Consider a country with ten people, one making $1M and nine making $1k.
The one making $1M also happens to be an entrepreneur who starts a business, fires everybody and moves the production overseas. He now makes $2M and his ex-employees are living off of welfare. Unfortunately welfare doesn't provide enough money for his employees to buy the Entrepreneur's products anymore so he also goes bankrupt and everybody has $0.
Probably not much would change. If you look at the features that Adobe has been rolling out the last couple of years and then look into their sources you'll find the original research is usually Microsoft R&D + University of Washington + Adobe R&D.
Adobe is already in Seattle. Microsoft is in Seattle. University of Washington is smack dab in between the two companies and I'm pretty sure Microsoft has a satellite campus pretty close to Adobe.
On the plus side you could finally see PDF support in Word really take off. And killing the OSX version of Premiere wouldn't really spite Apple. Apple already has made it pretty clear they don't give a shit about their professional users (Killed Shake. Slowed FCP to a halt. Constantly disrupt Photoshop development. Release pathetic "Pro" hardware offerings. And on and on...)
Once you read it a few times you start remembering who is who and then the significance of the story emerges.
Even the names of swords are important and it's easy to forget 100 pages earlier that you already were introduced to character.
It also helps to understand the structure of the story: The first page is the entire story. The 1st chapter is the entire story and then it decompresses exponentially from there.
It's not a question as to if a creature would eat its young. It's a question of "When". When being less than a week I would imagine. Which is my point that if it was the same day then yeah you're rescuing the little bugger from possible lunch. A month or two and the guy is worm food or adopted.
You are basically agreeing that Blender technology can essentially achieve the same standard of quality as so-called professional packages, right? It's just the business model you're questioning as being only viable in the context of big budget productions paying the salaries of the talent doing the free stuff in their spare time. So, reasoning along that line, what's keeping the big budget productions from using the freeware in your opinion? Because, even if computer time is cheap, it seems to always make good business sense to cut costs wherever you can, even if the impact is relatively small. You don't burn money unless you absolutely have to, right? So why do the 'big productions' waste money on paid-licence software in your opinion?
Technically most films today are created through the renderman standard. That means you could create an entire film without blender using notepad to write a RIB (renderman spec) file and feeding it into a renderman compliant renderer. It becomes a question though of efficiency and workflow. I could create the next Mona Lisa in MSpaint theoretically... but how long would it take? Professional software still sells because it's still usually a faster workflow and makes your artists more productive.
Even within the professional market you still have plugins. 3ds Max, Softimage and Maya all ship with Mental Ray--which is a very capable 3D Renderer but many studios still spend an extra $3k for 3rd party renderers whether that be Pixar's Renderman or Brazil R/S or Vray. They spend that because while cutting costs where you can is great--if you can boost the productivity to cover the cost and then some you are saving money by spending it.
If you have a shot which needs several models, textures, lighting, animation and rendering then you have to determine the necessary man days for each task. If you can do it with less people then you are saving money on office space, salary, hardware, food and supervision. If an artist is making $60-100k a year you can safely assume overhead is going double that to costing the studio $120k - $200k a year. Now you look at the maintance cost in bulk for an application like Maya or 3ds Max and you're looking at $1k. If the difference in productivity for a seat of 3ds Max vs blender is 1% it pays itself off ($100k for 100 licenses $120k for an additional artist). Another thing to keep in mind--and this is something I've always been very critical of Blender about is that every studio builds around a 'monolith'. The monolith is the package which brings everything together. It generally is your animation, lighting and rendering prep application. This is where most studios employ Max/Maya/Softimage. Very few places have specialized lighting or animation packages. So that is one of the most critical applications that can't come up short. It's where everything comes together. Lots of little tasks have been supplanted along the way by specialized tools: Mudbox/Zbrush for modeling, Photoshop, DeepPaint etc and now Mari for texturing, UV Unwrapping tools, RealFlow for fluids etc etc.. But eventually it has to be put into one scene and sent off to the renderer to produce the image and that program better be reliable. Blender has been trying to be a monolith because they want to be the be-all-end-all swiss army knife. I've always felt they should have focused on some other task and worked itself into pipelines as a stand alone tool used in tandem with Maya or Max. Unfortunately that attitude rubs the blender people the wrong way and they are playing an all or nothing development strategy which I believe will leave them perpetually playing catch up since it's not being integrated into any studios' pipelines. Once it was in someone's pipeline they would keep adding to it and getting development feedback. These shorts are exactly what Blender needs: Real artists telling the developers what they need to work on, unfortunately these shorts seem to be the only time and place this happens
Simple. And I'm speaking as a professional CG Artist: I get pissy when people sing the tale of "Creativity" and "Expression" and then when I ask if they will fix my leaking sink it's "$150 an hour". What happened to expressing your passion?
