Isn't this phrase a bit contradictory? Shouldn't this be setting of warning alarms in what is supposed to be a creative industry? Maybe the problem isn't sci-fi vs fantasy, maybe it's stuck-in-a-safe-rut vs being-creative-and-coming-up-with-new-ideas?
Maybe we need a new name for what are now popular yet highly generic fictional "fantasy" worlds, such as "Olde Tyme Wizard's Worlde" so that "fantasy" can go on being imaginative. The whole fantasy genre as it stands is terribly predictable, after all. Sci-fi isn't doing much better.
Considering all the technological gee-whizzery that goes into all aspects of bike racing, and all the years that bike racing has been televised live, I'm hoping that soon we'll see a drastic improvement in signal quality from the motorcycle-video feeds. It is still very prone to garbled images and interruptions.
"Lance was coming through the home stretch and the crowd was parting as he approached, not more than a meter in front of him."
The crowds on the mountains have always done that, since long before Lance knew how to ride a bicycle. As with most things in cycling, enthusiastic spectators are not a Lance creation. If you think that is crazy, you should see crowds do the exact same thing at rally races - that's with cars, not bicycles.
When the tv video is shot from behind a rider from a motorcycle, the foreshortening effect of the video camera lens can make the spectators in front of the cyclist appear much closer than they really are. The same effect is very pronounced on sprint finishes, when head-on images can make the race seem like a matter of centimeters, when really the riders are meters apart.
While drunken fans can be an annoyance, the biggest danger from fans is people using cameras - the camera lens can screw up their depth perception, they don't concentrate on what's happening around them, and straps and cords dangle causing hazards that handlebars can snag; all of these have led to high-profile crashes in bike races.
Believe it or not, it is possible that someone could have enjoyed children's entertainment when they were a child and find it immature as an adult without some sort of outside influence, as you suggest. It's a kid's show, and kid's toys, after all. Unfortunately it seems that pop-culture has gotten to the point that a man not being entertained by the silly tv shows he enjoyed as a kid is somehow considered abnormal (or a troll/flamebait). Does your wife still watch Care Bears or pink pony cutsie cartoon shows?
For better or worse, a lot of my childhood revolved around my imagination being blasted wide open by the Star Wars movies, yet as an adult I think that those same Star Wars movies are kinda dumb and immature. Shocking, I know.
Oh, and I never liked the Transformers; even as a kid I thought the show was dumb and the toys were cheap, flimsy and, well... dumb.
Isn't this something that can be reversed in the future? Couldn't the next president undo this and allow the investigation to continue? If so, what could Bush hope to suppress if it could only be dredged up later on? Is buying a few years delay worth the effort?
The diesel engine the bus carries drives a generator, which charges batteries which power the electric motors. This allows the diesel engine to run constantly at its optimal RPM, instead of revving and idling in stop-and-start conditions, increasing efficiency and reducing noise. Perhaps one day this can be adapted for smaller vehicles such as cars.
As for your worrying about the lack of noise, I think that's a ridiculous issue to hold against electric vehicles. I can imagine how much nicer cities would be without the constant drone of gasoline-powered vehicles. Somebody think of the children!?! What about the children's future? Shall we attach noisemakers to the front of electric vehicles just to warn absent-minded kids to get off the damned road? Which noise will be most effective? Shall we fill the air with the constant drone of raspberries, or would a loud beeper be more efficient?
"Well, we've always been very clear on that. We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
Well, they want to link sometimes. Like, when you make a movie, you burn a DVD and you take it to your DVD player. Someday that could happen over AirPort, so you don't have to burn a DVD -- you can just watch it right off your computer on your television set. But most of these products that have said, "Let's combine the television and the computer!" have failed. All of them have failed.
The problem is, when you're using your computer you're a foot away from it, you know? When you're using your television you want to be ten feet away from it. So they're really different animals."
Censorship exists everywhere, and I don't think it is accepted more hypocritically than in the west, espesically the US.
