I don't think there is an effect like this in the Haunted Mansion. You may be thinking of projections onto theatrical scrim, but that's more like fabric than fog. They do use lights and scrim in several places to simulate fog.
However, there is an effect like this in the Indiana Jones attraction at Disneyland. At one point you drive through a wall of fog onto which is projected a bunch of rats. This has been around for years. I'm assuming the one described in the article in an improvement by making the fog screen "smoother."
Disney also has several attractions that project onto water screens (notably Fantasmic! at Disneyland). If I recall this system was licensed from a French inventor.
Windmills used for energy were supposedly the devil's spawn way back when because it was viewed as a bird killer. Yet there is little mention of this anymore. Either the birds that were being killed are all dead and an entire species became extinct or... DUH... They adapated
Or, as is done in my area, the windmills are disabled during certain times of the year when endangered species of birds are teaching their young to fly. Patterns have been painted on the blades that scare the birds away from danger during the rest of the year.
Not only are all of the patents substantially similar, but they have the same grammar and spelling errors in each patent. Perhaps Copy & Paste is the root problem with the patent system.
People here rave about SpamAssassin, but I had such great results. My email-provider runs SpamAssassin on the server with a threshold of 6. To be conservative, they only mark suspected messages rather than tossing them. It only catches about half of my 70-100 daily spam messages, and I've had more than a handful of false positives. In fact, I've been getting so few legit messages recently that I suspect many of them are being lumped in with the spam.
So tell me, what's the trick to getting SpamAssassin to perform as well as it does for others?
They're using no different criterion to set pricing than they have in the past: consumer demand.
But consumer demand used to be measured across an entire market. What companies want to do is treat each consumer as a separate market.
I'm no economist, but it seems to me that effective competition requires that consumers be able to comparison shop. Price-obscuring bundling, described in the article as a form of discriminatory pricing, makes comparisons difficult to impossible.
Lots of people in this discussion seem to pay too much attention to the titles of patents. The title is not the specific invention being patented--it's a general description of it. You have to look at the claims. So just because the title says "computer system for management of resources," it doesn't mean that all computer systems that manage resources are covered.
That being said, these patents may or may not be frivolous. I haven't read the claims. Have you?
In contrast, many California counties that recently "upgraded" to e-voting may revert to punchcard ballots in the recall election for Governor this October. There's a low threshhold to become a candidate ($3500 and 65 signatures -- I think), so there's a concern that there may be too many candidates for some of the e-voting systems, which have an upper limit of about 40 candidates for any given race.
Making backup copies and transferring to other media may not be a "fair use." As the DOJ IP lawyer pointed out in yesterday's Slashdot interview, fair use encompasses comment, criticism, scholarship, and news reporting. I don't see where backups fit into this.
Maybe the music industry is different, but I've taken my shots at traditional fiction and screenwriting. The advice there is always to avoid anybody who charges up front. Legitimate publishers and agents don't charge the author anything. The money is supposed to flow the other way.
Self publishing is becoming more common, but I have yet to meet an author who has even come close to breaking even on one of those.
On the one hand, there's a faction trying to eliminate the penny in the US because it's nearly worthless (nothing costs <$0.05 anymore). On the other hand, people are trying to figure out how to charge micropayments on the net. Aren't these opposite approaches to the same problem?
It seems to me that when a commodity gets cheap enough, people are willing to pay a flat fee for nearly unlimited usage. The most obvious example is phone service. Do you think people will ever really want to spend their money in tiny increments? I don't.
Buried in a long interview with author Cory Doctorow is an explanation of why email is the only effective and timely means of communicating with your Washington representatives. It boils down to: (1) there's nobody to answer the phone, (2) the fax machines are all broken or out of supplies, and (3) the regular mail sits in quarantine for a month before it gets delivered to your reps.
Mickey Mouse is not really protected by copyright. Cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse are. Mickey himself is a trademark. Even if Steamboat Willie and other old Mickey cartoons slipped into the public domain, you'd have a hard time putting the famous mouse in your cartoon without a big battle with Disney lawyers.
