The grandparent's example was really not the best. One of the best I've ever seen is from the standard Java Collections API itself. It's the Comparable interface.
Basically, it allows you to toss a bunch of objects of the same type in a bucket designed to hold any type of objects and still allow you to sort them. You have to implement the Comparable interface on your object to get it to work.
Of course, alternately, you could implement this method on the Object object at the root of the object tree. This is how Smalltalk handles the problem. The only problem with this is that this method will exist for every instance of any object and you can call the compareTo method on any object. So if you happen to have a couple of objects of the same type and you compare them, but they don't have any kind of order? You suddenly can sort anything you want, but the order you get out of it means nothing. And you'll still have to overwrite the parent method to get a correct ordering anyway, so we're back to the same problem.
Interfaces are good, but frankly, you could just cut and paste the same method signatures into your classes and end up with the same result.
You don't get the same result because interfaces allow for some advantages of multiple inheritance. In other words, if you need to see if something is Comparable, you just check if it's an "instance" of the Comparable interface. If you just toss in the methods you want, you'll have to go in and check if those methods of that signature exist and then hope that they were actually implemented as you hoped.
I'd say none. Nothing like billing hours that have nothing to do with work while sitting at home or in a coffee shop.
Full time telecommuters break this rule, but that's only because they only work that way. The part timers ("I think I'll work from home today.") really don't do well.
Actually, teachers are paid squat throughout their careers. Both of my parents are/were (my father just retired) public school teachers. From an education perspective, both of them have the same level of education as I do (Masters degrees). My father was on the job since got his undergraduate degree, so he had been working as a teacher in public schools for 35 years. His wages, upon his retirement, were less than I currently make and I've only been working as a professional since 1998.
Wages are not the thing that makes teaching hard. It's the lack of respect that the parents and students give them.
The difference is, this is not required of her and she will not get fired for not providing office supplies.
This is a very common situation though. Both of my parents are public school teachers and I remember a number of times when my mother, who taught 1st grade at the time, would buy various educational supplements, etc. on her own dime to improve her students' learning experiences.
I commend you cousin for her dedication. I wish that I could do something more for public teachers everywhere who regularly go out of their way to provide a good education, but get shafted in the respect department.
The Hubble is out-dated (it was designed in the 70s) and has lived out its intended lifespan (15 years).
I think you'll find that just about everything that gets into space at this point was basically designed decades ago. The ISS dates from the later 70s/early 80s. The shuttle was late and it's first flight was in 1980. The Soyuz hasn't changed all that much since the 60s.
I'll admit that it's a combination of factors that do it. Between cost of development and the reliability of "tried and true" designs, older designs have the upper hand. Then there's the construction time. These things are assembled by hand, it's not surprising that the design will be old by the time it's actually is ready to launch. Then there's NASA's budget problems, which effect scientific instruments more than, say, communication satellites. I'm sure there are a dozen half constructed project just hanging around because their budgets got cut or even fully constructed ones that they couldn't get fit into the launch schedule.
Hubble is definitely old, but it's also all that we've got.
Here's a wild idea for you: a CS college, like any college, is supposed to prepare you to do actual useful work in the real world.
I hate to tell you this, but a college degree is supposed to teach you about the subject(s) of that degree. If you were supposed to learn about "real world" work, there'd be whole courses in how to fill out time sheets.
When it comes down to it, I don't think windows is a good choice as a teaching platform for CS. We always hear that we aren't supposed to reinvent the wheel when coding, but understanding the wheel is what learning is about. In that case, we should be writing to a minimalist API without much chance to do more. Command line UNIX is a great place for this. Heck, I learned with only stdio.h in my C includes. When I learned C++, the standard libs weren't really finalized, so we did a lot of rewriting. From a "getting ready to work in the real world" perspective, this was completely useless, but from an understanding of datastructures and algorithms, which is a major portion of a CS degree, it was great.
If you want to get a degree that will be able to directly apply to working in the "real world" go get a tech certification somewhere. It'll give you exactly what you need to do your job without any understanding of the reasons why you do it.
If you google for Selden Patent, you'll find that 100 years ago this wasn't the case. Selden patented a "road engine" in 1895 and, though just about everyone else did license it, Ford didn't and then spent 8 years in court before the patent was finally declared invalid. It was still valid for the specific engine example included in the patent itself, which wasn't actually used by anyone.
