"Homeowners want the conveniences and benefits of new technologies, but they don't want them to be so invasive or ubiquitous in their homes," said Phil Donaldson, senior vice president of product development for Andersen.
If you're asking what the problem is that they're trying to address, that quote tells you.
You're totally right, and the article describes this as a prototype without even an established price. Obviously for the money, whatever it may be, there are much better systems out there -- but that's when you follow the "building a shrine to your TV" model that we're all living with. Take a look around: people build whole "home theater" rooms onto their houses for this stuff, which is ridiculous. The basic M.O. here, as described in that quote from the Andersen guy, is to make the technology fit into your life better, rather that making you suffer with a hardly-really-hidden 42" screen in a colossal entertainment center around which the furniture must make its obseisance.
And yes, of course for the money you could build a nice low-profile drop-down screen. Somehow as a design choice, that wouldn't have the magic "zing" of the room going dark and the picture window turning into a screen in an instant. So nope -- not rational. (Would you want the room to darken every time you watched the 6 pm news anyway?) But it's a design approach I wouldn't mind seeing more of. And the Anderson guy who said that above has a real clue what he's trying to do, anyway.
To observe the obvious: the terrorists involved in 9/11 have no objection to "messy" images. They did target the WTC as a symbol of the US's economic hegemony, and the Pentagon as a symbol of the military -- but their specific targets had everything to do with inflicting lots of casualties in a "spectacular" way, too. "Terror" has a lot to do with bodies.
Forgive the lack of a clever twist on this post, but there it is.
"Advantages" don't seem that great
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The only problem with scroll bars mentioned is:
current display technology constrains the size of the display to be no larger than the physical size of the device.
Are we that worried about the screen real estate? Enough to break the user interface continuity from, say, your computer to your PDA for something as basic as scrolling? The "several advantages" of doing so seem pretty insubstantial:
Scrolling becomes direct and intuitive; one can move to a new region of the space just as fast as one can move the device. Arrows and a scroll bar are going to be more "intuitive" than any "move the PDA and it scrolls" approach, I'm betting. Remember seeing your grandma getting to the edge of her mousepad, and not knowing how to pick up the mouse to "hop" it and scroll a little farther? How intuitive will this be by comparison?
It eliminates the feedback loop of normal scrolling (press "Down", read, press "Down", read, etc.) and replaces it with a single movement. People don't read text as it scrolls. Watch that DVD you have of Star Wars, Episode I -- at 4x speed -- and read the yellow text at the start. Does that work?
It replaces discrete control with continuous control, massively increasing the bandwidth of information communicated between user and device. Is this one just filler? Describe the "massive" increase.
It frees the hand used to operate the device, permitting scrolling and interaction at the same time. People don't read and scroll at one time, and here's guessing they won't poke at a moving target of a button. What would they be doing, dragging a mask over the edge of an image in photoshop -- on their PDA? While moving the "peephole" window?
It yields some of the advantages of two-handed interfaces for free: the non-dominant hand gives coarse positioning information, while the dominant hand does specific pointing and manipulation. You can actually see this one -- except the converse statement would be that it requires two hands to do what one could do before.
If it's really just screen real estate, a trackball or little direction pad like a gameboy has makes more sense, with some sort of tiny but clear visual clue -- a border or something -- that you could scroll in one direction or another. But we're all used to scroll bars by now, we really are, and even something as simple as that would be jarring for lots of people.
Maybe there are some new ways to program for this model, to take advantage of those, uh, advantages, but for the stuff we do now it'd be clumsier.
If you look at the little projectors you have to set up for these first gen demos, they're basically taking up as much room as the pda itself. They'll have to be designed into the Palm or whatever to have a chance -- otherwise the combo's bulky enough to be a mini PC, and those have more meat to the system than a Palm so why not just get one of them instead? (People haven't, yet, but that's really the natural alternative, isn't it?)
Personally I'd prefer something physical -- flexible rubber-surfaced keyboards you roll out or whatever. This sort of reminds me of the eBook's limitations. There are probably lots of hidden sides to having the tangible keyboard, little things you'd miss. People think a book is simple, but the eBook has some serious publishing chops behind it and it still can't get it quite right. Typing in air with little wrist things on your hands? That just isn't going to fly.
There are times when slashdot descends into the morning talk show mire. This topic has to be right up there with those amazingly annoying people who drive slowly in the left-hand lane. Rich veins for lame indignancy.
