I'm not sure if you are joking, so I'll reply just in case. If you were, a good *whoosh* is sufficient.:-)
As long as the adult is able to purchase the game no problem, then that question is irrelevant.
Okay, so lets take two cases:
Case 1: The answer is "nothing is an adult product" which means children can buy any game they want, and the law is pointless.
Case 2: The answer is "all games are adult procuts" which means children can buy no games, adults must buy them.
You are saying that both of these cases are the same.
we as a society have already established that minors cannot be trusted with full freedoms on their own, so no harm in restricting theirs further.
Wait, so if we restrict the rights of some group somewhat, that means we can restrict it further? So... it is not okay for adults to commit murder. So there is no harm in restricting it further. So... adults cannot speak or read. That's okay? The argument that one restriction is okay cannot mean that all restrictions are thus okay.
They've had those proposals before the current crop of voting machines. Why didn't they use them? No for-profit corporation will ever make a truly safe secure voting system. Even if they did, no government is qualified to judge if the corporation actually did it or not. The only way to really make this work to it is to have academia design the machine and release those designs. The governments would then hire multiple different companies to implement those designs in hardware and software, then have academia verify them. That is a huge undertaking, and it isn't worth it.
More likely, these are specialized cars designed to meet an X-prize goal, not to meet road-safety standards, so you will never see it on the road. But you may see the technology in your next boring every-day car. Right now, I bet someone over at Toyota is calculating how much better gas mileage they can get by using specialized lightweight lug nuts.
which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to/usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins
Can we stop for a moment to appreciate the irony of doing this on Debian/IceWeasel? Debian is the ultimate in completely open-source Linux: so much that they created IceWeasel just to avoid using the Mozilla foundation's copyrighted logo. And so someone installed the closed source Flash player on it. Doing that is like a vegan becoming a cannibal.
...allows a minor who really wants an adult product...
Ahhh... but you are not thinking like a libertarian. The libertarian asks this question: "Who decides what is an adult product, and what is not?" And therein lies the problem with these kinds of laws.
The complexity of rasterisation is (very) roughly O(number of polygons * number of lights)
complexity of ray tracing is O(number of rays)
Both of those statements are completely incorrect. Your own comments explain why:
The number of secondary rays depends on the number of lights (you fire a ray into the scene and then a secondary ray from what it hits to each light).
So now it is O(number of rays * number of lights)
This means that increasing the complexity of the scene does not affect the ray tracing time very much, but increasing the resolution does.
Both increase the ray tracing time significantly. Point lights are simplest, but area lights can cause exponential increases.
Also, you neglect polygons in the ray tracing scenario. Ray tracing time is proportional to the number of polygons in the same way that rasterization is. Overall, the asymptotic complexity of ray tracing is far higher than rasterization, which is why rasterization is the dominant approach today. There are lots of benefits to ray tracing, but speed is not one of them.
That's crazy. You'd get practically the same effect just by alternately under/over-exposing successive frames. From there you could interpolate whatever level of exposure you wanted without losing too much detail.
That's crazy. You can't over/underexpose a frame by a full stop then compensate by interpolating. If you could do that, every camera would have HDR. Motion interpolation is terrible, even when you have good frames.
Imagine: frame 1 has a person running. Frame 2 is completely white because it was overexposed. Frame 3 is black because it was underexposed. Frame 4 is exposed correctly, but the person is off-screen. There is no way to interpolate what happened in Frames 2 and 3. When/where did the person go?
In my nextdoor neighbour's garden, there are a number of self-contained garden lights. They have a solar panel on top, which charges a battery during the day and they discharge at night,
I've seen and purchased several of these devices, and they just go to show how solar powered devices just are not ready yet. Inevitably, they are far dimmer than their electrical counterparts, and only last a few hours past sunset. They slowly die over the course of 1 - 3 years due to cheap panels, poor weatherproofing, and insufficient batteries. The manufacturers know this, so they even use parts that don't last: solar panels protected by plastic covers that turn opaque with time, iron parts that rust, cheap plastic that snaps in the wind.
The benefit of these things is that you don't have to run power lines to them. But the amount of power they consume is insignificant, so it isn't a green energy thing. I think radium lights or RTGs would probably be a better idea than solar. You could make a high-quality solar one, but it would have expensive panels, and the panels would probably be much larger than the light itself. You can resolve this by having panels elsewhere and running wires to the lights, but that kinda defeats the convenience aspect.
He wasn't talking about z-buffer occlusion. He was talking about occlusion done before the drawing step. For example, if you had an algorithm to determine if an object was off-camera and remove it from the drawing tree. Or a BSP tree that removed occluded objects. An object might be off-screen or occluded when viewed from one eye, but visible when viewed from the other.
I don't see why you couldn't put it into a larger package. But I am unsure if there would be any demand for such a thing, since it sounds like you can already make a component that behaves like a memristor. The advantage of these things is the size.
They aren't discriminating against older programmers because they are older. It is because they are asking for higher salaries. Why hire a 50-year-old when you can hire a 25 year old for less money? The 25-year old will have a more flexible schedule and is more willing to travel because they have no kids.
The article actually covers the facts fairly well, but it would be much better if the writer didn't label every quote "conservative" or "liberal" with a seemingly naive understanding of the meaning of those terms. For example, when one judge points out that not enough poor people become judges, so they are underrepresented, he is labeled a "raging liberal." This comes from the oversimplified stereotype that liberals love the poor and conservatives hate them. I would expect this from radio or TV pundits, but not from Time magazine.
Devine pleaded not guilty to the charges last week.
Oh my. I would love to hear his excuse for this. "What? Doesn't *everyone* keep a few hundred thousand dollars in shoe boxes? My financial planner told me to diversify! Those Swiss bank accounts were for storing cheese!"
Because it is harder to filter out. Advertising is so prevalent these days it almost makes me want to join the Amish. I know for a fact that there is an area of my brain dedicated to filtering them out. I don't want that area getting any bigger - there's better things to do with those brain cells.
I know it is bad form to reply again, but let me be even clearer on something:
It isn't feasible for a hammer to detect skin...so there's no manufacturer liability
There should not be any manufacturer liability for illegal use of a product even if it can detect illegal use. This is a fundamental problem with out legal system.
No question that manufacturers worry about it. But they shouldn't have to. This is a huge problem with the US tort system. (I can't speak for outside the country).
It is not reasonable for manufacturers to be forced to cripple their products because someone might improperly use it. This is why you must agree to a 25-page EULA to buy a song from iTunes.
When you are an employee, there is no question that the works are owned by the company. In fact, it is common for them to ask if you are working on any outside projects that relate to their business. I am currently a full-time employee and I absolutely never bring source code home or bring my personal source code to work.
It is different as a contractor.
I am a computer programmer who has been contracting on and off for about 10 years. I have never encountered a contract that made any statements about who owns the work. When ShoeCorp contracts me to write a database tracking what shoelaces are compatible with the different types of shoes they make, and I charge them an hourly rate to do it, it is pretty clear that they own the software.
Perhaps it is different for artists, but realistically, if ShoeCorp Inc. contracts you to draw a logo with a shoe that says "ShoeCorp is the best!" I cannot image a court would uphold your claim that you own the logo.
You can't compile that into a native application, or link it into a C++ application.
More developers need to learn that Flash isn't a browser plug-in. It is Javascript + a really good cross-platform framework that happens to also have a ubiquitous browser plug-in. In many ways it is what Java always promised to be. There are whole apps written in Flash. It is the dominant tool for user-interface design in video game.
It's even stupider than that: it should just come with recording software without limitation. Why should a device be expected to enforce the laws on itself? Do hammers need to check to see if they are hitting something that looks like skin? Do cars check the speed limit signs and automatically disable the gas pedal? Let the user decide if their action is illegal!
Single player steam games do not require you to sign-on to steam. (There might be some, but I have yet to encounter one. Let me know if you find any so I make sure not to buy them.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if you are joking, so I'll reply just in case. If you were, a good *whoosh* is sufficient. :-)
As long as the adult is able to purchase the game no problem, then that question is irrelevant.
Okay, so lets take two cases:
Case 1: The answer is "nothing is an adult product" which means children can buy any game they want, and the law is pointless.