I don't know the specifics of the patent or the case itself, so I can't determine whether this was just the court saying "Sorry, even though your patent is valid, we can't have you suing everyone who ever bought a Ford." or if the patent itself was considered too vague.
Sometinmes, it is though. Evolution is not about tuning and organism for the environment. It is about producing the largest number of offspring that go on to reproduce. Being finely tuned to the environment will help in this regard, but so will the ability to attract a mate. Witness, most of the avians (peacocks, any crested bird, etc).
While I agree with your argument about attractiveness, there is actually a good argument about the ungainliness of some of the male avian adaptations. What it comes down to is this: If you had a huge bright colorful tail that could be seen by any predator within 100 miles, but still managed to thrive, you've got something going for you and the chicks dig you.
I like to think of it as success through overcoming a permanent handicap and having a huge sign telling everyone so.
This is simply a case (an interesting case) of variation in the genome.
That's what evolution is based on. It's generally not substantial never-been-seen-before mutations. It's the accumulation of a number of these "interesting cases" that slowly, over generations, redirects the genome of a population.
These little mutations may cause this population to become non-breeding with other parallel populations due to a number of issues. With some species this may simply be the fact that one sub-population's breeding season no longer overlaps with another's (spring vs. fall), even though it's only a minor genome variation. It might be that some new mutation that plays well with other mutations accumulated with the population proves fatal when interacting with the original population's genes. It might also just be a social change; if one population is unattractive to the other, there's not much chance of cross breeding. (Like slashdotters and supermodels.)
In the end, no matter what the reason, separation of populations generally leads to further genetic drift. Not necessarily completely new species, especially if their environments are similar, but drift nonetheless.
I just can't figure out why people think that hydrogen is the end all and be all of clean fuels. As far as I can tell, it's only good attribute is that it burns without harmful emissions.
As for bad points, there are a huge number of them. To get hydrogen from clean power sources is nearly impossible in this day and age and not easy long term. Especially if you start defining "clean" as "non-environmentally harmful" since most clean sources, such as hydro, do some pretty nasty things to the environment, especially when viewed through the eyes of the environmental lobby. And, though I have nothing against nuclear, anything with the word "nuclear" in it gives your average Joe the willies.
Even if you do get enough clean sources to actually produce this hydrogen cleanly, you have to deal with energy density. Hydrogen, being a gas, doesn't have good energy density compared to most old chemical sources. Unless some amazing new technology becomes practical (for example, some of the carbon nanotube research, or those hydrogen storing metals), this will limit vehicle range.
Then there's storage. Hydrogen molecules (if you can call a bare proton with an electron paired loosely with a twin a molecule) are tiny, they'll escape just about container you can think of, since just about everything is porous to one extent or another.
The other major problem is logistical. We've got a huge network in place designed to transport gasoline. This could easily be converted to other liquid fuels, but is completely useless when it comes to transporting gases. Gases need to be kept under pressure and usually cooled, which tosses out basically all of our existing infrastructure including gas stations, transport trucks, etc.
I have no problems with electric vehicles; my wife drives a Honda Insight and the pep the electric assist gives it is really nice. I just can't figure out why a theoretical, hydrogen-dependent, fuel cell vehicle is so much better than a theoretical, biodiesel-powered hybrid.
People here are always comparing the TDI to various hybrids. Why no combine the two and throw in biodiesel produced from algae or a similar source?
Actually, this isn't so funny. When I was growing up, an old gentleman who lived behind me mowed his back lawn this way because he was more or less completely blind. His wife would guide him out with the mower, tie up the rope and let him go.
I don't remember if they moved the stake to handle the corners of the lawn, but it was a very small yard, and his wife handled the edging.
It seems to me that this is just taking another piece of art and removing the uniqueness of it.
So you're saying that by explaining the basis behind art (in this case the mathematics), the piece itself loses it's "artness"?
And why would computer generated images not be considered art? Even if you're not talking about artist created, rendered images, but are solely targeting parameter based images, this doesn't work. I've seen art that is literally created by taping blasting cord to metal and setting it off. Would this be explosion generated art and not "real" art?
A computer is another medium. It's like you're saying that paintings are not art because everything should be sculpted.
On another note, do americans *EVER* doubt that their constitution may NOT be perfect?
Actually, the Constitution itself assumes that it either is imperfect or will be at some future date. The traditional Constitution is usually seen as the original documents, plus the bill of rights, which are in actuality, the first 10 amendments to said Constitution. That's right, "amendments", changes and additions to the original document using a method defined by the original document.
