I actually quite liked The Core. Sure it was stretching physics quite a bit, but it was pretty entertaining, made an effort to explain the plausibility of what was going on, and had good characters. It didn't have a happy-ever-after ending for everyone apart from the inevitable guy getting the girl thing. At least it didn't have a squillion physics-defying implausible narrow escapes or driving-without-looking-where-you're-going continuity gaffes like 2012. Now that was just plain awful!
Oh so now you're suddenly all concerned about the plight of the blind? Your "Ok, Won't somebody please think of the Blind!!?? Yeah. Why not equip the blind with..." comment wasn't being sarcastic?
Ok, Won't somebody please think of the Blind!!?? Yeah. Why not equip the blind with the sensors that they need to detect large/fast moving objects instead of equipping all large moving objects with noise makers to be drowner out by other noise makers.
Like what? Bionic eyes?
That's a contemptible statement and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
As Green Car Reports notes, the legislation would allow for a common set of standards, rather than than a motley crew of approaches attempted by various automakers.
Brilliant. Legislate away the possibilities for innovation before the new market has a chance to solve the problem. Is it only in America that "leaders" push science and math and the entrepreneurial spirit, and then quickly make it illegal to innovate lest anyone gets hurt? sheesh
What this country needs is a good five cent nickel.
Quite right. A standard system for turn signals? Let the market sort it out! Ford can have a mechanical arrow flipping up from a slot, GM can have blinking lights, and Chrysler can have a colour-coded panel on the rear of the car with pink meaning I'm turning right, and blue meaning I'm turning left. Sure the public will figure it all out without this government dictatorship stuff!
Same goes for license plates, brake lights, reversing lights, and all other things that require some sort of standardisation so that the people have a chance of knowing what's going on.
Fucking government-phobic market fundamentalists on this site really get on my wick sometimes.
I've seen electric car drivers write into the paper saying that they are constantly having to honk at pedestrians who get in their way even though they can see the car coming. Some pedestrians even look at the car coming straight towards them but carry on walking on a collision course. People have become so accustomed to cars making noise that apparently they don't connect the dots when we see a car coming towards us that isn't making any noise. Maybe they think that because there's no noise, the car is decelerating or something. I've been known to be startled by Priuses in parking lots. There's something about the combination of noise and visual warnings that we've gotten used to, and suddenly taking one of those away is going to have an impact. (Please, no lectures about how petrol-engined cars are just as quiet as electric cars. They're not. Shut up.)
One of the things I like about certain neighbourhoods in San Francisco is the fact that you can sit outside a cafe and hear yourself think even though a bus is going past and labouring up those hills. That's because they're trolleybuses and they whisper along. I'd hate to imagine having to recreate the sound of a noisy diesel engine to make up for that.
When they reintroduced trams in Manchester about 20 years ago they added these nice little horns that give off a soft hoot rather than an aggressive honk. It's like almost like a soft whistle. Very easy on the ear, not threatening, but enough to let you know that the tram is there (they're so quiet you wouldn't believe it), which is necessary in some of the more confusing street layouts where pedestrians and trams mingle.
I think it's worth looking into rather than leaving it up to natural selection as many people are sure to be suggesting below. It wasn't so long ago that safety features on automobiles were a novelty and the know-all "I call bullshit"/. crowd's reaction in those days would probably have been "if they get killed in a car crash then it's their own tough shit". You wouldn't get away with that now. That's one thing I suppose we should thank Ralph Nader for.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.
While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.
Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers—and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible.
It's not an opinion that he was born in the USA. It's a fact. I know it's a fact because it has been reported as such by every reputable source I have checked. His birth certificate looks pretty convincing too, wouldn't you say?
Saying that Obama was born in the USA is a fact, not an opinion. If you think he wasn't, then you are wrong. Wrong is not as equally valid a point of view as right.
Annakin did not switch accents in the prequels. We could hear him talking after he switched to the dark side and right up to the end of the third prequel he was still speaking in a rhotic accent. When he next appears in Episode 4 he suddenly has a non-rhotic accent. Clear?
Eharmony happily accepted me, but never found a match until just a day or two before the monthly bill came due. For almost every one, by the time I got to the site to check them out, they'd unilaterally closed the contact.
Were I a suspicious person by nature, I'd say that EH was salting the mine trying to keep me on the hook. I wriggled free, though.
I think the only relevant qualification that EH looks at is the credit rating and credit line on your credit card.
Same thing with match.com. Not a single response from anyone until just before it was time to pay up and renew. Odd, that.
People who use dateing websites are not the people you want to date. That's why they use dating websites.
What's the weather like back there in 1999? I remember what the dating scene was like then, when meeting someone outside of a pub or club was considered losery and before online dating became mainstream.
The idea that you get what you pay for does not apply here. OKCupid is to match.com is what Linux is to Windoze. I mean it, OKCupid is actually a pretty decent site. I actually find more fake profiles on pay sites than I do on OKCupid. Come to think of it, I've never found a fake profile on OKCupid and have never received an email from a hot 18 year old girl who "really likes my profile" and wants me to view her webcam.
I agree actually. I did the Match.com thing for ages and soon came to realise that this was a scam to defraud me out of my money. They were letting me waste hours sending emails to girls who are unlikely to be paid up members who can even read my emails, to say nothing of responding to them. I wonder how that guy's lawsuit ended up, I'm hoping to get included in the class if it becomes class action. OKCupid is way better, at least there are systems in place to let you know how real a person is.
The idea that you get what you pay for does not apply here. OKCupid is to match.com is what Linux is to Windoze.
Wrong. I'm not talking about sci fi here, I'm talking about regular drama movies that are supposed to be set in this particular world. Sorry, but you can't fall 60 feet onto concrete and run away from it even if you're in a movie! Die! Die! Die!
Not true. Even after he put the mask on I distinctly heard the 'R' at the end of 'master' instead of 'masta' as he would have said in the original films.
On the subject of Star Wars, there's still something impressive about the opening scene of Episode IV which was never replicated in any of the other movies. They tried to recreate the same sense of impressive scale and carnage at the start of one of the prequels (can't remember which one, they all blend together in my mind) when they started off with a space battle over Coruscant, but it suffered from the touch of George Lucas having more money than sense and hence was cluttered up with too many ships big and small. Not to mention the bad movie physics as well. However, I digress. The opening scene of Ep IV was all done with models, as was Star Trek TWOK, and to this day I still maintain that the model shots of ships in old sci fi were much more impressive than the CGI effects that started coming in with Babylon 5 and ST:TNG. I always thought that the Enterprise looked bigger and more graceful in the earlier movies, subsequent films didn't quite capture the scale of it.
I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?
You know what drives me fucking insane? Blatantly bad movie physics. Like people falling 60 feet onto solid concrete and I think "oh shit, they're dead!" and then they promptly get up and keep on running. Grrrr!
Slashdot Mirror
That was Mystery Science Theatre 3000 material. I think they should bring back MST3K just for the purpose of skewering it.
I actually quite liked The Core. Sure it was stretching physics quite a bit, but it was pretty entertaining, made an effort to explain the plausibility of what was going on, and had good characters. It didn't have a happy-ever-after ending for everyone apart from the inevitable guy getting the girl thing. At least it didn't have a squillion physics-defying implausible narrow escapes or driving-without-looking-where-you're-going continuity gaffes like 2012. Now that was just plain awful!
They don't even list "Capricorn One".
What's wrong with making it look like you can land on the surface of Mars and blast away again in a puny little Lunar style module?
I thought they had a parliamentary system in Spain.
Oh so now you're suddenly all concerned about the plight of the blind? Your "Ok, Won't somebody please think of the Blind!!?? Yeah. Why not equip the blind with..." comment wasn't being sarcastic?
Yeah, right!
Asshole.
Ok, Won't somebody please think of the Blind!!??
Yeah. Why not equip the blind with the sensors that they need to detect large/fast moving objects instead of equipping all large moving objects with noise makers to be drowner out by other noise makers.
Like what? Bionic eyes?
That's a contemptible statement and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Brilliant. Legislate away the possibilities for innovation before the new market has a chance to solve the problem. Is it only in America that "leaders" push science and math and the entrepreneurial spirit, and then quickly make it illegal to innovate lest anyone gets hurt? sheesh
What this country needs is a good five cent nickel.
Quite right. A standard system for turn signals? Let the market sort it out! Ford can have a mechanical arrow flipping up from a slot, GM can have blinking lights, and Chrysler can have a colour-coded panel on the rear of the car with pink meaning I'm turning right, and blue meaning I'm turning left. Sure the public will figure it all out without this government dictatorship stuff!
Same goes for license plates, brake lights, reversing lights, and all other things that require some sort of standardisation so that the people have a chance of knowing what's going on.
Fucking government-phobic market fundamentalists on this site really get on my wick sometimes.
I've seen electric car drivers write into the paper saying that they are constantly having to honk at pedestrians who get in their way even though they can see the car coming. Some pedestrians even look at the car coming straight towards them but carry on walking on a collision course. People have become so accustomed to cars making noise that apparently they don't connect the dots when we see a car coming towards us that isn't making any noise. Maybe they think that because there's no noise, the car is decelerating or something. I've been known to be startled by Priuses in parking lots. There's something about the combination of noise and visual warnings that we've gotten used to, and suddenly taking one of those away is going to have an impact. (Please, no lectures about how petrol-engined cars are just as quiet as electric cars. They're not. Shut up.)
One of the things I like about certain neighbourhoods in San Francisco is the fact that you can sit outside a cafe and hear yourself think even though a bus is going past and labouring up those hills. That's because they're trolleybuses and they whisper along. I'd hate to imagine having to recreate the sound of a noisy diesel engine to make up for that.
When they reintroduced trams in Manchester about 20 years ago they added these nice little horns that give off a soft hoot rather than an aggressive honk. It's like almost like a soft whistle. Very easy on the ear, not threatening, but enough to let you know that the tram is there (they're so quiet you wouldn't believe it), which is necessary in some of the more confusing street layouts where pedestrians and trams mingle.
I think it's worth looking into rather than leaving it up to natural selection as many people are sure to be suggesting below. It wasn't so long ago that safety features on automobiles were a novelty and the know-all "I call bullshit" /. crowd's reaction in those days would probably have been "if they get killed in a car crash then it's their own tough shit". You wouldn't get away with that now. That's one thing I suppose we should thank Ralph Nader for.
... if they have nothing to hide.
Sauce for the goose and all that.
This is the link to the actual article. The link in the summary leads to a details-free summary.
I had to look this up.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (beta)
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.
While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.
Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers—and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible.
And...?
It's not an opinion that he was born in the USA. It's a fact. I know it's a fact because it has been reported as such by every reputable source I have checked. His birth certificate looks pretty convincing too, wouldn't you say?
Saying that Obama was born in the USA is a fact, not an opinion. If you think he wasn't, then you are wrong. Wrong is not as equally valid a point of view as right.
You are very confused. This is not difficult.
Annakin did not switch accents in the prequels. We could hear him talking after he switched to the dark side and right up to the end of the third prequel he was still speaking in a rhotic accent. When he next appears in Episode 4 he suddenly has a non-rhotic accent. Clear?
No, he's talking about when Annakin switched to the dark side. That happened in the prequels and the American accent held right up to the Nooooooooo!.
Eharmony happily accepted me, but never found a match until just a day or two before the monthly bill came due. For almost every one, by the time I got to the site to check them out, they'd unilaterally closed the contact.
Were I a suspicious person by nature, I'd say that EH was salting the mine trying to keep me on the hook. I wriggled free, though.
I think the only relevant qualification that EH looks at is the credit rating and credit line on your credit card.
Same thing with match.com. Not a single response from anyone until just before it was time to pay up and renew. Odd, that.
People who use dateing websites are not the people you want to date. That's why they use dating websites.
What's the weather like back there in 1999? I remember what the dating scene was like then, when meeting someone outside of a pub or club was considered losery and before online dating became mainstream.
The idea that you get what you pay for does not apply here. OKCupid is to match.com is what Linux is to Windoze. I mean it, OKCupid is actually a pretty decent site. I actually find more fake profiles on pay sites than I do on OKCupid. Come to think of it, I've never found a fake profile on OKCupid and have never received an email from a hot 18 year old girl who "really likes my profile" and wants me to view her webcam.
I agree actually. I did the Match.com thing for ages and soon came to realise that this was a scam to defraud me out of my money. They were letting me waste hours sending emails to girls who are unlikely to be paid up members who can even read my emails, to say nothing of responding to them. I wonder how that guy's lawsuit ended up, I'm hoping to get included in the class if it becomes class action. OKCupid is way better, at least there are systems in place to let you know how real a person is.
The idea that you get what you pay for does not apply here. OKCupid is to match.com is what Linux is to Windoze.
Wrong. I'm not talking about sci fi here, I'm talking about regular drama movies that are supposed to be set in this particular world. Sorry, but you can't fall 60 feet onto concrete and run away from it even if you're in a movie! Die! Die! Die!
Not true. Even after he put the mask on I distinctly heard the 'R' at the end of 'master' instead of 'masta' as he would have said in the original films.
What I want to know is:
A - Why did Darth Vader switch from an American to an English accent?
and
B - Why am I the only person ever to have noticed?
On the subject of Star Wars, there's still something impressive about the opening scene of Episode IV which was never replicated in any of the other movies. They tried to recreate the same sense of impressive scale and carnage at the start of one of the prequels (can't remember which one, they all blend together in my mind) when they started off with a space battle over Coruscant, but it suffered from the touch of George Lucas having more money than sense and hence was cluttered up with too many ships big and small. Not to mention the bad movie physics as well. However, I digress. The opening scene of Ep IV was all done with models, as was Star Trek TWOK, and to this day I still maintain that the model shots of ships in old sci fi were much more impressive than the CGI effects that started coming in with Babylon 5 and ST:TNG. I always thought that the Enterprise looked bigger and more graceful in the earlier movies, subsequent films didn't quite capture the scale of it.
I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?
You know what drives me fucking insane? Blatantly bad movie physics. Like people falling 60 feet onto solid concrete and I think "oh shit, they're dead!" and then they promptly get up and keep on running. Grrrr!