Case 2: The answer is "all games are adult procuts" which means children can buy no games, adults must buy them.
You are saying that both of these cases are the same.
we as a society have already established that minors cannot be trusted with full freedoms on their own, so no harm in restricting theirs further.
Wait, so if we restrict the rights of some group somewhat, that means we can restrict it further? So... it is not okay for adults to commit murder. So there is no harm in restricting it further. So... adults cannot speak or read. That's okay? The argument that one restriction is okay cannot mean that all restrictions are thus okay.
They've had those proposals before the current crop of voting machines. Why didn't they use them? No for-profit corporation will ever make a truly safe secure voting system. Even if they did, no government is qualified to judge if the corporation actually did it or not. The only way to really make this work to it is to have academia design the machine and release those designs. The governments would then hire multiple different companies to implement those designs in hardware and software, then have academia verify them. That is a huge undertaking, and it isn't worth it.
More likely, these are specialized cars designed to meet an X-prize goal, not to meet road-safety standards, so you will never see it on the road. But you may see the technology in your next boring every-day car. Right now, I bet someone over at Toyota is calculating how much better gas mileage they can get by using specialized lightweight lug nuts.
which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins
Can we stop for a moment to appreciate the irony of doing this on Debian/IceWeasel? Debian is the ultimate in completely open-source Linux: so much that they created IceWeasel just to avoid using the Mozilla foundation's copyrighted logo. And so someone installed the closed source Flash player on it. Doing that is like a vegan becoming a cannibal.
...allows a minor who really wants an adult product...
Ahhh... but you are not thinking like a libertarian. The libertarian asks this question: "Who decides what is an adult product, and what is not?" And therein lies the problem with these kinds of laws.
The complexity of rasterisation is (very) roughly O(number of polygons * number of lights)
complexity of ray tracing is O(number of rays)
Both of those statements are completely incorrect. Your own comments explain why:
The number of secondary rays depends on the number of lights (you fire a ray into the scene and then a secondary ray from what it hits to each light).
So now it is O(number of rays * number of lights)
This means that increasing the complexity of the scene does not affect the ray tracing time very much, but increasing the resolution does.
Both increase the ray tracing time significantly. Point lights are simplest, but area lights can cause exponential increases.
Also, you neglect polygons in the ray tracing scenario. Ray tracing time is proportional to the number of polygons in the same way that rasterization is. Overall, the asymptotic complexity of ray tracing is far higher than rasterization, which is why rasterization is the dominant approach today. There are lots of benefits to ray tracing, but speed is not one of them.
That's crazy. You'd get practically the same effect just by alternately under/over-exposing successive frames. From there you could interpolate whatever level of exposure you wanted without losing too much detail.
That's crazy. You can't over/underexpose a frame by a full stop then compensate by interpolating. If you could do that, every camera would have HDR. Motion interpolation is terrible, even when you have good frames.
Imagine: frame 1 has a person running. Frame 2 is completely white because it was overexposed. Frame 3 is black because it was underexposed. Frame 4 is exposed correctly, but the person is off-screen. There is no way to interpolate what happened in Frames 2 and 3. When/where did the person go?
Is there a PDFBlock for FireFox like there is a Flashblock? (At home I use Foxit Reader but at work Adobe Reader is installed.)
And they never produced enough power. My parents owned one and it always ran too slowly.
In my nextdoor neighbour's garden, there are a number of self-contained garden lights. They have a solar panel on top, which charges a battery during the day and they discharge at night,
I've seen and purchased several of these devices, and they just go to show how solar powered devices just are not ready yet. Inevitably, they are far dimmer than their electrical counterparts, and only last a few hours past sunset. They slowly die over the course of 1 - 3 years due to cheap panels, poor weatherproofing, and insufficient batteries. The manufacturers know this, so they even use parts that don't last: solar panels protected by plastic covers that turn opaque with time, iron parts that rust, cheap plastic that snaps in the wind.
