My prediction is that in 5-10 years, the average home computer will have a machinima software package that will produce Little Nemo quality or better animation with basically video-game controls. It would be a convergence of machinima and open-source rendering programs. I can't wait until any geek in the world can animate their feature-length sci-fi movie on their home computer!
I'll have to disagree with that. For many people "right" looking shadows are like the movies and television shows. Shadows and light/dark interplay in these environments are far from natural and even in ray-traced environments, animators laboriously juggle "fake" light sources to make the shadows "right" looking. So then, in a ray-traced environment, couldn't developers just install virtual stage lights in the environment to re-create TV and movie lighting in the gameplay? Sort of the same way that Nintendo made the Zelda game look like it was animated?
If this really is true, we could easily prove or disprove it. First, make a map of street crimes before cameras. Then, make a map of street crime after cameras. The 'after' map should show holes where no street crime is occurring. These crimeless holes should match up exactly with a map of camera coverage.
Furthermore, I won't buy arguments that cameras deter crime generally because criminals don't know where cameras are, so they simply stop committing crimes all around. Criminals, though they risk injury and imprisonment in their chosen profession, really aren't stupid. They are clever like a fox -- they find 'safe' areas to prowl and pick 'marks' to target. If they know a camera is in the area, they will avoid it. If you ever doubt that criminals are clever and crafty, overhear a conversation amongst drug dealers and buyers. They know the ins and outs of reasonable search, suspicion, evidence, punishment, and mandatory sentencing.
"Well, if they are so smart and they know so much about the law, then why do they get caught?" They know ( and learn -- sometimes the hard way ) the risks, and they willingly take them. Getting caught is part of the game. It's like asking, "If investors know so much about finance, why would they ever lose money?" Criminals view it as part of the system. You win some, you lose some. Time in prison is seen by many young black men as part of growing up. Sooner or later, you are going to do time.
Yeah, sure, geeks would never pass up the chance for sex, because it comes so rarely. If a woman comes up to a geek and says, "Would you like to have sex?" the geek will respond with a resounding "Yes I would!"
The poorly socialized, autism-spectrum geek never passes up the chance for sex by totally ignoring a woman when she turns her wrists to him, or plays with her hair in front of him. He never blows it by forgetting her name, not making eye contact, or rambling on about the details his favorite obscure subject when she asks him a simple rhetorical question. The geek is perfectly capable of maintaining the long train of social cues and responses that allow a woman to drop her defenses and risk pregnancy, negative social status, and disease for a few moments of pleasure. His black-and-white binary world-view doesn't divide women into the Madonna/whore bifurcation when he sees her talking to another man or finds out details of her past.
Nope, you're absolutely right, the alert, knowledgeable, sleuthing geek would never miss an opportunity for sex! He can also spot sarcasm at fifty yards!
You know what? I think you're right. This totally makes sense. Dad has high-powered connections -- doctors, lawyers, bankers -- none of whom understand technology. Like every parent, he keeps telling them over and over again how his son is a genius on the computer. Finally they witness some small demonstration of his supposed genius -- the ability to pay for items in a game -- and either they think it's cute, until they hear his pie-in-the-sky dreams of how he could take over the internet, OR they immediately see it as a way to monetize MMORPGs. Then they whip out their checkbooks.
One idle day, I imagined a MMORPG where you play a wizard who can create monsters. You develop and test these monsters fighting each other on their own machine. Then, when you feel ready, you can 'open a portal', and invite another wizard to send their monsters the arena on your machine. You battle it out and see how your creation does. You can also enter another wizard's arena if you so choose.
This great MMORPG would have magic balancing code so that you couldn't create super kill-all monsters, but they had to have could strategies based on different resources. You have to program them with behavior to survive in the arena. You would be a team of various monsters that would employ various strategies. Different team composures would have different success against various team make-ups.
Probably just because it's orders of magnitude easier to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot, compared to a 3-D virtual world? Most people aren't interested in reading, and that's why there isn't greater web saturation amongst the population. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources. Nerds, whose primary interest in life is learning and sharing knowledge, comprise a small portion of the population. Most people are interested in totally different things. Witness the popularity of pornographic images and movies, MySpace, and youtube -- that's what most people are interested in.
