In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."
"It just keeps coming" Ashcroft continued. "It's everywhere. Pornographic website just keep appearing in your bookmarks. Credit cards fly out of your pocket buying movies on late night when your wife is at the RNC sewing circle. Young hot girls repeatedly spank eachother while giggling and jiggling on videos which jump into your hands at the rental line. Steaming co-eds with possessed toys do the bouncy-bouncy with a group of district attorneys in jail. Make it stop! Make it stop!"
Ashcroft then broke down into tears and sobbed.
Why are the champions of decency always the ones who are having problems repressing things? Like Rush Limbaugh's perpetual rants against drug use, or anything done by Eminem? Should we really allow important government policy about sexual freedoms to be formed by a man who doesn't dance?
BTW, parent is not flamebait. Parent is pointing out that in most other developed nations, we're viewed as highly sexually immature. And really, we are. Our viewpoint on sex is formed more by preconceived notions rather than experience, leaning far more towards an unattainable idealized sex life than a real one. This cultural repression leads to sex being a problem for many, in exactly the same way that binge eating is a problem for dieters, and binge drinking is a problem for people (of every culture) just before the minimum legal age. In this respect America needs to mature.
Congratulations on your Score 5, Flamebait. Take a picture of that for posterity.
Now get over it. The US is not the only country that refers to that sport as Soccer. While most of the rest of the world refers to it as futbol or some variant thereof, that doesn't mean that suddenly the US should rename one of it's most popular sports, which developed at roughly the same time and carries with it large entrenched domestic interests.
You call it football, we call it soccer. In the same way that we haven't standardized on one language, we're allowed to have different names for the same things. When we talk about soccer, you know what we are saying. When you talk about football, we can guess you don't mean American or Australian or Rugby.
"If you work in 3D, navigation in space probably occupies far more of your day than you realize. But just as a painter doesn't give much thought to how he positions his brush on the canvas, experienced 3D artists don't really think about moving around in three-dimensional space. Unless you're using an unfamiliar application, say, switching from Maya to 3DS Max, navigation is simply an integral part of what you do and there's not much room for improvement. Or is there?
The $599 Space Traveler, which looks like a volume control knowb (complete with a purple LED accent on the buttons around it's rim) is designed to make 3D operations faster and more intuitive.
Using the Space Traveler is almost immediately familiiar. You plug it into your USB port and install the driver software (plug-ins are provided for Maya and Max, and built into MotionBuilder, Cinema 4D, and BodyPaint 3D, but the controller doesn't work with every 3D tool). To use it, you simply push, pull, tilt, and tist the single contol knob. Your finger movements translate directly into 3D space- x,y, and z rotation and translation, often referred to as six degrees of freedom - in your application. Lift th knob and you move up in y, push it forward and you move forward in z. Twist the knob and you'll rotate in y; tilt it, and you'll pitch forward or back, left or right. The tricky part is learning not to traslate on z when you pitch on x, and not to translate on y when you actually mean to roll on z (a temporary filter can be turned on that blocks non-dominant movements). But with a few minutes worth of practice to get a feel for it, the Space Traveler becomes very natural to use, although it is quite sensitive to even fine movement. However, you'll soon find yourself tumbling a scene around as easily as you would with your standard keyboard and moust combinations, and rotating a camera is certainly more intuitive than, say SHFT-CTRL-ALT-middle-mouse dragging.
Which brings us to the most obvious question about this device: who needs it? If you're already comfortable working in a 3d application, and navigation with the standard key commands and mouse actions has become second nature, why bother with yet another input device? In my experience, many 3D operations, such as architectural modeling, dynamics, and texture manipulations, simply require too much keyboard input to benefit from the Space Traveler at all. I need my hands on the keyboard, and mouse, and instant access to pop-ups and marking menus provided by my right hand mouse button, which just doesn't leave enough hands for a third input device.
On the other hand (literally) when it comes to operations that require one-handed navigation, the SpaceTraveler is a terrific idea. For example, when sculpting an organic model or painting textures on surfaces with a Wacom tablet, you can rotate and tumble the model with one hand, while painting with the other. While doing character animation, the SpaceTraveler can be used as a low-speed motion capture input device that lets you use gestures, rather than explicit rotations, to move a joint, although you'll have to set up your characters to work with this input. The device's eight buttons can be mapped to common keyboard shortcuts, and the defaults for Maya activate the Hot Box, translate, rotate, and scale commands. However, the buttons are too small with terrible ergonomics, and I still need to use the keyboard for other commands, such as the marking menus.
The SpaceTraveler, as the name implies, is small and portable. Although on-the-road walkthroughs of real-time-3D scenes seem unlikely, I found the SpaceTraveler useful as an accessory to a high-end 3D laptop for bringing work home. My Compaq runs all my 3D applications, but the built-in trackpad is all but useless for 3D navigation, and the keyboard is cramped, with a non-standard layout, which also makes navigation clumsy. The SpaceTraveler really i
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, computer programs are the one area in life where free things are often better than expensive alternatives.
Ahem, drugs?
And if Eric Raymond in real life is anything like he is in Revolution OS, then he knows this.
In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."