And while the article points out that Disney made money with cartoons based on public domain characters, it fails to note that many of its most successful franchises use characters that they have had to (and in some cases continue to) pay royalties for: Tarzan, Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, etc. So, while the long copyrights (and trademarks) have had impact on the cost of creating new works with others' IP, it has not prevented new, successful works from being made. It makes me wonder if the system is really as flawed as everyone says? And if the costs of licensing somebody else's work is too expensive, doesn't that inspire people to create original works? Wasn't that the whole idea? When you see Edgar Rice Burroughs's heirs still collecting royalties for Tarzan, doesn't that inspire you to dream up your own original works?
I'm not sure a nearly-infinite series of derivative works was a concept envisioned by the original inventors of copyright law. Sure, an author might crank out several stories or novels about a world or set of characters during his or her career, but who would have guessed that corporate owned franchises could continue to innovate based on ideas they've milked for decades and decades?
Magicians that do tricks with money work right on the edge of legality. Defacing currency is illegal if you attempt to pass it off.
If you get a batch of new notes, it's likely that the serial numbers will be consecutive. On US currency, the green ink used for the serial numbers can be erased quite cleanly with a regular pencil eraser. So you take two consecutively numbered bills and erase the last digit of each. Now it appears you have two bills with the same serial number. Spectators generally don't know how many digits are in a serial number and thus won't notice that it's short. You can burn a bill right in front of their eyes then produce the substitute for a startling illusion.
There are lots of gaffed coins out there, too. Craftsmen start with real coins and modify them, so they're not counterfitting. Inexpensive ones look good. Expensive ones are uncanny. The trick is not to spend them accidentally.:-)
Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know how CA works? What in the TV signal distinguishes the program from the advertisements? Does Replay have a patent on this technique?
[T]he law forbids selling minors any video or computer game depicting violence against law enforcement officials.
What constitutes minor for the purposes of this law? Under 18? Under 21?
Does video or computer game mean videos (e.g., VHS tapes and DVDs) as well as computer games? Or are they trying to cover class of video games that don't use computers? How about pinball?
The engineering disasters on par with those medieval collapses can be counted on one hand.... This is directly due to the fact that a civil engineer can determine if a design is structurally sound before they build it.
Ah, but it's more than that. Civil engineers use material science and physics to decide how strong a bridge needs to be, then they double or triple it in the specs to help cover what they don't know. I don't think there's a software equivalent to using twice as many bolts and thicker suspension cables.
I've been a bad programmer and I haven't truly studied many of the newer languages. I've always felt its good for programmers to learn different languages.
C++ was my forth or fifth language and by far the hardest to learn. Not because of the OO-paradigm--I was already quite familiar with that--but because of the syntax klunkiness, size, broken tools, changing standards, libraries that defy good design, and linkage problems. I'm loathe to dive into a whole new can of worms now that I finally feel productive with this flawed by ubiquitous tool. If it takes such a huge investment to learn a new language well, how many languages can a programmer master?
Is it better to be really good at a handful or to be somewhat skilled in a broad base? For a given project, knowing the implementation language well is essential. Having broad experience might help with good design.
I took issue with some of his facts.
I... don't care much for the strong static typing found in C and its descendants.
Lot's of people would argue that ANSI C is not strongly typed.
[Static typing] feels like premature optimization to decide that a variable will always fit into eight or 16 bits.
Huh? Types are still a level of abstraction. Except for certain language extensions, most types in C and its descendents do not define things down at the bit level.
Thirty years of growth and patches to the standard library have produced many, many similar functions with similar, terse names. Quick, what are the differences between execl, execlp, execle, execv, and execvp?
Ironically, these are not standard library functions, not ANSI C standard library anyway (as the context implies). Aside from nit-picking, I think this is a good illustration of my point: it takes a long time to learn the details of your language and libraries. How much software is developed by programmers who are learning new tools? How does that impact productivity and the ability to construct reliable programs?
I'm probably becoming a luddite as I get older. I instinctively flinch when I'm told that newer ways are better. I always see trade-offs. As you move to higher-level languages (and libraries) you lose some control. Often that control is not necessary, but when your performance problem is due to thrashing because your STL container scattered bits of indexing and data all over the virtual address space--life sucks.