Government censorship is considered to be a symptom of tyranny, yet the public as a whole readily accepts and expects corporate censorship, and has for decades. When it comes to television and radio, "you can't say that" or "you can't see that" have been used for decades to suppress words, ideas and images, and very few people seem to mind. I don't think that any US television network will deny the existence of network censors.
1968"Sponsors go into an uproar and threaten to pull support after a television program shows interracial 'touching.' During the taping of a duet between Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, Clark lays her hand on Belafonte's arm (Clark is white and Belafonte is black)."
"After being invited by the Smothers Brothers to perform his anti-Vietnam anthem 'Waist Deep in the Big Muddy' on their TV show, Pete Seeger is edited out of the program by the censors at CBS television."
1971"Several radio stations alter the John Lennon song 'Working Class Hero' without the consent of Lennon or his record label."
1975"Radio stations across the country refuse to play Loretta Lynn's 'The Pill' because of its references to birth control."
2001"Producers of Late Night with David Letterman cancel an appearance by singer Ani DiFranco after she refuses to drop plans to perform the song 'Subdivision.' The song deals with racism and white flight to the suburbs."
Censorship is all around you. China and India did not invent it.
What about switching hands? If she's right-handed, switch the mouse to the left, keyboard right. It would take a while to adjust, but it would also give her the opportunity to adopt good technique for using that hand from the start, and hopefully not suffer a recurrence. I considered doing this myself while suffering pain in my mousing hand and wrist for a long time, but managed to eliminate the pain by other means.
Can we please take this seriously? These devices are intended to defend against very credible threats. I mean, really... won't somebody think of the children!?!
There are three posts describing what glow fuel is, they are all somewhat different, and they are all modded to 4 or 5 points as either informative or insightful. Whois thewinner?
And is this post funny, insighful, informative, or is it just off topic?
I'm too lazy to mail in the card; I think mail-in rebates are a rip-off; I don't want to pay full sales tax if I'm getting money back; I won't shop anywhere that uses mail-in rebates; I don't want to buy my own stamps; I don't want to go out of my way to find a mailbox...
There's an old saying about not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I wish I could come up with a witty way to say "don't complain about trivial matters when you're getting a discount that nobody had to offer".
Rebates are a motivator to get people to buy products. I can understand if a rebate doesn't motivate you enough to buy the product, or if you buy products and are too lazy to mail in the paperwork, but complaining as if mail-in rebates violate some sort of basic human right guaranteeing discounted retail prices is just silly.
I worked in a Riyadh hospital for over two years, and I was the resident mac/OSX expert. I would do some troubleshooting for other offices too.
I frequently (at least once a week for two years) did troubleshooting for one Saudi woman, who had been working on macs as a "graphic designer" for about a decade. In case you don't know, in Saudi Arabia, if you are Saudi, then you don't need to be qualified or experienced to get a plum job. This makes for an interesting work environment. Outrageous tech stories were so commonplace with this woman that I can't even remember most of them, but they were all ridiculous.
Actually, I have been trying to forget all the crap that happened while I worked there - it was all ridiculous.
- The Saudi designer is using Photoshop and all her palettes have disappeared (which is a feature - hit tab and they go away, hit it again and they come back). She panics! I'm standing by her desk and I ask her to hit her "tab" key. She pauses, lightly touches her space bar, then seems to hit keys at random, slowly... she didn't know where the tab key was.
- She's throwing a fit because her computer is broken. She boots the machine and the mouse/keyboard don't work. She has been force-rebooting it all morning and demanding a new computer from the manager. Shifting of the huge pile of papers and crap on her desk has managed to unplug the keyboard from the computer - which is the first thing I check - the mouse was plugged into the keyboard, which is why that didn't work.
- She claims her computer is irredeemably broken because it is so slow as to be unusable, and she wants a new one. She is working on a photoshop file she has created. It is big, very high resolution, and literally has hundreds of layers. It is several gigs in size. Eliminating layers and lowering resolution solves the problem. I also give her the umpteenth lesson in doing text in Illustrator or InDesign, not Photoshop.
I had plenty of experience cleaning up after local tech support too. "Totally incapable" is a descriptor which comes to mind.
