In nearly all 50 of these United States, you are required to carry some form of ID, usually a driver's license.
Uh, only if you're driving are you required to carry a driver's license. Even in states with stop-and-identify laws, you do not need to carry ID, (you may be legally required to tell a police officer who you are). There is no law requiring you to even own an identification card.
I've carried a state ID for over 20 years, and I've never had anyone ask to see my papers.
I've been required to show ID to gain admission to a restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in a big city. In Colorado, passengers on a public bus have been required to show ID at certain checkpoints. During the first Gulf War and after 9-11, we've had to show ID to board an airplane. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say you've never been asked for your papers.
The article and the summary are missing the point. This was Gilmore v. Gonzales, not Gilmore v. the airlines. The argument, as I understand it, is that there is no published law or rule that says passengers have to show identification. The TIA says there is such a rule, but that it's a secret for security purposes. Gilmore argues secret laws are unconstitutional. I tend to agree with Gilmore.
In California you have to possess ID when you're in public.
Nope. You have to have your driver's license with you when operating a vehicle on public roads in California, but you do not have to carry any form of identification otherwise.
I don't know why it is that vendors insist on preloading so much crap on their machines when they ship them....
Because they're paid to ship the shovelware.
Re:Services aren't the same thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
The moment you start relating "theft of service" with "infringement", you're trying to mix the two concepts....
I did not relate these two concepts. I completely understand that theft of service has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
My beef is with the fallacious argument that only acts that deprive a victim of tangible property may be labelled as "theft". To disprove this argument, I gave a counter example. Theft of service, as I described in my cable TV example, does not deprive the cable company of anything but a potential customer. (In fact, having a TV connected to a cable can actually reduce the amount of electricity used versus driving an unterminated cable.) Therefore, the word "theft" can be applied in a legal sense even when nobody is deprived of property.
This does not mean that copyright infringement can necessarily be called theft, but it does debunk the reason (and often repeated in this forum) that the word cannot be applied.
Whenever somebody uses the word "theft" in these copyright infringement discussions, people trot out the argument that it doesn't apply. Perhaps--in a legal sense--it does not, but the reason commonly given is simply bogus.
Furthermore, not everyone who writes "theft" in these discussions means it in the strict legal sense, but rather in the common English sense of the word, which just happens to be much easier to type than "copyright infringement". But that doesn't stop anybody from lashing back with the "it's not theft" screed. Being pedantic is fine, but only if the reasoning is correct.
Re:Services aren't the same thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
Theft of service is actually taking something, a service, the effort of producing something like electricity, etc., without paying for the said effort. When you use it, it's gone in most cases....
"Most cases" is not all cases. Please re-read my initial post. I'm taking issue with the claim that the law doesn't consider something "theft" unless the victim loses something. To disprove a claim, you only need one counter example. I presented one. Theft of cable service, as I described, only deprives the provider of a potential customer, and yet the law calls it "theft". Therefore, it is misleading to say that you can't label something theft simply because the victim didn't lose anything tangible.
When you're buying music, movies, etc. it's NOT framed as a service
I never said it was.
Words have meaning- and with everything you're trying to map your moral leanings to what you THINK the law is or should be, you're perverting the words themselves. It's as morally wrong as the people you're trying to label as "Theives".
I've done no such thing. I have never called a copyright infringer a thief (a pirate yes, but not a thief). My point is that the argument that copyright infringement should not be called theft is a big distraction from the important aspects of the debate. I have not perverted the meanings of words. I'm pointing out a fallacy in the argument that you can't label something as "theft" unless it deprives the victim of tangible property. I debunked that argument by showing a counter example.
Did you actually read the Wikipedia article you linked to? All of the examples given either involve the theft of a product (gas, electricity, food from a restaurant) or causing the victim to expend additional time/money without paying (hospital services).
Yes, I read the article. Just because I used a different example doesn't mean it's not valid. I know someone who was prosecuted for "theft of services" for exactly the cable case I gave in my earlier post. The cable company lost nothing but a potential customer, and yet the law calls it "theft".
None of this applies at all to copyright infringment.