I predict that the more powerful computers become, they more they will fulfill the average person's desires, which have little to do with learning, and have a lot more to do with hanging out, looking good, socializing, and having sex. Of course, there will be a small cadre of geeks who will recreated the 'nerd table in the lunchroom' in this giant virtual orgy, playing dungeons and graons and discussing the fine details of obscure subjects, but I predict after a certain point, the internet will no longer resemble the nerd paradise it started out as.
You are right. I did overlook the new possibility of self-production, internet distribution, and mass-market micropayments. However, I don't think most artists will make a living at it even then -- more will be able to, but I think music will still be a hobby or side gig for most artists who produce and sell.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but artists really don't make a living. Be it music, painting, theater, acrobatics; it doesn't matter. You just can't do enough to make ends meet. That's why we have the term 'starving artist'.
Any ideas? Without the artists being able to make a living, we'll end up with no dedicated artists at all. If you want dedicated artists, you'll either have to have the state pay for it ( good luck selling that in America ) , or have sponsorships of wealthy patrons and corporations ( selling out, anyone? ). All of the classical music that we get from the middle ages was paid for by the sponsorship of a wealthy patron or financed by the church ( which is why so much is religious ). Folk songs are songs that people sang when the got done working in the fields. The troubadour of medieval Europe was a combination musician, storyteller, and message- and news-carrier -- and also a wandering, starving vagabond. Your local opera, dance ensemble, or theater group exists on government grants, wealthy donors, and perhaps a trust fund. Art is not something that puts food in your mouth. It's something you do after you've put food in your mouth, in order to give your life meaning and a reason to get up in the morning.
The ability to make a living as a musician in the past 100 years has depended on the difficulty of production and distribution of music recordings, and the willingness of the artists to go on tour. Needless to say, the record companies raked in the lion's share of the proceeds, leaving the recording, performing musician mostly broke. A few people became super stars, which a few generations of suckers for the record labels to exploit, preying on their hopes of becoming famous and rich. Few people became famous; even less became rich. And those that did become rich made their money from performing; record sales, not so much.
Now we have come full circle: music recording and distribution has become so cheap, you don't have that revenue stream available anymore. Musicians who do make a living as musicians will do so by going around performing, just as they did before the 20th century. And the idea that musicians were actually able to make a decent living as recording artists during the 20th century is really a myth -- successful musicians, even those who sold lots of albums, made their money from touring. The record companies took most of the profits from record sales. Sure there were a number of popular musicians, but there were many more who never made any money off of it.
Most people with a Masters of Fine Arts who actually still paint ( and I know a few of them ) have a day job. A few of them are lucky enough to teach college kids to paint. The rest sell weed and/or are starving.
So, being a full time artist is a pipe dream for many people. It many sound like a downer, but I look at it the other way -- for human history, art has always been a folk expression. People got together in the village after they were done in the fields and danced and sang. Simple as that. Your brother will have a hard time making a living solely as an artist, but he can get a 9-to-5 and perform at some bars a few nights a week, release an album every few years, and have a damn lot of fun doing it, all without starving;)
What is the deal with this RIAA/MPAA situation? Are these organizations run by total morons? I'm not trolling, but it seems like they aren't putting one iota of serious effort into this. Are they so cynical, moneyed, and jaded, that they think nothing of suing mothers and teenagers apparently just for the hell of it? How can they do such a lousy effort this yet be one of the largest sectors of industry?
The longer I live, the more I am in a state of sheer awe that society doesn't come apart like Britney Spears fan on youtube.
... the tendency to just insert dark matter wherever it's needed, after the fact (as opposed to predicting its presence and location by theory) Here's a thought -- what if the sole observable property of dark matter was that it exerted gravitational tug on the stuff around it? That there was no other way to detect it, other than it made it look like there should be some matter, with other observable properties, exist in a certain place? That it is not 'dark' matter at all, just a force of gravity? That you could only observe it by excluding all other possible explanations of gravitational pull?