It isn't easy to add an amendment and it is impossible to remove one (a new one must be created to supercede the older one; search for the Prohibition in the US). I consider this a good thing. As it's so hard to alter, it gives people time to actually think about what is being altered to see if it's really, really a good idea or not.
Now, I do see your point. Generally, Americans point at the Constitution as the eternal, unwavering truth, but generally those same Americans don't remember squat about their high school civics class either.
Currently, there have been 27 changes to the Constitution. And as an example of how long it takes for an amendment to be ratified, the 27th amendment was proposed in 1789 and wasn't ratified until 1992.
Basically, the "spare" parity bit is used to alter sum all the bits to a given value parity. Think of it as making sure the total parity of the system even (or odd). Thus, given n bits of data, the n+1st bit is assigned either 0 or 1 to make the total parity even.
Now imagine that one of the drives dies. Using the remaining drives and the parity bit we can reconstruct the dead drive because we can derive its data from the fact that the new parity will not be identical across the board. In the case of even parity, any combination the sums to odd needs a 1 for the missing data, while any data that sums to even needs a 0 for the missing data.
The number of parity bits can actually be increased for even more redundancy by adding the bits in a hierarchical fashion, so that you can take down multiple drives at a time. I remember reading about a SUN array which used 39 different drives to represent 32 drives worth of data (32 data bits, with an accompanying 7 parity bits).
There's magic in acting: controling your every emotion to become someone you're not, and then making other people believe it. That's art man.
I'll agree with you here. There is magic in acting, but, as a counterargument, there's also magic in live performance, which movies are definitely not, nor are any kind of recordings, possibly excepting those of live performances.
I don't see that much difference between running a scene a few dozen times to get all the elements the director wants then editing it so that it flows how the director wants and an animator creating it exactly how "the director" (in this case the animator) wants it in the first place.
No, the actors aren't real, no the voices may not be real, but is the outcome any different? It seems to be showing the artist's vision in any case. And this seems to be a pretty good parallel to previous mediums: Which is better a Picasso of a woman or the woman herself?
Uh, a lot more places than you'd think. I'm well short of $200k a year (in fact, I'm well short of half of that), but my boss expenses me out at over $100/hour. It's not that I actually cost that, it's that he costs something to get me onto this project, the accountant costs something to do the books, marketing costs something, etc.
See my point? I work for a small contractor, so when I work on a particular project, the client not only pays for me, but for a chunk of my company (and thus my upkeep) along with me. So if my computer at the client's site is on the fritz for an hour a week, the client (though not my company, they still get paid), gets a bill for something over $100.
And, I don't see the whole *PDA* thing. I'm seriously curious as to what PDAs are used for in real life?
I think I can answer some of this. I'm in front of a computer at work for at least 8 hours a day. I've got a wireless laptop at home that I use nearly exclusively over the two desktops that I have, but I still have a PDA. I happen to have a Palm Tungsten T, so most of my comments may be a bit Palm centric, but you'll get the picture.
My pda is basically an incredibly portable computer with long battery life. It's a backlit book that I'm always carrying (I have about 40 volumes on it from free online sources, such as Baen and Project Gutenberg). It's my mp3 player when I'm commuting. In fact, when I'm commuting by train, I listen to mp3s while I read a book. I use it as a watch. I use it to keep all my addresses and my calendar, along with any warnings I need for events. I also use it to transport and edit documents in case the urge to write catches me. I also have several solitaire-like games on it to keep me assumed and looking busy at the same time.
I'm not even sure what I'd do if I had wireless access. Due to a combination of Verizon not seeming to carry any bluetooth phones and that I can't convince myself to get a new pda with 802.11b wireless, I don't have any way to check my mail, etc. when I'm on the road. So I can't even comment on it's ability to act as a communication device.
Okay, so your neighbor makes five times as much as you, so he can police you in any way he wants?
It's nice to know that the biggest kid on the block has every right to beat up on anyone, just because he's biggest.
Re:Since you're in the US..
on
Open Maps?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Since OpenGIS was brought up, I figured I'd chime in. I've been working with various OpenGIS standards for the last couple of years, so I'm familiar with them and also have some opinions about them.