I never said it did. I was taking issue with the claim that the law doesn't call something "theft" unless it deprives the victim of something. To prove my point, I found a contrary example: "theft of service" which can be applied even when the victim hasn't lost anything.
Here's a better theft of service analogy. You move into a home. The previous owners canceled their cable TV service, but the cable company never physically disconnected the feed to the house. If you connect your TV to the cable and watch it, you can be prosecuted for theft of service. The cable company has not been deprived of tangible property or actual income, only potential income. Nonetheless, it's theft in the eyes of the law.
In the case of copyright infringement, there isn't necessarily any interaction with the copyright owner. The copyright owner has no way of even knowing about the infringement without snooping into your private life to uncover it.
That holds for my theft of service analogy as well.
Here's yet another way to look at it: service is a limited, finite resource.
Perhaps there's an immeasurably small cost associated with the infrastructure maintenance that's attributable to your one tap, but that cost has already been ammortized, so you can watch that cable 24x7 until the cows come home without affecting the cable company's capacity to provide the service to others.
Like physical property, theft of service is taking away something the provider had (time, physical space to rent, etc.) and no longer has as a result of the theft.
No, in the cable TV example, there is no loss of anything tangible. The cable company has only lost a potential customer. That doesn't change the fact that it can be prosecuted as larceny.
In and of itself, the act of making a copy has absolutely no effect on the copyright owner and deprives the copyright owner of nothing that the owner had before the infringement took place.
Here we agree. I think copyrights should be replaced with distribution and performance rights. Everyone should be able to make copies for whatever purpose except distribution or public performance. When you make a work available for free, you devalue it (in a commericial, capitalistic sense). The intent of copyright law was to incent creators to create with potential economic upside. (There's that word potential again.)
Switching from copyrights to distribution and performance rights would maintain the original intent of copyright, codify nearly all fair uses, have minimal impact on most existing businesses, render the stupid anti-circumvention laws generally irrelevant, and redirect most legal actions against the big counterfeiters rather than individual downloaders.
While I agree with your sentiment, I continue to take issue with the pedantic insistence that the word "theft" doesn't apply to copyright infringement because the victim is not deprived of tangible property.
Consider "theft of services", which, according to Wikipedia, is a legal term. Theft of services does not deprive the victim of property. And yet, like more common forms of theft, it is typically prosecuted as larceny. If the word "theft" can be used as a legal term in this context, then the argument that it only applies when the victim is deprived of tangible property doesn't hold.
"Eat our chips, they're not greasy like those other guys," "Our laundry detergent works better than the leading brand!" and "why shop at those other guys?"
I believe that advertisements avoid naming the competition because:
Mentioning the competition, even in a bad light, might reinforce their brand.
The parent company may also be the parent of the "leading brand". (See Proctor and Gamble for an example.)
GMail also doesn't provide a well-defined delete feature
I've seen this statement more than a few times now, and I don't understand where this idea is coming from.
Perhaps they have improved it, but there was much discussion when GMail arrived about deleting. Supposedly, when you empty out the trash folder, at least some copies of the messages linger on the servers for potentially quite some time. When asked specifically about how long it takes before all the servers synch up, Google suggested that it was a complex system and not completely predictable.
CNet did not, however, seem to know anything about how long that data was being kept by Google. They only insinuated that there was the remote possibility that Google could be hoarding the data.
It's not just how long Google may hold data they've collected, it's also about how long your data (e.g., your Gmail messages) remain on their servers. Specifically, if messages are routinely kept for more than 180 days, then the hurdles for law enforcement to get a warrant are lowered. CNet wasn't very specific in this article, but they did allude to the discussion that many analysts were making of this Electronic Privacy Act ramification on the second page of the original article:
"The prospect of unlimited data retention creates a honey pot for law enforcement," Hoofnagle said in his testimony. In addition, e-mail stored for longer than 180 days has less protection from law enforcement than e-mail deleted before then, he said.
I think that's an interesting legal ramification.
CNet went on to speculate about all the nasty things Google could do with it. Personal information about the CEO was used to add a "fear factor" to these speculations. That sounds like mudslinging to me.
I don't disagree that the tone of the article, especially at the beginning, was sensationalistic. My point was just that the article was not simply about what you can find on the Web with a search engine, as so many people in the thread were insinuating.