I've seen the kudzu 'statuaries' here in Ohio... Does kudzu need to climb on living things, or can it creep on walls? If it doesn't need trees, we could build a field of frames or towers for the kudzu to grow. If it needs the organic structure of trees for climbing grip, we could use what are essentially telephone poles in the field. Kudzu seems to have no problem climbing dead trees, and that's what a telephone pole is. Think of tomato plant poles or grape trellises , on a much larger scale.
And if you have a flat surface, like a tower or telephone pole, the kudzu vines may be easy to harvest by just pulling them down, if their grip isn't that strong.
Or perhaps cops are more likely to round up non-whites, disbelieve their stories, and prosecutors are more likely to charge them with more serious crimes, and judges and juries are more likely to find them guilty...
I re-read the article trying to figure out the point you can make. From what I gather, a Swedish 'hacker' -- probably just a computer user -- found a list of valid passwords for the embassies' email websites. It's not like this is a buffer overflow, backdoor, or lousy password policy. They simply didn't protect their passwords, AFAICan tell. So what exactly is the story, or the journalistic angle? "Web email system works as expected, even for Embassies" ? That you can log in, provided you know the username and password?
This info can be validated by anyone in 3 minutes. Sigh. First of all, No, it can't. Investigative journalists are trained to do only two things:
Tell when someone's lying or when their story doesn't add up -- a kind of social engineering
Follow the money
They can't examine scientific claims or medical breakthroughs or stories about computer technologies. When they are forced to do this, they call a bunch of experts and see what their opinions are, which is basically employing skill #1.
If you can validate this story in 3 minutes, you are a better than average computer expert than probably even most tech support people out there -- let alone Joe Blow or any journalist.
Secondly, even if a journalist could validate this in 3 minutes, they shouldn't bother, because 99% percent of the anonymous crapflood would turn out to be completely false and a waste of time. If they bothered to validate this story, they would be looking into water-combusting engines or new evidence of the faked moon landing all the time. And we have enough of those stories already.
Yeah right. Newspapers get bogus crap from anonymous 'geniuses' all the time, who claim to have uncovered conspiracies or figured out the secrets of the universe. Another list of startling vulnerabilities in the world's embassies certainly would have gotten the attention of all the editors.
IANAB, but I believe their are. We inherit our mDNA exclusively from our mothers. By the way, this is how they traced back the human genome to find the 'Mitochondrial Eve', a theoretical female ancestor of all humans alive today. She lived about 200,000 years ago, and they figured this out by looking at the mDNA from people around the world and figuring how long ago it was the same.
Grandparent was arguing kind, not this specific program. He said that a project, any project, this large can be kept secret. They didn't say, "this project was kept secret".
Slashdot Mirror
My prediction is that in 5-10 years, the average home computer will have a machinima software package that will produce Little Nemo quality or better animation with basically video-game controls. It would be a convergence of machinima and open-source rendering programs. I can't wait until any geek in the world can animate their feature-length sci-fi movie on their home computer!
If this really is true, we could easily prove or disprove it. First, make a map of street crimes before cameras. Then, make a map of street crime after cameras. The 'after' map should show holes where no street crime is occurring. These crimeless holes should match up exactly with a map of camera coverage.
Furthermore, I won't buy arguments that cameras deter crime generally because criminals don't know where cameras are, so they simply stop committing crimes all around. Criminals, though they risk injury and imprisonment in their chosen profession, really aren't stupid. They are clever like a fox -- they find 'safe' areas to prowl and pick 'marks' to target. If they know a camera is in the area, they will avoid it. If you ever doubt that criminals are clever and crafty, overhear a conversation amongst drug dealers and buyers. They know the ins and outs of reasonable search, suspicion, evidence, punishment, and mandatory sentencing.
"Well, if they are so smart and they know so much about the law, then why do they get caught?" They know ( and learn -- sometimes the hard way ) the risks, and they willingly take them. Getting caught is part of the game. It's like asking, "If investors know so much about finance, why would they ever lose money?" Criminals view it as part of the system. You win some, you lose some. Time in prison is seen by many young black men as part of growing up. Sooner or later, you are going to do time.
Oh! Thank God they wouldn't have us boarding planes like this!
