Mathematicians, Engineers, Physicists, and basically anyone in a technical field of work or study have to resort to writing because inserting mathematical or engineering symbology on-the-fly while typing is very tedious at best.
I love typing, and I am very fast at it, and it worked great for all of my liberal arts studies.
But for the real work, I have to use pencil and paper.
The reason I want a tablet computer is that that I can write on it with a stylus like a pencil, and take notes, including sketches and mathematical and engineering symbols, on what is essentially a limitless notebook, and on top of this I can annotate my notes with audio, video, and hyperlinks.
And on top of this I would like to store my textbooks in it.
Plus, I could envision a system where you loaded many books into a cartridge of sorts, say about 6 feet long, with a divider of some kind placed between each book.
As the scanner worked its way down the cartridge, it could detect the dividers, which would delineate one book from the next.
Thus even if the scanner were slow, perhaps it could scan say 50 books in one pass.
I often wondered if it would be possible for a book to be scanned while closed, using some kind of MRI technology that digitally sliced the book page by page, picking up on the density difference between the ink and the paper slice by slice.
And that was my final take of the move, as the colonists left Pandora - the Na'Vi are fucked. Just like the brief glory for the Indians at Little Big Horn, in the end it provoked a tidal wave of retribution against which there was no hope of resistance.
As I watched the human colonists column off to leave Pandora, I was thinking, "In a few years an automated drone will arrive in orbit to bathe the Na'Vi villages in a neutron death-ray and solve the problem forever."
>"Simulation" and "CGI" are not mutually exclusive as you paint them to be. In fact, they're practically synonymous.
Yes, you are correct.
The point I'm trying to make here is that to date, CGI graphics have looked like CGI graphics. In Avatar, they have developed the process to where it is now a very good simulation - far more "realistic" and "life-like" than anything we have seen before.
>You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
Except for two clumsily-inserted phrases of "fight terror with terror", and "shock and awe", I saw very little comparison to our situation in Iraq. Even the "unobtanium" played only a 30 second role in the film, but OK, I'll give that one, too.
Mostly, this was a story of a technologically superior force taking a technologically inferior force's resources by force. The parallel I drew most strongly was with Native Americans.
As for Iraq, yes, it is true we are not overtly stealing oil from Iraq, that we know of. Whether this is due to altruism or just because they haven't figured out a way to do it overtly is up for debate. But regardless, the simple fact is that securing energy resources is a #1 priority for the continued American Way of Life. That by itself is worth trillions of dollars, and the people with major financial stakes in our situation know this and no doubt are pressuring our government, directly and indirectly, to make sure that energy lifeline stays intact.
On top of this, there are trillions of dollars worth of energy contracts at stake in obtaining, transporting, and selling Iraqi oil. To insinuate that no one is profiting off of the American intervention in Iraq simply because no one is overtly stealing the oil is naive. To speculate that people in our government are not either directly or indirectly pressured by such monied interests is likewise naive.
I have heard other people express the sentiment that they don't intend to see this film because of the similarity to the plight of the American Indians.
I wonder, do you have a problem with films in the tragic genre in general or just ones that strike too close to historical reality for comfort?
>Really? Because all I get from the trailers is that it's an updated version of The Smurfs.
Obviously you have not been paying attention.
If you are honestly comparing the sophistication of the animation and rendering in Avatar to that of The Smurfs then you really just need to be quiet because clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
3D tech aside, the rendering in Avatar has raised the bar for animation to unprecedented heights. In fact, I find words like "rendering" and "Computer Generated Imagery" to no longer have meaning for a film like this.
What they are doing now very nearly constitutes simulation. The only thing holding it back is the fact that the beings being simulated are, obviously, fictional.
Because of this work, the technology is very close now to being able to convincingly simulate humans.
Yeah, and they fucked themselves by doing it. I tend to side with the OP that the reason why DRM is falling out of favor is because the content providers are realizing that the protection DRM offers (which is negligible) is not worth putting all your market share at the control of the DRM provider.
No doubt the music labels originally required it. That's because they 1) thought it would work and 2) didn't realize the control they were giving up.
>If this is what your doctor does, you need to find a new one.
This is what very doctor I've ever been to does. I've quit going to the doctor when I get sick, because there is no cure available. All they do is ask you what your symptoms are, and write a prescription for medicine to address the symptoms.
Really - I could check my symptoms off of a web page with the same level of effectiveness. The doctor is completely relying on me, the patient, to tell them what is wrong with me, so that they can prescribe the appropriate medicine.
>Perhaps your symptoms didn't warrant a blood test. There are hundreds of tests than can be ordered, >they all cost money, and none of them are perfect. If someone has a cold, should blood tests be ordered? >Of course not. The likelihood is that the person will get over their symptoms in a few days on their own. >Ordering blood tests in this situation, on a macro level, will result in lots of false positives that >lead to further work-up of non-existent problems. This leads to patient anxiety, possible iatrogenic >diseases, and (even more) skyrocketing health costs.