- One guy fixed problems on an OS9 machine by copying data onto an external HD, wiping the computer's drive and then reinstalling OS9 and all software onto the computer again, then returning the data to the computer, all in exactly the same state it was in before the problems began. This process would take at least a full day, during which he would hang around, drink coffee and use the office phones while software installed, and he got paid by the hour. This happened about once a week. He never actually solved the problem. When I took ten minutes and resolved the extension conflict which was the root of the issue, I cut off his gravy train.
- A computer goes down after a power outage, and won't boot. The tech guy they call in declares it dead, and they need a new one. (by the way, his company also sells macs). The first thing I do is reset the PMU and it's running fine - two minutes work.
- There was a piece of OSX client software which we couldn't get to work with the hospital's back-up server. A tech guy who worked for CA flew in from Dubai to do troubleshooting on the back-up system, and I worked with him trying to resolve the OSX issues. We're sitting at my desk going through stuff, and he's baffled. He's asking me questions. I give him some answers, and he's still confused. Then he looks at me and asks "Macs have their own operating system?"
The most potent repellent chemical were then isolated by strapping miniature electrodes to the antennae of female mosquitoes and checking their responses to specific compounds. Logan will not divulge the names of the chemicals until they are patented.... "It's very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals"
So, what is the status of the situation which allows companies to patent naturally occurring phenomena, such as DNA and now a scent which comes from a chemical naturally produced by the human body?
In other news, reports indicate that future SUVs will continue suffer from poor fuel economy, future helicopters will continue to be noisy and future fried chicken will continue to be greasy.
Slashdot Mirror
"fantasy is very well defined in our minds"
Isn't this phrase a bit contradictory? Shouldn't this be setting of warning alarms in what is supposed to be a creative industry? Maybe the problem isn't sci-fi vs fantasy, maybe it's stuck-in-a-safe-rut vs being-creative-and-coming-up-with-new-ideas?
Maybe we need a new name for what are now popular yet highly generic fictional "fantasy" worlds, such as "Olde Tyme Wizard's Worlde" so that "fantasy" can go on being imaginative. The whole fantasy genre as it stands is terribly predictable, after all. Sci-fi isn't doing much better.
"The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy."
Keeping your debt to a minimum and eliminating it as quickly as possible should be your top priorities. Everything else should be aimed at that.
Considering all the technological gee-whizzery that goes into all aspects of bike racing, and all the years that bike racing has been televised live, I'm hoping that soon we'll see a drastic improvement in signal quality from the motorcycle-video feeds. It is still very prone to garbled images and interruptions.
"Lance was coming through the home stretch and the crowd was parting as he approached, not more than a meter in front of him."
The crowds on the mountains have always done that, since long before Lance knew how to ride a bicycle. As with most things in cycling, enthusiastic spectators are not a Lance creation. If you think that is crazy, you should see crowds do the exact same thing at rally races - that's with cars, not bicycles.
When the tv video is shot from behind a rider from a motorcycle, the foreshortening effect of the video camera lens can make the spectators in front of the cyclist appear much closer than they really are. The same effect is very pronounced on sprint finishes, when head-on images can make the race seem like a matter of centimeters, when really the riders are meters apart.
While drunken fans can be an annoyance, the biggest danger from fans is people using cameras - the camera lens can screw up their depth perception, they don't concentrate on what's happening around them, and straps and cords dangle causing hazards that handlebars can snag; all of these have led to high-profile crashes in bike races.
duh!
duh
Is that the comic book guy on the bottom-left side of the photo?
Believe it or not, it is possible that someone could have enjoyed children's entertainment when they were a child and find it immature as an adult without some sort of outside influence, as you suggest. It's a kid's show, and kid's toys, after all. Unfortunately it seems that pop-culture has gotten to the point that a man not being entertained by the silly tv shows he enjoyed as a kid is somehow considered abnormal (or a troll/flamebait). Does your wife still watch Care Bears or pink pony cutsie cartoon shows?
For better or worse, a lot of my childhood revolved around my imagination being blasted wide open by the Star Wars movies, yet as an adult I think that those same Star Wars movies are kinda dumb and immature. Shocking, I know.
