Cindy Morgan's comment on this: "We were playing computer programs. We weren't supposed to be emotional!" Well... you know, it depends how you view the film. The premise was that on some abstract level computer programs were "alive". Ultimately, this is fantasy as much as (say) someone becoming part of a story within a book is- perhaps moreso because computer programs of that time generally don't pretend to mimic human motivation or behaviour. (It's probably not worth overanalysing this aspect precisely *because* Tron is ultimately fantasy- in the general sense of the word- rather than sci-fi.)
But my point was that the film's premise already required you to accept that programs have pseudo-religious motivations, and anger and fear. They already display "emotions"...
And on a basic level, a film has to have some reason for watching. Tron is- ultimately- supposed to be a fun Disney fantasy adventure, you have to engage with the plot and/or characters at some level, but for me it never quite gelled, they never came to life.
It's not a bad film; it's technically brilliant, ahead of its time in many respects and was a brave and interesting decision. And it's still perfectly watchable- I just don't think that as a story/character-driven film it works as well as it should.
It was because, underneath the brilliant technology, it was pretty standard Disney fare. The Disney audience didn't appreciate the technology and those that did wanted better writing. Very good point. The plot (as you imply) doesn't have much depth- it's ultimately just a cheesy fantasy. However (IMHO) the reason Tron doesn't really work as a Disney family film either is because the characters never come alive. You just don't care what happens to them... the wooden dialogue and acting just don't help.
However, (as also mentioned in that comment), Tron has never been given the credit it deserves for innovative use of non-CGI animation. "WTF?!", I hear you say... but watch the 20th anniversary DVD documentary, and you'll realise just how reliant Tron was on:-
Manual Layering and Compositing. To get that particular appearance to the characters and other film elements, it was necessary to split the elements up, process them and recombine them. This was *not* a trivial process, and caused many headaches. (For example, when they received some matted-out frames from Korea- or wherever they were doing it- and the wet ink had caused them to stick together. Wet ink!... This is *not* CGI, folks.)
Backlit animation (i.e. pretty things that "glow"). Again, there is a lot of this in the film. Sure, backlit animation itself was nothing new; it seems to have been fashionable in the late-70s/early-80s for animated logos. But the extensive and professional manner in which Tron used it put it in another league altogether.
Both techniques feature so universally (on the scenes inside the computer, obviously) that you could legitimately ask whether those parts of the film were truly "live action"!
The documentary asserts that Tron was the first- and likely to remain the only- film to use these techniques on such a wide scale, and I see no reason to disagree with that. So for once, let's forget Tron's (admittedly brilliant) use of CGI and give credit to its innovations in the non-CGI area.
I'm wary of giving your incompetent statistical analyses any further credibility by taking them (and you) seriously. It's already been made clear why they're worth of nothing but derision. That having been said, I'll bite:
Note that 99% is absurdly optimistic if it only includes condom failure. I chose that number on purpose, being generous and simplifying things. A 99% reduction of risk (i.e. 0.01 * existing_risk), is almost certainly "absurdly optimistic". But since you misused that figure (to imply that any given sexual encounter carried a 1% risk of infection), it's hardly being "generous". On the contrary- if you're talking about the absolute risk of infection for any given sexual encounter, then you're wrong- the risks are much lower than 1% (even *without* condom use) in almost every case.
That's not to say that they're insignificant, but they're sure as hell nowhere near 1%, let alone 100%!
If you want to argue over details like chance of infection with unprotected sex, then I'll take back my 99%. You still don't get it, do you? If you don't understand what that percentage is supposed to mean or how to apply it correctly, it doesn't really matter.
And you're a hypocrite- you accuse me of arguing over "details", but relied on those same statistical details as the basis of your "argument"... and even then you couldn't use them correctly!
Real world condom success, including the problem of many people who mess up, is far lower. (be careful: many condom-related numbers wrongly exclude incorrect usage)
Shall we go with 70% instead? What is this- haggling over figures?
The reduction of risk figure I've seen was 80% in typical (i.e. not ideal) usage.
Really, all this is irrelevant. You didn't acknowledged the well-founded criticisms of your seriously flawed argument ("You have a 99.46% chance of getting the disease!!! That's a death sentence."). Either you still don't understand what the problem was, or you're just trying to skirt the issue.
I'm not even sure if you're just a stupid person acting in good faith, or trying to distort things to promote your own agenda.
Do us all a favour. The basic flaw in your argument was pointed out; in the replies to this post, and you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
You used your childish misunderstanding of your supposedly brilliant probability skills to make a flawed argument and witlessly brand what I said "evil".