WMS (Web Mapping Service) is a pretty good standard. It's simple and easily interoperable since you basically can type in a URL in your browser and come back with a map. Of course, since you get a static image back, you have to make another round trip to the map server to do any manipulation at all. In other words, it's really easy to use (and to implement), but it's use is both hard on your network and on the mapserver.
WFS (Web Feature Service) is a vector format for maps. In theory, this is really wonderful. You request the map area you want to see, a ton of vector data is downloaded to your viewer (SVG or other vector drawing tool) and you can zoom in and out as long as stay within the area you first requested and don't want to see anything new. This is a little bit harder on your processor, but with today's machines this isn't much of a problem. And it eliminates the round trip problem which WMS has.
It has it's problems though. A minor problem is that it doesn't support raster data (such as aerial or satellite imagery). This means, if you want to overlay aerial photos you'll have to hit a WMS for the photo itself and then put your vector data on top of it.
The major problem is the GML format itself. This is how a WFS sends data to you. It's a particularly verbose XML format that, as of the current standard for WFS, is uncompressed when shipped. Geographic vector data is data dense. As a simple example, say you want to give the lat/lon for every house in your neighborhood. You'd probably end up with a list of about 60 doubles (assuming 30 houses). Now print all that out in a text format and surround them with about four or five levels of XML tags. Not that you could easily write this up yourself: the GML specification is an incredibly dense, 300+ page document.
Basically, GML is an impractical solution because of the opaqueness of the standard and the sheer size of the data it produces. The standard's opaqueness isn't so bad, since more or less GML is only machine readable, but the size is a major roadblock.
I'm not saying that there are better standards out there. For example. ESRI's Shape file (an industry accepted "standard" which ESRI, who is the Microsoft of the GIS world, created) is one of the nastinest binary formats I've ever seen (why would you have a binary format that contains data in both little endian and big endian at the same time?), but at least it's size friendly. For example, a shape file of the state boundaries of the US might be about a megabyte (this would probably be only 1:1000000 scale or slightly better, so once you get down to a county level, the state boundaries would be really choppy). The equivalent GML file would be about an order of magnitude larger, so if a person wanted to view something of the sort in their browser without having to continuously download more detailed data (the WMS problem again), they would need to download about a gigabyte of data just to see the state borders and allow for some fairly high level panning and zooming.
The difference here is that "a few Iraqis" are just that. Some people who are from Iraq. "A few soldiers" are direct representatives of a government. Whether they're trained well or not has nothing to do with it. They were the responsibility of the US government and as a group they acted improperly and it reflects on the Army and the government itself.
Re:Same thing's coming with Harry P
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Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
Well, I have to warn you that kids are also reading these books. By "kids" I mean elementary aged kids (11 years old and younger).
In fact, my mother, who's an elementary school librarian, can't keep them on the shelves. She's told me stories of 7 and 8 year olds who have slogged their way through every one of the books with no one reading to them.
When it comes down to it, the Harry Potter books are exceedingly kid friendly and deal with some very mature topics in a way children can understand. I would rather children read them than most of the so-called "kid friendly" books out there that are all lemonade and daisies.
Spider-man's plotline is almost a point for point ripoff
Yeah, and it has been a general ripoff for the last 30 or 40 years. All superhero stories are the same to some extent and Superman is generally considered the progenitor of the line. Especially when those stories are origin stories.
In my opinion, Spiderman (even in the movie) was a much more human character than Superman, but I do agree that overall the plotlines are the same.
This would only be true after a (near perfect) static "recompile" from PPC machine code to x86 machine code. It's all well and good that the translated instructions would only take three times as long as the native instructions per clock, but it's the actually parsing of the instruction, switching endianness, etc. that take up the time.
The largest overhead is in the actual translation, not the execution.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it allows you to toss a bunch of objects of the same type in a bucket designed to hold any type of objects and still allow you to sort them. You have to implement the Comparable interface on your object to get it to work.
Of course, alternately, you could implement this method on the Object object at the root of the object tree. This is how Smalltalk handles the problem. The only problem with this is that this method will exist for every instance of any object and you can call the compareTo method on any object. So if you happen to have a couple of objects of the same type and you compare them, but they don't have any kind of order? You suddenly can sort anything you want, but the order you get out of it means nothing. And you'll still have to overwrite the parent method to get a correct ordering anyway, so we're back to the same problem.
Interfaces are good, but frankly, you could just cut and paste the same method signatures into your classes and end up with the same result.