... Cnet is singling out Google for something that can be done on any search engine.
Not true.
The original CNet article was not solely about all the information you can search for. It was also about all of the information Google can collect about users of its services, and how to balance all of that information against privacy. Granted, you have to read past the first page to get the gist of article.
Not all the major search engines have the same reach here. Things like GMail, Froogle, and even AdWords makes it possible for Google to collect and correlate a huge amount of data about their users. Other big portals, like Yahoo!, were mentioned in the article. (Like many tech stories now, when Google does it, it's news, even if the competitors have been doing it for a while.) But the article points out distinctions between the Google's data resources and those of its competition.
GMail offered magnitudes more space than anyone else at the time it came out, and it made all those messages easy to search. This dramatically changed the usage pattern for many email users. Instead of having a few items in their inboxes, they would now keep everything indefinitely. Turns out this has a legal effect in the U.S., since data routinely kept less than 180 days have more privacy protections (under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) than those kept longer. GMail also doesn't provide a well-defined delete feature, so the 180-day test is a little more vague.
I'll grant you that the CNet article was a bit sensationalistic, and it starts out with a different thrust than the rest of the piece, but it does raise some good points about privacy and data collection.
I read the thread, and it looks like this is a fishy-sounding rumor. Before everyone one goes karma-whoring with anti-MS rants, why don't we wait for some facts?
Try a little skepticism. The FA is a posting on a bulletin board by "Administrative User #4" who, when asked for a source, says that it was from a conversation at SIGGRAPH.
Vista certainly has significant changes going on in the rendering department. Avalon is built on DirectX, so perhaps there's some re-jiggering going on to make OpenGL work alongside that. But a 50% performance degradation? Come on. Microsoft is not that stupid. They know applications sell computers, not OSes. If they screw several games and CAD apps, it'll hurt them.
I'm still waiting for someone to point out a really good reason why we need DST.
There are several studies that show Daylight Saving time saves lives (pedestrians and automobile traffic), reduces violent crime, and saves electricity.
True, they index the Web, but they're more than a catalog (as the article details after the first page). Google also collects vast amounts of information on your use of that catalog, and--if you use their other services--they've got that data, too. That makes a big, fat target for a warrant or an unscrupulous person.
I think you are overplaying the cost of the projector. It's really pretty simple technology.
A 35-mm projector installation for a single screen in a multiplex can easily cost more than $10,000. I consider that non-trivial. If you're an exhibitor thinking of upgrading to 3D, an add-on system can be more attractive than one that requires you to replace and expensive asset.
Getting enough light onto the screen is always a challenge. With standard film projection, the screen is dark more than half of the time, since the shutter is completely closed while the film advances to the next frame. Typical cinema lamps run 4500 to 7000 watts.
A two-projector system for 3D can cost more than two projectors, because you need a way to precisely synchronize them.
The polarization model loses half the light at the projector. The LCD shutter glasses loses half the light at the LCD shutter, so there is not difference in brightness.
Assuming a single projector, for 3D you need to project two images for each frame. If you multiplex in space by putting both images side-by-side or over-and-under in the same frame, you've already cut the light seen by either eye by (approximately) half. Then you have the polarizer loss, and there are additional losses with the beam-splitter optics. Silver screens may also be less efficient reflectors than modern white screens.
If, however, you multiplex in time, you avoid the extra optics. If you can run the projector at double speed, eliminating much of the shutter-closed time, (as IMAX does for 3D), then you can reclaim the brightness lossed to alternatation.
By the way, it's true that an ideal polarizer loses half the light, but real-life filters cut even more than that. If you've played with a manual camera and a polarizer, you've probably noticed that a polarizer can cut the light as much as two full stops (a 75% reduction) rather than the theoretical one stop.
The polarization timing problem requires much less precision than the LCD shutter timing.
True, but that's a solved problem. The IMAX headsets work well at a very high frame rate.
Can someone explain to me how investing in and maintaining hundreds of active LCD shutter specs is better than using two projectors with polarizing filters and super-cheap passive polarized glasses?