You are either an idiot or intentionally trying to deceive people with misuse of probability for your own ideological reasons; and that would be truly "evil". Either way, please just shut up.
Before we get to the meat-and-veg of this stupidity, let's deal with these weasel words:
It is not sane to trust a flimsy latex membrane to save you from horrible diseases that can kill you. "It is not sane to trust a flimsy latex membrane?" Emotionally-loaded use of language that would do an adman proud.
Either it does the job or it doesn't. No-one would claim that it reduces the risks to zero, but it significantly reduces them, which is its job- and all that matters.
What makes the suggestion really evil most people don't understand probability, let alone any serious statistics. That's the part that really pisses me off- you'll see why after you read this bit:
Suppose you do everything right, and get 99% protection -- a generous estimate indeed. Suppose you have sex once a week, year after year. Do you know how to calculate the chance of infection after a decade of that behavior? I do. You have a 99.46% chance of getting the disease!!! Let me repeat: 99.46% That's a death sentence. Your reasoning is shockingly flawed; it assumes (as this idiot also did) that any given unprotected sexual encounter carries a 100% chance of becoming infected. This simply isn't true (see others' replies for more in-depth explanation).
For someone who implies that they know more than "most people [who] don't understand probability, let alone any serious statistics", you couldn't have more clearly demonstrated your incompetence. I'd dismiss you as an arrogant kid who has just learned probability at school and thinks he knows it all (the numbers are correct; their application is totally wrong). But this is unlikely given your lowish user number; given your experience you ought to know better, and you don't.
Let's make this clear. You're claiming to know statistics and probability (and using it to back up your argument) when you obviously have little experience in the areas. You're calling my suggestion "evil", and spouting ludicrous assertions such as "You have a 99.46% chance of getting the disease!!!" and "That's a death sentence" on the basis of a blatantly flawed argument.
In this case, I feel justified in saying that you are one hell of an arrogant and deluded FUCKWIT. Don't you fucking dare call me or anyone or anything else "evil", when you so clearly know nothing about the subject, and probably never will. The only evil thing around here is a stupid and arrogant fool giving out flawed "advice" on a serious subject.
If you got that "1 in 50" figure from about.com, then AFAICT it simply referred to the risk in any given unprotected sexual encounter with a random person. In other words, it already took the percentage of infected people into account; so you're counting it twice.
Still, that's the figures without condom use. And also, I note that about.com gave the risk of unprotected receptive anal sex as between 1 in 50 and 1 in 1300 (a much lower figure). (I would assume that the 1 in 50 figure is a "worst case" guess, and that it applies mainly to ultra-promiscuous gay men in drug-using, multiple-partners/clubbing type situations).
I'm not sure where you got this religion idea from though, since everything in my post was entirely true, and didn't mention anything religious. To be honest, I doubted the truth of the OP's story (I don't know if you're the same AC or not). The story about him/her having AIDs was cursory and somewhat non-specific. The whole thing smacked of a vague "cautionary tale" being used as an excuse to promote a particular sexual/religious agenda.
I would never claim that condom use is 100% reliable. You'll notice that I said it "vastly reduces the risks"; which is correct.
Most studies find that condoms reduce the risk of HIV by 75%-95% (and that's only if they are used every time, and always used properly.) Where did you get that statistic? According to the ones I'm aware of, they reduce the risk by 80% for typical use (not correct use on every occasion, which would provide much greater protection).
Even taking the best case scenario there of 95% reduction, is high-risk sex really worth even a 5% chance of a near-certain death sentence? That's an incredibly stupid (or blatant and deliberate) misinterpretation of the 95% figure. It's a twentyfold reduction of the original risk. These start off at between 1 in 50 (ouch...) and 1 in 1300 for the riskiest forms of sex, and are more like 1 in 100,000 for vaginal sex. Using a condom reduces this between five and twenty times further.
Obviously the risks vary between what you're doing and how you do it- I'm not going to tell anyone that there is no risk when using a condom. It's their life and their decision... but it's just as evil to spout misinformative b******ks as you do.
"Diet Pepsi Max" [..] It is just called "Pepsi Max" in the UK and it doesn't have sugar in it, so is effectively a diet drink, but doesn't have diet in the name. Yeah; and let's be honest here- it's pretty obvious that the whole point of Pepsi Max was to sell sugar-free Pepsi to the young(-ish) male market who didn't want to be seen with a "girl's" drink (Diet Pepsi). (There's just not that much difference in the flavour to justify it on those grounds.) So to call it "Diet" Pepsi Max would be kind of counter-productive.