Loads of technologies we accept every day are more obnoxious than cell phones. Gas lawn mowers, for one: there's a 50-year-old design, and a travesty against peace and quiet -- not to mention modern emissions standards. If a bunch of designers want to be clever about something, they could identify everyday stuff like that for which their might be a technological answer, rather than just cooking up supposedly clever ways to shock the slow drivers in the left lane. Designers who fix the problem have a little something over the ones who just spoof it.
The only example of real cell phone abuse in my presence was a drunk fool at a Bruce Cockburn concert. Like a few awake people have said, the problem there isn't the technology, it's the lack of common consideration and just general stupidity of the user. News break: we always had drunk idiots at concerts. Before they had cell phones, they found ways to get on your nerves. (Granted, I don't go to crap movies, but it's never happened -- maybe your problem is that you're going to MIB II, the audience for which is 15 years old?)
Boy was Conventional Wisdom wrong! It was FUN to learn grafitti. When I first got my Palm, I couldn't wait to learn it, so I can be "in the club" like everyone else. I ran their practice app, and got good at it within an hour.
Let's review:
Their old handwriting recognition system didn't recognize handwriting; it recognized a shorthard system particular to their devices.
They're switching to a new system -- for reasons that have nothing to do with you, the user, but that are instead about a lawsuit they're being threatened with. Their new system also won't recognize your handwriting; it will require you to learn a new shorthand system. Go figure.
And you're enthused. Being part of the club is so very appealing, to you, that you're excited to learn the new one too.
How low are your standards for this company? What irrational drive is wedding you to a plainly half-baked implementation of a basic feature like this? They aren't making the change to respond to your needs, remember -- it's about the lawsuit.
Maybe it's not conventional wisdom, I'll give you that... but is it wisdom at all?
Whether they make the tech tree enormous or not -- and yeah, more variety's cool -- they need to fix some play balance problems in MOO2. The "creative" race thing really got monotonous, especially for multiplayer games. Was there anything "creative" about that playing style?
The Civ 3 tree isn't much larger than Civ 2, but when you play the game some you appreciate how much better it is. Just killing the problem with Leonardo's [Free Lunch] Workshop was a huge deal. Play balance is everything. Variety's nice, but if there's a killer race trait or technology, you won't even bother to try all the other options anyway.
Because There focuses on non-tech geeks, and because communication and chatting forms the core of the world, the company limits you to normal, human looking avatars.
So, what, we can't make ones that look like us in real life?
Shooting daggers and a very Mario-like floating heart convey deeper emotions.
"Deeper" being a relative term... How many times in one day do you wink at someone?
There expects its audience to skew more towards women than men, at least at first. Why? Well according to CEO Tom Melcher, "men will go where the women are, but the reverse isn't true."
The logic there doesn't quite work. Why not just say "The company behind There has figured out what drinking establishments have known for several hundred years"?
Wow. Anyone would've said your first post was a troll, but... See, now there are some people who would see something like this that's written for light entertainment and say "Guess I don't feel like reading that one today" -- and then there are others who see it and say to themselves "This is silly and intended to be fun but I don't read enough to see why! Slashdot isn't about having fun. I must intervene in the service of all that is true and good!"
You remind me of a Limbaugh true believer who expained to me in 1987 that he was propounding a grand new political philosophy -- on a dailup BBS that purged all but the last 100 messages. "Silly?" Silly doesn't even start to describe it.
Some basic exposition is missing from this story. We get the words "religious cult" and then no explanation other than that they want to clone people.
The Raelians, who advocate the cloning of humans, created a company called Clonaid in 1997. The company's web site says its "main goal is to give life to the first human clone."
...The Raelians, who claim 55,000 members worldwide, believe human life was created by DNA brought to earth by an alien race. Their founder and leader is Rael, a former French journalist known as Claude Vorilhon.
The group's headquarters, called UFO Land, are located in Valcourt, Que., about 200 km east of Montreal.
So, um, what about this "cult" is "religious"? You read a story like that, and the labels get used, but what exactly are the "religious" aspects of the cultism, here? 'Cause I'm kinda curious.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on.
You're saying human scientists were able to do that a few years after we speciated from whatever our direct ancestor was? Wow, I missed that.
No, really, I understand -- you're saying it won't necessarily take forever, now we've thought of it, to mimic butterfly flight. Maybe.
