Worse yet, the CG in most movies is not believeable. The quality is so low and the animation so obvious that it removes the credibility so that only children could possibly enjoy it.
That may be true for implementations like Jar-Jar in SW Episode 1, but don't group Pixar in there with the hollywood CG abusers. Pixar produces high quality cartoons, not real-life simulations. They're not trying to fool your eye into thinking that the bugs in A Bug's Life are actually real bugs moving around.
Even Gollum from the recent LOTR movies, which had some of the best acting by a CG character in a while, was difficult to believe because half the time he was on the screen, it we obvious that he was a CG character.
So your glass is half-empty. I thought it was amazing how the other half the time, I was watching the movie forgetting that Gollum was CG.
the police can pull people over for minor traffic violations, or not, completely based on their own discretion
Exactly. Or even if they want to harass someone in particular, they can tell their buddies to pull over a certian car whenever they get the chance; 5 mph over the limit, no turn signal, anything.
When society changes so that certain laws, like speed limit laws, find themselves out of date, and most people break them, the police get way more authority than they should have. It should be that most people obey the law, and the few who break it are caught and punished. Instead, most people break the law, so the police get to pick and choose who to single out. The same applies to industries, where when republicans are in power, regulations over republican-dominated industries tend to be less strictly enforced. Too scary:-(
So if they go after ONE person, they also have to go after the other 700 million people
Actually, law enforcement has the power to apply the law when they see fit. It's one of the main problems with our criminal justice system; two people could engage in exactly the same criminal activity, and if one of those people has friends in the department, he'll never get charged, while the other guy will. It's frightening how much power comes with the choice of who to prosecute. Companies friendly to the government can sneak by regulation-compliance checks, so they can run dirtier (and more profitable) factories, while their non-lobbying counterparts have to spend money getting their factories up to date.
That's competition for ya. But don't expect nVidia to stay down for long; nothing's stopping them from developing faster cards, and eventually they'll be back on top.
Re:I liked it better...
on
P2P Meets Push
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to trust whoever's running the channel not to send me kiddie pr0n and then call the FBI on me.
If you were flipping channels and HBO showed a naked child that was later ruled to be kiddie porn, who would be legally responsible?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon do something as opposed to writing a script that does it?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon manually separate chaff from cotton fibers as opposed to building a machine (or "gin", if you will) that does it?
Very little.
A script is just a piece of logic that someone wrote down. If you want to accomplish the same goal, you can write your own form of that logic, as long as you don't copy it directly. A cotton gin is just one man's idea of how to more efficiently process cotton. You're still free to make a machine to process cotton, it just can't be the same as the first man's cotton gin.
Buy.com was built around a huge server farm that scoured the web and found the best prices for products it sells and then beat those prices (to the best of its ability).
Plus, "to the best of their ability" was quite lower than other sites. Buy.com's business plan, for the first few tech-boom funded years of its existence (1997ish?), was to sell products at a loss in order to drive other startup e-commerce sites out of business.
They've found a way to get a wireless probe to connect from the middle of a molten ball of iron deep in the center of the earth, but I still can't get my cellphone to work in the subway.
is how companies get patents on things that everybody is already doing. Shouldn't a patent be done *first* (or at least, be pending),before they start doing/producing something? As it stands, IMHO it seems to be something else: i.e. "let's see what's not patented yet and patent it". Insane...
keep in mind this patent application was filed in 2000, so the things you've taken for granted for the last 2+ years might not have been around then.
Re:Why do you say AI is going nowhere?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
It is an Eliza program. It turns everything you tell it into a question. Some people have wonderful conversations with them. For example, visit this one
> Hello, I am Eliza. me: Have you ever been slashdotted, Eliza? > We were discussing you, not me.
I suspect she'll change her attitude after she gets posted to the slashdot front page:-)
From USA Today: Chat with Gary about keeping your computer safe from hacking and viruses.
Yeah, I'm sure Manhattan's uber-elite white hat hacker wants to spend his time answering questions like "I can't find my email. Did a hacker take it, or does my computer just hate me?"
Well whenever you sample something, it's polite to ask the owner of the music whether it's ok to do so. Without proper references or approval, you'd be plagiarizing their work.
Some bands, like "The Avalanches" have done same really skillful, clever, and artistic sampling to make some great, thoughtful songs.
Other bands have simply taken some riff from another popular song, and used that riff's catchyness to make their own crappy song sound catchy.