Artists are expected to starve and suffer because they like what they do. I'm sorry you all hate your jobs but enjoying your job doesn't mean you shouldn't expect compensation. It's not noble to starve and live like a hobo. If you're spending your time, training, degree and talent on something which people desire and value then you should be payed for it.
People think that artists should starve so that they can be cheap ass leaches and pick up that extra cocktail at dinner. No by all means, don't compensate people for something which you describe as "moving", "life changing" or "brought you to tears", I get it... that Martini is worth far more to you than the person responsible for that experience having to apply for food stamps.
The desire to create is great. But eventually the desire to eat wins out. It would be a shame if someone was creating a product you all enjoyed but couldn't make a living at it because you would rather get that extra Double Shot No Whip.
I'm not even sure what MGM was supposedly doing in this yarn. Fronting print and advertising IS THE JOB of the distributor. If they aren't printing or advertising they aren't doing anything. Nor does MGM get to decide "how many theaters" a movie is going to go into (except in that they only pay for so many prints). That's up to the theater chains bidding on projection rights.
Someone stole the movie but it wasn't MGM. I doubt MGM even is aware of these schmucks. And I have Apple's CEO's email to prove it!
I needed to be spoon fed because the main character was mentally handicapped. I can't sympathize with brain dead characters' problems. In this case the hero was obviously a retarded nut job.
She walked across a desert, jungle, mountain range and grassland. Now I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that just those 4 things would take at least 2 months. Fine, fine she "Lost Track of Time" but she must have known that at least 2 months had passed. Hell she must have realized that at least 2 weeks had passed.
If Big Dragon snatches Little Dragon you can assume that Big Dragon is going to eat Little Dragon within a week. The Little Dragon is dead meat probably by the end of the day. Alternately someone who understands the concept of children and adults -- or aging -- would realize that maybe, just maybe Little Dragon looks like a little version of Big Dragon because it's a child.
So at the end of this quest our Hero should either find Baby Dragon with Mommy Dragon or bones. Alive baby dragon being held for snack is not one of the options. So even if the Hero lost track of time, if she had an IQ above 30 she should have realized that Little Dragon is a child of the Big Dragon and not food. The damn thing was even in a nest. The 'best case scenario' in this instance was the Hero was going to kill what she thought was her baby dragon's mother. The time scale is a red herring. If it's been a week or 20 years it makes no difference it's painfully obvious to even the lowly earth worm that small version, not being eaten, is offspring not food.
Now there are a few ways the writer or director could have turned this shit show around and at least brought it in for a clumsy landing. For instance if she found what appeared to be the skeleton of the Baby Dragon then she would have had motivation for revenge. If she found no baby and just fought the dragon for revenge it would have made a smidgen of sense. Maybe the baby then shows up after she kills her friend to emphasize the time passed. I don't find incomprehensible actions tragic I just find them incomprehensible. Tragic would have been letting her vengeful rage lead her to make a rash emotional decision which results in the death of her friend.
The hero deserves to be jailed and strung up by her ankles. She's a menace to society and too dumb to be trusted to walk free amongst us.
Also what on earth is a bandit doing on a random mountain ridge. Are there a lot of travelers at that time of year to rob? Isn't there a better road somewhere that isn't on a random cliff in a huge mountain range? Where does the bandit live? What does he do the other 364 days out of the year when someone doesn't happen upon his mountain peak? Is he a cannibal? Is there food up there anywhere? What does the old man eat? How did the old man get up there all by himself? I have a lot of logistical questions regarding that entire encounter.
Actually *MOST* Hollywood movies produce a plethora of Open Source Software. Lots of studios release huge volumes of scripts, tools and standards. For example OpenEXR which is probably the format used for all of the rendering in Sintel is a file format developed by Industrial Light and Magic. On a smaller scale lots of rigs, scripts and tools are released to the community.