But go take a look and see how long submarine designers have been trying to mimic the agility (and specifically, lack of drag) of dolphins in the water. Or watch the way a sparrow uses stall speed when it lands on a tree branch outside your office window. Ain't necessarily all that easy. We can't make robots that run around like a five-year-old can, and that's a mode of locomotion we know pretty well, right?
I have liatris aspera plants in my front priarie garden -- a monarch magnet -- and sometimes in August there are maybe eight butterflies dogfighting for position out there. They aren't sluggish in flight, not at all. Maybe you haven't watched a buttefly lately?
So, let's see -- pop-cultural decline as measured by the "spirit" of the Mad Max movies, is it?
Wimpy, who was addicted to hamburgers (a stand-in for alcohol in those more sensitive times).
Those more sensitive times? You're saying it's imaginable, today, to have a popular kids' cartoon where being a drunk is funny? If anything we'd be much quicker to find that offensive now, wouldn't we? (Dick Van Dyke used to do a great drunk on his show, very funny -- until he got sober in real life.)
Spongebob Squarepants, who epitomizes and glorifies chronic laziness and disrespect for authority...
Spongebob squarepants ain't an influence on Generation X, and I'm having trouble thinking of who you mean by "like" spongebob for them. If you wanted a weird choice to do with the drug culture, you might have chosen "H.R. Puffinstuff" -- now THERE was a thinly veiled drug reference, huh? As far as "obviously gay" fictional characters, the first one I can remember was Monroe on a lame sitcom called Too Close for Comfort... hardly a huge cultural milestone, and not much of a formative role model for anyone really.
The Mad Max movies were okay fun -- they did have a low budget thing going on at first, and I sort of dread sitting through what's sure to be a lavish, CGI-beefed reprise. But cultural belleweathers they aren't. If this one sucks, it'll be because it got made for money rather than fun.
Is this patent from the same Tokyo commuter whose inflatable underwear went off on the train a few years ago?
(Who knew NASA technology would pay off in this particular indirect way? Now our motorcyclists are bouncing around like Mars Pathfinder... After the accident maybe they can enjoy some refreshing TANG.)
The commercials' sound could be an artifact of their TV origins. Commercials on TV spike the sound levels, they're far more extreme that way than the programming they interrupt. They're intended to have more dramatic changes in volume and pitch, to grab your attention -- sort of like "NEW!" blurbs on toothpaste packaging.
That's one reason for the televisions with that sound-leveling feature that keeps everything within a given volume range.
Has anyone else noticed that most theaters these days turn the sound up to truly nasty levels?
Pop-cultural volume-setting rule: always amp any public situation in order to drown out the crowds of screaming girls who'll be there to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo. If you don't plan for a horde of crazed fans going hoarse screaming, you're only planning for failure. (Note to Miriam Makeba concert producers: hysterical fans are not going to threaten to drown out respected African folk singers.)
I'll see this in the theater, I love the event of it when it's actually a very decent movie. But you're right, the first movie was loud enough to sterilize the mice living in my theater's floorboards. Even the people who get a perfect copy in this Asian market are going to go home and crank the home theater system up to rumble the fittings on their bathroom sink. Loud must be better, right?
My father worked at a mapmaking company. They had some charts of Mars that NASA printed through the USGS.
Down in the corner there was a standard disclaimer to the effect that if you found any inaccuracies in the map during use, NASA and the USGS weren't responsible.
For one, there is no evidence of any other planetary body which would have gotten a significant infusion of water this way and it seems unlikely that Mars would have been the only target.
Discover ran a story about someone who thinks Earth is still being bombarded by smaller bodies like this -- it was a couple of years ago I think. He's regarded as a flake, but he's at least on the edges of the real scientific community.
Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days).
Ever hear of the Lake Missoula ice-age floods? Water from a penned-in glacial lake burst through ice dams several times, ripping up the northwestern US in colossal floods. The entire surface of eastern Washington state was formed through quite sudden flooding:
"In about two days the water of Glacial Lake Missoula emptied through the breached dam. The amount of escaping water was equal to ten times the discharge of all the Earth's rivers today." Water several hundred feet deep flooded the region and ripped up hundreds of feet of soil and rock, carrying it inside the torrent of water westward toward the sea. The flood cut channels and carved islands, leaving behind the scarred landscape now called the Channeled Scabland.