"It just keeps coming" Ashcroft continued. "It's everywhere. Pornographic website just keep appearing in your bookmarks. Credit cards fly out of your pocket buying movies on late night when your wife is at the RNC sewing circle. Young hot girls repeatedly spank eachother while giggling and jiggling on videos which jump into your hands at the rental line. Steaming co-eds with possessed toys do the bouncy-bouncy with a group of district attorneys in jail. Make it stop! Make it stop!"
Ashcroft then broke down into tears and sobbed.
Why are the champions of decency always the ones who are having problems repressing things? Like Rush Limbaugh's perpetual rants against drug use, or anything done by Eminem? Should we really allow important government policy about sexual freedoms to be formed by a man who doesn't dance?
BTW, parent is not flamebait. Parent is pointing out that in most other developed nations, we're viewed as highly sexually immature. And really, we are. Our viewpoint on sex is formed more by preconceived notions rather than experience, leaning far more towards an unattainable idealized sex life than a real one. This cultural repression leads to sex being a problem for many, in exactly the same way that binge eating is a problem for dieters, and binge drinking is a problem for people (of every culture) just before the minimum legal age. In this respect America needs to mature.
Dear rest of the world,
Speak English, and we'll call it football.
Deal?
Sincerely,
North America.
Congratulations on your Score 5, Flamebait. Take a picture of that for posterity.
Now get over it. The US is not the only country that refers to that sport as Soccer. While most of the rest of the world refers to it as futbol or some variant thereof, that doesn't mean that suddenly the US should rename one of it's most popular sports, which developed at roughly the same time and carries with it large entrenched domestic interests.
You call it football, we call it soccer. In the same way that we haven't standardized on one language, we're allowed to have different names for the same things. When we talk about soccer, you know what we are saying. When you talk about football, we can guess you don't mean American or Australian or Rugby.
And the state of computer employment.
It sends you on wild goose chases for years, trying the silliest of things, eventually leading to the point where you give up and do it yourself.
(From this month's Game Developer Magazine), by sean wagstaff
"If you work in 3D, navigation in space probably occupies far more of your day than you realize. But just as a painter doesn't give much thought to how he positions his brush on the canvas, experienced 3D artists don't really think about moving around in three-dimensional space. Unless you're using an unfamiliar application, say, switching from Maya to 3DS Max, navigation is simply an integral part of what you do and there's not much room for improvement. Or is there?
The $599 Space Traveler, which looks like a volume control knowb (complete with a purple LED accent on the buttons around it's rim) is designed to make 3D operations faster and more intuitive.
Using the Space Traveler is almost immediately familiiar. You plug it into your USB port and install the driver software (plug-ins are provided for Maya and Max, and built into MotionBuilder, Cinema 4D, and BodyPaint 3D, but the controller doesn't work with every 3D tool). To use it, you simply push, pull, tilt, and tist the single contol knob. Your finger movements translate directly into 3D space- x,y, and z rotation and translation, often referred to as six degrees of freedom - in your application. Lift th knob and you move up in y, push it forward and you move forward in z. Twist the knob and you'll rotate in y; tilt it, and you'll pitch forward or back, left or right. The tricky part is learning not to traslate on z when you pitch on x, and not to translate on y when you actually mean to roll on z (a temporary filter can be turned on that blocks non-dominant movements). But with a few minutes worth of practice to get a feel for it, the Space Traveler becomes very natural to use, although it is quite sensitive to even fine movement. However, you'll soon find yourself tumbling a scene around as easily as you would with your standard keyboard and moust combinations, and rotating a camera is certainly more intuitive than, say SHFT-CTRL-ALT-middle-mouse dragging.
Which brings us to the most obvious question about this device: who needs it? If you're already comfortable working in a 3d application, and navigation with the standard key commands and mouse actions has become second nature, why bother with yet another input device? In my experience, many 3D operations, such as architectural modeling, dynamics, and texture manipulations, simply require too much keyboard input to benefit from the Space Traveler at all. I need my hands on the keyboard, and mouse, and instant access to pop-ups and marking menus provided by my right hand mouse button, which just doesn't leave enough hands for a third input device.
On the other hand (literally) when it comes to operations that require one-handed navigation, the SpaceTraveler is a terrific idea. For example, when sculpting an organic model or painting textures on surfaces with a Wacom tablet, you can rotate and tumble the model with one hand, while painting with the other. While doing character animation, the SpaceTraveler can be used as a low-speed motion capture input device that lets you use gestures, rather than explicit rotations, to move a joint, although you'll have to set up your characters to work with this input. The device's eight buttons can be mapped to common keyboard shortcuts, and the defaults for Maya activate the Hot Box, translate, rotate, and scale commands. However, the buttons are too small with terrible ergonomics, and I still need to use the keyboard for other commands, such as the marking menus.
The SpaceTraveler, as the name implies, is small and portable. Although on-the-road walkthroughs of real-time-3D scenes seem unlikely, I found the SpaceTraveler useful as an accessory to a high-end 3D laptop for bringing work home. My Compaq runs all my 3D applications, but the built-in trackpad is all but useless for 3D navigation, and the keyboard is cramped, with a non-standard layout, which also makes navigation clumsy. The SpaceTraveler really i