Now, I'd be pretty pissed off if I spent 25 years mastering the guitar in order to write and perform some amazing riff and used it to make a really popular song, only to have some other musician at his computer take a "sample" of the best part of the riff and use it in his own song. That riff, whenever you hear it, will remind you of my hit song; and I may not want to be associated with the crappy song that the other musician wrote. Essentially, one artist tries to steal another artist's glory.
For example, one thing that made U2 so popular is Bono's distinctive voice. He worked long and hard to be able to find a sound that people would want to listen to. So why should another artist be able to take a "sample" of him singing a famous line, paste it into his own song, and then sell it ???
Especially when an artist samples a riff from another genre, then uses it in a song which appeals to a market that wouldn't know it was a sample. You know Will Smith's song, "Men in Black"? The whole thing is a remake and rewording of an older song (someone pleeeease help me identify it). All he did was put on a drumbeat and put in some new words. So why does he earn millions for it?
There's nothing so amazing about taking a drum track and using Windows Sound Recorder to mix in the best parts of someone else's song. But, as long as you have the other artist's approval, there's no problem with it.
Personally I'm not a fan of "Come with me", Puff Daddy+Jimmy Page's remake of Led Zepplin's song "Cashmere", but at least it had the original Artist's approval.
No, you're totally right; auto insurance is seriously f'd up and needs to be reworked. Same with medical malpractice insurance - no one deserves a $100 million dollar settlement cause some human made a medical mistake.
The hard thing to convince people about any insurance is that you really can't predict when you'll need it, and most people never do.
Young, healthy people pay for alot of old, unhealthy people's medical treatment. And young male drivers 18-25 are all grouped together with 18 year old hotheads who crash daddy's car, so we all have to pay ridiculous auto insurance until we're 26, which kind of bites, because at 23, I'm daaaaaamn careful with my car.
Wow, this is possibly the most off topic convo I've ever had on/.
[sarcasm]This can't be a bad thing. It creates jobs! How can you not like something that creates jobs? A 800 billion dollar tax cut creates jobs, so we must like it. This surveilanece network will create jobs, too. If you're against this, you're against the economy, and the american people.[/sarcasm]
Life Insurance companies generate money two ways: -through stable, long term investing (most) -through policies that people cancel, so do not ever need to be paid out (small portion of revenue)
After about 7 years, an insurance company has collected enough of a premium from a person that the investment revenue will break even with teh cost of paying off the benefit when the person dies. After that, many policy types allow the policyholder to either increase the payout benefit, or decrease his payments.
As for mass casualty plans, insurance companies first of all keep a hell of a lot of cash on hand, and are required by law to keep enough on hand to pay out for usual mortality rates and then some. They also contract out to reinsurance companies to cover them in the event of a disaster.
It's not a scam, it just something you don't understand; and if you were actually applying for a policy, it'd be your agent's job to teach you about how insurance works, and why you can trust your insurance company. A little bad press can really hurt a life insurance company, so we try to do all we can to accommodate our customers.
Not to sound too harsh, but there is always going to be some sort of risk involved in business dealings. More so with insurance companies*. Basically, the moral I take from the story you presented is not to trust that life insurance will definitely be paid out upon my death. If I thought a spouse would need money after I died, I'd diversify. I'd buy some life insurance*, invest in some mutual funds, make sure bills are all paid, etc.
[off-topic rant to follow]
Actually, that is a little unfair. Maybe that undocumented story was about a small, untrustworthly insurance company, but the big guns in the life insurance industry would never drag out a court case like that, especially where it appeared they were being stingy with the benefit payments. Life Insurance isn't for things you can plan. It's for unplanned events. You can diversify, buy your mutual funds, etc, but only a good Life Insurance policy will pay your dependents need when they really need it. If you invest in stable mutual funds, you'll do well over a certain amount of time. After 50 years, money in a mutual fund will grow much larger than money in a life insurance policy.
But if you die two years after you buy the fund, those funds won't be worth much more than when you bought them. Even a 25% gain would be very high for a medium risk mutual fund.
The thing about a typical life insurance policy is that it pays 100% of the benefit no matter how long you've had it. So you may have only payed $200 total after 2 years, they still pay $100,000 to your beneficiaries on your death. How is that a scam?
Slashdot Mirror
In most states it's illegal to own an alligator.
And in a few, it's illegal to show a DVD to one.
Worse yet, the CG in most movies is not believeable. The quality is so low and the animation so obvious that it removes the credibility so that only children could possibly enjoy it.
That may be true for implementations like Jar-Jar in SW Episode 1, but don't group Pixar in there with the hollywood CG abusers. Pixar produces high quality cartoons, not real-life simulations. They're not trying to fool your eye into thinking that the bugs in A Bug's Life are actually real bugs moving around.