Passive polarized glasses may seem simpler and cheaper, but that's only if you look at the viewing side of the equation and not the projection requirements. For cross polarization, you have to project two images simultaneously. That can be done with two perfectly synchronized projectors. Although expensive, this is often the choice for dedicated 3D theatres. Or you can try to squeeze both images into a single frame and use a special optics to split the beams, polarize them, and rejoin them. This means you get half the resolution at best, and you've cut the light to each eye at least in half. In practice, you need a *really* powerful projector, since there are also losses for the additional optics. For polarized light to remain polarized when reflected off the screen, you need a silvered screen. These aren't much more expensive than a conventional modern screen, but it is one more thing to consider. The result is dimmer, lower resolution 3D. You may be able to compensate for the dimming by installing more powerful projectors, but then you also need more cooling power in the booth. (Those extra optics absorb lots of heat!)
Using LCD shutter glasses and multiplexing in time eliminates the loss of spatial resolution and dramatically mitigates the loss of brightness. If your projector is capable of a 2x frame rate, you can comletely eliminate the loss of brightness. If your theatre is already digital, then buying the glasses and installing an IR or RF synchronization signal broadcaster is quite possibly less expensive. And you can immediately switch back and forth between 3D and conventional movies.
Hitchcock saw 3D as an exciting new direction to take the art of films, and originally shot and released one of his pictures in 3D format.
That's doesn't jibe with the story I've been told. I heard Hitchcock considered 3D too gimmicky, but the studio insisted that he use it for Dial M for Murder. In protest, he eschewed compositions that would emphasize the stereoscopic effect. In essence, he made a very flat 3D film.
Ironically, stereo enthusiasts consider it one of the best 3D movies, because it doesn't use in-your-face gimmicks. The 3D (in most of the film) is subtle, simply lending realism to the scenes. Watch Dial M on (2D) video, and you won't feel like you're missing anything. That isn't the case with most other 3D movies.
I'm a stereo-buff. A few years ago, I ODed on a 3D film festival at a revival theatre in my area. Of the dozens of 3D flicks I sat through, Dial M was one of the best because it was a good film enhanced by 3D.
Blogging has nothing in common with open source....
Isn't that point that both are examples of amateurs successfully providing product that traditionally comes only from professional organizations? That seems like a valid point to me.
Thanks for the link. I'd never heard of the National Education Association before. When I read your original post, I was confused. So I did a search on "teachers' union". NEA doesn't come up in the top ten hits. The American Federation of Teachers did. So I assumed it was a simple mistake.
Turns out the NEA isn't exactly a "teachers' union" (or even a "teacher's union" as you called it). It includes people employeed in school administration as well as teachers. That's probably why the web search didn't turn anything up.
Since your post was rated "+5, Insightful" when I read it, I was looking for the insight. But all I found was a vague swipe at the NEA. I would be interested in specific examples of proposals to improve education that the NEA has opposed and how they successfully managed to block them.
In case you're simply not reading the posts, I'll explain that I was the original poster of the comment "What do you expect?", so by "refine my point" I was referring to the original comment.
Thanks for clarifying. I read posts at +2. At the time, the parent post was only a 1 (it's currently a 3). From the wording, it sounded like "refine my point" was referring to the first two paragraphs of the post in question. As such, it seemed a non-sequiter.
Now, do you understand everything, or do I need to spell it out any more for you?
More clever comments because, of course, a failure to communicate clearly can always be blamed on the reader.
What if Disney required your home address and social security number to enter their park? You know that some people would provide that, stupid as it may be. Instead, the government has laws that limit who can require your social security number.
Can you provide an example of such a law? I just found this explanation on the Social Security website:
If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, only if you're driving are you required to carry a driver's license. Even in states with stop-and-identify laws, you do not need to carry ID, (you may be legally required to tell a police officer who you are). There is no law requiring you to even own an identification card.
I've been required to show ID to gain admission to a restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in a big city. In Colorado, passengers on a public bus have been required to show ID at certain checkpoints. During the first Gulf War and after 9-11, we've had to show ID to board an airplane. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say you've never been asked for your papers.
