It's perfectly easy to oppose polygamy without opposing gay marriage. It goes like this.
You may form partnerships with one other person. In the event that one person dies, all assets shift to your partner. If you wish to have 5 wives you need to form a corporation not a partnership due to an increase in complications of asset law.
Simple example. If a spouse dies, the other spouse gets all of the assets. If a polygamist spouse dies... there would need to be a completely different asset distribution system. If a single spouse is sick then one spouse is by default granted all rights to make medical decisions. If a polygamist gets stick and needs medical consent do you take a vote? Does it need to be unanimous? Just visitation is different. If you have a hospital room the spouse may stay. If you have 6 spouses, are they all entitled to visitation? If you give Social Security benefits... or a company gives out healthcare to spouses--are they obligated to pay for 6x spouses? That becomes a financial burden on any one company who can't anticipate if their healthcare will go from say a 3 person company to a 3 person company and 90 spouses. You would have to be allowed to discriminate on quantity at some number.
On the other hand there are no practical arguments against Gay Marriage that apply to regular marriages. If you cover one spouse--their gender is mostly irrelevant. If you need a medical consent signed it doesn't matter what gender signs. Etc.
You didn't mention which "60s" you're referring to, the 1860s or the 1960s. I have little doubt you're thinking of the 1960s, but the future is an uncertain thing. They may be seen like the people in the 1850s and 1860s that opposed the right of other Americans to own slaves, a right reflected in the Constitution itself, opposing a right that was popular in some areas but ultimately a bad idea. When you're referring to "prejudice," make sure to consider your own.
Somehow I feel safe believing that not discriminating against people due to the sexual orientation will fall on the side of not discriminating based on skin color.
I'm totally against the right to discriminate against slaves. I'm also totally against the right to discriminate against gays. You have to have a very convoluted worldview to equate those who ask for the same rights as everyone else with slave masters.
You're right it is unidirectional. Just like KKK members even though they lost the civil rights movement are still generally scorned and viewed as bad. The hate towards neo-nazis is generally unidirectional as well (don't hear about Neo-nazis being terribly discriminatory in workplaces).
I'm setting a goal of a $5 PC with modern tablet quality. My approach to achieving my goal is to do absolutely nothing but I will be happy to take credit when it I achieve all of my goals in 5 years.
Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, and there is no indication that it would, even in a world where all content was distributed for free
When shows cost tens of millions of dollars to produce (It's estimated that Game of Thrones costs $50-100m per season) you HAVE to make money to produce the content. Yeah if you enjoy watching shitty YouTube videos of people jump cutting multiple takes of a sentence into a spastic auctioneer rant then there will always be content. If you want high quality content like Game of Thrones or Sons of Anarchy then the only way you can continue that is if the producers can make at least $100 million off of their investment.
Otherwise Netflix will charge $1 per month for bandwidth and pay no-one for the content. Even Netflix's house of cards is only profitable because only Netflix can distribute it. If Netflix could just stream Game of Thrones for free without paying HBO then everyone would do it through Netflix and skip the $15 / month to HBO too.
The only reason that Intellectual Property has ANY value is because of the monopoly it's granted on sales. Without it, nobody will produce anything that can't be directly monetized or else another very large corporation with powerful distribution channels will destroy them.
I have about 6TB now on backblaze and haven't received a complaint. I don't know who "Just Cloud" is but it sounds like a rather small organization who resells cloud storage. Backblaze prides themselves on being truly unlimited as well as their efficiency. They probably would see the cost of storage less than the cost of the PR nightmare from all their bragging being undone by a policy that only affects a handful of clients.
Having a 20TB backup would be a marketing win. It might cost them a couple dollars per month but that's cheaper than even a small Google ad campaign.
As my Civil engineering friend would always point out though, gas taxes barely cover a small fraction of a road's expenses. Most DOT construction budgets come out of the general funds.
One thing I'm waiting to happen is when this becomes an international incident. How long is it before a North Korean defected to the south doesn't put a blocks of C4 onto a drone and orchestrate a prison break?
One drone to fly to and from the prison. Determine where every guard post is. $100k for 20 drones to take out guard towers and blast a path through the fences/walls.
Or even milder forms of activism such as dropping leaflets on prisoners.
I'm sure there are quite a few people more than happy to donate heavily to such a cause. And a few years after that the price will drop even more. We might have nearly untraceable proxy wars on our hands carried out by terrorists/vigilantes.
Numerous studies show that illegal immigrants use less net government services than the average citizen. They might not be filling out W-4s but they are paying sales tax and numerous other taxes while taking no refunds and generally avoiding government services (less they be discovered and deported).
Yeah I just finished a shot with butterflies. They looked perfect but "Felt too frenetic" so they got slower... and slower... and slower... now they fly in slow motion and are approved. In real life they would fall out of the sky like bricks.
Softimage XSI used to be sold in multiple price brackets from a $500 cheapo version to a $7,000 'advanced' version. All that Autodesk did was kill the top of the line and the introductory version and released a single all inclusive version (The $7,000 version) for $3,500. This is exactly what they did with Maya too. Maya used to come in a $1,000, $4,000 and I think $8,000 version but then they consolidated down to their target price of $3,500.
If anything they offered a price drop. If you're a student you can also get a copy of any of the packages free of charge these days. So the $500 crappy version is $500 cheaper and 10x better than it used to be.
Almost all CGI is hand animated. Pretty much everything in Avatar even was motion captured but then redone by an animator. Motion capture is great for capturing intent but its data almost always ends up completely unused.
This is about half correct. ICE is not becoming Bifrost. Bifrost is the spiritual successor to Naiad, although some of the ICE people are working on it.
Also Bifrost isn't just coming to Maya it's being developed as a standalone API/SDK. So it's not a "Maya feature" any more than Renderman is a Maya feature.
As to profit hungry shareholders... XSI/Softimage has been a money losing expedition since the beginning. They had a really hard time getting people to transition from Softimage 3D to XSI. By the time XSI was released many of the users had already migrated to 3ds Max or Maya. It definitely has the newest core system but like Lightwave's attempt to rewrite its core they discovered that the time it takes is lethal to its marketshare. Microsoft bought it initially to port it to Windows NT in an effort to kill off SGI and prove that Windows could handle professional graphics. As a response Maya also moved to Windows so having succeeded in dumping money into Softimage they sold them off to Avid. Avid also dumped money into them hoping that they could have a total pipeline from edit to delivery in their post software. But after losing dump trucks of money on a failed product they too sold it off to Autodesk. Autodesk possibly bought it as a defensive move to ensure that nobody else would pick it up *cough Adobe* but they honestly probably thought they could turn it around. Well... they didn't it also cost them a crapload of money and now they're killing it.
XSI has been costing its corporate owners millions and millions of dollars for over a decade. I suspect it's never actually turned a profit in its entire history. The fact that Autodesk kept it alive this long is really actually surprising to me. It's been perceived as dead for the last 8 years.
As to the all-CG primates in Planet of the Apes... that was done by Weta and Weta has an inhouse proprietary muscle and sliding simulation system so you can't really add that as a flag as a + for softimage. Nor can you add Jurassic Park which predates XSI.
This is a good day for CG. Autodesk has wasted too many years spreading its resources across too many places and I for one am thrilled they finally stopped wasting their customers' money on a dead end.
I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.
"Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"
"Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"
The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.
I wouldn't describe the Windows Phone market as "dead". It's doubled in the last 12 months and it looks like Microsoft has given up on it being a premium iPhone competitor which opens it up to competing with the crappy android hardware that's flooded the market.
With 1B smartphones sold each year even a 5-10% runner up represents a pretty substantial market for Qualcom.
AMD wouldn't have done anything if it weren't for Epic and Valve etc. AMD is responding to developer requests for more baremetal access. The developers who have been talking to AMD and NVidia are also talking to Microsoft and the OpenGL consortium and everybody in between.
This isn't really for the casual gamer though since if you buy the expansion you get one character up-leveled for free. It's unlikely a casual gamer has multiple characters that they feel need to be leveled up.
Also the subsidies for an ICE (oil and refinery subsidies) vehicle are built into the subsidized fuel price. So the $7,500 electric vehicle subsidy should be included as part of the price as well for an Apples to Apples vehicle cost comparison.
Why would I have been at all unhappy with my Zune. All of the reviews for the Zune were glowing. The Zune software was awesome compared to iTunes which is still horrifically terrible on Windows.
Zune was a complete sales disaster but it wasn't because it was a poor product. And I had no need for it to sell well to get a great experience.
Why are you using social responsibility and a business in the same sentence?
Because there is no reason you shouldn't have a social responsibility as a business. In fact when corporations were first created they were only created when they demonstrated a public good to society.
You yourself even say that its responsible for the community by paying taxes however a significant number of huge corporations pay nothing in taxes therefore even your meager expectations aren't being fulfilled.
Also don't forget to put your contact info on there. I have one of these brother printers and I put my name and phone number on everything. Big things also get my address as well.
How is Microsoft a Rival though? They absolutely dominate the ad market. Microsoft has almost no presence in the ad market. Chromebooks are a novel experiment but I don't see them threatening Microsoft in the slightest. After all you can run Chrome on a Windows 8 device (for $15 now even).
I see GoogleDocs as an effort to grab some stragglers but it doesn't seem to be a big money maker or a large enough investment on Google's part to warrant Microsoft's attention. After all the Office division is still showing growing sales.
I would say attributing these as efforts to hurt their competitors both overestimates the harm that's been done and the intentions beyond the obvious attempts at a second trick for their pony.
Google can't sit on their laurels. If 90% of their products aren't significant cash cows then their ad business can't indefinitely fund their experiments. Eventually someone is going to knee cap their adwords revenue. They need more sources of income. It might look like a strategic "win" to pressure their "Competitors" but Google needs another big win.
They PINKY SWEAR they're only using this information for terrorism, right?
No they don't. Because this number is total subpoenas and search warrants. These could be for tax fraud, divorce cases, speeding tickets, murder trials etc.
Welcome to 1884, where a lawyer can subpoena information on you in the course of a trial. The National Security Letters examples are related to terrorism. Everything else is just all of the normal legal requests a large document archive will get related to the rest of the law enforcement activities we've seen for hundreds of years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly easy to oppose polygamy without opposing gay marriage. It goes like this.
You may form partnerships with one other person. In the event that one person dies, all assets shift to your partner. If you wish to have 5 wives you need to form a corporation not a partnership due to an increase in complications of asset law.
Simple example. If a spouse dies, the other spouse gets all of the assets. If a polygamist spouse dies... there would need to be a completely different asset distribution system. If a single spouse is sick then one spouse is by default granted all rights to make medical decisions. If a polygamist gets stick and needs medical consent do you take a vote? Does it need to be unanimous? Just visitation is different. If you have a hospital room the spouse may stay. If you have 6 spouses, are they all entitled to visitation? If you give Social Security benefits... or a company gives out healthcare to spouses--are they obligated to pay for 6x spouses? That becomes a financial burden on any one company who can't anticipate if their healthcare will go from say a 3 person company to a 3 person company and 90 spouses. You would have to be allowed to discriminate on quantity at some number.
On the other hand there are no practical arguments against Gay Marriage that apply to regular marriages. If you cover one spouse--their gender is mostly irrelevant. If you need a medical consent signed it doesn't matter what gender signs. Etc.
You didn't mention which "60s" you're referring to, the 1860s or the 1960s. I have little doubt you're thinking of the 1960s, but the future is an uncertain thing. They may be seen like the people in the 1850s and 1860s that opposed the right of other Americans to own slaves, a right reflected in the Constitution itself, opposing a right that was popular in some areas but ultimately a bad idea. When you're referring to "prejudice," make sure to consider your own.
Somehow I feel safe believing that not discriminating against people due to the sexual orientation will fall on the side of not discriminating based on skin color.
I'm totally against the right to discriminate against slaves. I'm also totally against the right to discriminate against gays. You have to have a very convoluted worldview to equate those who ask for the same rights as everyone else with slave masters.
You're right it is unidirectional. Just like KKK members even though they lost the civil rights movement are still generally scorned and viewed as bad. The hate towards neo-nazis is generally unidirectional as well (don't hear about Neo-nazis being terribly discriminatory in workplaces).
I'm setting a goal of a $5 PC with modern tablet quality. My approach to achieving my goal is to do absolutely nothing but I will be happy to take credit when it I achieve all of my goals in 5 years.
Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, and there is no indication that it would, even in a world where all content was distributed for free
When shows cost tens of millions of dollars to produce (It's estimated that Game of Thrones costs $50-100m per season) you HAVE to make money to produce the content. Yeah if you enjoy watching shitty YouTube videos of people jump cutting multiple takes of a sentence into a spastic auctioneer rant then there will always be content. If you want high quality content like Game of Thrones or Sons of Anarchy then the only way you can continue that is if the producers can make at least $100 million off of their investment.
Otherwise Netflix will charge $1 per month for bandwidth and pay no-one for the content. Even Netflix's house of cards is only profitable because only Netflix can distribute it. If Netflix could just stream Game of Thrones for free without paying HBO then everyone would do it through Netflix and skip the $15 / month to HBO too.
The only reason that Intellectual Property has ANY value is because of the monopoly it's granted on sales. Without it, nobody will produce anything that can't be directly monetized or else another very large corporation with powerful distribution channels will destroy them.
It's not even that extreme these days, you can get 4TB drives now. So we're down to 5 drives stacked in a closet.
I have about 6TB now on backblaze and haven't received a complaint. I don't know who "Just Cloud" is but it sounds like a rather small organization who resells cloud storage. Backblaze prides themselves on being truly unlimited as well as their efficiency. They probably would see the cost of storage less than the cost of the PR nightmare from all their bragging being undone by a policy that only affects a handful of clients.
Having a 20TB backup would be a marketing win. It might cost them a couple dollars per month but that's cheaper than even a small Google ad campaign.
As my Civil engineering friend would always point out though, gas taxes barely cover a small fraction of a road's expenses. Most DOT construction budgets come out of the general funds.
One thing I'm waiting to happen is when this becomes an international incident. How long is it before a North Korean defected to the south doesn't put a blocks of C4 onto a drone and orchestrate a prison break?
One drone to fly to and from the prison. Determine where every guard post is. $100k for 20 drones to take out guard towers and blast a path through the fences/walls.
Or even milder forms of activism such as dropping leaflets on prisoners.
I'm sure there are quite a few people more than happy to donate heavily to such a cause. And a few years after that the price will drop even more. We might have nearly untraceable proxy wars on our hands carried out by terrorists/vigilantes.
Numerous studies show that illegal immigrants use less net government services than the average citizen. They might not be filling out W-4s but they are paying sales tax and numerous other taxes while taking no refunds and generally avoiding government services (less they be discovered and deported).
Yeah I just finished a shot with butterflies. They looked perfect but "Felt too frenetic" so they got slower... and slower... and slower... now they fly in slow motion and are approved. In real life they would fall out of the sky like bricks.
Softimage XSI used to be sold in multiple price brackets from a $500 cheapo version to a $7,000 'advanced' version. All that Autodesk did was kill the top of the line and the introductory version and released a single all inclusive version (The $7,000 version) for $3,500. This is exactly what they did with Maya too. Maya used to come in a $1,000, $4,000 and I think $8,000 version but then they consolidated down to their target price of $3,500.
If anything they offered a price drop. If you're a student you can also get a copy of any of the packages free of charge these days. So the $500 crappy version is $500 cheaper and 10x better than it used to be.
Almost all CGI is hand animated. Pretty much everything in Avatar even was motion captured but then redone by an animator. Motion capture is great for capturing intent but its data almost always ends up completely unused.
This is about half correct. ICE is not becoming Bifrost. Bifrost is the spiritual successor to Naiad, although some of the ICE people are working on it.
Also Bifrost isn't just coming to Maya it's being developed as a standalone API/SDK. So it's not a "Maya feature" any more than Renderman is a Maya feature.
As to profit hungry shareholders... XSI/Softimage has been a money losing expedition since the beginning. They had a really hard time getting people to transition from Softimage 3D to XSI. By the time XSI was released many of the users had already migrated to 3ds Max or Maya. It definitely has the newest core system but like Lightwave's attempt to rewrite its core they discovered that the time it takes is lethal to its marketshare. Microsoft bought it initially to port it to Windows NT in an effort to kill off SGI and prove that Windows could handle professional graphics. As a response Maya also moved to Windows so having succeeded in dumping money into Softimage they sold them off to Avid. Avid also dumped money into them hoping that they could have a total pipeline from edit to delivery in their post software. But after losing dump trucks of money on a failed product they too sold it off to Autodesk. Autodesk possibly bought it as a defensive move to ensure that nobody else would pick it up *cough Adobe* but they honestly probably thought they could turn it around. Well... they didn't it also cost them a crapload of money and now they're killing it.
XSI has been costing its corporate owners millions and millions of dollars for over a decade. I suspect it's never actually turned a profit in its entire history. The fact that Autodesk kept it alive this long is really actually surprising to me. It's been perceived as dead for the last 8 years.
As to the all-CG primates in Planet of the Apes... that was done by Weta and Weta has an inhouse proprietary muscle and sliding simulation system so you can't really add that as a flag as a + for softimage. Nor can you add Jurassic Park which predates XSI.
This is a good day for CG. Autodesk has wasted too many years spreading its resources across too many places and I for one am thrilled they finally stopped wasting their customers' money on a dead end.
I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.
"Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"
"Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"
The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.
I wouldn't describe the Windows Phone market as "dead". It's doubled in the last 12 months and it looks like Microsoft has given up on it being a premium iPhone competitor which opens it up to competing with the crappy android hardware that's flooded the market.
With 1B smartphones sold each year even a 5-10% runner up represents a pretty substantial market for Qualcom.
AMD wouldn't have done anything if it weren't for Epic and Valve etc. AMD is responding to developer requests for more baremetal access. The developers who have been talking to AMD and NVidia are also talking to Microsoft and the OpenGL consortium and everybody in between.
This isn't really for the casual gamer though since if you buy the expansion you get one character up-leveled for free. It's unlikely a casual gamer has multiple characters that they feel need to be leveled up.
Also the subsidies for an ICE (oil and refinery subsidies) vehicle are built into the subsidized fuel price. So the $7,500 electric vehicle subsidy should be included as part of the price as well for an Apples to Apples vehicle cost comparison.
Why would I have been at all unhappy with my Zune. All of the reviews for the Zune were glowing. The Zune software was awesome compared to iTunes which is still horrifically terrible on Windows.
Zune was a complete sales disaster but it wasn't because it was a poor product. And I had no need for it to sell well to get a great experience.
Why are you using social responsibility and a business in the same sentence?
Because there is no reason you shouldn't have a social responsibility as a business. In fact when corporations were first created they were only created when they demonstrated a public good to society.
You yourself even say that its responsible for the community by paying taxes however a significant number of huge corporations pay nothing in taxes therefore even your meager expectations aren't being fulfilled.
Also don't forget to put your contact info on there. I have one of these brother printers and I put my name and phone number on everything. Big things also get my address as well.
http://www.brother-usa.com/Pto...
Everything also has a piece of blue electrical tape on it for the most part. Makes it easy to pick out your gear from a distance.
How is Microsoft a Rival though? They absolutely dominate the ad market. Microsoft has almost no presence in the ad market. Chromebooks are a novel experiment but I don't see them threatening Microsoft in the slightest. After all you can run Chrome on a Windows 8 device (for $15 now even).
I see GoogleDocs as an effort to grab some stragglers but it doesn't seem to be a big money maker or a large enough investment on Google's part to warrant Microsoft's attention. After all the Office division is still showing growing sales.
I would say attributing these as efforts to hurt their competitors both overestimates the harm that's been done and the intentions beyond the obvious attempts at a second trick for their pony.
Google can't sit on their laurels. If 90% of their products aren't significant cash cows then their ad business can't indefinitely fund their experiments. Eventually someone is going to knee cap their adwords revenue. They need more sources of income. It might look like a strategic "win" to pressure their "Competitors" but Google needs another big win.
They PINKY SWEAR they're only using this information for terrorism, right?
No they don't. Because this number is total subpoenas and search warrants. These could be for tax fraud, divorce cases, speeding tickets, murder trials etc.
Welcome to 1884, where a lawyer can subpoena information on you in the course of a trial. The National Security Letters examples are related to terrorism. Everything else is just all of the normal legal requests a large document archive will get related to the rest of the law enforcement activities we've seen for hundreds of years.
Mercedes-Benz has devised a crazy new 360-degree video capture method
What is this crazy new system you ask? The exact same system that 360 degree video has always been captured!