Pepsi Max was launched in the early 1990s; I'm surprised that Coke only just got round to doing something similar with Coke Zero, because it has been explicitly marketing Diet Coke towards women for years.
That having been said, I don't not drink Diet Coke because it's a girl's drink. I don't drink it because it's foul anaemic garbage I can't believe anyone would like.
All this in a story about 80 column terminals. This is, like, a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. Wouldn't that just be the same thing as the original tangent, then?
[the Saudi royals] give money to their local religious whackos with the tacit agreement that the whackos won't stir up the population to overthrow them. Now, having piles of money, whackos spend it on propaganda So what you're saying is that it goes like this:-
(1) Give money to religious fundamentalists.
(2) ???
(3) Prophet!!!
How dare those jackbooted thugs be making life inconvenient for those who want to upload and download copyrighted materials without paying for them! Whatever the rights and the wrongs of The Pirate Bay doing what they do with copyrighted material, this has nothing to do with the reason given by the police for blocking them. (Mis-)use of the law and unsubstantiated charges (child porn, or "Y") unrelated to the actual reason (piracy, or "X") is an ominous development, even if the original charge is worthy of prosecution. Mainly because it doesn't matter whether X is legal or not (it might just upset the government), or even if they've done anything at all- you can prosecute someone on trumped-up charges regardless.
And 50$ for the iString so they can hang the phone around their neck or 80$ for the iBag so they can carry it on their hip. Socks for your iPod, anyone? Only £18.75 (approx US $37.50, inc. sales tax).....
Are people actually paying close to 20 quid for official iPod SOCKS??!!!!! I rest my.... uh, your case.
I didn't mean that- I was talking about the materials and concepts themselves being the "unsung heroes". Yes, these are incremental improvements, but the overall effect of these improvements is still significant. They deserve (or at least warrant) prominence, if only because so much wouldn't be possible without them.
Let me put it another way; people notice computers, and the way they improve, even though those improvements are mostly incremental- especially Intel and AMD's processors. But they don't notice the everyday developments without which the modern world wouldn't be possible. This isn't about rewarding people, it's about considering things that we take for granted.
If you can't tell the difference between 128kb and lossless formats To be fair, 128kbps MP3s that I made myself using the "notlame" encoder (*) sound quite passable, albeit through a pair of £20 closed ear headphones (**). On the other hand, I have MP3s made by others (that I acquired from.... well, anyway...). The artifacts are much more obvious, and you can see where 128kbps got its poor reputation from.
Perhaps they were transcoded, but AFAIK even without that, the quality of the encoder can make a lot of difference. Therefore, it's maybe not so helpful to damn 128kbps audio without judging it in the best case- or to at least mention the quality of the encoder as well.
(*) Which I believe is a derivative of the well-regarded LAME.
(**) Technics, although for £20, I know they're probably just jumped-up Panasonics. They even use the same case as a cheaper Panasonic model. But for the money, they're quite decent.
The blue laser is a much more important invention that it will likely ever get credit for. The modern world is reliant upon countless inventions that will never get the credit they deserve.
People are kind of snotty about plastic, but can you honestly imagine anything resembling the modern world without it?
And speaking of plastics and materials in general, what about all the materials developed over the past (say) 25 years? The kind that you don't even see, and probably aren't aware of because they're hidden or don't look any different to older plastics- but whose properties are essential to modern inventions.
I don't know much about the science of materials, but having thought about it, I'm pretty convinced that it's another of those "unsung hero" areas.
French had high-definition in 1948- sort of....
on
The History of the CD-ROM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And that's leaving out the issue of finding an HDTV set to make full use of the format. (HDTV was invented in 1969, but wasn't commercially viable until the 90's.) The original French TV standard (before they changed to 625-line SECAM) was 819-line. Whether or not that was high-definition is open to debate (according to Wikipedia, the equipment of the time wasn't capable of exploiting that much resolution).
It's like with million monkeys typing random letters, Reminds me of Digg...
but online users actually produce gramatical content That's not true in every case....
(mostly). ...oh, okay, you remembered Digg after all.;-)
my grandmother can't even double click... This probably isn't helpful, since the problem is likely symptomatic of her problems with computers rather than the cause. However, if you're running Windows (from the later versions of 95 onwards), there's a single-click option.
In XP, it's under the file/directory window's Tools->Folder-Options... dialog, on the General tab. Select "Single click to open an item (point to select)".