Imagine ripples like in a streambed, only on the scale of hillsides. It doesn't necessarily take years.
Not that I'm buying this idea, but it's not as outrageous as all that.
Punitive damages are damages awarded to a successful plaintiff in a civil action, over and above the amount of compensatory damages, to:
punish the conduct of the civil defendant;
deter the civil defendant from committing the invidious act again; and
deter others from doing the same thing.
You can say punitive damages are a weird bleeding edge between civil and criminal law, but "retarded" doesn't work for me. They're meant to prevent corporate indifference to stuff like bad tailgate latches on minivans. The reason they're proportional is to be sure the mammoth corporation doesn't just shrug and move on -- which is why, horror of horrors, McDonald's was originally told to fork over two days' worth of coffee sales. (The eventual settlement was much smaller. It was cut to 400 grand almost immediately, and then they settled out of court.)
I don't really see the comparison to this red tint thing. McDonalds' arrogance had resulted in over 700 scalding cases in the years prior to that case, and their own doctor on the stand said the coffee was being served so hot it could destroy skin on contact. Here Disney's covering its butt in the usual corporate manner, but why would you need to put the hammer down? How "invidious" is releasing a sucky DVD? Can I sue because A Christmas Story is a bad transfer with no letterboxing and warbling sound?
I think William showed just how lame some people are.
A great person, responding to questions, elevates the asker and the listener. A little person dismisses questions arbitrarily, comes across as vaguely defensive and aggressive toward the questioners, and just basically makes everyone feel smaller for the experience, including the listener.
Does anyone feel like they've just heard from a genuinely great guy? Because he so aptly deomonstrated how "lame" the questions were?
You know, I just hunted back and read the old Wil Wheaton/. interview, and he answered the questions, you know? With some funny anecdotes and a measure of thought?
Not that I scheduled my week around this, but Shatner's interview could have been worth the two minutes it took us to read it.
Try building one without paying adequate attention to the needs of the people who'll use it, you mean? That way you'll end up with the hybrid train tracks and the backward compatibility with commercial trucking and so on, sure. The only way a bridge like that gets built is when the engineer is too arrogant to solicit and pay attention to the needs of the people commissioning the thing.
A good architect or engineer puts a hell of a lot more thought into those supposedly routine ("they only do one thing") bridges than software "engineers" put into their designs, at least from what I see. The point of this article is that software's much more unique and variable, but shouldn't that make us better at listening to the user?
And after the franchise has run its course, Keaton is arguably the best of the "Dark Knight" movie versions.
In other news, I've recently been declared the tallest short person in the world.
For all the hype at the time, all those Batman movies were incoherent and dreary. Quick -- give me three memorable lines or situations from that first Batman. I can think of one line, and then I'm stuck on the dreadful dead pause with the Prince video/parade forty-hour sequence. Memorable 'cause it was so squalid, maybe...
Spielberg won't blow it in quite that way, or that's not his M.O. anyway. But I'll take the WB cartoons for Batman, thanks, and for this particular movie -- or Foundations, or Harry Potter -- I'd take a well-done miniseries from the BBC, on a shoestring budget with stage actors and a decent script, over Hollywood any day. (Except the day the next LOTR comes out, I mean.)
Probably the censors think "Red Lobster" is some sort of subtle political metaphor.
The tradition of allegorical criticism in Chinese literature and art makes that a suspicious name. When intellectuals want to confront the government in China, and this isn't just since 1948, they write a metaphorical poem about flowers. (When the leadership wants to prove they're still vital despite the criticism, they fake pictures of themselves swimming in the Yangtze river.)
Or maybe Red Lobster's on the list because of some sort of fluky algorithm -- though I doubt it. The Chinese economy is all about labor-intensive everything. Huge buildings there are coated in tile, because the material's cheap and the labor doesn't cost anything. They'd do this with brute human force. I imagine a beehive of busy IS professionals is steadily clicking through the internet every day, identifying illicit sites and disconnecting people who try to access them. Wow.
They're paying people to lie inside MRI machines and look at pictures of products while the machine snaps images of their brains.
News flash: people who volunteer for medical research aren't always in much of a position to buy consumer products. Maybe the people who might actually buy your sports sedan will think about the car instead of the girl, you know?
It's amazing the things people will willingly do for a study like this. Advertizing psychology does stuff like put little cameras in your living room, to track your eye movement when you watch commercials. Who would volunteer for that to be in her home? Chee-sus! (And who are the people who start fooling around on camera? Supposedly happens, or according to a psych teacher I had anyway.)
Advertizers have no scruples, but are we this willing to participate in the process?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're asking what the problem is that they're trying to address, that quote tells you.
You're totally right, and the article describes this as a prototype without even an established price. Obviously for the money, whatever it may be, there are much better systems out there -- but that's when you follow the "building a shrine to your TV" model that we're all living with. Take a look around: people build whole "home theater" rooms onto their houses for this stuff, which is ridiculous. The basic M.O. here, as described in that quote from the Andersen guy, is to make the technology fit into your life better, rather that making you suffer with a hardly-really-hidden 42" screen in a colossal entertainment center around which the furniture must make its obseisance.
And yes, of course for the money you could build a nice low-profile drop-down screen. Somehow as a design choice, that wouldn't have the magic "zing" of the room going dark and the picture window turning into a screen in an instant. So nope -- not rational. (Would you want the room to darken every time you watched the 6 pm news anyway?) But it's a design approach I wouldn't mind seeing more of. And the Anderson guy who said that above has a real clue what he's trying to do, anyway.
To observe the obvious: the terrorists involved in 9/11 have no objection to "messy" images. They did target the WTC as a symbol of the US's economic hegemony, and the Pentagon as a symbol of the military -- but their specific targets had everything to do with inflicting lots of casualties in a "spectacular" way, too. "Terror" has a lot to do with bodies.
Forgive the lack of a clever twist on this post, but there it is.
The only problem with scroll bars mentioned is:
Are we that worried about the screen real estate? Enough to break the user interface continuity from, say, your computer to your PDA for something as basic as scrolling? The "several advantages" of doing so seem pretty insubstantial:
If it's really just screen real estate, a trackball or little direction pad like a gameboy has makes more sense, with some sort of tiny but clear visual clue -- a border or something -- that you could scroll in one direction or another. But we're all used to scroll bars by now, we really are, and even something as simple as that would be jarring for lots of people.
Maybe there are some new ways to program for this model, to take advantage of those, uh, advantages, but for the stuff we do now it'd be clumsier.
Personally I'd prefer something physical -- flexible rubber-surfaced keyboards you roll out or whatever. This sort of reminds me of the eBook's limitations. There are probably lots of hidden sides to having the tangible keyboard, little things you'd miss. People think a book is simple, but the eBook has some serious publishing chops behind it and it still can't get it quite right. Typing in air with little wrist things on your hands? That just isn't going to fly.
Loads of technologies we accept every day are more obnoxious than cell phones. Gas lawn mowers, for one: there's a 50-year-old design, and a travesty against peace and quiet -- not to mention modern emissions standards. If a bunch of designers want to be clever about something, they could identify everyday stuff like that for which their might be a technological answer, rather than just cooking up supposedly clever ways to shock the slow drivers in the left lane. Designers who fix the problem have a little something over the ones who just spoof it.
The only example of real cell phone abuse in my presence was a drunk fool at a Bruce Cockburn concert. Like a few awake people have said, the problem there isn't the technology, it's the lack of common consideration and just general stupidity of the user. News break: we always had drunk idiots at concerts. Before they had cell phones, they found ways to get on your nerves. (Granted, I don't go to crap movies, but it's never happened -- maybe your problem is that you're going to MIB II, the audience for which is 15 years old?)
Let's review:
Their old handwriting recognition system didn't recognize handwriting; it recognized a shorthard system particular to their devices.
They're switching to a new system -- for reasons that have nothing to do with you, the user, but that are instead about a lawsuit they're being threatened with. Their new system also won't recognize your handwriting; it will require you to learn a new shorthand system. Go figure.
And you're enthused. Being part of the club is so very appealing, to you, that you're excited to learn the new one too.
How low are your standards for this company? What irrational drive is wedding you to a plainly half-baked implementation of a basic feature like this? They aren't making the change to respond to your needs, remember -- it's about the lawsuit.
Maybe it's not conventional wisdom, I'll give you that... but is it wisdom at all?
The Civ 3 tree isn't much larger than Civ 2, but when you play the game some you appreciate how much better it is. Just killing the problem with Leonardo's [Free Lunch] Workshop was a huge deal. Play balance is everything. Variety's nice, but if there's a killer race trait or technology, you won't even bother to try all the other options anyway.
So, what, we can't make ones that look like us in real life?
Shooting daggers and a very Mario-like floating heart convey deeper emotions.
"Deeper" being a relative term... How many times in one day do you wink at someone?
There expects its audience to skew more towards women than men, at least at first. Why? Well according to CEO Tom Melcher, "men will go where the women are, but the reverse isn't true."
The logic there doesn't quite work. Why not just say "The company behind There has figured out what drinking establishments have known for several hundred years"?
Wow. Anyone would've said your first post was a troll, but... See, now there are some people who would see something like this that's written for light entertainment and say "Guess I don't feel like reading that one today" -- and then there are others who see it and say to themselves "This is silly and intended to be fun but I don't read enough to see why! Slashdot isn't about having fun. I must intervene in the service of all that is true and good!"
You remind me of a Limbaugh true believer who expained to me in 1987 that he was propounding a grand new political philosophy -- on a dailup BBS that purged all but the last 100 messages. "Silly?" Silly doesn't even start to describe it.
(There is a TiVo knockoff for Macs, by the way. Uses hard drive space rather than a dedicated drive, which makes no sense to me, but whatever...)
Some basic exposition is missing from this story. We get the words "religious cult" and then no explanation other than that they want to clone people.
So, um, what about this "cult" is "religious"? You read a story like that, and the labels get used, but what exactly are the "religious" aspects of the cultism, here? 'Cause I'm kinda curious.
You're saying human scientists were able to do that a few years after we speciated from whatever our direct ancestor was? Wow, I missed that.
No, really, I understand -- you're saying it won't necessarily take forever, now we've thought of it, to mimic butterfly flight. Maybe.
But go take a look and see how long submarine designers have been trying to mimic the agility (and specifically, lack of drag) of dolphins in the water. Or watch the way a sparrow uses stall speed when it lands on a tree branch outside your office window. Ain't necessarily all that easy. We can't make robots that run around like a five-year-old can, and that's a mode of locomotion we know pretty well, right?
I have liatris aspera plants in my front priarie garden -- a monarch magnet -- and sometimes in August there are maybe eight butterflies dogfighting for position out there. They aren't sluggish in flight, not at all. Maybe you haven't watched a buttefly lately?
Wimpy, who was addicted to hamburgers (a stand-in for alcohol in those more sensitive times).
Those more sensitive times? You're saying it's imaginable, today, to have a popular kids' cartoon where being a drunk is funny? If anything we'd be much quicker to find that offensive now, wouldn't we? (Dick Van Dyke used to do a great drunk on his show, very funny -- until he got sober in real life.)
Spongebob Squarepants, who epitomizes and glorifies chronic laziness and disrespect for authority...
Spongebob squarepants ain't an influence on Generation X, and I'm having trouble thinking of who you mean by "like" spongebob for them. If you wanted a weird choice to do with the drug culture, you might have chosen "H.R. Puffinstuff" -- now THERE was a thinly veiled drug reference, huh? As far as "obviously gay" fictional characters, the first one I can remember was Monroe on a lame sitcom called Too Close for Comfort... hardly a huge cultural milestone, and not much of a formative role model for anyone really.
The Mad Max movies were okay fun -- they did have a low budget thing going on at first, and I sort of dread sitting through what's sure to be a lavish, CGI-beefed reprise. But cultural belleweathers they aren't. If this one sucks, it'll be because it got made for money rather than fun.
(Who knew NASA technology would pay off in this particular indirect way? Now our motorcyclists are bouncing around like Mars Pathfinder... After the accident maybe they can enjoy some refreshing TANG.)
That's one reason for the televisions with that sound-leveling feature that keeps everything within a given volume range.
Pop-cultural volume-setting rule: always amp any public situation in order to drown out the crowds of screaming girls who'll be there to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo. If you don't plan for a horde of crazed fans going hoarse screaming, you're only planning for failure. (Note to Miriam Makeba concert producers: hysterical fans are not going to threaten to drown out respected African folk singers.)
I'll see this in the theater, I love the event of it when it's actually a very decent movie. But you're right, the first movie was loud enough to sterilize the mice living in my theater's floorboards. Even the people who get a perfect copy in this Asian market are going to go home and crank the home theater system up to rumble the fittings on their bathroom sink. Loud must be better, right?