Since you mentioned VMS, I thought I'd throw in this tidbit. I went to a DECUS symposium in 1989 (maybe '90 or '91) given by two VMS engineers. They claimed VMS beat all of the Unix-derived OSes and was the first OS to be certified POSIX-compliant (API and shell). They also pointed out that the official validation suite required several command line tools that the spec didn't, so actually they had to implement more than the spec itself required.
When I saw the title of this article, I got very excited. You see, I love 3D movies. But, as fans of stereoscopy often are, I was disappointed that these were really 2.5D presentations: 3D models with all of the binocular beauty flattened out of them. Its like those bastards who dubbed 24-bit color "true color". Yeah, right.
The AP (Advanced Placement) tests typically have essays. In particular, I took the Computer Science AP test in 1985. At least a few of the questions involved writing code (pencil on paper) in Pascal. I assume they were simply read and graded by humans. I wonder if the modern version actually transcribe them into a computer and test the solutions. Should style be graded? Appropriate comments? Good variable names?
I recall that the wording of one question (deleting a subtree from a binary tree) was ambiguous. I wrote a paragraph explaining this and then wrote two versions of the procedure depending on which interpretation they meant.
The multimillion-dollar deal is a milestone for the game
industry, which traditionally has paid to use other companies' logos in their
games.
Sony Corp., for example, has paid tens of
thousands of dollars to car manufacturers such as Honda Motor Co. to use
real-world race cars in its driving games
Real life product brands have been featured in video games
increasingly since Pole Position, but this [inclusion of McDonald's and Intel
logos in The Sims] is being hailed as the first time a company has
paid to have its products placed in a game. It's also being
hailed as the latest step the video game market has made towards the
lucrative product-placement schemes that are common in the Hollywood film
industry.
Until now, video game makers have taken it upon
themselves to add corporate brands to their games to add authenticity. Believe
it or not, video game makers say they have even paid outside companies for the
use of recognizable logos inside their games.
...product placement is relatively new to games....
While video game companies traditionally have had major brand
names in their games, usually those brands have been licensed for a fee by the
publishers, rather than the brands paying to be placed in the
game.
The main argument for using recognizable products is that
they lend a realistic flavor to gameplay.
What gamers may not
know, however, is that this kind of brand exposure doesn't necessarily bring
developers rolls of cash. More likely, companies swap advertising, as with
the "Super Monkey Ball" deal.
Most of the time that you see a
product in a Sega game no money has changed hands.
But although commercial products have appeared in games in the
past--mostly as "Easter egg" surprises buried in the games (such as the Coke
cans that rolled out of a vending machine in the game Half Life), or as
authentic touches (such as the Pennzoil ads on cars in NASCAR racing
games)--there have been no cases of paid product placement, or at least none
that a survey of game publishers can recall. And it's not that developers
haven't tried.
Suppose you're one of these freelance watchers. How many times are you going to want to look at a picture of a deer or a racoon or a cloud before you quit? How much will your response time lag when you realize that odds that you'll spot someone is infinitessimal.
This is different than other security camera networks today. Many cameras (like convenience stores) just collect evidence to be used after a crime. Actively monitored networks (casinos, theme parks, public areas) have continuous activity that can help alleviate the boredom to some degree.
Not being able to rip music CDs may impact a reasonable chunk of the voting public, but no critical mass there.
When Napster was shut down, they had approximately 57 million users. George W. Bush received approximately 50 million votes in the popular election. Sounds like critical mass to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there is an effect like this in the Haunted Mansion. You may be thinking of projections onto theatrical scrim, but that's more like fabric than fog. They do use lights and scrim in several places to simulate fog.
However, there is an effect like this in the Indiana Jones attraction at Disneyland. At one point you drive through a wall of fog onto which is projected a bunch of rats. This has been around for years. I'm assuming the one described in the article in an improvement by making the fog screen "smoother."
Disney also has several attractions that project onto water screens (notably Fantasmic! at Disneyland). If I recall this system was licensed from a French inventor.
Or, as is done in my area, the windmills are disabled during certain times of the year when endangered species of birds are teaching their young to fly. Patterns have been painted on the blades that scare the birds away from danger during the rest of the year.
Not only are all of the patents substantially similar, but they have the same grammar and spelling errors in each patent. Perhaps Copy & Paste is the root problem with the patent system.