The benefit of these things is that you don't have to run power lines to them. But the amount of power they consume is insignificant, so it isn't a green energy thing. I think radium lights or RTGs would probably be a better idea than solar. You could make a high-quality solar one, but it would have expensive panels, and the panels would probably be much larger than the light itself. You can resolve this by having panels elsewhere and running wires to the lights, but that kinda defeats the convenience aspect.
He wasn't talking about z-buffer occlusion. He was talking about occlusion done before the drawing step. For example, if you had an algorithm to determine if an object was off-camera and remove it from the drawing tree. Or a BSP tree that removed occluded objects. An object might be off-screen or occluded when viewed from one eye, but visible when viewed from the other.
I don't see why you couldn't put it into a larger package. But I am unsure if there would be any demand for such a thing, since it sounds like you can already make a component that behaves like a memristor. The advantage of these things is the size.
They aren't discriminating against older programmers because they are older. It is because they are asking for higher salaries. Why hire a 50-year-old when you can hire a 25 year old for less money? The 25-year old will have a more flexible schedule and is more willing to travel because they have no kids.
What else would someone do upon hearing an alarm at a fueling station?
The article actually covers the facts fairly well, but it would be much better if the writer didn't label every quote "conservative" or "liberal" with a seemingly naive understanding of the meaning of those terms. For example, when one judge points out that not enough poor people become judges, so they are underrepresented, he is labeled a "raging liberal." This comes from the oversimplified stereotype that liberals love the poor and conservatives hate them. I would expect this from radio or TV pundits, but not from Time magazine.
Devine pleaded not guilty to the charges last week.
Oh my. I would love to hear his excuse for this. "What? Doesn't *everyone* keep a few hundred thousand dollars in shoe boxes? My financial planner told me to diversify! Those Swiss bank accounts were for storing cheese!"
Because it is harder to filter out. Advertising is so prevalent these days it almost makes me want to join the Amish. I know for a fact that there is an area of my brain dedicated to filtering them out. I don't want that area getting any bigger - there's better things to do with those brain cells.
None of those products can be used to make user interfaces. They make game content and resources. You can't code in them.
FYI: Some games that use scaleform which is a 3rd-party Flash engine used in most AAA games.
I know it is bad form to reply again, but let me be even clearer on something:
It isn't feasible for a hammer to detect skin...so there's no manufacturer liability
There should not be any manufacturer liability for illegal use of a product even if it can detect illegal use. This is a fundamental problem with out legal system.
No question that manufacturers worry about it. But they shouldn't have to. This is a huge problem with the US tort system. (I can't speak for outside the country).
It is not reasonable for manufacturers to be forced to cripple their products because someone might improperly use it. This is why you must agree to a 25-page EULA to buy a song from iTunes.
When you are an employee, there is no question that the works are owned by the company. In fact, it is common for them to ask if you are working on any outside projects that relate to their business. I am currently a full-time employee and I absolutely never bring source code home or bring my personal source code to work.
It is different as a contractor.
I am a computer programmer who has been contracting on and off for about 10 years. I have never encountered a contract that made any statements about who owns the work. When ShoeCorp contracts me to write a database tracking what shoelaces are compatible with the different types of shoes they make, and I charge them an hourly rate to do it, it is pretty clear that they own the software.
Perhaps it is different for artists, but realistically, if ShoeCorp Inc. contracts you to draw a logo with a shoe that says "ShoeCorp is the best!" I cannot image a court would uphold your claim that you own the logo.
You can't compile that into a native application, or link it into a C++ application.
More developers need to learn that Flash isn't a browser plug-in. It is Javascript + a really good cross-platform framework that happens to also have a ubiquitous browser plug-in. In many ways it is what Java always promised to be. There are whole apps written in Flash. It is the dominant tool for user-interface design in video game.
It's even stupider than that: it should just come with recording software without limitation. Why should a device be expected to enforce the laws on itself? Do hammers need to check to see if they are hitting something that looks like skin? Do cars check the speed limit signs and automatically disable the gas pedal? Let the user decide if their action is illegal!
Blowing up a plane didn't damage the sky so that other planes couldn't use it. Blowing up a train damages the rail.
Single player steam games do not require you to sign-on to steam. (There might be some, but I have yet to encounter one. Let me know if you find any so I make sure not to buy them.)