You don't get the same result because interfaces allow for some advantages of multiple inheritance. In other words, if you need to see if something is Comparable, you just check if it's an "instance" of the Comparable interface. If you just toss in the methods you want, you'll have to go in and check if those methods of that signature exist and then hope that they were actually implemented as you hoped.
Full time telecommuters break this rule, but that's only because they only work that way. The part timers ("I think I'll work from home today.") really don't do well.
Wages are not the thing that makes teaching hard. It's the lack of respect that the parents and students give them.
This is a very common situation though. Both of my parents are public school teachers and I remember a number of times when my mother, who taught 1st grade at the time, would buy various educational supplements, etc. on her own dime to improve her students' learning experiences.
I commend you cousin for her dedication. I wish that I could do something more for public teachers everywhere who regularly go out of their way to provide a good education, but get shafted in the respect department.
I think you'll find that just about everything that gets into space at this point was basically designed decades ago. The ISS dates from the later 70s/early 80s. The shuttle was late and it's first flight was in 1980. The Soyuz hasn't changed all that much since the 60s.
I'll admit that it's a combination of factors that do it. Between cost of development and the reliability of "tried and true" designs, older designs have the upper hand. Then there's the construction time. These things are assembled by hand, it's not surprising that the design will be old by the time it's actually is ready to launch. Then there's NASA's budget problems, which effect scientific instruments more than, say, communication satellites. I'm sure there are a dozen half constructed project just hanging around because their budgets got cut or even fully constructed ones that they couldn't get fit into the launch schedule.
Hubble is definitely old, but it's also all that we've got.
I hate to tell you this, but a college degree is supposed to teach you about the subject(s) of that degree. If you were supposed to learn about "real world" work, there'd be whole courses in how to fill out time sheets.
When it comes down to it, I don't think windows is a good choice as a teaching platform for CS. We always hear that we aren't supposed to reinvent the wheel when coding, but understanding the wheel is what learning is about. In that case, we should be writing to a minimalist API without much chance to do more. Command line UNIX is a great place for this. Heck, I learned with only stdio.h in my C includes. When I learned C++, the standard libs weren't really finalized, so we did a lot of rewriting. From a "getting ready to work in the real world" perspective, this was completely useless, but from an understanding of datastructures and algorithms, which is a major portion of a CS degree, it was great.
If you want to get a degree that will be able to directly apply to working in the "real world" go get a tech certification somewhere. It'll give you exactly what you need to do your job without any understanding of the reasons why you do it.
It's only a good dating technique if you're on a date, not if you're looking for one.
If you google for Selden Patent, you'll find that 100 years ago this wasn't the case. Selden patented a "road engine" in 1895 and, though just about everyone else did license it, Ford didn't and then spent 8 years in court before the patent was finally declared invalid. It was still valid for the specific engine example included in the patent itself, which wasn't actually used by anyone.
I don't know the specifics of the patent or the case itself, so I can't determine whether this was just the court saying "Sorry, even though your patent is valid, we can't have you suing everyone who ever bought a Ford." or if the patent itself was considered too vague.
While I agree with your argument about attractiveness, there is actually a good argument about the ungainliness of some of the male avian adaptations. What it comes down to is this: If you had a huge bright colorful tail that could be seen by any predator within 100 miles, but still managed to thrive, you've got something going for you and the chicks dig you.
I like to think of it as success through overcoming a permanent handicap and having a huge sign telling everyone so.
That's what evolution is based on. It's generally not substantial never-been-seen-before mutations. It's the accumulation of a number of these "interesting cases" that slowly, over generations, redirects the genome of a population.
These little mutations may cause this population to become non-breeding with other parallel populations due to a number of issues. With some species this may simply be the fact that one sub-population's breeding season no longer overlaps with another's (spring vs. fall), even though it's only a minor genome variation. It might be that some new mutation that plays well with other mutations accumulated with the population proves fatal when interacting with the original population's genes. It might also just be a social change; if one population is unattractive to the other, there's not much chance of cross breeding. (Like slashdotters and supermodels.)
In the end, no matter what the reason, separation of populations generally leads to further genetic drift. Not necessarily completely new species, especially if their environments are similar, but drift nonetheless.
As for bad points, there are a huge number of them. To get hydrogen from clean power sources is nearly impossible in this day and age and not easy long term. Especially if you start defining "clean" as "non-environmentally harmful" since most clean sources, such as hydro, do some pretty nasty things to the environment, especially when viewed through the eyes of the environmental lobby. And, though I have nothing against nuclear, anything with the word "nuclear" in it gives your average Joe the willies.