Down in the corner there was a standard disclaimer to the effect that if you found any inaccuracies in the map during use, NASA and the USGS weren't responsible.
Use?
Discover ran a story about someone who thinks Earth is still being bombarded by smaller bodies like this -- it was a couple of years ago I think. He's regarded as a flake, but he's at least on the edges of the real scientific community.
Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days).
Ever hear of the Lake Missoula ice-age floods? Water from a penned-in glacial lake burst through ice dams several times, ripping up the northwestern US in colossal floods. The entire surface of eastern Washington state was formed through quite sudden flooding:
Imagine ripples like in a streambed, only on the scale of hillsides. It doesn't necessarily take years.
Not that I'm buying this idea, but it's not as outrageous as all that.
"The concept of punitive damages is retarded"
The wikipedia says:
You can say punitive damages are a weird bleeding edge between civil and criminal law, but "retarded" doesn't work for me. They're meant to prevent corporate indifference to stuff like bad tailgate latches on minivans. The reason they're proportional is to be sure the mammoth corporation doesn't just shrug and move on -- which is why, horror of horrors, McDonald's was originally told to fork over two days' worth of coffee sales. (The eventual settlement was much smaller. It was cut to 400 grand almost immediately, and then they settled out of court.)
I don't really see the comparison to this red tint thing. McDonalds' arrogance had resulted in over 700 scalding cases in the years prior to that case, and their own doctor on the stand said the coffee was being served so hot it could destroy skin on contact. Here Disney's covering its butt in the usual corporate manner, but why would you need to put the hammer down? How "invidious" is releasing a sucky DVD? Can I sue because A Christmas Story is a bad transfer with no letterboxing and warbling sound?
A great person, responding to questions, elevates the asker and the listener. A little person dismisses questions arbitrarily, comes across as vaguely defensive and aggressive toward the questioners, and just basically makes everyone feel smaller for the experience, including the listener.
Does anyone feel like they've just heard from a genuinely great guy? Because he so aptly deomonstrated how "lame" the questions were?
Not that I scheduled my week around this, but Shatner's interview could have been worth the two minutes it took us to read it.
A good architect or engineer puts a hell of a lot more thought into those supposedly routine ("they only do one thing") bridges than software "engineers" put into their designs, at least from what I see. The point of this article is that software's much more unique and variable, but shouldn't that make us better at listening to the user?
In other news, I've recently been declared the tallest short person in the world.
For all the hype at the time, all those Batman movies were incoherent and dreary. Quick -- give me three memorable lines or situations from that first Batman. I can think of one line, and then I'm stuck on the dreadful dead pause with the Prince video/parade forty-hour sequence. Memorable 'cause it was so squalid, maybe...
Spielberg won't blow it in quite that way, or that's not his M.O. anyway. But I'll take the WB cartoons for Batman, thanks, and for this particular movie -- or Foundations, or Harry Potter -- I'd take a well-done miniseries from the BBC, on a shoestring budget with stage actors and a decent script, over Hollywood any day. (Except the day the next LOTR comes out, I mean.)
Probably the censors think "Red Lobster" is some sort of subtle political metaphor.
The tradition of allegorical criticism in Chinese literature and art makes that a suspicious name. When intellectuals want to confront the government in China, and this isn't just since 1948, they write a metaphorical poem about flowers. (When the leadership wants to prove they're still vital despite the criticism, they fake pictures of themselves swimming in the Yangtze river.)
Or maybe Red Lobster's on the list because of some sort of fluky algorithm -- though I doubt it. The Chinese economy is all about labor-intensive everything. Huge buildings there are coated in tile, because the material's cheap and the labor doesn't cost anything. They'd do this with brute human force. I imagine a beehive of busy IS professionals is steadily clicking through the internet every day, identifying illicit sites and disconnecting people who try to access them. Wow.
News flash: people who volunteer for medical research aren't always in much of a position to buy consumer products. Maybe the people who might actually buy your sports sedan will think about the car instead of the girl, you know?
It's amazing the things people will willingly do for a study like this. Advertizing psychology does stuff like put little cameras in your living room, to track your eye movement when you watch commercials. Who would volunteer for that to be in her home? Chee-sus! (And who are the people who start fooling around on camera? Supposedly happens, or according to a psych teacher I had anyway.)
Advertizers have no scruples, but are we this willing to participate in the process?