Even Gollum from the recent LOTR movies, which had some of the best acting by a CG character in a while, was difficult to believe because half the time he was on the screen, it we obvious that he was a CG character.
So your glass is half-empty. I thought it was amazing how the other half the time, I was watching the movie forgetting that Gollum was CG.
Those archived qualifying tests were just what I needed to make myself feel really stupid first thing in the morning.
Or back even further in time, when we didn't even have slide rules to help us wash our clothes and use the bathroom!
the police can pull people over for minor traffic violations, or not, completely based on their own discretion
Exactly. Or even if they want to harass someone in particular, they can tell their buddies to pull over a certian car whenever they get the chance; 5 mph over the limit, no turn signal, anything.
When society changes so that certain laws, like speed limit laws, find themselves out of date, and most people break them, the police get way more authority than they should have. It should be that most people obey the law, and the few who break it are caught and punished. Instead, most people break the law, so the police get to pick and choose who to single out. The same applies to industries, where when republicans are in power, regulations over republican-dominated industries tend to be less strictly enforced. Too scary:-(
So if they go after ONE person, they also have to go after the other 700 million people
Actually, law enforcement has the power to apply the law when they see fit. It's one of the main problems with our criminal justice system; two people could engage in exactly the same criminal activity, and if one of those people has friends in the department, he'll never get charged, while the other guy will. It's frightening how much power comes with the choice of who to prosecute. Companies friendly to the government can sneak by regulation-compliance checks, so they can run dirtier (and more profitable) factories, while their non-lobbying counterparts have to spend money getting their factories up to date.
That's competition for ya. But don't expect nVidia to stay down for long; nothing's stopping them from developing faster cards, and eventually they'll be back on top.
I have to trust whoever's running the channel not to send me kiddie pr0n and then call the FBI on me.
If you were flipping channels and HBO showed a naked child that was later ruled to be kiddie porn, who would be legally responsible?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon do something as opposed to writing a script that does it?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon manually separate chaff from cotton fibers as opposed to building a machine (or "gin", if you will) that does it?
Very little.
A script is just a piece of logic that someone wrote down. If you want to accomplish the same goal, you can write your own form of that logic, as long as you don't copy it directly. A cotton gin is just one man's idea of how to more efficiently process cotton. You're still free to make a machine to process cotton, it just can't be the same as the first man's cotton gin.
(See story about Win 2k/XP patch from last month that made even the fastest machines crawl.)
FYI: http://www.google.com/search?q=Q811493+AND+slow
yeah, but i bet she can't dance like monkey boy ballmer.
Actually, I think I'd be very disturbed if she did.
Buy.com was built around a huge server farm that scoured the web and found the best prices for products it sells and then beat those prices (to the best of its ability).
Plus, "to the best of their ability" was quite lower than other sites. Buy.com's business plan, for the first few tech-boom funded years of its existence (1997ish?), was to sell products at a loss in order to drive other startup e-commerce sites out of business.
Set your homepage to pricewatch.com, then train a monkey to type in your chosen product names and write down the prices. Easy!
They've found a way to get a wireless probe to connect from the middle of a molten ball of iron deep in the center of the earth, but I still can't get my cellphone to work in the subway.
is how companies get patents on things that everybody is already doing. Shouldn't a patent be done *first* (or at least, be pending),before they start doing/producing something? As it stands, IMHO it seems to be something else: i.e. "let's see what's not patented yet and patent it". Insane...
keep in mind this patent application was filed in 2000, so the things you've taken for granted for the last 2+ years might not have been around then.
It is an Eliza program. It turns everything you tell it into a question. Some people have wonderful conversations with them. For example, visit this one
> Hello, I am Eliza.
me: Have you ever been slashdotted, Eliza?
> We were discussing you, not me.
I suspect she'll change her attitude after she gets posted to the slashdot front page:-)
From USA Today: Chat with Gary about keeping your computer safe from hacking and viruses.
Yeah, I'm sure Manhattan's uber-elite white hat hacker wants to spend his time answering questions like "I can't find my email. Did a hacker take it, or does my computer just hate me?"
The original song is Forget-Me-Nots by Patrice Rushen.
thanks!
Uh, I think you mean "Kashmir" (as in the country) not "Cashmere" (as in the fabric).
yes, thanks:-) don't know where my brain was...
Well whenever you sample something, it's polite to ask the owner of the music whether it's ok to do so. Without proper references or approval, you'd be plagiarizing their work.