Studios recognize that it's wasteful for everybody to reinvent the wheel every film and collaboration is imperative so the more open studios are with their non-proprietary assets the better.
Yeah but how well are the Blender Foundation Artists living?
Do they have health insurance? Can they pay their rent? Or at they doing this largely out the kindness of their hearts? The largest cost for most animation studios is the talent not the software. Our software licenses are less than 1% of our annual expenditures. And since our software makes us considerably more than 1% more productive than the free alternatives that's not really a cost at all so much as it's an investment.
There is a saying in production "Computer time is cheap." It's not the large $10m render farm that costs a lot of money it's the 5,000 artists setting up the scenes to render.
I've worked on a lot of low to no budget films before and I always get annoyed and pretty pissed off when the director then goes around saying that the movie was only made for "$xxx,000". "Yeah sure you can make a movie for nothing when I donate tends of thousands of dollars worth of my time and equipment for free."
It's those MPAA distributed films that allow me to donate my time and talent to projects that I want to help out on. It's the big budget films that feed and house most of the crew and talent on low budget indie films.
Yeah remarkably effective at taking down websites which nobody ever looks at.
They were probably very easy to denial of service since the sites do little more than post press releases. Oh no! How ever will the RIAA continue publishing press releases with their website down! The organizations operations are going to grind to a halt!
Except when gridlock is stopping important, good things.
There's opposition and then there is obstruction in order to make the opposition look incompetent. That's sabotage not opposition. The trouble is we now have to have a super majority in the senate to make any progress. That is an unreasonable demand.
The conservatives are blocking every bill (even tax cuts) in an effort to reinforce their campaign motto that government can't and shouldn't do anything. There has to be compromise in any opposition group. You might not get exactly what you want but you can extract bits and pieces. That's not what's happening. The conservative "oppposition" is saying "start over and throw it all away or we won't vote for it." That's unreasonable. The Republicans could have gotten tort reform out of the healthcare bill if they had 'sold out'. But they decided that they were going to go for all the marbles and they ended up getting none of their priorities.
What frustrates me most of the the GOP right now isn't that they're opposing the DEMs it's that they aren't putting up a real opposition. The only real opposition is coming from right of center democrats because they're actually willing to eventually vote and can extract demands as a result. When you have no vote to offer then you don't have a bargaining position.
Liberals are a bunch of disorganized, self defeating, introspective idealists. That means presented with 30 different ideas you'll get 30 different candidates who all divide the vote.
Conservatives are structured, team oriented cheerleaders. They stay on message. They circle the wagons. They read the talking points (which are actually catchy) and STICK to them.
Just based on personality the Conservatives would win just about every time. If you just took environmental protection you would end up with: 1) The Cap and Trade candidate 2) The Carbon Tax candidate 3) The nuclear subsidy candidate 4) The green tech tax credit candidate.
On the conservative side you would get: 1) The 'Global Warming is a con to steal your freedom.' candidate
Always carry a little tiny roll of duck tape. Besides its numerous other qualities and applications a strip over your heel will effectively completely heal (no pun intended) any blistering for several days.
I sometimes even proactively duct tape the contact points if I haven't worn my hiking boots for a few months.
This is why rules need to be flexible, and when all parties can come to mutually agreed upon alternative contracts then they should have the ability to waive them.
The rules are flexible. The guild can offer waivers. The Guild often DOES issue waivers.
In this instance the Guild rejected Rodriguez's argument that Frank Miller did enough to be worthy of a directing credit. If you can demonstrate that you're a legitimate directing team working collaboratively they will grant directing credits.
99% of the time this rule protects its guild members. Issuing waivers whenever the director "asks" for it would be the same as removing the rule. "Would you like to direct Lord of the Rings?" "You bet!" "Ok here's the deal though, if you do it, I'm going to be co-director and I want you to ask for a waiver." "Ok, I guess, if it gets me to direct LOTR!"
In no time flat the Directing credit would be going to every moneybag who showed up to set one day and made an offhand remark.
They are learning quickly. All 15 seconds of experience and they can often at least sort of carry on an awkward situation.
I learn things very quickly. If there is an activity where "only about 30% of you will be able to do this on the first day so don't feel bad if it takes a couple days to get the hang for it" my geekiness aptitudes tend help me almost always be in that minority group. That doesn't mean though that I'm an expert who could teach the class the next day or am really competent all the things I've dabbled in.