Even if you do get enough clean sources to actually produce this hydrogen cleanly, you have to deal with energy density. Hydrogen, being a gas, doesn't have good energy density compared to most old chemical sources. Unless some amazing new technology becomes practical (for example, some of the carbon nanotube research, or those hydrogen storing metals), this will limit vehicle range.
Then there's storage. Hydrogen molecules (if you can call a bare proton with an electron paired loosely with a twin a molecule) are tiny, they'll escape just about container you can think of, since just about everything is porous to one extent or another.
The other major problem is logistical. We've got a huge network in place designed to transport gasoline. This could easily be converted to other liquid fuels, but is completely useless when it comes to transporting gases. Gases need to be kept under pressure and usually cooled, which tosses out basically all of our existing infrastructure including gas stations, transport trucks, etc.
I have no problems with electric vehicles; my wife drives a Honda Insight and the pep the electric assist gives it is really nice. I just can't figure out why a theoretical, hydrogen-dependent, fuel cell vehicle is so much better than a theoretical, biodiesel-powered hybrid.
People here are always comparing the TDI to various hybrids. Why no combine the two and throw in biodiesel produced from algae or a similar source?
I don't remember if they moved the stake to handle the corners of the lawn, but it was a very small yard, and his wife handled the edging.
So you're saying that by explaining the basis behind art (in this case the mathematics), the piece itself loses it's "artness"?
And why would computer generated images not be considered art? Even if you're not talking about artist created, rendered images, but are solely targeting parameter based images, this doesn't work. I've seen art that is literally created by taping blasting cord to metal and setting it off. Would this be explosion generated art and not "real" art?
A computer is another medium. It's like you're saying that paintings are not art because everything should be sculpted.
Actually, the Constitution itself assumes that it either is imperfect or will be at some future date. The traditional Constitution is usually seen as the original documents, plus the bill of rights, which are in actuality, the first 10 amendments to said Constitution. That's right, "amendments", changes and additions to the original document using a method defined by the original document.
It isn't easy to add an amendment and it is impossible to remove one (a new one must be created to supercede the older one; search for the Prohibition in the US). I consider this a good thing. As it's so hard to alter, it gives people time to actually think about what is being altered to see if it's really, really a good idea or not.
Now, I do see your point. Generally, Americans point at the Constitution as the eternal, unwavering truth, but generally those same Americans don't remember squat about their high school civics class either.
Currently, there have been 27 changes to the Constitution. And as an example of how long it takes for an amendment to be ratified, the 27th amendment was proposed in 1789 and wasn't ratified until 1992.
That's an interesting question. In truth, I doubt that it's purposeful on their part. It's more of a negligence issue than anything else.
If I were you, I'd start targeting Mozilla-derived browsers and try to get my clients to switch over.
Now imagine that one of the drives dies. Using the remaining drives and the parity bit we can reconstruct the dead drive because we can derive its data from the fact that the new parity will not be identical across the board. In the case of even parity, any combination the sums to odd needs a 1 for the missing data, while any data that sums to even needs a 0 for the missing data.
The number of parity bits can actually be increased for even more redundancy by adding the bits in a hierarchical fashion, so that you can take down multiple drives at a time. I remember reading about a SUN array which used 39 different drives to represent 32 drives worth of data (32 data bits, with an accompanying 7 parity bits).
I'll agree with you here. There is magic in acting, but, as a counterargument, there's also magic in live performance, which movies are definitely not, nor are any kind of recordings, possibly excepting those of live performances.
I don't see that much difference between running a scene a few dozen times to get all the elements the director wants then editing it so that it flows how the director wants and an animator creating it exactly how "the director" (in this case the animator) wants it in the first place.
No, the actors aren't real, no the voices may not be real, but is the outcome any different? It seems to be showing the artist's vision in any case. And this seems to be a pretty good parallel to previous mediums: Which is better a Picasso of a woman or the woman herself?
See my point? I work for a small contractor, so when I work on a particular project, the client not only pays for me, but for a chunk of my company (and thus my upkeep) along with me. So if my computer at the client's site is on the fritz for an hour a week, the client (though not my company, they still get paid), gets a bill for something over $100.