Yeah, sure, geeks would never pass up the chance for sex, because it comes so rarely. If a woman comes up to a geek and says, "Would you like to have sex?" the geek will respond with a resounding "Yes I would!"
The poorly socialized, autism-spectrum geek never passes up the chance for sex by totally ignoring a woman when she turns her wrists to him, or plays with her hair in front of him. He never blows it by forgetting her name, not making eye contact, or rambling on about the details his favorite obscure subject when she asks him a simple rhetorical question. The geek is perfectly capable of maintaining the long train of social cues and responses that allow a woman to drop her defenses and risk pregnancy, negative social status, and disease for a few moments of pleasure. His black-and-white binary world-view doesn't divide women into the Madonna/whore bifurcation when he sees her talking to another man or finds out details of her past.
Nope, you're absolutely right, the alert, knowledgeable, sleuthing geek would never miss an opportunity for sex! He can also spot sarcasm at fifty yards!
Where did you find his email address? I'd like to email him. I am yet unable to find it on the Forbes website.
You know what? I think you're right. This totally makes sense. Dad has high-powered connections -- doctors, lawyers, bankers -- none of whom understand technology. Like every parent, he keeps telling them over and over again how his son is a genius on the computer. Finally they witness some small demonstration of his supposed genius -- the ability to pay for items in a game -- and either they think it's cute, until they hear his pie-in-the-sky dreams of how he could take over the internet, OR they immediately see it as a way to monetize MMORPGs. Then they whip out their checkbooks.
One idle day, I imagined a MMORPG where you play a wizard who can create monsters. You develop and test these monsters fighting each other on their own machine. Then, when you feel ready, you can 'open a portal', and invite another wizard to send their monsters the arena on your machine. You battle it out and see how your creation does. You can also enter another wizard's arena if you so choose.
This great MMORPG would have magic balancing code so that you couldn't create super kill-all monsters, but they had to have could strategies based on different resources. You have to program them with behavior to survive in the arena. You would be a team of various monsters that would employ various strategies. Different team composures would have different success against various team make-ups.
Couldn't you send it compressed? Obviously it wouldn't be as efficient as binary, but it would be pretty good, no?
Probably just because it's orders of magnitude easier to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot, compared to a 3-D virtual world? Most people aren't interested in reading, and that's why there isn't greater web saturation amongst the population. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources. Nerds, whose primary interest in life is learning and sharing knowledge, comprise a small portion of the population. Most people are interested in totally different things. Witness the popularity of pornographic images and movies, MySpace, and youtube -- that's what most people are interested in.
I predict that the more powerful computers become, they more they will fulfill the average person's desires, which have little to do with learning, and have a lot more to do with hanging out, looking good, socializing, and having sex. Of course, there will be a small cadre of geeks who will recreated the 'nerd table in the lunchroom' in this giant virtual orgy, playing dungeons and graons and discussing the fine details of obscure subjects, but I predict after a certain point, the internet will no longer resemble the nerd paradise it started out as.
You are right. I did overlook the new possibility of self-production, internet distribution, and mass-market micropayments. However, I don't think most artists will make a living at it even then -- more will be able to, but I think music will still be a hobby or side gig for most artists who produce and sell.
The ability to make a living as a musician in the past 100 years has depended on the difficulty of production and distribution of music recordings, and the willingness of the artists to go on tour. Needless to say, the record companies raked in the lion's share of the proceeds, leaving the recording, performing musician mostly broke. A few people became super stars, which a few generations of suckers for the record labels to exploit, preying on their hopes of becoming famous and rich. Few people became famous; even less became rich. And those that did become rich made their money from performing; record sales, not so much.
Now we have come full circle: music recording and distribution has become so cheap, you don't have that revenue stream available anymore. Musicians who do make a living as musicians will do so by going around performing, just as they did before the 20th century. And the idea that musicians were actually able to make a decent living as recording artists during the 20th century is really a myth -- successful musicians, even those who sold lots of albums, made their money from touring. The record companies took most of the profits from record sales. Sure there were a number of popular musicians, but there were many more who never made any money off of it.
Most people with a Masters of Fine Arts who actually still paint ( and I know a few of them ) have a day job. A few of them are lucky enough to teach college kids to paint. The rest sell weed and/or are starving.
