I had a friend who was involved in a small way with the RoTK in Wellington. From all accounts they hauled data from one render farm to another using big pelican cases (the ones that you can push over a waterfall and not get your camera inside wet or damaged) full of hard drives.
When you have to get a person to drive across town to move the hard drive from one place to another, having a few extra hard drives in that pelican case wasn't a biggie.
I agree with your opinions on the matrix, but with respect to LOTR I have to say that you are a troll of the highest order. I am not a LOTR freak, and have only seen the first two movies a couple of times each, and read the book only once, about ten years ago.
LOTR uses CG to better tell a story that is played out on a massive scale. It is not used simply for the joy of running animation engines hot for a year or so. I will concede that the Matrix did fall into the trap of CG for its own sake after the first movie.
Many others plainly disagree with your opinion on the text of LOTR based on its taking out readers surveys of favourite books again and again.
your comment makes a lot of sense. people would tend to work on the things that amuse them or are their pet projects rather than having the "big picture" view of it all.
Unless you were trying to sound funny and fell flat, I have to say that I disagree entirely with your sentiment.
It is one thing to say that the source code should be available should you want to peruse and tweak it for your own pleasure, and another altogether to alienate the 98+% of the population who struggle through windows installations, let alone work out how to get the latest version of the open source software of their choice loaded onto their box.
I'm not intending to incite a flame war. The general member of the public may well know that they are getting a poor deal from microsoft (or alternatively may well love the BSOD et al), but unless alternatives are as technically simple to install for the folks who can barely program their VCRs people wont see the alternatives as viable.
I, too had similar thoughts, but in order to not appear redundant in my post I decided to find out the particle size of a typical virus.
I found this at drgreene.com
Viruses range in size from 20 to 250 nanometers
The average bacterium is 1,000 nanometers long.
If a bacterium were my size, a typical virus particle would look like a tiny mouse-robot. If an average virus were my size, a bacterium would be the size of a dinosaur over ten stories tall.
It could be a scale thing taht means this first generation of magnetic detox devices are too large to pick up virus particles. i don't know what sort of % you would need to remove of a viral infection compared to a bacterial infection to ensure a recovery by the casualty, but suspect it would be a lot higher for a virus.
Another problem could lie in the changing nature of viruses, making them a harder target to select for when designing your magnetised particles.
I'm a structural engineer, and one of my lecturers at university said that "roads are what you drive on to get somewhere that you are doing some real engineering".
Re:fun fun, but it's still not teleportation
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I am reminded of the Douglas Adams song about teleportation:
I teleported home one night With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away And I got Sidney's leg.
the spoilsports with the non proliferation treaties probably have something to do with this lack of tactical nukes in your christmas stockings.
I was sorely tempted to drop in a comment about your constitutional right to nukes but then realised that there is a right to bear arms (short sleeve shirts anyone?) but says nothing about batteries.
given the effort that is going into anonymous (sp?) trading P2P systems, it seems amazing that there are still sites out there that host MP3s that are not squeaky clean.
I have as big a chip on my shoulder as the next/.er when it comes to the RIAA / ARIA / "assorted recording acronym", but these guys were painting a large target on their foreheads and saying "come and get us".
Jail is over the top, but if you wanted to get away with doing dodgy things, these guys failed miserably.
And the death of broadcast TV, or TV per se, would be bad because...?
Imagine what would happen if we had no TV (and chose not to spend our evenings on IRC or ICQ), and read, talked to family members, thought or even (shock horror) exercised a little.
Would it be illegal to post the directions for the manufacture of a device (mentioned in another post) for the removal of these broadcast flags on an overseas site?
Also, if the removal of these signals can be done using off the shelf equipment, and only limited know-how, surely actually enforcing the law would be as difficult (and possibly as ridiculous) as outlawing the black marker pens that famously circumvented one of the CD copy protection schemes.
If each team starts at a random (or sensibly positioned) part of the course, and has to navigate to a central point or points the vehicles would need to navigate similar but not identical terrain, and also have to deal with traffic that is coming at it from many directions rather than a convoy type traffic scenario with everyone starting from the same place.
Alternately, if the weather conditions in this part of the world are stable enough it should be possible to run the course over several weeks. The only problems that occur to me would be that evidence of previous vehicles would mean that the latter teams would have tracks as markers as to where others went. If the area is reasonably windy, or has lots of rain, these could be washed away but that is sheer speculation.
Just my $0.02 worth
Alternately you could engrave the data onto coconuts and use migratory swallows transport them. But then that would raise the matter of using an African swallow compared to a European swallow.
fair call re a poor analogy - should have chosen something also dodgy to make the point but not quite as emotive as drugs.
I am quite clear on the difference between crack and MP3s - nobody has yet developed a mechanism (other than mail order sites I would suppose) to deliver drugs via a dial-up connection;-)
I fully agree that the law is an ass in this case as the horse has well and truly bolted with respect to MP3s and their distribution through the net. It was also a long bow to draw to connect drug pushing to providing a portal to get MP3s (are people not connected enough to get onto waste networks?).
the point was more that it was a "no shit sherlock" sort of situation that they didn't have anything dodgy on their own site.
Surely this is like hosting a list of places you can buy illicit drugs. You do not actually possess said drugs, but you are party and complicit in assisting access to illegal materials.
By the letter of the law they may be correct in claiming a high ground, but morally, you are as guilty as someone who stands in front of a junior school with a list of crack houses and hand them out to the kids, then claims he was doing nothing wrong as he didn't posses the drugs.
I was not arguing for a socialist model at all, merely a reasonable appraisal that if a project is not going to make sufficient profit to justify its going ahead within 50 years, it is highly unlikely to generate that extra money in the final 20 years.
Will an extra 20 years really make that much difference that movies will either be produced or not produced? If you can't enough make money in the first few years (and ideally the first year)of realease, why bother at all?
How much (other than as much as their pockets can fit) money do they really have to make to justify their projects?
I believe that such a monster exists, and is known as a "waste" network, which uses encrypted traffic (I think that it is even public key encrypted) to send your p2p files. there is a sharing of the keys among people on the inner circle, and from what I have heard, even when there is not file transfer going down the line, the program generates noise so that file sizes cannot readily be determined and back engineered to likely file names.
I don't know exactly where to get it from, or how easy it is to use, but know that friends of mine have been setting up their own "small circles of trust" using waste rather than sharing with the great wide world that might include RIAA moles / other tin foil hat devices.
Google for it and you're bound to find a copy or directions as to how to get it up and running.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a friend who was involved in a small way with the RoTK in Wellington. From all accounts they hauled data from one render farm to another using big pelican cases (the ones that you can push over a waterfall and not get your camera inside wet or damaged) full of hard drives.
When you have to get a person to drive across town to move the hard drive from one place to another, having a few extra hard drives in that pelican case wasn't a biggie.
Or alternately, don't try to catch a pig by rolling in the mud with it, the pig enjoys it and you only end up dirty yourself.
I agree with your opinions on the matrix, but with respect to LOTR I have to say that you are a troll of the highest order. I am not a LOTR freak, and have only seen the first two movies a couple of times each, and read the book only once, about ten years ago.
LOTR uses CG to better tell a story that is played out on a massive scale. It is not used simply for the joy of running animation engines hot for a year or so. I will concede that the Matrix did fall into the trap of CG for its own sake after the first movie.
Many others plainly disagree with your opinion on the text of LOTR based on its taking out readers surveys of favourite books again and again.
fair enough.
my error.
your comment makes a lot of sense. people would tend to work on the things that amuse them or are their pet projects rather than having the "big picture" view of it all.
Unless you were trying to sound funny and fell flat, I have to say that I disagree entirely with your sentiment.
It is one thing to say that the source code should be available should you want to peruse and tweak it for your own pleasure, and another altogether to alienate the 98+% of the population who struggle through windows installations, let alone work out how to get the latest version of the open source software of their choice loaded onto their box.
I'm not intending to incite a flame war. The general member of the public may well know that they are getting a poor deal from microsoft (or alternatively may well love the BSOD et al), but unless alternatives are as technically simple to install for the folks who can barely program their VCRs people wont see the alternatives as viable.
I, too had similar thoughts, but in order to not appear redundant in my post I decided to find out the particle size of a typical virus.
I found this at drgreene.com
Viruses range in size from 20 to 250 nanometers
The average bacterium is 1,000 nanometers long.
If a bacterium were my size, a typical virus particle would look like a tiny mouse-robot. If an average virus were my size, a bacterium would be the size of a dinosaur over ten stories tall.
It could be a scale thing taht means this first generation of magnetic detox devices are too large to pick up virus particles. i don't know what sort of % you would need to remove of a viral infection compared to a bacterial infection to ensure a recovery by the casualty, but suspect it would be a lot higher for a virus.
Another problem could lie in the changing nature of viruses, making them a harder target to select for when designing your magnetised particles.
It would be a wonderful application if it works.
I'm a structural engineer, and one of my lecturers at university said that "roads are what you drive on to get somewhere that you are doing some real engineering".