IIRC, this was called "Web View" when first introduced; it was supposed to make the computer interface more consistent with that of a web browser. I'm not sure that many people use it... except me.
For some reason, I tried it out when I was learning 95, and kept it that way. This didn't strike me as being strange until right now, when I consciously thought about it. Although I like web-view in some ways, it's also a nuisance when you're trying to select multiple files, particularly from thumbnails- incorrectly hovering can lead to files being deselected (and so on). Not sure why I didn't change back- habit, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
But my point was that the film's premise already required you to accept that programs have pseudo-religious motivations, and anger and fear. They already display "emotions"...
And on a basic level, a film has to have some reason for watching. Tron is- ultimately- supposed to be a fun Disney fantasy adventure, you have to engage with the plot and/or characters at some level, but for me it never quite gelled, they never came to life.
It's not a bad film; it's technically brilliant, ahead of its time in many respects and was a brave and interesting decision. And it's still perfectly watchable- I just don't think that as a story/character-driven film it works as well as it should.
I speculated on reasons for this in a much longer analysis of the film I did a couple of years back.
However, (as also mentioned in that comment), Tron has never been given the credit it deserves for innovative use of non-CGI animation. "WTF?!", I hear you say... but watch the 20th anniversary DVD documentary, and you'll realise just how reliant Tron was on:-
- Manual Layering and Compositing. To get that particular appearance to the characters and other film elements, it was necessary to split the elements up, process them and recombine them. This was *not* a trivial process, and caused many headaches. (For example, when they received some matted-out frames from Korea- or wherever they were doing it- and the wet ink had caused them to stick together. Wet ink!... This is *not* CGI, folks.)
- Backlit animation (i.e. pretty things that "glow"). Again, there is a lot of this in the film. Sure, backlit animation itself was nothing new; it seems to have been fashionable in the late-70s/early-80s for animated logos. But the extensive and professional manner in which Tron used it put it in another league altogether.
Both techniques feature so universally (on the scenes inside the computer, obviously) that you could legitimately ask whether those parts of the film were truly "live action"!The documentary asserts that Tron was the first- and likely to remain the only- film to use these techniques on such a wide scale, and I see no reason to disagree with that. So for once, let's forget Tron's (admittedly brilliant) use of CGI and give credit to its innovations in the non-CGI area.
That's not to say that they're insignificant, but they're sure as hell nowhere near 1%, let alone 100%! If you want to argue over details like chance of infection with unprotected sex, then I'll take back my 99%. You still don't get it, do you? If you don't understand what that percentage is supposed to mean or how to apply it correctly, it doesn't really matter.
And you're a hypocrite- you accuse me of arguing over "details", but relied on those same statistical details as the basis of your "argument"... and even then you couldn't use them correctly! Real world condom success, including the problem of many people who mess up, is far lower. (be careful: many condom-related numbers wrongly exclude incorrect usage)
Shall we go with 70% instead? What is this- haggling over figures?
The reduction of risk figure I've seen was 80% in typical (i.e. not ideal) usage.
Really, all this is irrelevant. You didn't acknowledged the well-founded criticisms of your seriously flawed argument ("You have a 99.46% chance of getting the disease!!! That's a death sentence."). Either you still don't understand what the problem was, or you're just trying to skirt the issue.
I'm not even sure if you're just a stupid person acting in good faith, or trying to distort things to promote your own agenda.
Do us all a favour. The basic flaw in your argument was pointed out; in the replies to this post, and you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
You used your childish misunderstanding of your supposedly brilliant probability skills to make a flawed argument and witlessly brand what I said "evil".
You are either an idiot or intentionally trying to deceive people with misuse of probability for your own ideological reasons; and that would be truly "evil". Either way, please just shut up.
For someone who implies that they know more than "most people [who] don't understand probability, let alone any serious statistics", you couldn't have more clearly demonstrated your incompetence. I'd dismiss you as an arrogant kid who has just learned probability at school and thinks he knows it all (the numbers are correct; their application is totally wrong). But this is unlikely given your lowish user number; given your experience you ought to know better, and you don't.
Let's make this clear. You're claiming to know statistics and probability (and using it to back up your argument) when you obviously have little experience in the areas. You're calling my suggestion "evil", and spouting ludicrous assertions such as "You have a 99.46% chance of getting the disease!!!" and "That's a death sentence" on the basis of a blatantly flawed argument.
In this case, I feel justified in saying that you are one hell of an arrogant and deluded FUCKWIT. Don't you fucking dare call me or anyone or anything else "evil", when you so clearly know nothing about the subject, and probably never will. The only evil thing around here is a stupid and arrogant fool giving out flawed "advice" on a serious subject.