Thank you for exactly proving my point. Because testing is expensive and often inconclusive, most doctors don't perform any real diagnostics on their patients. They simply ask them "what's wrong with you", and, based on what the patient describes, they guess at an appropriate medicine to treat those symptoms. I have often wondered what it would be like to just go to the doctor and say nothing more than "I am sick" and see if they could figure it out.
As it is, diagnosis is based on patient interview. A web page could do that.
I think most of the time going to a "doctor" is overkill. No doubt, when you have a serious illness or injury and they have figured out what is actually wrong with you, all those expensive skill sets definitely come into play in solving the problem.
But going to the doctor with any non-obvious illness is pretty much a waste of time. Nobody has the ability to actually diagnose.
>Why make a pretense of actual examination when one can write a prescription serving as a bandaid >to mask symptoms sight unseen and move on to the next "patient"? That's what most doctors do today >anyway, except they go through a 5 minute theater of taking your vital signs.
This is why I think this telemedicine is a great idea. Since the doctor examination is theater anyway, why not just run down the symptom checklist and guess at a prescription just like they do in doctor's offices anyway!
Most of the time I have gone to the doctor when I was sick they did not bother with blood work - they just prescribed some medicine to treat my symptoms. In the few cases where they did order blood work, I was well on my own by the time the blood work came back.
Hopefully the time is coming when you can go to your local drug store and get an instant blood test done by a machine, and then call up one of these tele-doctors to have the right medicine prescribed. Hell, maybe a computer will do the analysis and cut the doctor out of the loop entirely.
Does anyone think anyone will REALLY honor these treaties? I am 100% convinced that they will say, "OK, we will stop cyber warfare work" and then they will get their geeks right back to work on it in their laboratories again.
I would put ZERO confidence in any treaty of this sort.
Businesses are going to use this. If I had a retail business, I sure would in a heartbeat.
If I caught a shoplifter in my store, and I had video surveillance of this person that included his face, I would enter his face into my facial-recognition system so that every time that "customer" came into my store in the future, I could give him an excellent, personal customer service experience by attending him closely every time he visited my store.
Likewise, if I had video surveillance of my best customers' faces, I would enter those faces into my facial-recognition system also, so that every time/they/ came into my store I could also give them excellent, personal customer service experiences, though for entirely different reasons, of course.
In short, I would use such a system to surreptitiously provide a different shopping experience to my better customers vs. my worst ones.
I think I was one of the last people on the planet to sign up for Facebook.
I figured, "I already keep in touch with everyone I want to keep in touch with". Oh, BTW, I've been out of college for 20 years.
But then I signed up. And you know what? There are lots of people I have lost track of over the years that I found on Facebook. It's fun to see their pictures, see how they have aged, and see their families. It's fun to read what amounts to peoples' diaries and see what is going on in their lives.
It's also a great way to post pictures of my family so that my friends and family can see them without me having to email them to whoever wants them.
Now I agree that all the apps suck. I have absolutely ZERO interest in what games people are playing, and I do not want to be notified that they just scored 10 points in "Sparkle" or whatever game it is they are playing. I have pretty much succeeded in blocking all the currently in-vogue apps, but I wish there was a setting that I could click to jut block ALL apps by default.
Worse than that, the pop-up menu option for more privacy was not listed as "keep private", it was listed as "old settings". If you hovered over the "old setting" button a menu did pop up that said "private" or something like that, but clearly the menu was designed to entice users to reveal more private information.
I remember watching this "live" on TV as a kid, and being so disappointed. Our parents had been telling us for days that "Star Wars is going to be on TV!" and of course that wasn't what it was at all.
It's funny - back then - this was before even VCRs - we absolutely PINED for some things to finally come to TV. Now any time you want to watch something you just pop in a DVD and plop yourself on the couch. Times have changed.
I think I've finally managed to block all of the CURRENT hit games that my friends are addicted to on FB, but it is annoying to have to block each application individually.
Is there a way to simply block ALL present and future application notices?
All I want to see are what people type in their profile and their pictures. I am not interested in watching people play games, or hearing about the results.
Slashdot Mirror
>Who writes anything anymore?
Mathematicians, Engineers, Physicists, and basically anyone in a technical field of work or study have to resort to writing because inserting mathematical or engineering symbology on-the-fly while typing is very tedious at best.
I love typing, and I am very fast at it, and it worked great for all of my liberal arts studies.
But for the real work, I have to use pencil and paper.
The reason I want a tablet computer is that that I can write on it with a stylus like a pencil, and take notes, including sketches and mathematical and engineering symbols, on what is essentially a limitless notebook, and on top of this I can annotate my notes with audio, video, and hyperlinks.