Expertise and exposure I think are extremely important in a situation like this and while I think geeks are also important in cyber warfare it largely comes down to pattern recognition. A soldier has spent tens of thousands of hours staring at the way weapons instructions *should* look. So when something is out of place they're far more likely to recognize something out of place. On the other hand while looking at server logs the geek has spent tens of thousands of hours staring at router logs so they're more likely to notice a generic anomaly in network traffic.
Of those two experts I would say the person who certifies the bomb is going to the right place is the more important since that bomb is about to be dropped right THEN at that very moment. On the other hand a network breach probably wouldn't be as immediately obvious. An intrusion might not even pose any sort of immediate danger to active missions, nor may it have compromised any mission critical systems.
So you're saying this guy is a sociopath with a dream of world domination?
Seems like quite a leap to accuse him of that based on "Maybe we should setup a second parallel network which we completely control for mission critical information."
I love that half of the comments to this story read: "OMG DON'T USE THE INTERNET FOR MISSION CRITICAL FUNCTIONS IDIOTS!" and the other half respond "OMG IT'S ALL A PLOY TO STEAL OUR INTERNETZ!"
Maybe Microsoft isn't so much "trying to get gamers to buy Windows 7ista" as they just don't see a reason to invest a considerable amount of resources on an operating system a decade and 2 releases old.
"Adobe today announced that they're 'trying to get artists to buy the new Photoshop' by not adding all of the new features for free to Photoshop 3.0"
I mean how far back do you want them to go? Win 3.1? Is Microsoft pressuring people to transition to 7 from 3.1 by no longer offering any new features?
Since when was it onerous for a software company to not give away all of their new features for free? Windows XP even got a considerable upgrade in the form of SP2 for free. That back ported a huge number of Vista features.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a country with ten people, one making $1M and nine making $1k.
The one making $1M also happens to be an entrepreneur who starts a business, fires everybody and moves the production overseas. He now makes $2M and his ex-employees are living off of welfare. Unfortunately welfare doesn't provide enough money for his employees to buy the Entrepreneur's products anymore so he also goes bankrupt and everybody has $0.
Actually the windows idea unlike the cars would probably pay itself off if you broke the right windows.
Not only would the glaziers do well but the home owners would recoup the costs in improved efficiency.
Probably not much would change. If you look at the features that Adobe has been rolling out the last couple of years and then look into their sources you'll find the original research is usually Microsoft R&D + University of Washington + Adobe R&D.
Adobe is already in Seattle. Microsoft is in Seattle. University of Washington is smack dab in between the two companies and I'm pretty sure Microsoft has a satellite campus pretty close to Adobe.
On the plus side you could finally see PDF support in Word really take off. And killing the OSX version of Premiere wouldn't really spite Apple. Apple already has made it pretty clear they don't give a shit about their professional users (Killed Shake. Slowed FCP to a halt. Constantly disrupt Photoshop development. Release pathetic "Pro" hardware offerings. And on and on...)
What about Mars?
It took me about 4 tries but it was worth it.
Once you read it a few times you start remembering who is who and then the significance of the story emerges.
Even the names of swords are important and it's easy to forget 100 pages earlier that you already were introduced to character.
It also helps to understand the structure of the story: The first page is the entire story. The 1st chapter is the entire story and then it decompresses exponentially from there.
It's not a question as to if a creature would eat its young. It's a question of "When". When being less than a week I would imagine. Which is my point that if it was the same day then yeah you're rescuing the little bugger from possible lunch. A month or two and the guy is worm food or adopted.
You are basically agreeing that Blender technology can essentially achieve the same standard of quality as so-called professional packages, right? It's just the business model you're questioning as being only viable in the context of big budget productions paying the salaries of the talent doing the free stuff in their spare time.
So, reasoning along that line, what's keeping the big budget productions from using the freeware in your opinion? Because, even if computer time is cheap, it seems to always make good business sense to cut costs wherever you can, even if the impact is relatively small. You don't burn money unless you absolutely have to, right? So why do the 'big productions' waste money on paid-licence software in your opinion?
Technically most films today are created through the renderman standard. That means you could create an entire film without blender using notepad to write a RIB (renderman spec) file and feeding it into a renderman compliant renderer. It becomes a question though of efficiency and workflow. I could create the next Mona Lisa in MSpaint theoretically... but how long would it take? Professional software still sells because it's still usually a faster workflow and makes your artists more productive.