People here rave about SpamAssassin, but I had such great results. My email-provider runs SpamAssassin on the server with a threshold of 6. To be conservative, they only mark suspected messages rather than tossing them. It only catches about half of my 70-100 daily spam messages, and I've had more than a handful of false positives. In fact, I've been getting so few legit messages recently that I suspect many of them are being lumped in with the spam.
So tell me, what's the trick to getting SpamAssassin to perform as well as it does for others?
But consumer demand used to be measured across an entire market. What companies want to do is treat each consumer as a separate market.
I'm no economist, but it seems to me that effective competition requires that consumers be able to comparison shop. Price-obscuring bundling, described in the article as a form of discriminatory pricing, makes comparisons difficult to impossible.
Lots of people in this discussion seem to pay too much attention to the titles of patents. The title is not the specific invention being patented--it's a general description of it. You have to look at the claims. So just because the title says "computer system for management of resources," it doesn't mean that all computer systems that manage resources are covered.
That being said, these patents may or may not be frivolous. I haven't read the claims. Have you?
In contrast, many California counties that recently "upgraded" to e-voting may revert to punchcard ballots in the recall election for Governor this October. There's a low threshhold to become a candidate ($3500 and 65 signatures -- I think), so there's a concern that there may be too many candidates for some of the e-voting systems, which have an upper limit of about 40 candidates for any given race.
Making backup copies and transferring to other media may not be a "fair use." As the DOJ IP lawyer pointed out in yesterday's Slashdot interview, fair use encompasses comment, criticism, scholarship, and news reporting. I don't see where backups fit into this.
Maybe the music industry is different, but I've taken my shots at traditional fiction and screenwriting. The advice there is always to avoid anybody who charges up front. Legitimate publishers and agents don't charge the author anything. The money is supposed to flow the other way.
Self publishing is becoming more common, but I have yet to meet an author who has even come close to breaking even on one of those.
On the one hand, there's a faction trying to eliminate the penny in the US because it's nearly worthless (nothing costs <$0.05 anymore). On the other hand, people are trying to figure out how to charge micropayments on the net. Aren't these opposite approaches to the same problem?
It seems to me that when a commodity gets cheap enough, people are willing to pay a flat fee for nearly unlimited usage. The most obvious example is phone service. Do you think people will ever really want to spend their money in tiny increments? I don't.
Buried in a long interview with author Cory Doctorow is an explanation of why email is the only effective and timely means of communicating with your Washington representatives. It boils down to: (1) there's nobody to answer the phone, (2) the fax machines are all broken or out of supplies, and (3) the regular mail sits in quarantine for a month before it gets delivered to your reps.
Mickey Mouse is not really protected by copyright. Cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse are. Mickey himself is a trademark. Even if Steamboat Willie and other old Mickey cartoons slipped into the public domain, you'd have a hard time putting the famous mouse in your cartoon without a big battle with Disney lawyers.
And while the article points out that Disney made money with cartoons based on public domain characters, it fails to note that many of its most successful franchises use characters that they have had to (and in some cases continue to) pay royalties for: Tarzan, Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, etc. So, while the long copyrights (and trademarks) have had impact on the cost of creating new works with others' IP, it has not prevented new, successful works from being made. It makes me wonder if the system is really as flawed as everyone says? And if the costs of licensing somebody else's work is too expensive, doesn't that inspire people to create original works? Wasn't that the whole idea? When you see Edgar Rice Burroughs's heirs still collecting royalties for Tarzan, doesn't that inspire you to dream up your own original works?
I'm not sure a nearly-infinite series of derivative works was a concept envisioned by the original inventors of copyright law. Sure, an author might crank out several stories or novels about a world or set of characters during his or her career, but who would have guessed that corporate owned franchises could continue to innovate based on ideas they've milked for decades and decades?
Magicians that do tricks with money work right on the edge of legality. Defacing currency is illegal if you attempt to pass it off.
If you get a batch of new notes, it's likely that the serial numbers will be consecutive. On US currency, the green ink used for the serial numbers can be erased quite cleanly with a regular pencil eraser. So you take two consecutively numbered bills and erase the last digit of each. Now it appears you have two bills with the same serial number. Spectators generally don't know how many digits are in a serial number and thus won't notice that it's short. You can burn a bill right in front of their eyes then produce the substitute for a startling illusion.