The article and the summary are missing the point. This was Gilmore v. Gonzales, not Gilmore v. the airlines. The argument, as I understand it, is that there is no published law or rule that says passengers have to show identification. The TIA says there is such a rule, but that it's a secret for security purposes. Gilmore argues secret laws are unconstitutional. I tend to agree with Gilmore.
I unregistered the DLL as described, but I found that IE will still render a valid .WMF, so does unregistering really protect you?
Nope. You have to have your driver's license with you when operating a vehicle on public roads in California, but you do not have to carry any form of identification otherwise.
Because they're paid to ship the shovelware.
I did not relate these two concepts. I completely understand that theft of service has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
My beef is with the fallacious argument that only acts that deprive a victim of tangible property may be labelled as "theft". To disprove this argument, I gave a counter example. Theft of service, as I described in my cable TV example, does not deprive the cable company of anything but a potential customer. (In fact, having a TV connected to a cable can actually reduce the amount of electricity used versus driving an unterminated cable.) Therefore, the word "theft" can be applied in a legal sense even when nobody is deprived of property.
This does not mean that copyright infringement can necessarily be called theft, but it does debunk the reason (and often repeated in this forum) that the word cannot be applied.
Whenever somebody uses the word "theft" in these copyright infringement discussions, people trot out the argument that it doesn't apply. Perhaps--in a legal sense--it does not, but the reason commonly given is simply bogus.
Furthermore, not everyone who writes "theft" in these discussions means it in the strict legal sense, but rather in the common English sense of the word, which just happens to be much easier to type than "copyright infringement". But that doesn't stop anybody from lashing back with the "it's not theft" screed. Being pedantic is fine, but only if the reasoning is correct.
"Most cases" is not all cases. Please re-read my initial post. I'm taking issue with the claim that the law doesn't consider something "theft" unless the victim loses something. To disprove a claim, you only need one counter example. I presented one. Theft of cable service, as I described, only deprives the provider of a potential customer, and yet the law calls it "theft". Therefore, it is misleading to say that you can't label something theft simply because the victim didn't lose anything tangible.
I never said it was.
I've done no such thing. I have never called a copyright infringer a thief (a pirate yes, but not a thief). My point is that the argument that copyright infringement should not be called theft is a big distraction from the important aspects of the debate. I have not perverted the meanings of words. I'm pointing out a fallacy in the argument that you can't label something as "theft" unless it deprives the victim of tangible property. I debunked that argument by showing a counter example.
Yes, I read the article. Just because I used a different example doesn't mean it's not valid. I know someone who was prosecuted for "theft of services" for exactly the cable case I gave in my earlier post. The cable company lost nothing but a potential customer, and yet the law calls it "theft".
I never said it did. I was taking issue with the claim that the law doesn't call something "theft" unless it deprives the victim of something. To prove my point, I found a contrary example: "theft of service" which can be applied even when the victim hasn't lost anything.
Here's a better theft of service analogy. You move into a home. The previous owners canceled their cable TV service, but the cable company never physically disconnected the feed to the house. If you connect your TV to the cable and watch it, you can be prosecuted for theft of service. The cable company has not been deprived of tangible property or actual income, only potential income. Nonetheless, it's theft in the eyes of the law.
That holds for my theft of service analogy as well.
Perhaps there's an immeasurably small cost associated with the infrastructure maintenance that's attributable to your one tap, but that cost has already been ammortized, so you can watch that cable 24x7 until the cows come home without affecting the cable company's capacity to provide the service to others.
No, in the cable TV example, there is no loss of anything tangible. The cable company has only lost a potential customer. That doesn't change the fact that it can be prosecuted as larceny.
Here we agree. I think copyrights should be replaced with distribution and performance rights. Everyone should be able to make copies for whatever purpose except distribution or public performance. When you make a work available for free, you devalue it (in a commericial, capitalistic sense). The intent of copyright law was to incent creators to create with potential economic upside. (There's that word potential again.)
Switching from copyrights to distribution and performance rights would maintain the original intent of copyright, codify nearly all fair uses, have minimal impact on most existing businesses, render the stupid anti-circumvention laws generally irrelevant, and redirect most legal actions against the big counterfeiters rather than individual downloaders.