So, being a full time artist is a pipe dream for many people. It many sound like a downer, but I look at it the other way -- for human history, art has always been a folk expression. People got together in the village after they were done in the fields and danced and sang. Simple as that. Your brother will have a hard time making a living solely as an artist, but he can get a 9-to-5 and perform at some bars a few nights a week, release an album every few years, and have a damn lot of fun doing it, all without starving
What is the deal with this RIAA/MPAA situation? Are these organizations run by total morons? I'm not trolling, but it seems like they aren't putting one iota of serious effort into this. Are they so cynical, moneyed, and jaded, that they think nothing of suing mothers and teenagers apparently just for the hell of it? How can they do such a lousy effort this yet be one of the largest sectors of industry?
The longer I live, the more I am in a state of sheer awe that society doesn't come apart like Britney Spears fan on youtube.
... the tendency to just insert dark matter wherever it's needed, after the fact (as opposed to predicting its presence and location by theory) Here's a thought -- what if the sole observable property of dark matter was that it exerted gravitational tug on the stuff around it? That there was no other way to detect it, other than it made it look like there should be some matter, with other observable properties, exist in a certain place? That it is not 'dark' matter at all, just a force of gravity? That you could only observe it by excluding all other possible explanations of gravitational pull?I've seen the kudzu 'statuaries' here in Ohio... Does kudzu need to climb on living things, or can it creep on walls? If it doesn't need trees, we could build a field of frames or towers for the kudzu to grow. If it needs the organic structure of trees for climbing grip, we could use what are essentially telephone poles in the field. Kudzu seems to have no problem climbing dead trees, and that's what a telephone pole is. Think of tomato plant poles or grape trellises , on a much larger scale.
And if you have a flat surface, like a tower or telephone pole, the kudzu vines may be easy to harvest by just pulling them down, if their grip isn't that strong.
Or perhaps cops are more likely to round up non-whites, disbelieve their stories, and prosecutors are more likely to charge them with more serious crimes, and judges and juries are more likely to find them guilty...
I re-read the article trying to figure out the point you can make. From what I gather, a Swedish 'hacker' -- probably just a computer user -- found a list of valid passwords for the embassies' email websites. It's not like this is a buffer overflow, backdoor, or lousy password policy. They simply didn't protect their passwords, AFAICan tell. So what exactly is the story, or the journalistic angle? "Web email system works as expected, even for Embassies" ? That you can log in, provided you know the username and password?
If that's all that's required, I have to admit that that level of technical competence is widespread enough that any journalist could do it.
- Tell when someone's lying or when their story doesn't add up -- a kind of social engineering
- Follow the money
They can't examine scientific claims or medical breakthroughs or stories about computer technologies. When they are forced to do this, they call a bunch of experts and see what their opinions are, which is basically employing skill #1.If you can validate this story in 3 minutes, you are a better than average computer expert than probably even most tech support people out there -- let alone Joe Blow or any journalist.
Secondly, even if a journalist could validate this in 3 minutes, they shouldn't bother, because 99% percent of the anonymous crapflood would turn out to be completely false and a waste of time. If they bothered to validate this story, they would be looking into water-combusting engines or new evidence of the faked moon landing all the time. And we have enough of those stories already.
Yeah right. Newspapers get bogus crap from anonymous 'geniuses' all the time, who claim to have uncovered conspiracies or figured out the secrets of the universe. Another list of startling vulnerabilities in the world's embassies certainly would have gotten the attention of all the editors.
Thanks, but I actually meant 'they', as in "they are".
They still are symbiotic bacteria. They have their own DNA, life-cycle, etc.
IANAB, but I believe their are. We inherit our mDNA exclusively from our mothers. By the way, this is how they traced back the human genome to find the 'Mitochondrial Eve', a theoretical female ancestor of all humans alive today. She lived about 200,000 years ago, and they figured this out by looking at the mDNA from people around the world and figuring how long ago it was the same.
Grandparent was arguing kind, not this specific program. He said that a project, any project, this large can be kept secret. They didn't say, "this project was kept secret".