Oh, and I never liked the Transformers; even as a kid I thought the show was dumb and the toys were cheap, flimsy and, well... dumb.
Isn't this something that can be reversed in the future? Couldn't the next president undo this and allow the investigation to continue? If so, what could Bush hope to suppress if it could only be dredged up later on? Is buying a few years delay worth the effort?
Browser war is hell.
Isn't Mantrap a new show on OLN?
There are Dutch buses which utilise this idea (as featured on Slashdot some years ago). The buses also feature an original approach to motor/drivetrain efficiency.
The diesel engine the bus carries drives a generator, which charges batteries which power the electric motors. This allows the diesel engine to run constantly at its optimal RPM, instead of revving and idling in stop-and-start conditions, increasing efficiency and reducing noise. Perhaps one day this can be adapted for smaller vehicles such as cars.
As for your worrying about the lack of noise, I think that's a ridiculous issue to hold against electric vehicles. I can imagine how much nicer cities would be without the constant drone of gasoline-powered vehicles. Somebody think of the children!?! What about the children's future? Shall we attach noisemakers to the front of electric vehicles just to warn absent-minded kids to get off the damned road? Which noise will be most effective? Shall we fill the air with the constant drone of raspberries, or would a loud beeper be more efficient?
Steve Jobs has long held that he does not envision the computer being television, nor the television being a computer. So if iTunes were used for movie rentals, how would the movies be watched? Is a video Airport Express waiting in the wings?
"Well, we've always been very clear on that. We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
Well, they want to link sometimes. Like, when you make a movie, you burn a DVD and you take it to your DVD player. Someday that could happen over AirPort, so you don't have to burn a DVD -- you can just watch it right off your computer on your television set. But most of these products that have said, "Let's combine the television and the computer!" have failed. All of them have failed.
The problem is, when you're using your computer you're a foot away from it, you know? When you're using your television you want to be ten feet away from it. So they're really different animals."
Tell that to the brand managers.
Censorship exists everywhere, and I don't think it is accepted more hypocritically than in the west, espesically the US.
Government censorship is considered to be a symptom of tyranny, yet the public as a whole readily accepts and expects corporate censorship, and has for decades. When it comes to television and radio, "you can't say that" or "you can't see that" have been used for decades to suppress words, ideas and images, and very few people seem to mind. I don't think that any US television network will deny the existence of network censors.
1968 "Sponsors go into an uproar and threaten to pull support after a television program shows interracial 'touching.' During the taping of a duet between Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, Clark lays her hand on Belafonte's arm (Clark is white and Belafonte is black)."
"After being invited by the Smothers Brothers to perform his anti-Vietnam anthem 'Waist Deep in the Big Muddy' on their TV show, Pete Seeger is edited out of the program by the censors at CBS television."
1971 "Several radio stations alter the John Lennon song 'Working Class Hero' without the consent of Lennon or his record label."
1975 "Radio stations across the country refuse to play Loretta Lynn's 'The Pill' because of its references to birth control."
2001 "Producers of Late Night with David Letterman cancel an appearance by singer Ani DiFranco after she refuses to drop plans to perform the song 'Subdivision.' The song deals with racism and white flight to the suburbs."
Censorship is all around you. China and India did not invent it.
Beuno writes:
"The review isn't as thorough as I would like..."
Nine pages wasn't enough. We want ten... and a 96 oz Big Gulp, a 4 lb bag of doritos and bigger cheeseburger options.
What about switching hands? If she's right-handed, switch the mouse to the left, keyboard right. It would take a while to adjust, but it would also give her the opportunity to adopt good technique for using that hand from the start, and hopefully not suffer a recurrence. I considered doing this myself while suffering pain in my mousing hand and wrist for a long time, but managed to eliminate the pain by other means.
Can we please take this seriously? These devices are intended to defend against very credible threats. I mean, really... won't somebody think of the children!?!
Has Myspace patented having friends yet? I think there's big money to be made in that racket.
Format war is hell.
There are three posts describing what glow fuel is, they are all somewhat different, and they are all modded to 4 or 5 points as either informative or insightful. Who is the winner?
And is this post funny, insighful, informative, or is it just off topic?
I'm too lazy to mail in the card; I think mail-in rebates are a rip-off; I don't want to pay full sales tax if I'm getting money back; I won't shop anywhere that uses mail-in rebates; I don't want to buy my own stamps; I don't want to go out of my way to find a mailbox...
There's an old saying about not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I wish I could come up with a witty way to say "don't complain about trivial matters when you're getting a discount that nobody had to offer".
Rebates are a motivator to get people to buy products. I can understand if a rebate doesn't motivate you enough to buy the product, or if you buy products and are too lazy to mail in the paperwork, but complaining as if mail-in rebates violate some sort of basic human right guaranteeing discounted retail prices is just silly.
I worked in a Riyadh hospital for over two years, and I was the resident mac/OSX expert. I would do some troubleshooting for other offices too.
I frequently (at least once a week for two years) did troubleshooting for one Saudi woman, who had been working on macs as a "graphic designer" for about a decade. In case you don't know, in Saudi Arabia, if you are Saudi, then you don't need to be qualified or experienced to get a plum job. This makes for an interesting work environment. Outrageous tech stories were so commonplace with this woman that I can't even remember most of them, but they were all ridiculous.
Actually, I have been trying to forget all the crap that happened while I worked there - it was all ridiculous.
- The Saudi designer is using Photoshop and all her palettes have disappeared (which is a feature - hit tab and they go away, hit it again and they come back). She panics! I'm standing by her desk and I ask her to hit her "tab" key. She pauses, lightly touches her space bar, then seems to hit keys at random, slowly... she didn't know where the tab key was.
- She's throwing a fit because her computer is broken. She boots the machine and the mouse/keyboard don't work. She has been force-rebooting it all morning and demanding a new computer from the manager. Shifting of the huge pile of papers and crap on her desk has managed to unplug the keyboard from the computer - which is the first thing I check - the mouse was plugged into the keyboard, which is why that didn't work.
- She claims her computer is irredeemably broken because it is so slow as to be unusable, and she wants a new one. She is working on a photoshop file she has created. It is big, very high resolution, and literally has hundreds of layers. It is several gigs in size. Eliminating layers and lowering resolution solves the problem. I also give her the umpteenth lesson in doing text in Illustrator or InDesign, not Photoshop.
I had plenty of experience cleaning up after local tech support too. "Totally incapable" is a descriptor which comes to mind.
- One guy fixed problems on an OS9 machine by copying data onto an external HD, wiping the computer's drive and then reinstalling OS9 and all software onto the computer again, then returning the data to the computer, all in exactly the same state it was in before the problems began. This process would take at least a full day, during which he would hang around, drink coffee and use the office phones while software installed, and he got paid by the hour. This happened about once a week. He never actually solved the problem. When I took ten minutes and resolved the extension conflict which was the root of the issue, I cut off his gravy train.
- A computer goes down after a power outage, and won't boot. The tech guy they call in declares it dead, and they need a new one. (by the way, his company also sells macs). The first thing I do is reset the PMU and it's running fine - two minutes work.
- There was a piece of OSX client software which we couldn't get to work with the hospital's back-up server. A tech guy who worked for CA flew in from Dubai to do troubleshooting on the back-up system, and I worked with him trying to resolve the OSX issues. We're sitting at my desk going through stuff, and he's baffled. He's asking me questions. I give him some answers, and he's still confused. Then he looks at me and asks "Macs have their own operating system?"
From the New Scientist article:
...
The most potent repellent chemical were then isolated by strapping miniature electrodes to the antennae of female mosquitoes and checking their responses to specific compounds. Logan will not divulge the names of the chemicals until they are patented.
"It's very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals"
So, what is the status of the situation which allows companies to patent naturally occurring phenomena, such as DNA and now a scent which comes from a chemical naturally produced by the human body?
In other news, reports indicate that future SUVs will continue suffer from poor fuel economy, future helicopters will continue to be noisy and future fried chicken will continue to be greasy.
Back to you, Ted.