And on top of this I would like to store my textbooks in it.
I could go to school with one single item.
Plus, I could envision a system where you loaded many books into a cartridge of sorts, say about 6 feet long, with a divider of some kind placed between each book.
As the scanner worked its way down the cartridge, it could detect the dividers, which would delineate one book from the next.
Thus even if the scanner were slow, perhaps it could scan say 50 books in one pass.
Steve
I often wondered if it would be possible for a book to be scanned while closed, using some kind of MRI technology that digitally sliced the book page by page, picking up on the density difference between the ink and the paper slice by slice.
I tried one of the 14-day trials.
It was obvious to me that in order to be a real player in this game you would have to invest a LOT of time and/or real money buying ISK.
I didn't have that kind of time or money.
Yes, that is what I was looking for! I loved that game! Gotta see if there is a PC version.
Back when I was in college one of my dorm mates had an Amiga.
It had a two-player tank game where you basically raided the other guy's base. You could drop mines, and shoot his tank or his base.
Does anyone know what this game was called? Is there an online or PC version?
>but Native Americans essentially lost...
And that was my final take of the move, as the colonists left Pandora - the Na'Vi are fucked. Just like the brief glory for the Indians at Little Big Horn, in the end it provoked a tidal wave of retribution against which there was no hope of resistance.
As I watched the human colonists column off to leave Pandora, I was thinking, "In a few years an automated drone will arrive in orbit to bathe the Na'Vi villages in a neutron death-ray and solve the problem forever."
Sounds to me like you just don't care for fictional storytelling at all, then.
Are there any movies that you have enjoyed?
>"Simulation" and "CGI" are not mutually exclusive as you paint them to be. In fact, they're practically synonymous.
Yes, you are correct.
The point I'm trying to make here is that to date, CGI graphics have looked like CGI graphics. In Avatar, they have developed the process to where it is now a very good simulation - far more "realistic" and "life-like" than anything we have seen before.
I love the idea in the article that Avatar would have been a cool story with no white guy's avatar injected into their story at all.
>You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
Except for two clumsily-inserted phrases of "fight terror with terror", and "shock and awe", I saw very little comparison to our situation in Iraq. Even the "unobtanium" played only a 30 second role in the film, but OK, I'll give that one, too.
Mostly, this was a story of a technologically superior force taking a technologically inferior force's resources by force. The parallel I drew most strongly was with Native Americans.
As for Iraq, yes, it is true we are not overtly stealing oil from Iraq, that we know of. Whether this is due to altruism or just because they haven't figured out a way to do it overtly is up for debate. But regardless, the simple fact is that securing energy resources is a #1 priority for the continued American Way of Life. That by itself is worth trillions of dollars, and the people with major financial stakes in our situation know this and no doubt are pressuring our government, directly and indirectly, to make sure that energy lifeline stays intact.
On top of this, there are trillions of dollars worth of energy contracts at stake in obtaining, transporting, and selling Iraqi oil. To insinuate that no one is profiting off of the American intervention in Iraq simply because no one is overtly stealing the oil is naive. To speculate that people in our government are not either directly or indirectly pressured by such monied interests is likewise naive.
I have heard other people express the sentiment that they don't intend to see this film because of the similarity to the plight of the American Indians.
I wonder, do you have a problem with films in the tragic genre in general or just ones that strike too close to historical reality for comfort?
For example, did you similarly boycott "300"?
>Really? Because all I get from the trailers is that it's an updated version of The Smurfs.
Obviously you have not been paying attention.
If you are honestly comparing the sophistication of the animation and rendering in Avatar to that of The Smurfs then you really just need to be quiet because clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
3D tech aside, the rendering in Avatar has raised the bar for animation to unprecedented heights. In fact, I find words like "rendering" and "Computer Generated Imagery" to no longer have meaning for a film like this.
What they are doing now very nearly constitutes simulation. The only thing holding it back is the fact that the beings being simulated are, obviously, fictional.
Because of this work, the technology is very close now to being able to convincingly simulate humans.
I agree - the movie was not anti-technology, it was anti-plunder.
Basically it was the story of Native Americans. Alternatively, it was "The Last Samurai".
>The labels required it.
Yeah, and they fucked themselves by doing it. I tend to side with the OP that the reason why DRM is falling out of favor is because the content providers are realizing that the protection DRM offers (which is negligible) is not worth putting all your market share at the control of the DRM provider.
No doubt the music labels originally required it. That's because they 1) thought it would work and 2) didn't realize the control they were giving up.
>If this is what your doctor does, you need to find a new one.
This is what very doctor I've ever been to does. I've quit going to the doctor when I get sick, because there is no cure available. All they do is ask you what your symptoms are, and write a prescription for medicine to address the symptoms.
Really - I could check my symptoms off of a web page with the same level of effectiveness. The doctor is completely relying on me, the patient, to tell them what is wrong with me, so that they can prescribe the appropriate medicine.
>Perhaps your symptoms didn't warrant a blood test. There are hundreds of tests than can be ordered,
>they all cost money, and none of them are perfect. If someone has a cold, should blood tests be ordered?
>Of course not. The likelihood is that the person will get over their symptoms in a few days on their own.
>Ordering blood tests in this situation, on a macro level, will result in lots of false positives that
>lead to further work-up of non-existent problems. This leads to patient anxiety, possible iatrogenic
>diseases, and (even more) skyrocketing health costs.
Thank you for exactly proving my point. Because testing is expensive and often inconclusive, most doctors don't perform any real diagnostics on their patients. They simply ask them "what's wrong with you", and, based on what the patient describes, they guess at an appropriate medicine to treat those symptoms. I have often wondered what it would be like to just go to the doctor and say nothing more than "I am sick" and see if they could figure it out.
As it is, diagnosis is based on patient interview. A web page could do that.
I think most of the time going to a "doctor" is overkill. No doubt, when you have a serious illness or injury and they have figured out what is actually wrong with you, all those expensive skill sets definitely come into play in solving the problem.
But going to the doctor with any non-obvious illness is pretty much a waste of time. Nobody has the ability to actually diagnose.
I want my Star Trek medicine.
>Why make a pretense of actual examination when one can write a prescription serving as a bandaid
>to mask symptoms sight unseen and move on to the next "patient"? That's what most doctors do today
>anyway, except they go through a 5 minute theater of taking your vital signs.
This is why I think this telemedicine is a great idea. Since the doctor examination is theater anyway, why not just run down the symptom checklist and guess at a prescription just like they do in doctor's offices anyway!
Most of the time I have gone to the doctor when I was sick they did not bother with blood work - they just prescribed some medicine to treat my symptoms. In the few cases where they did order blood work, I was well on my own by the time the blood work came back.
Hopefully the time is coming when you can go to your local drug store and get an instant blood test done by a machine, and then call up one of these tele-doctors to have the right medicine prescribed. Hell, maybe a computer will do the analysis and cut the doctor out of the loop entirely.
Does anyone think anyone will REALLY honor these treaties? I am 100% convinced that they will say, "OK, we will stop cyber warfare work" and then they will get their geeks right back to work on it in their laboratories again.
I would put ZERO confidence in any treaty of this sort.
Businesses are going to use this. If I had a retail business, I sure would in a heartbeat.
If I caught a shoplifter in my store, and I had video surveillance of this person that included his face, I would enter his face into my facial-recognition system so that every time that "customer" came into my store in the future, I could give him an excellent, personal customer service experience by attending him closely every time he visited my store.
Likewise, if I had video surveillance of my best customers' faces, I would enter those faces into my facial-recognition system also, so that every time /they/ came into my store I could also give them excellent, personal customer service experiences, though for entirely different reasons, of course.
In short, I would use such a system to surreptitiously provide a different shopping experience to my better customers vs. my worst ones.
I think I was one of the last people on the planet to sign up for Facebook.
I figured, "I already keep in touch with everyone I want to keep in touch with". Oh, BTW, I've been out of college for 20 years.
But then I signed up. And you know what? There are lots of people I have lost track of over the years that I found on Facebook. It's fun to see their pictures, see how they have aged, and see their families. It's fun to read what amounts to peoples' diaries and see what is going on in their lives.
It's also a great way to post pictures of my family so that my friends and family can see them without me having to email them to whoever wants them.
Now I agree that all the apps suck. I have absolutely ZERO interest in what games people are playing, and I do not want to be notified that they just scored 10 points in "Sparkle" or whatever game it is they are playing. I have pretty much succeeded in blocking all the currently in-vogue apps, but I wish there was a setting that I could click to jut block ALL apps by default.
Worse than that, the pop-up menu option for more privacy was not listed as "keep private", it was listed as "old settings". If you hovered over the "old setting" button a menu did pop up that said "private" or something like that, but clearly the menu was designed to entice users to reveal more private information.
I remember watching this "live" on TV as a kid, and being so disappointed. Our parents had been telling us for days that "Star Wars is going to be on TV!" and of course that wasn't what it was at all.
It's funny - back then - this was before even VCRs - we absolutely PINED for some things to finally come to TV. Now any time you want to watch something you just pop in a DVD and plop yourself on the couch. Times have changed.
I think I've finally managed to block all of the CURRENT hit games that my friends are addicted to on FB, but it is annoying to have to block each application individually.
Is there a way to simply block ALL present and future application notices?
All I want to see are what people type in their profile and their pictures. I am not interested in watching people play games, or hearing about the results.
This is outrageous.
If someone leaked that the USPS was steaming open letters for the government for $40 or whatever people would be going ape-shit.