There are lots of gaffed coins out there, too. Craftsmen start with real coins and modify them, so they're not counterfitting. Inexpensive ones look good. Expensive ones are uncanny. The trick is not to spend them accidentally. :-)
Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know how CA works? What in the TV signal distinguishes the program from the advertisements? Does Replay have a patent on this technique?
Quoth the article:
What constitutes minor for the purposes of this law? Under 18? Under 21?
Does video or computer game mean videos (e.g., VHS tapes and DVDs) as well as computer games? Or are they trying to cover class of video games that don't use computers? How about pinball?
Can kids rent the games?
Ah, but it's more than that. Civil engineers use material science and physics to decide how strong a bridge needs to be, then they double or triple it in the specs to help cover what they don't know. I don't think there's a software equivalent to using twice as many bolts and thicker suspension cables.
I've been a bad programmer and I haven't truly studied many of the newer languages. I've always felt its good for programmers to learn different languages.
C++ was my forth or fifth language and by far the hardest to learn. Not because of the OO-paradigm--I was already quite familiar with that--but because of the syntax klunkiness, size, broken tools, changing standards, libraries that defy good design, and linkage problems. I'm loathe to dive into a whole new can of worms now that I finally feel productive with this flawed by ubiquitous tool. If it takes such a huge investment to learn a new language well, how many languages can a programmer master?
Is it better to be really good at a handful or to be somewhat skilled in a broad base? For a given project, knowing the implementation language well is essential. Having broad experience might help with good design.
I took issue with some of his facts.
Lot's of people would argue that ANSI C is not strongly typed.
Huh? Types are still a level of abstraction. Except for certain language extensions, most types in C and its descendents do not define things down at the bit level.
Ironically, these are not standard library functions, not ANSI C standard library anyway (as the context implies). Aside from nit-picking, I think this is a good illustration of my point: it takes a long time to learn the details of your language and libraries. How much software is developed by programmers who are learning new tools? How does that impact productivity and the ability to construct reliable programs?
I'm probably becoming a luddite as I get older. I instinctively flinch when I'm told that newer ways are better. I always see trade-offs. As you move to higher-level languages (and libraries) you lose some control. Often that control is not necessary, but when your performance problem is due to thrashing because your STL container scattered bits of indexing and data all over the virtual address space--life sucks.
Since you mentioned VMS, I thought I'd throw in this tidbit. I went to a DECUS symposium in 1989 (maybe '90 or '91) given by two VMS engineers. They claimed VMS beat all of the Unix-derived OSes and was the first OS to be certified POSIX-compliant (API and shell). They also pointed out that the official validation suite required several command line tools that the spec didn't, so actually they had to implement more than the spec itself required.
When I saw the title of this article, I got very excited. You see, I love 3D movies. But, as fans of stereoscopy often are, I was disappointed that these were really 2.5D presentations: 3D models with all of the binocular beauty flattened out of them. Its like those bastards who dubbed 24-bit color "true color". Yeah, right.
Where are the awards for stereoscopic films?
The AP (Advanced Placement) tests typically have essays. In particular, I took the Computer Science AP test in 1985. At least a few of the questions involved writing code (pencil on paper) in Pascal. I assume they were simply read and graded by humans. I wonder if the modern version actually transcribe them into a computer and test the solutions. Should style be graded? Appropriate comments? Good variable names?
I recall that the wording of one question (deleting a subtree from a binary tree) was ambiguous. I wrote a paragraph explaining this and then wrote two versions of the procedure depending on which interpretation they meant.
The Scott Adams adventure games are still available at SAGA.
Suppose you're one of these freelance watchers. How many times are you going to want to look at a picture of a deer or a racoon or a cloud before you quit? How much will your response time lag when you realize that odds that you'll spot someone is infinitessimal.
This is different than other security camera networks today. Many cameras (like convenience stores) just collect evidence to be used after a crime. Actively monitored networks (casinos, theme parks, public areas) have continuous activity that can help alleviate the boredom to some degree.
When Napster was shut down, they had approximately 57 million users. George W. Bush received approximately 50 million votes in the popular election. Sounds like critical mass to me.