While I agree with your sentiment, I continue to take issue with the pedantic insistence that the word "theft" doesn't apply to copyright infringement because the victim is not deprived of tangible property.
Consider "theft of services", which, according to Wikipedia, is a legal term. Theft of services does not deprive the victim of property. And yet, like more common forms of theft, it is typically prosecuted as larceny. If the word "theft" can be used as a legal term in this context, then the argument that it only applies when the victim is deprived of tangible property doesn't hold.
I believe that advertisements avoid naming the competition because:
Perhaps they have improved it, but there was much discussion when GMail arrived about deleting. Supposedly, when you empty out the trash folder, at least some copies of the messages linger on the servers for potentially quite some time. When asked specifically about how long it takes before all the servers synch up, Google suggested that it was a complex system and not completely predictable.
It's not just how long Google may hold data they've collected, it's also about how long your data (e.g., your Gmail messages) remain on their servers. Specifically, if messages are routinely kept for more than 180 days, then the hurdles for law enforcement to get a warrant are lowered. CNet wasn't very specific in this article, but they did allude to the discussion that many analysts were making of this Electronic Privacy Act ramification on the second page of the original article:
I think that's an interesting legal ramification.
I don't disagree that the tone of the article, especially at the beginning, was sensationalistic. My point was just that the article was not simply about what you can find on the Web with a search engine, as so many people in the thread were insinuating.
Not true.
The original CNet article was not solely about all the information you can search for. It was also about all of the information Google can collect about users of its services, and how to balance all of that information against privacy. Granted, you have to read past the first page to get the gist of article.
Not all the major search engines have the same reach here. Things like GMail, Froogle, and even AdWords makes it possible for Google to collect and correlate a huge amount of data about their users. Other big portals, like Yahoo!, were mentioned in the article. (Like many tech stories now, when Google does it, it's news, even if the competitors have been doing it for a while.) But the article points out distinctions between the Google's data resources and those of its competition.
GMail offered magnitudes more space than anyone else at the time it came out, and it made all those messages easy to search. This dramatically changed the usage pattern for many email users. Instead of having a few items in their inboxes, they would now keep everything indefinitely. Turns out this has a legal effect in the U.S., since data routinely kept less than 180 days have more privacy protections (under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) than those kept longer. GMail also doesn't provide a well-defined delete feature, so the 180-day test is a little more vague.
I'll grant you that the CNet article was a bit sensationalistic, and it starts out with a different thrust than the rest of the piece, but it does raise some good points about privacy and data collection.
I read the thread, and it looks like this is a fishy-sounding rumor. Before everyone one goes karma-whoring with anti-MS rants, why don't we wait for some facts?
Try a little skepticism. The FA is a posting on a bulletin board by "Administrative User #4" who, when asked for a source, says that it was from a conversation at SIGGRAPH.
Vista certainly has significant changes going on in the rendering department. Avalon is built on DirectX, so perhaps there's some re-jiggering going on to make OpenGL work alongside that. But a 50% performance degradation? Come on. Microsoft is not that stupid. They know applications sell computers, not OSes. If they screw several games and CAD apps, it'll hurt them.
There are several studies that show Daylight Saving time saves lives (pedestrians and automobile traffic), reduces violent crime, and saves electricity.
Here's one example.True, they index the Web, but they're more than a catalog (as the article details after the first page). Google also collects vast amounts of information on your use of that catalog, and--if you use their other services--they've got that data, too. That makes a big, fat target for a warrant or an unscrupulous person.
A 35-mm projector installation for a single screen in a multiplex can easily cost more than $10,000. I consider that non-trivial. If you're an exhibitor thinking of upgrading to 3D, an add-on system can be more attractive than one that requires you to replace and expensive asset.
Getting enough light onto the screen is always a challenge. With standard film projection, the screen is dark more than half of the time, since the shutter is completely closed while the film advances to the next frame. Typical cinema lamps run 4500 to 7000 watts.
A two-projector system for 3D can cost more than two projectors, because you need a way to precisely synchronize them.
Assuming a single projector, for 3D you need to project two images for each frame. If you multiplex in space by putting both images side-by-side or over-and-under in the same frame, you've already cut the light seen by either eye by (approximately) half. Then you have the polarizer loss, and there are additional losses with the beam-splitter optics. Silver screens may also be less efficient reflectors than modern white screens.