I think I can answer some of this. I'm in front of a computer at work for at least 8 hours a day. I've got a wireless laptop at home that I use nearly exclusively over the two desktops that I have, but I still have a PDA. I happen to have a Palm Tungsten T, so most of my comments may be a bit Palm centric, but you'll get the picture.
My pda is basically an incredibly portable computer with long battery life. It's a backlit book that I'm always carrying (I have about 40 volumes on it from free online sources, such as Baen and Project Gutenberg). It's my mp3 player when I'm commuting. In fact, when I'm commuting by train, I listen to mp3s while I read a book. I use it as a watch. I use it to keep all my addresses and my calendar, along with any warnings I need for events. I also use it to transport and edit documents in case the urge to write catches me. I also have several solitaire-like games on it to keep me assumed and looking busy at the same time.
I'm not even sure what I'd do if I had wireless access. Due to a combination of Verizon not seeming to carry any bluetooth phones and that I can't convince myself to get a new pda with 802.11b wireless, I don't have any way to check my mail, etc. when I'm on the road. So I can't even comment on it's ability to act as a communication device.
It's nice to know that the biggest kid on the block has every right to beat up on anyone, just because he's biggest.
WMS (Web Mapping Service) is a pretty good standard. It's simple and easily interoperable since you basically can type in a URL in your browser and come back with a map. Of course, since you get a static image back, you have to make another round trip to the map server to do any manipulation at all. In other words, it's really easy to use (and to implement), but it's use is both hard on your network and on the mapserver.
WFS (Web Feature Service) is a vector format for maps. In theory, this is really wonderful. You request the map area you want to see, a ton of vector data is downloaded to your viewer (SVG or other vector drawing tool) and you can zoom in and out as long as stay within the area you first requested and don't want to see anything new. This is a little bit harder on your processor, but with today's machines this isn't much of a problem. And it eliminates the round trip problem which WMS has.
It has it's problems though. A minor problem is that it doesn't support raster data (such as aerial or satellite imagery). This means, if you want to overlay aerial photos you'll have to hit a WMS for the photo itself and then put your vector data on top of it.
The major problem is the GML format itself. This is how a WFS sends data to you. It's a particularly verbose XML format that, as of the current standard for WFS, is uncompressed when shipped. Geographic vector data is data dense. As a simple example, say you want to give the lat/lon for every house in your neighborhood. You'd probably end up with a list of about 60 doubles (assuming 30 houses). Now print all that out in a text format and surround them with about four or five levels of XML tags. Not that you could easily write this up yourself: the GML specification is an incredibly dense, 300+ page document.
Basically, GML is an impractical solution because of the opaqueness of the standard and the sheer size of the data it produces. The standard's opaqueness isn't so bad, since more or less GML is only machine readable, but the size is a major roadblock.
I'm not saying that there are better standards out there. For example. ESRI's Shape file (an industry accepted "standard" which ESRI, who is the Microsoft of the GIS world, created) is one of the nastinest binary formats I've ever seen (why would you have a binary format that contains data in both little endian and big endian at the same time?), but at least it's size friendly. For example, a shape file of the state boundaries of the US might be about a megabyte (this would probably be only 1:1000000 scale or slightly better, so once you get down to a county level, the state boundaries would be really choppy). The equivalent GML file would be about an order of magnitude larger, so if a person wanted to view something of the sort in their browser without having to continuously download more detailed data (the WMS problem again), they would need to download about a gigabyte of data just to see the state borders and allow for some fairly high level panning and zooming.
The difference here is that "a few Iraqis" are just that. Some people who are from Iraq. "A few soldiers" are direct representatives of a government. Whether they're trained well or not has nothing to do with it. They were the responsibility of the US government and as a group they acted improperly and it reflects on the Army and the government itself.
In fact, my mother, who's an elementary school librarian, can't keep them on the shelves. She's told me stories of 7 and 8 year olds who have slogged their way through every one of the books with no one reading to them.
When it comes down to it, the Harry Potter books are exceedingly kid friendly and deal with some very mature topics in a way children can understand. I would rather children read them than most of the so-called "kid friendly" books out there that are all lemonade and daisies.
Yeah, and it has been a general ripoff for the last 30 or 40 years. All superhero stories are the same to some extent and Superman is generally considered the progenitor of the line. Especially when those stories are origin stories.
In my opinion, Spiderman (even in the movie) was a much more human character than Superman, but I do agree that overall the plotlines are the same.
The largest overhead is in the actual translation, not the execution.