Even within the professional market you still have plugins. 3ds Max, Softimage and Maya all ship with Mental Ray--which is a very capable 3D Renderer but many studios still spend an extra $3k for 3rd party renderers whether that be Pixar's Renderman or Brazil R/S or Vray. They spend that because while cutting costs where you can is great--if you can boost the productivity to cover the cost and then some you are saving money by spending it.
If you have a shot which needs several models, textures, lighting, animation and rendering then you have to determine the necessary man days for each task. If you can do it with less people then you are saving money on office space, salary, hardware, food and supervision. If an artist is making $60-100k a year you can safely assume overhead is going double that to costing the studio $120k - $200k a year. Now you look at the maintance cost in bulk for an application like Maya or 3ds Max and you're looking at $1k. If the difference in productivity for a seat of 3ds Max vs blender is 1% it pays itself off ($100k for 100 licenses $120k for an additional artist). Another thing to keep in mind--and this is something I've always been very critical of Blender about is that every studio builds around a 'monolith'. The monolith is the package which brings everything together. It generally is your animation, lighting and rendering prep application. This is where most studios employ Max/Maya/Softimage. Very few places have specialized lighting or animation packages. So that is one of the most critical applications that can't come up short. It's where everything comes together. Lots of little tasks have been supplanted along the way by specialized tools: Mudbox/Zbrush for modeling, Photoshop, DeepPaint etc and now Mari for texturing, UV Unwrapping tools, RealFlow for fluids etc etc.. But eventually it has to be put into one scene and sent off to the renderer to produce the image and that program better be reliable. Blender has been trying to be a monolith because they want to be the be-all-end-all swiss army knife. I've always felt they should have focused on some other task and worked itself into pipelines as a stand alone tool used in tandem with Maya or Max. Unfortunately that attitude rubs the blender people the wrong way and they are playing an all or nothing development strategy which I believe will leave them perpetually playing catch up since it's not being integrated into any studios' pipelines. Once it was in someone's pipeline they would keep adding to it and getting development feedback. These shorts are exactly what Blender needs: Real artists telling the developers what they need to work on, unfortunately these shorts seem to be the only time and place this happens
Simple. And I'm speaking as a professional CG Artist: I get pissy when people sing the tale of "Creativity" and "Expression" and then when I ask if they will fix my leaking sink it's "$150 an hour". What happened to expressing your passion?
Artists are expected to starve and suffer because they like what they do. I'm sorry you all hate your jobs but enjoying your job doesn't mean you shouldn't expect compensation. It's not noble to starve and live like a hobo. If you're spending your time, training, degree and talent on something which people desire and value then you should be payed for it.
People think that artists should starve so that they can be cheap ass leaches and pick up that extra cocktail at dinner. No by all means, don't compensate people for something which you describe as "moving", "life changing" or "brought you to tears", I get it... that Martini is worth far more to you than the person responsible for that experience having to apply for food stamps.
The desire to create is great. But eventually the desire to eat wins out. It would be a shame if someone was creating a product you all enjoyed but couldn't make a living at it because you would rather get that extra Double Shot No Whip.
At work I'm always dragging windows to the edge of the screen.... in Vista! I'm already spoiled.
They didn't commit any money.
I'm not even sure what MGM was supposedly doing in this yarn. Fronting print and advertising IS THE JOB of the distributor. If they aren't printing or advertising they aren't doing anything. Nor does MGM get to decide "how many theaters" a movie is going to go into (except in that they only pay for so many prints). That's up to the theater chains bidding on projection rights.
Someone stole the movie but it wasn't MGM. I doubt MGM even is aware of these schmucks. And I have Apple's CEO's email to prove it!
I needed to be spoon fed because the main character was mentally handicapped. I can't sympathize with brain dead characters' problems. In this case the hero was obviously a retarded nut job.
She walked across a desert, jungle, mountain range and grassland. Now I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that just those 4 things would take at least 2 months. Fine, fine she "Lost Track of Time" but she must have known that at least 2 months had passed. Hell she must have realized that at least 2 weeks had passed.
If Big Dragon snatches Little Dragon you can assume that Big Dragon is going to eat Little Dragon within a week. The Little Dragon is dead meat probably by the end of the day. Alternately someone who understands the concept of children and adults -- or aging -- would realize that maybe, just maybe Little Dragon looks like a little version of Big Dragon because it's a child.
So at the end of this quest our Hero should either find Baby Dragon with Mommy Dragon or bones. Alive baby dragon being held for snack is not one of the options. So even if the Hero lost track of time, if she had an IQ above 30 she should have realized that Little Dragon is a child of the Big Dragon and not food. The damn thing was even in a nest. The 'best case scenario' in this instance was the Hero was going to kill what she thought was her baby dragon's mother. The time scale is a red herring. If it's been a week or 20 years it makes no difference it's painfully obvious to even the lowly earth worm that small version, not being eaten, is offspring not food.
Now there are a few ways the writer or director could have turned this shit show around and at least brought it in for a clumsy landing. For instance if she found what appeared to be the skeleton of the Baby Dragon then she would have had motivation for revenge. If she found no baby and just fought the dragon for revenge it would have made a smidgen of sense. Maybe the baby then shows up after she kills her friend to emphasize the time passed. I don't find incomprehensible actions tragic I just find them incomprehensible. Tragic would have been letting her vengeful rage lead her to make a rash emotional decision which results in the death of her friend.
The hero deserves to be jailed and strung up by her ankles. She's a menace to society and too dumb to be trusted to walk free amongst us.
Also what on earth is a bandit doing on a random mountain ridge. Are there a lot of travelers at that time of year to rob? Isn't there a better road somewhere that isn't on a random cliff in a huge mountain range? Where does the bandit live? What does he do the other 364 days out of the year when someone doesn't happen upon his mountain peak? Is he a cannibal? Is there food up there anywhere? What does the old man eat? How did the old man get up there all by himself? I have a lot of logistical questions regarding that entire encounter.
Few Hollywood movies have that result for FLOSS.
Actually *MOST* Hollywood movies produce a plethora of Open Source Software. Lots of studios release huge volumes of scripts, tools and standards. For example OpenEXR which is probably the format used for all of the rendering in Sintel is a file format developed by Industrial Light and Magic. On a smaller scale lots of rigs, scripts and tools are released to the community.
Studios recognize that it's wasteful for everybody to reinvent the wheel every film and collaboration is imperative so the more open studios are with their non-proprietary assets the better.
Yeah but how well are the Blender Foundation Artists living?
Do they have health insurance? Can they pay their rent? Or at they doing this largely out the kindness of their hearts? The largest cost for most animation studios is the talent not the software. Our software licenses are less than 1% of our annual expenditures. And since our software makes us considerably more than 1% more productive than the free alternatives that's not really a cost at all so much as it's an investment.
There is a saying in production "Computer time is cheap." It's not the large $10m render farm that costs a lot of money it's the 5,000 artists setting up the scenes to render.
I've worked on a lot of low to no budget films before and I always get annoyed and pretty pissed off when the director then goes around saying that the movie was only made for "$xxx,000". "Yeah sure you can make a movie for nothing when I donate tends of thousands of dollars worth of my time and equipment for free."
It's those MPAA distributed films that allow me to donate my time and talent to projects that I want to help out on. It's the big budget films that feed and house most of the crew and talent on low budget indie films.
Yeah remarkably effective at taking down websites which nobody ever looks at.
They were probably very easy to denial of service since the sites do little more than post press releases. Oh no! How ever will the RIAA continue publishing press releases with their website down! The organizations operations are going to grind to a halt!
Except when gridlock is stopping important, good things.
There's opposition and then there is obstruction in order to make the opposition look incompetent. That's sabotage not opposition. The trouble is we now have to have a super majority in the senate to make any progress. That is an unreasonable demand.
The conservatives are blocking every bill (even tax cuts) in an effort to reinforce their campaign motto that government can't and shouldn't do anything. There has to be compromise in any opposition group. You might not get exactly what you want but you can extract bits and pieces. That's not what's happening. The conservative "oppposition" is saying "start over and throw it all away or we won't vote for it." That's unreasonable. The Republicans could have gotten tort reform out of the healthcare bill if they had 'sold out'. But they decided that they were going to go for all the marbles and they ended up getting none of their priorities.