If, however, you multiplex in time, you avoid the extra optics. If you can run the projector at double speed, eliminating much of the shutter-closed time, (as IMAX does for 3D), then you can reclaim the brightness lossed to alternatation.
By the way, it's true that an ideal polarizer loses half the light, but real-life filters cut even more than that. If you've played with a manual camera and a polarizer, you've probably noticed that a polarizer can cut the light as much as two full stops (a 75% reduction) rather than the theoretical one stop.
True, but that's a solved problem. The IMAX headsets work well at a very high frame rate.
Passive polarized glasses may seem simpler and cheaper, but that's only if you look at the viewing side of the equation and not the projection requirements. For cross polarization, you have to project two images simultaneously. That can be done with two perfectly synchronized projectors. Although expensive, this is often the choice for dedicated 3D theatres. Or you can try to squeeze both images into a single frame and use a special optics to split the beams, polarize them, and rejoin them. This means you get half the resolution at best, and you've cut the light to each eye at least in half. In practice, you need a *really* powerful projector, since there are also losses for the additional optics. For polarized light to remain polarized when reflected off the screen, you need a silvered screen. These aren't much more expensive than a conventional modern screen, but it is one more thing to consider. The result is dimmer, lower resolution 3D. You may be able to compensate for the dimming by installing more powerful projectors, but then you also need more cooling power in the booth. (Those extra optics absorb lots of heat!)
Using LCD shutter glasses and multiplexing in time eliminates the loss of spatial resolution and dramatically mitigates the loss of brightness. If your projector is capable of a 2x frame rate, you can comletely eliminate the loss of brightness. If your theatre is already digital, then buying the glasses and installing an IR or RF synchronization signal broadcaster is quite possibly less expensive. And you can immediately switch back and forth between 3D and conventional movies.
That's doesn't jibe with the story I've been told. I heard Hitchcock considered 3D too gimmicky, but the studio insisted that he use it for Dial M for Murder. In protest, he eschewed compositions that would emphasize the stereoscopic effect. In essence, he made a very flat 3D film.
Ironically, stereo enthusiasts consider it one of the best 3D movies, because it doesn't use in-your-face gimmicks. The 3D (in most of the film) is subtle, simply lending realism to the scenes. Watch Dial M on (2D) video, and you won't feel like you're missing anything. That isn't the case with most other 3D movies.
I'm a stereo-buff. A few years ago, I ODed on a 3D film festival at a revival theatre in my area. Of the dozens of 3D flicks I sat through, Dial M was one of the best because it was a good film enhanced by 3D.
Isn't that point that both are examples of amateurs successfully providing product that traditionally comes only from professional organizations? That seems like a valid point to me.
Go see a professional. It could be an opthamalic migraine. My wife get's halos like these about 20 minutes before the pain of a regular migraine.
Funny.
Thanks for the link. I'd never heard of the National Education Association before. When I read your original post, I was confused. So I did a search on "teachers' union". NEA doesn't come up in the top ten hits. The American Federation of Teachers did. So I assumed it was a simple mistake.
Turns out the NEA isn't exactly a "teachers' union" (or even a "teacher's union" as you called it). It includes people employeed in school administration as well as teachers. That's probably why the web search didn't turn anything up.
Since your post was rated "+5, Insightful" when I read it, I was looking for the insight. But all I found was a vague swipe at the NEA. I would be interested in specific examples of proposals to improve education that the NEA has opposed and how they successfully managed to block them.
Thanks for clarifying. I read posts at +2. At the time, the parent post was only a 1 (it's currently a 3). From the wording, it sounded like "refine my point" was referring to the first two paragraphs of the post in question. As such, it seemed a non-sequiter.
More clever comments because, of course, a failure to communicate clearly can always be blamed on the reader.
The National Endowment for the Arts? WTF? Did you mean the AFT (American Federation of Teachers)?
I don't understand what you mean. What does the Department of Education have to do with a teachers' union?
Can you provide an example of such a law? I just found this explanation on the Social Security website: