Are you still doing special effects for commercials and/or movies, or is Mythbusters your full time job now? Have your mythbusting experiments helped out with your special effects work?
> there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
Actually, pretty much everybody agrees there is global climate change. The debate is to what degree, and what is causing it.
> business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
Business is quickly learning that waste is, well, wasteful. Using less/using better saves money.
> the economy can survive $100 oil
There's plenty of oil. There's tons and tons of it. It's just in environmentally sensitive areas, like arctic wasteland, that are politically sensitive for some reason (Probably has more to do with making Middle East countries angry than anything else)
> nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
I still haven't heard a reason why it isn't. The main reason it sucks right now are all the lawsuits that get filed to stop construction of new plants raise the cost so much they aren't cost effective. Modern nuke plants (especially the gravel-bed reactors in China) are extremely safe and very efficient, leaving behind very little waste.
> Wouldn't it be simpler/fairer to raise the tax on each gallon of fuel, and really hit the SUV owner where it hurts.
Then you punish those who bought fuel efficient cars to begin with as well. Besides, those who pay $400-$600 a month for a huge SUV can afford another 20 or 30% price hike. Besides, artificial fuel price hikes hurt poor people more than anyone else, and is inflationary to boot.
> Or is it un-American to tax fuel?
No, it's un-American to try to control what other people do.
I think TRON looks perfect the way it is. The old-school hand-shaded computer graphics look awesome. It's the first thing I think of when someone says "CGI." If they are smart they'll keep the look just as they kept it with the new video game.
My favorite scene is at the end when the helicopter takes off above the lit-up city and the whole thing turns into a circuit-board looking schematic. I still have a thing for looking at cities at night out of tall buildings:)
(Best view: Bathroom at the Signature Lounge, top of the Hancock building in Chicago)
'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.'
Fantastic! Just a couple questions: 1. What constitutes an "Industrialized" country? 2. What constitutes an "Emission" ? 3. Why those six particular greenhouse gasses? 4. Why 5.2%? Why not 10.2? Or 2.7? 5. Why 1990 levels? Why not 1980? 1994?
I tried to glean the answers from the protocol itself: http://unfccc.int/essential_background/ky oto_proto col/items/1678.php
And, well, it's unreadable legaleese. It's like an obfuscated code contest, half the articles point to other articles and those point to other paragraphs. It looks like there's about two paragraphs of substance in it's 20 pages.
On it's original media, even! My second PC was, luckily, a Mac 512K. I've still got the system disks for it, with the original MacPaint and MacWrite disks. I've still got the first doodle I've done in MacPaint on 3.5" 400K diskette, and my PowerMac 6100/60 still reads it fine. When my all-singing, all-dancing Linux-based windows/appletalk/NFS/novell server is up and running, I'm going to back up everything onto RAID, then optical. As long as I keep cycling backup strategies, and keep offsite backups in a safety deposit box, all my data should be secure for quite a long time...
Recent polling data from a leading software vendor shows that other, "open" formats are pushing MP3 further out of the marketplace and into a horrible, shoebox-sized niche. The scientific on-line poll taken from the front of a popular web portal that is the default homepage on several popular operating systems, 95% of respondants chose "WMA" or Windows Media Audio, over 5% choosing "uLaw, other" compression formats, which clearly includes MP3.
To further bury the MP3 format into a stygian abyss of irrelevance, most digital audio players support the open WMA standard over the closed, other standard, whose parent company has several pending lawsuits from companies also named after fruit. Also, it is belived the competing, non-open media format player makes you sterile.
Parent groups applaud the news, citing overwhelming evidence that the MP3 format contributes to the starvation of starving musicians and their starving children. Studies show that 99.9% of all musicians prefer the WMA format over MP3. The remaining 0.01% of musicians, constisting of U2, sucks and will probably die of lung cancer or in a plane crash.
Is it just me or is everyone ripping off the iPod GUI? Most of the player's I've seen have the progress bar at the the bottom, with a couple lines of text above. Virgin's device looks a bit more cluttered, and the buttons look terrible. I've played around with a bunch of MP3 players and nothing comes close to the intuitiveness of the iPod's interface. I got one for my Mom and she figured it out in a couple minutes, while it usually takes her weeks to get used to a new remote control. Brilliant design from Apple, someone is going to have to do their homework to beat it.
Domain names are just pointers to IP addreses. It's a handle, or street address, or telephone number. Technically speaking, I don't belive in "Cybersquatting," to me it's like Ford suing a company that has the phone number 1-800-BUY-FORD.
Now, if you register the domain ford.com and you pretend you are Ford, I can see a problem there.
To quote Penn & Teller, this guy's an "Elitist asshole" (pardon the light profanity)
Right, we supposedy don't need GE food. And people who live along the shrinking green belt along the Nile river couldn't use rice that needs less water to grow, and farmers in India don't need disease and pest resistant crops.
I'm as scientifically conservative as anyone, and I understand GE is pretty scary. However, the one argument I don't see out of the anti-GE crop bunch is HARD SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. Show me the studies that proove GE crops are dangerous. Anyone?
The anti-GM hysteria reminds me of the early luddites who hated electricity. They were afraid it would leak out of the sockets and slowly kill you, among other crackpot ideas. New != bad.
So Real wants Apple to open up licensing of iTunes DRM so they can undercut Apple on a non-Apple platform?
In other words, "We want you to let us use your DRM for our music store which won't run on your OS so we can compete fairly with your music store." Does that not make sense to anyone else?
In the U.S. at least, MPEG2 and CSS used in current DVD players are not really "Open", although they have been reverse engineered and implemented in open source projects (Opened with a crowbar, in a sense.)
I suppose you could make an argument MPEG2 is somewhat more open, if not unencumbered, than Microsoft codex XXX, but CSS certainly isn't.
If you are talking about the CD/satellite radio bus, every company has their own standard. Alpine, Clairon, Pioneer, Kenwood, Sony, Becker, Denon, Panasonic, Audiovox, Delphi, Visteon, they all use their own signalling and connectors, not to mention the in-car busses such as MOST and J1850. Unless you sign up for a developer agreement with them, you don't get the specs. They probably won't like you connecting it to your computer, especially with the XM news. This whole endeavour would be pricey.
That being said, Soundgate specializes in reverse engineering these protocols and building adapters for them. Unfortunatly they usually go from one standard to another, installing an aftermarket CD changer in your Volkswagon Beetle, for instance.
1. Read the C2 security certification guide from the NSA. http://nsa2.www.conxion.com/
2. Remove the network card from your computer. 3. Install Windows 2000 Workstation. 4. Install all service packs and security hotfixes from Microsoft from CD. 5. Turn off all unecessary services, including server, messenger, networking, etc... 6. Get 2000lite and nuke internet explorer off your computer. http://www.litepc.com/
7. Lock down a restricted user for general machine use. 8. Install OpenOffice.org for office applications. 9. Remove floppy and cdrom drives and lock case. 10. Epoxy shut the USB ports to discourage thumbdrive use.
All done! I dare anyone to hack into this machine:)
It doesn't matter if you release everyting in 1080p 90FPS DV files, all it takes is Discreet Media Cleaner and suddenly it's 480p at 30FPS MPEG2. Or VirtualDub with ffmpeg/xvid/theora or whatever.
It's the classic ratio of disk space versus processor power. The more processor power you have the less disk space you need (As you get better compression with compute-intensive algorithms)
Computers vent most of their heat through airflow (Feel the exhaust in the back of your case, then feel the side). The case radiates relatively little heat. Witness the Macintosh G4 Cube which has no fans, is mostly encased in plexiglass, and is cooled entirely through convection and a well-placed heatsink. The only exception are laptops, which radiate quite a bit of heat through the case.
>as CPR instructions do change over the years while >the brain's structure has been constant in recent history even as our understanding of it changes significantly
The instructions are more for her own safety than training purposes. Old instructions on CPR are better for someone trying to treat her than no instruction at all (If the person trying to treat her doesn't know CPR, that is)
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Are you still doing special effects for commercials and/or movies, or is Mythbusters your full time job now? Have your mythbusting experiments helped out with your special effects work?
> there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
Actually, pretty much everybody agrees there is global climate change. The debate is to what degree, and what is causing it.
> business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
Business is quickly learning that waste is, well, wasteful. Using less/using better saves money.
> the economy can survive $100 oil
There's plenty of oil. There's tons and tons of it. It's just in environmentally sensitive areas, like arctic wasteland, that are politically sensitive for some reason (Probably has more to do with making Middle East countries angry than anything else)
> nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
I still haven't heard a reason why it isn't. The main reason it sucks right now are all the lawsuits that get filed to stop construction of new plants raise the cost so much they aren't cost effective. Modern nuke plants (especially the gravel-bed reactors in China) are extremely safe and very efficient, leaving behind very little waste.
> Wouldn't it be simpler/fairer to raise the tax on each gallon of fuel, and really hit the SUV owner where it hurts.
Then you punish those who bought fuel efficient cars to begin with as well. Besides, those who pay $400-$600 a month for a huge SUV can afford another 20 or 30% price hike. Besides, artificial fuel price hikes hurt poor people more than anyone else, and is inflationary to boot.
> Or is it un-American to tax fuel?
No, it's un-American to try to control what other people do.
The 97%/3% non-working rip software to working rip software ratio will quickly become 97%/3%.
I live one block away from the eastern border of Oakland, *and* I have a bunch of tall trees next to my house. Mwahahahahaaa....
I think TRON looks perfect the way it is. The old-school hand-shaded computer graphics look awesome. It's the first thing I think of when someone says "CGI." If they are smart they'll keep the look just as they kept it with the new video game.
:)
My favorite scene is at the end when the helicopter takes off above the lit-up city and the whole thing turns into a circuit-board looking schematic. I still have a thing for looking at cities at night out of tall buildings
(Best view: Bathroom at the Signature Lounge, top of the Hancock building in Chicago)
I thought for sure you were going to say Microsoft. I think it would be more apropos. Besides, ENCOM is pretty close spelling-wise to ENRON.
'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.'
y oto_proto col/items/1678.php
Fantastic! Just a couple questions:
1. What constitutes an "Industrialized" country?
2. What constitutes an "Emission" ?
3. Why those six particular greenhouse gasses?
4. Why 5.2%? Why not 10.2? Or 2.7?
5. Why 1990 levels? Why not 1980? 1994?
I tried to glean the answers from the protocol itself:
http://unfccc.int/essential_background/k
And, well, it's unreadable legaleese. It's like an obfuscated code contest, half the articles point to other articles and those point to other paragraphs. It looks like there's about two paragraphs of substance in it's 20 pages.
Zinf is a nice open source Winamp-like player, but it is updated even less often than Winamp.
On it's original media, even! My second PC was, luckily, a Mac 512K. I've still got the system disks for it, with the original MacPaint and MacWrite disks. I've still got the first doodle I've done in MacPaint on 3.5" 400K diskette, and my PowerMac 6100/60 still reads it fine. When my all-singing, all-dancing Linux-based windows/appletalk/NFS/novell server is up and running, I'm going to back up everything onto RAID, then optical. As long as I keep cycling backup strategies, and keep offsite backups in a safety deposit box, all my data should be secure for quite a long time...
Recent polling data from a leading software vendor shows that other, "open" formats are pushing MP3 further out of the marketplace and into a horrible, shoebox-sized niche. The scientific on-line poll taken from the front of a popular web portal that is the default homepage on several popular operating systems, 95% of respondants chose "WMA" or Windows Media Audio, over 5% choosing "uLaw, other" compression formats, which clearly includes MP3.
To further bury the MP3 format into a stygian abyss of irrelevance, most digital audio players support the open WMA standard over the closed, other standard, whose parent company has several pending lawsuits from companies also named after fruit. Also, it is belived the competing, non-open media format player makes you sterile.
Parent groups applaud the news, citing overwhelming evidence that the MP3 format contributes to the starvation of starving musicians and their starving children. Studies show that 99.9% of all musicians prefer the WMA format over MP3. The remaining 0.01% of musicians, constisting of U2, sucks and will probably die of lung cancer or in a plane crash.
Is it just me or is everyone ripping off the iPod GUI? Most of the player's I've seen have the progress bar at the the bottom, with a couple lines of text above. Virgin's device looks a bit more cluttered, and the buttons look terrible. I've played around with a bunch of MP3 players and nothing comes close to the intuitiveness of the iPod's interface. I got one for my Mom and she figured it out in a couple minutes, while it usually takes her weeks to get used to a new remote control. Brilliant design from Apple, someone is going to have to do their homework to beat it.
Domain names are just pointers to IP addreses. It's a handle, or street address, or telephone number. Technically speaking, I don't belive in "Cybersquatting," to me it's like Ford suing a company that has the phone number 1-800-BUY-FORD.
Now, if you register the domain ford.com and you pretend you are Ford, I can see a problem there.
Stateless anarchy + entrenched beauracracy = goodness? I don't think so.
To quote Penn & Teller, this guy's an "Elitist asshole" (pardon the light profanity)
Right, we supposedy don't need GE food. And people who live along the shrinking green belt along the Nile river couldn't use rice that needs less water to grow, and farmers in India don't need disease and pest resistant crops.
I'm as scientifically conservative as anyone, and I understand GE is pretty scary. However, the one argument I don't see out of the anti-GE crop bunch is HARD SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. Show me the studies that proove GE crops are dangerous. Anyone?
The anti-GM hysteria reminds me of the early luddites who hated electricity. They were afraid it would leak out of the sockets and slowly kill you, among other crackpot ideas. New != bad.
So Real wants Apple to open up licensing of iTunes DRM so they can undercut Apple on a non-Apple platform?
In other words, "We want you to let us use your DRM for our music store which won't run on your OS so we can compete fairly with your music store." Does that not make sense to anyone else?
Got that, NINE WHOLE CENTS!!! Wow, if I buy 100 albums I can save $9!!! I'm dropping iTunes, throwing away my iPod, buying a Nomad and signing up!!!
In the U.S. at least, MPEG2 and CSS used in current DVD players are not really "Open", although they have been reverse engineered and implemented in open source projects (Opened with a crowbar, in a sense.)
I suppose you could make an argument MPEG2 is somewhat more open, if not unencumbered, than Microsoft codex XXX, but CSS certainly isn't.
If you are talking about the CD/satellite radio bus, every company has their own standard. Alpine, Clairon, Pioneer, Kenwood, Sony, Becker, Denon, Panasonic, Audiovox, Delphi, Visteon, they all use their own signalling and connectors, not to mention the in-car busses such as MOST and J1850. Unless you sign up for a developer agreement with them, you don't get the specs. They probably won't like you connecting it to your computer, especially with the XM news. This whole endeavour would be pricey.
That being said, Soundgate specializes in reverse engineering these protocols and building adapters for them. Unfortunatly they usually go from one standard to another, installing an aftermarket CD changer in your Volkswagon Beetle, for instance.
1. Read the C2 security certification guide from the NSA.
:)
http://nsa2.www.conxion.com/
2. Remove the network card from your computer.
3. Install Windows 2000 Workstation.
4. Install all service packs and security hotfixes from Microsoft from CD.
5. Turn off all unecessary services, including server, messenger, networking, etc...
6. Get 2000lite and nuke internet explorer off your computer.
http://www.litepc.com/
7. Lock down a restricted user for general machine use.
8. Install OpenOffice.org for office applications.
9. Remove floppy and cdrom drives and lock case.
10. Epoxy shut the USB ports to discourage thumbdrive use.
All done! I dare anyone to hack into this machine
It doesn't matter if you release everyting in 1080p 90FPS DV files, all it takes is Discreet Media Cleaner and suddenly it's 480p at 30FPS MPEG2. Or VirtualDub with ffmpeg/xvid/theora or whatever.
It's the classic ratio of disk space versus processor power. The more processor power you have the less disk space you need (As you get better compression with compute-intensive algorithms)
Thank you for the clarification.
:)
However, those heat pipe cooling-fin jobbies behind the little fans in my Dell *look* like a radiator
Computers vent most of their heat through airflow (Feel the exhaust in the back of your case, then feel the side). The case radiates relatively little heat. Witness the Macintosh G4 Cube which has no fans, is mostly encased in plexiglass, and is cooled entirely through convection and a well-placed heatsink. The only exception are laptops, which radiate quite a bit of heat through the case.
I clearly saw that Phelps guy with an iPod. He's got cash, time for the fines!
Where is all the money the IOC collects going, anyway? It's board must make a TON of dough.
>as CPR instructions do change over the years while
>the brain's structure has been constant in recent history even as our understanding of it changes significantly
The instructions are more for her own safety than training purposes. Old instructions on CPR are better for someone trying to treat her than no instruction at all (If the person trying to treat her doesn't know CPR, that is)