If you got that "1 in 50" figure from about.com, then AFAICT it simply referred to the risk in any given unprotected sexual encounter with a random person. In other words, it already took the percentage of infected people into account; so you're counting it twice.
Still, that's the figures without condom use. And also, I note that about.com gave the risk of unprotected receptive anal sex as between 1 in 50 and 1 in 1300 (a much lower figure). (I would assume that the 1 in 50 figure is a "worst case" guess, and that it applies mainly to ultra-promiscuous gay men in drug-using, multiple-partners/clubbing type situations).
I would never claim that condom use is 100% reliable. You'll notice that I said it "vastly reduces the risks"; which is correct. Most studies find that condoms reduce the risk of HIV by 75%-95% (and that's only if they are used every time, and always used properly.) Where did you get that statistic? According to the ones I'm aware of, they reduce the risk by 80% for typical use (not correct use on every occasion, which would provide much greater protection). Even taking the best case scenario there of 95% reduction, is high-risk sex really worth even a 5% chance of a near-certain death sentence? That's an incredibly stupid (or blatant and deliberate) misinterpretation of the 95% figure. It's a twentyfold reduction of the original risk. These start off at between 1 in 50 (ouch...) and 1 in 1300 for the riskiest forms of sex, and are more like 1 in 100,000 for vaginal sex. Using a condom reduces this between five and twenty times further
Obviously the risks vary between what you're doing and how you do it- I'm not going to tell anyone that there is no risk when using a condom. It's their life and their decision... but it's just as evil to spout misinformative b******ks as you do.
Of course, you omitted to mention that condom use vastly reduces the risks, regardless of what those with a particular religious agenda claim.
Pepsi Max was launched in the early 1990s; I'm surprised that Coke only just got round to doing something similar with Coke Zero, because it has been explicitly marketing Diet Coke towards women for years.
That having been said, I don't not drink Diet Coke because it's a girl's drink. I don't drink it because it's foul anaemic garbage I can't believe anyone would like.
(1) Give money to religious fundamentalists.
(2) ???
(3) Prophet!!!
Most people would say that what you're discussing is software engineering, not computer science.
Are people actually paying close to 20 quid for official iPod SOCKS??!!!!! I rest my.... uh, your case.
I didn't mean that- I was talking about the materials and concepts themselves being the "unsung heroes". Yes, these are incremental improvements, but the overall effect of these improvements is still significant. They deserve (or at least warrant) prominence, if only because so much wouldn't be possible without them.
Let me put it another way; people notice computers, and the way they improve, even though those improvements are mostly incremental- especially Intel and AMD's processors. But they don't notice the everyday developments without which the modern world wouldn't be possible. This isn't about rewarding people, it's about considering things that we take for granted.
Perhaps they were transcoded, but AFAIK even without that, the quality of the encoder can make a lot of difference. Therefore, it's maybe not so helpful to damn 128kbps audio without judging it in the best case- or to at least mention the quality of the encoder as well.
(*) Which I believe is a derivative of the well-regarded LAME.
(**) Technics, although for £20, I know they're probably just jumped-up Panasonics. They even use the same case as a cheaper Panasonic model. But for the money, they're quite decent.
People are kind of snotty about plastic, but can you honestly imagine anything resembling the modern world without it?
And speaking of plastics and materials in general, what about all the materials developed over the past (say) 25 years? The kind that you don't even see, and probably aren't aware of because they're hidden or don't look any different to older plastics- but whose properties are essential to modern inventions.
I don't know much about the science of materials, but having thought about it, I'm pretty convinced that it's another of those "unsung hero" areas.
Alan Cox after a sex-change operation? (Though he'd have to change his surname as well as his christian name- Cox wouldn't be as appropriate then).
In XP, it's under the file/directory window's Tools->Folder-Options... dialog, on the General tab. Select "Single click to open an item (point to select)".
IIRC, this was called "Web View" when first introduced; it was supposed to make the computer interface more consistent with that of a web browser. I'm not sure that many people use it... except me.
For some reason, I tried it out when I was learning 95, and kept it that way. This didn't strike me as being strange until right now, when I consciously thought about it. Although I like web-view in some ways, it's also a nuisance when you're trying to select multiple files, particularly from thumbnails- incorrectly hovering can lead to files being deselected (and so on). Not sure why I didn't change back- habit, I guess.
You forgot to account for the 2 x 9 months of the pregnancies. Which could still make her under 30...