Some bands, like "The Avalanches" have done same really skillful, clever, and artistic sampling to make some great, thoughtful songs.
Other bands have simply taken some riff from another popular song, and used that riff's catchyness to make their own crappy song sound catchy.
Now, I'd be pretty pissed off if I spent 25 years mastering the guitar in order to write and perform some amazing riff and used it to make a really popular song, only to have some other musician at his computer take a "sample" of the best part of the riff and use it in his own song. That riff, whenever you hear it, will remind you of my hit song; and I may not want to be associated with the crappy song that the other musician wrote. Essentially, one artist tries to steal another artist's glory.
For example, one thing that made U2 so popular is Bono's distinctive voice. He worked long and hard to be able to find a sound that people would want to listen to. So why should another artist be able to take a "sample" of him singing a famous line, paste it into his own song, and then sell it ???
Especially when an artist samples a riff from another genre, then uses it in a song which appeals to a market that wouldn't know it was a sample. You know Will Smith's song, "Men in Black"? The whole thing is a remake and rewording of an older song (someone pleeeease help me identify it). All he did was put on a drumbeat and put in some new words. So why does he earn millions for it?
There's nothing so amazing about taking a drum track and using Windows Sound Recorder to mix in the best parts of someone else's song. But, as long as you have the other artist's approval, there's no problem with it.
Personally I'm not a fan of "Come with me", Puff Daddy+Jimmy Page's remake of Led Zepplin's song "Cashmere", but at least it had the original Artist's approval.
No, you're totally right; auto insurance is seriously f'd up and needs to be reworked. Same with medical malpractice insurance - no one deserves a $100 million dollar settlement cause some human made a medical mistake.
/.
The hard thing to convince people about any insurance is that you really can't predict when you'll need it, and most people never do.
Young, healthy people pay for alot of old, unhealthy people's medical treatment. And young male drivers 18-25 are all grouped together with 18 year old hotheads who crash daddy's car, so we all have to pay ridiculous auto insurance until we're 26, which kind of bites, because at 23, I'm daaaaaamn careful with my car.
Wow, this is possibly the most off topic convo I've ever had on
[sarcasm]This can't be a bad thing. It creates jobs! How can you not like something that creates jobs? A 800 billion dollar tax cut creates jobs, so we must like it. This surveilanece network will create jobs, too. If you're against this, you're against the economy, and the american people.[/sarcasm]
If I owned that patent, I'd say only porn websites can use pop-ups, and I have to be getting laid in any picture used in the pop-up.
Life Insurance companies generate money two ways:
-through stable, long term investing (most)
-through policies that people cancel, so do not ever need to be paid out (small portion of revenue)
After about 7 years, an insurance company has collected enough of a premium from a person that the investment revenue will break even with teh cost of paying off the benefit when the person dies. After that, many policy types allow the policyholder to either increase the payout benefit, or decrease his payments.
As for mass casualty plans, insurance companies first of all keep a hell of a lot of cash on hand, and are required by law to keep enough on hand to pay out for usual mortality rates and then some. They also contract out to reinsurance companies to cover them in the event of a disaster.
It's not a scam, it just something you don't understand; and if you were actually applying for a policy, it'd be your agent's job to teach you about how insurance works, and why you can trust your insurance company. A little bad press can really hurt a life insurance company, so we try to do all we can to accommodate our customers.
Not to sound too harsh, but there is always going to be some sort of risk involved in business dealings. More so with insurance companies*. Basically, the moral I take from the story you presented is not to trust that life insurance will definitely be paid out upon my death. If I thought a spouse would need money after I died, I'd diversify. I'd buy some life insurance*, invest in some mutual funds, make sure bills are all paid, etc.
[off-topic rant to follow]
Actually, that is a little unfair. Maybe that undocumented story was about a small, untrustworthly insurance company, but the big guns in the life insurance industry would never drag out a court case like that, especially where it appeared they were being stingy with the benefit payments. Life Insurance isn't for things you can plan. It's for unplanned events. You can diversify, buy your mutual funds, etc, but only a good Life Insurance policy will pay your dependents need when they really need it. If you invest in stable mutual funds, you'll do well over a certain amount of time. After 50 years, money in a mutual fund will grow much larger than money in a life insurance policy.
But if you die two years after you buy the fund, those funds won't be worth much more than when you bought them. Even a 25% gain would be very high for a medium risk mutual fund.
The thing about a typical life insurance policy is that it pays 100% of the benefit no matter how long you've had it. So you may have only payed $200 total after 2 years, they still pay $100,000 to your beneficiaries on your death. How is that a scam?
[end rant]