I am reminded of the Douglas Adams song about teleportation:
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
/me wonders aloud if beer arms are a condition not unlike beer belly, with the wobbly bits of skin like the bit of skin under a turkey's chin
the spoilsports with the non proliferation treaties probably have something to do with this lack of tactical nukes in your christmas stockings.
I was sorely tempted to drop in a comment about your constitutional right to nukes but then realised that there is a right to bear arms (short sleeve shirts anyone?) but says nothing about batteries.
given the effort that is going into anonymous (sp?) trading P2P systems, it seems amazing that there are still sites out there that host MP3s that are not squeaky clean.
/.er when it comes to the RIAA / ARIA / "assorted recording acronym", but these guys were painting a large target on their foreheads and saying "come and get us".
I have as big a chip on my shoulder as the next
Jail is over the top, but if you wanted to get away with doing dodgy things, these guys failed miserably.
I want to know how many coconuts a migratory elk can carry, and if they would need to drag it between two of them using a length of string.
The soviet russians did it years ago ;-)
And the death of broadcast TV, or TV per se, would be bad because...?
Imagine what would happen if we had no TV (and chose not to spend our evenings on IRC or ICQ), and read, talked to family members, thought or even (shock horror) exercised a little.
Would it be illegal to post the directions for the manufacture of a device (mentioned in another post) for the removal of these broadcast flags on an overseas site?
Also, if the removal of these signals can be done using off the shelf equipment, and only limited know-how, surely actually enforcing the law would be as difficult (and possibly as ridiculous) as outlawing the black marker pens that famously circumvented one of the CD copy protection schemes.
If each team starts at a random (or sensibly positioned) part of the course, and has to navigate to a central point or points the vehicles would need to navigate similar but not identical terrain, and also have to deal with traffic that is coming at it from many directions rather than a convoy type traffic scenario with everyone starting from the same place.
Alternately, if the weather conditions in this part of the world are stable enough it should be possible to run the course over several weeks. The only problems that occur to me would be that evidence of previous vehicles would mean that the latter teams would have tracks as markers as to where others went. If the area is reasonably windy, or has lots of rain, these could be washed away but that is sheer speculation. Just my $0.02 worth
dare i say it: ;-)
a virtual beowulf cluster, as it were
Alternately you could engrave the data onto coconuts and use migratory swallows transport them. But then that would raise the matter of using an African swallow compared to a European swallow.
fair call re a poor analogy - should have chosen something also dodgy to make the point but not quite as emotive as drugs. ;-)
I am quite clear on the difference between crack and MP3s - nobody has yet developed a mechanism (other than mail order sites I would suppose) to deliver drugs via a dial-up connection
I fully agree that the law is an ass in this case as the horse has well and truly bolted with respect to MP3s and their distribution through the net. It was also a long bow to draw to connect drug pushing to providing a portal to get MP3s (are people not connected enough to get onto waste networks?).
the point was more that it was a "no shit sherlock" sort of situation that they didn't have anything dodgy on their own site.
It is what you get when you crush the screen on your cellphone and snort it up a rolled up $20 note ;-)
Surely this is like hosting a list of places you can buy illicit drugs. You do not actually possess said drugs, but you are party and complicit in assisting access to illegal materials.
By the letter of the law they may be correct in claiming a high ground, but morally, you are as guilty as someone who stands in front of a junior school with a list of crack houses and hand them out to the kids, then claims he was doing nothing wrong as he didn't posses the drugs.
I agree. Where is all this free beer that people keep on talking about? I have yet to be offered any of it.
I was not arguing for a socialist model at all, merely a reasonable appraisal that if a project is not going to make sufficient profit to justify its going ahead within 50 years, it is highly unlikely to generate that extra money in the final 20 years.
Will an extra 20 years really make that much difference that movies will either be produced or not produced? If you can't enough make money in the first few years (and ideally the first year)of realease, why bother at all?
How much (other than as much as their pockets can fit) money do they really have to make to justify their projects?
I believe that such a monster exists, and is known as a "waste" network, which uses encrypted traffic (I think that it is even public key encrypted) to send your p2p files. there is a sharing of the keys among people on the inner circle, and from what I have heard, even when there is not file transfer going down the line, the program generates noise so that file sizes cannot readily be determined and back engineered to likely file names.
I don't know exactly where to get it from, or how easy it is to use, but know that friends of mine have been setting up their own "small circles of trust" using waste rather than sharing with the great wide world that might include RIAA moles / other tin foil hat devices.
Google for it and you're bound to find a copy or directions as to how to get it up and running.