where an employee informs their employer they are taking a new job, gives their two weeks notice, and are immediately escorted out the building and left with no job for two weeks.
Unless you're working at the company from Office Space, you tend to actually be told that you're fired.
You have the obligation to tell them you quit, just like they have the obligation to tell you you're fired.
Sorry to burst your ideological bubble but in the U.S. only 8.4% of prisoners are in private prisons. In no universe is 8.5% of something many.
In every universe can 8.5% of something be "many." It's just not "most," or a "plurality."
"Many" people were out of work when unemployment was 8.5%
I don't think the standard for "should we ever invest in emerging markets" should be "yes, but only as long as none of them fails, ever." Unlike many an investment, the company had real revenues and real sales, and was doing well because their panels were innovative in reducing the amount of polysilicon needed for a solar array. That gave them a leg up on their competition, since polysilicon was rare and expensive.. until the price fell by 89%. All of a sudden, Solyndra's competitive advantage had entirely disappeared. Now, there were some other financial concerns about the company that the Justice Department raised, but I'm still trying to figure out why this has been used as a major rallying cry.
That's because those are the movies that don't cost as much for Netflix to carry.
The big content companies detest Netflix's payment model ("$15/month for all you can watch? People spend that much on tickets for ONE movie at the theater!"). They hate Netflix in general, blaming it for their decline in DVD sales (due to cheap rentals), and now that they compete directly with Netflix in streaming they want to kill the company completely. So, high prices.
They also charge huge amounts that Netflix couldn't pay unless they double/tripled/whatever subscription fees. The content companies want pay per view. That's why you can rent a low-rez version on Youtube for "only" $3. They're betting they can get a ton of money from you in the long term, at least a lot more than with Netflix.
Google is contributing to the problem by requiring location services be turned on for a lot of bluetooth and Wifi Functions.
I normally have location services turned off, and nothing on my phone has ever asked for them to be on besides Google Maps. Bluetooth and Wifi work just fine without them.
The tipping ice sword fight and cartoon physics 'falling away' from the goblins were clearly previews of intended game mechanics.
I think it's more of an indication that the effects guys had like.. five minutes to block out a scene, and animation never had much of a chance to even start. With each of the three movies, the previous movie ended a bit later in the schedule, so the next movie's production schedule was even more compressed. The further along the pipeline, the worse the crunch, and they already had a hard, unmoving date to reach. The couldn't just miss their December target and release the movie in January. You can see the effects get worse with each subsequent movie. Look at the eagles from the first movie and compare them to the third. The third's eagles are... noticeably worse. And neither of their eagles looked anywhere as good as those from the Return of the King, 11 years earlier. How can the special effects look WORSE, even though they have much better lighting, shading, texturing tools? They can look worse if you have no polish time at all.
I mean, I can't say that some producer wasn't thinking about video games, but I can speak with surety that the crew and director weren't really thinking about it. They had far costlier affairs to consider at the time, trying to make sure their spinning plates did not cause a 3/4 billion dollar budget to totally crash, which it almost did (IMO, they were unsuccessful..)
They've already got your movie ticket money, now they want your (or your kid's) game money. Not going to age well, game 'eye candy' never does.
Knowing Peter Jackson, when he was filming those he was NOT thinking about video games. I know we liked to suspect that since they were video-game-like, it had to be intentional, but that really was the last thing on his mind. Getting something you could show on screen at all was not a given. The production was incredibly rushed, and there were days when the actors couldn't do much of anything because Jackson was rewriting the script on set, so the crew had them just fight randomly on green screens in the hope that some of that footage would be usable when the screenplay could finally be blocked out.
If the action scenes look basic and lazy, it's because there was not much thought put into them, which is why so much of it is a montage of 3-shot sequences: 1) See a problem, 2) Reaction/devise solution, 3) Execute a solution. Those sequences could have been assembled in any order, because nothing depended on anything that came before it.
Yes you can... but then tolerance kicks in and beer just doesn't do it anymore, so you move on to something with more punch than 5% by volume...
I had an acquaintance who had an alcoholic mother, and the weekend when mom visited were a horrifying account. She went out brought back cases of beer (all to drink that weekend), and she always had to have an open can of beer on the bedside table "for sipping" to "comfort her." Naturally things went horribly, and it was just due to the amazing quantities of just beer!
All of 'The Hobbit' movies added whole scenes just to setup incredibly bad video game levels.
I follow a great channel on Youtube called Just Write. He focuses on different pop culture media (usually movies) from a writers' perspective, and posted a pretty good evaluation of what went wrong with the Hobbit movies (and their terrible terrible writing). The Hobbit movies are basically action movies, yet they contain the most tensionless and boring action sequences ever filmed. I liked his breakdown of the Mines of Moria escape from Fellowship of the Ring, a great sequence from Peter Jackson, with the Misty Mountains escape from the Hobbit.
Tensionless Action. Pretty good overall.
Yeah, when using modern TVs, the most important tricks are the ones that reduce video latency. Everything else is second to that.
I'm not defending 24fps cameras, but interpolation is not a higher framerate
If you're watching 24fps at 120fps with no interpolation, then you're still just watching 24fps. Interpolation will bump that up, but usually in a crappy way that's not worth it.
I remember watching the space station 3D IMAX film a while back. It was amazing, almost like being there. What ruined the immersion was the crappy 24fps, watching people judder across the screen.
You just mentioned the exact problem: 3D. 3D requires higher frame rates to have the same effect as 24fps due to the left/right strobing. It's not actually running at 12 fps, but it definitely looks to your eyes like it was. (Also, depending on the year, the brightness may have been halved) I watched the first Hobbit movie at 48fps 3D, and while I was still not convinced that 3D made it better in any way, I WAS convinced that high-frame-rate is the only way to do 3D. I avoid 24fps 3D whenever I can; I'll always prefer 24 fps 2D instead. It looks FAR better.
I detest Scientology, but you don't need to be a SeaOrg devotee to like an action actor who does excellent physical stunts. They LOOK better, and the audience notices the difference.
Meh, if Tom Cruise thinks TV Frame Interpolation is a bad thing- then I'm all for it. Put it in everything I say! Even cheeseburgers.
I believe that is called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
The last 10-15 years he cranks out endless derivative action films and sequels.
That's fine, that's your opinion. I think Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and Ghost Protocol are absolutely fantastic films. Now The Mummy on the other hand...
Au contraire, when you trash an already trashy image, the results are often very noticeable.
If I make a decent JPG of a GIF image, the quality drop will be more noticeable than making a JPG out of uncompressed TIFF.
It could never hold a single trip to Costco for us.
How many households are you buying for?? I visited Costco a few times a month for three years when I owned a Leaf, and I didn't have any trouble fitting everything in there. The one and only time I couldn't was when I bought a person-height tool chest that wouldn't have fit in any passenger car (I borrowed my neighbor's pickup for that).
And if we bought one, we wouldn't have a reasonable vehicle for road trips
The Leaf's current range is much better than it was, but during those three years, I tried to force some long-range road trips. It wasn't pretty. 100 miles is just nowhere near the amount of range that people need.
That said, for everything other than the twice-a-year road trip, the Leaf served every purpose I threw at it, and I wasn't sorry I had it. I just wish I had a longer range vehicle as a backup, like I do now.
NOx is generated by natural processes and is critical for plant growth.
If a certain amount of a substance is beneficial, then enormous amounts of it should be waaaay more beneficial!
There is no such thing as "too much of a good thing."