What frustrates me most of the the GOP right now isn't that they're opposing the DEMs it's that they aren't putting up a real opposition. The only real opposition is coming from right of center democrats because they're actually willing to eventually vote and can extract demands as a result. When you have no vote to offer then you don't have a bargaining position.
The original summary was lacking but the alternative proposed summary was WAY too long.
It's just supposed to pique my interest enough to read the article, not run several pages.
Here's the trouble though:
Liberals are a bunch of disorganized, self defeating, introspective idealists. That means presented with 30 different ideas you'll get 30 different candidates who all divide the vote.
Conservatives are structured, team oriented cheerleaders. They stay on message. They circle the wagons. They read the talking points (which are actually catchy) and STICK to them.
Just based on personality the Conservatives would win just about every time. If you just took environmental protection you would end up with:
1) The Cap and Trade candidate
2) The Carbon Tax candidate
3) The nuclear subsidy candidate
4) The green tech tax credit candidate.
On the conservative side you would get:
1) The 'Global Warming is a con to steal your freedom.' candidate
Always carry a little tiny roll of duck tape. Besides its numerous other qualities and applications a strip over your heel will effectively completely heal (no pun intended) any blistering for several days.
I sometimes even proactively duct tape the contact points if I haven't worn my hiking boots for a few months.
This is why rules need to be flexible, and when all parties can come to mutually agreed upon alternative contracts then they should have the ability to waive them.
The rules are flexible. The guild can offer waivers. The Guild often DOES issue waivers.
In this instance the Guild rejected Rodriguez's argument that Frank Miller did enough to be worthy of a directing credit. If you can demonstrate that you're a legitimate directing team working collaboratively they will grant directing credits.
99% of the time this rule protects its guild members. Issuing waivers whenever the director "asks" for it would be the same as removing the rule. "Would you like to direct Lord of the Rings?" "You bet!" "Ok here's the deal though, if you do it, I'm going to be co-director and I want you to ask for a waiver." "Ok, I guess, if it gets me to direct LOTR!"
In no time flat the Directing credit would be going to every moneybag who showed up to set one day and made an offhand remark.
They are learning quickly. All 15 seconds of experience and they can often at least sort of carry on an awkward situation.
I learn things very quickly. If there is an activity where "only about 30% of you will be able to do this on the first day so don't feel bad if it takes a couple days to get the hang for it" my geekiness aptitudes tend help me almost always be in that minority group. That doesn't mean though that I'm an expert who could teach the class the next day or am really competent all the things I've dabbled in.
Expertise and exposure I think are extremely important in a situation like this and while I think geeks are also important in cyber warfare it largely comes down to pattern recognition. A soldier has spent tens of thousands of hours staring at the way weapons instructions *should* look. So when something is out of place they're far more likely to recognize something out of place. On the other hand while looking at server logs the geek has spent tens of thousands of hours staring at router logs so they're more likely to notice a generic anomaly in network traffic.
Of those two experts I would say the person who certifies the bomb is going to the right place is the more important since that bomb is about to be dropped right THEN at that very moment. On the other hand a network breach probably wouldn't be as immediately obvious. An intrusion might not even pose any sort of immediate danger to active missions, nor may it have compromised any mission critical systems.
So you're saying this guy is a sociopath with a dream of world domination?
Seems like quite a leap to accuse him of that based on "Maybe we should setup a second parallel network which we completely control for mission critical information."
I love that half of the comments to this story read:
"OMG DON'T USE THE INTERNET FOR MISSION CRITICAL FUNCTIONS IDIOTS!"
and the other half respond
"OMG IT'S ALL A PLOY TO STEAL OUR INTERNETZ!"
CNN Makes claims? I thought they just showed water skiing chipmunks all day.
Weird. And here I thought Vista was working just fine for me. I guess I didn't know my computer hadn't been working for several years.
Maybe Microsoft isn't so much "trying to get gamers to buy Windows 7ista" as they just don't see a reason to invest a considerable amount of resources on an operating system a decade and 2 releases old.
"Adobe today announced that they're 'trying to get artists to buy the new Photoshop' by not adding all of the new features for free to Photoshop 3.0"
I mean how far back do you want them to go? Win 3.1? Is Microsoft pressuring people to transition to 7 from 3.1 by no longer offering any new features?
Since when was it onerous for a software company to not give away all of their new features for free? Windows XP even got a considerable upgrade in the form of SP2 for free. That back ported a huge number of Vista features.