Funnily enough, post-Avatar, the "3D share" of movies showing in both formats has been declining.
Like, say, large-format (e.g., IMAX) presentation or even theater-vs-home-theater presentation, there's some films that inherently are well-suited to 3D adding value if done correctly, and some filmmakers that are good at taking advantage of that. The more studios try to throw 3D at everything, the more they are going to miss, either because the movie wasn't right for 3D to add much or because the execution was bad.
The runaway success of Avatar itself and its 3D presentation (along with the lesser but still notable success of certain other 3D films in the handful of years before Avatar) encouraged studios to throw 3D at lots of things (IIRC, in some cases, adding it to things already late in production). So its not surprising that lots of those have had 3D that is less compelling to audiences than was the case with Avatar.
I actually preferred the older effects, sets and model work to the shiny CGI in the prequels. The latter films looked too clean and artificial. The used, worn, slightly badly fitting look of everything in the original trilogy made it a lot more believable to me.
The in-story relation of the prequel trilogy makes the clean and artificial look of most of the things in that trilogy, compared to the used, worn, and slightly badly fitting look of most of the original trilogy (a look which, to an extent, the prequel trilogy also has in the places where it makes sense from a story perspective) make sense.
You might as well argue that a 3 year old drawing a picture of her favorite cartoon character, then giving it to her friend as a gift constitutes "a derivative copyrighted work that was then distributed".
Well, it does, but that doesn't mean the liability would be the same as for other acts of that type, because, of course, both criminal and civil laws often have provisions which treat children, especially very young children, different in terms of liability.
You sir, are a moron.
I'm not sure how stating a fact that would, if one ignored a critical factor, tend to support a conclusion that you find distasteful makes someone a "moron".
Insofar as "piracy" is a common, if somewhat informal, term for acts which violate copyright law, sure. At least, it is if the SDK is protected by copyright, if the work you create is a derivative work under copyright law, and you have neither a license to use the SDK for the purpose nor the protection of an applicable exception to copyright law.
While, absent litigation on the specific cases, there's may be some room for debate, I'd expect that most uses of a leaked Sony SDK to create homebrew PS3 software, and the copying and distribution of such software after it was created, be "piracy".
While he's not specifically a news organization, he does attempt to provide commentary on newsworthy issues.
Yes, that's what issue advocates, paid and unpaid, with and without financial interests at stake, do.
There might be a place to argue about the ethics that apply to issue advocacy, but they aren't the same as those that apply to an entity that holds itself out as a news organization.
If one can simply avoid ethical obligations by not being part of a news organization, that seems a rather low bar to set.
The ethical burden of a news organization are directly related to the idea that a news organization, as such, holds itself out as something different than an issue advocacy organization or an individual issue advocate.
Hitler WAS a socialist* (and a fascist as well, you're correct).
No, he wasn't a socialist, for all that the Nazi Party had "socialist" in its name.
The German name of the Nazi Party translates to "National Socialist German Workers' Party".
Yes, and the official name of the North Korean state translates to "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but that doesn't make North Korea a democracy.
this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
Capitalism tends to monopolistic blackmail, which is why intelligent advocates of economic systems organized for the common good as far back as Adam Smith have argued against allowing economic policy to disproportionately favor the interests of the capital-holding/mercantile class.
Oddly enough, the word "capitalism", originating in the 19th Century and popularized by Marxist writers using it as a label for the 19th Century system in advanced industrial countries that they advocated needed to be replaced is often used in a rather equivocal way to refer to that system, the economic system of modern advanced countries, and the economic systems advocated by classical economic theorists like Smith, as if those all were the same, or even similar, systems; however, its obvious to any sensible observer that those systems are completely different -- the 19th Century system to which the name "capitalism" was first attached was driven by policies of the precise types Smith warned against, and the modern economies sometimes labelled "capitalist" are, virtually without exception, systems which have thrived precisely because they adopted many of the proposals that 19th Century critics of capitalism demanded in the Communist Manifesto.
monopolistic and oligopolistic anti-capitalist schemes are alive and well. we learned nothing from the gilded age of victorian times
The "monopolistic and oligopolistc" schemes of Victorian times are the heart of the system the word "capitalism" was first widely used to describe, and they very much serve the interests of the capitalist class. They are not, in any reasonable sense, "anti-capitalist".
Do you feel the same way regarding Gore's global warming investments and his warnings Re: such
The question makes no sense. The statement I made was that "ethical news organizations... don't allow employees who are also paid advocates for a product or cause to address that cause through the news organization without disclosing that interest."
Al Gore is not a news organization, or an employee of a news organization, so that statement has no applicability to him.
Government did it once to force dollars into the market, it can do it again. What it can't ban is gold coinage.
Insofar as the federal government can ban, restrict, or punitively tax private ownership, possession, or trade in gold bullion, it can certainly just as well ban, restrict, or punitively tax private ownership, possession, or trade of gold coins, foreign or domestic.
I don't particularly like Glenn Beck, but should he endorse products he doesn't believe in?
The point is that ethical news organizations -- which Fox News, credible or not in doing so, pretends to be -- don't allow employees who are also paid advocates for a product or cause to address that cause through the news organization without disclosing that interest.
Google Voice was a good example. At the time it was developed, it offered unlimited texting, which duplicated core functionality, which of course is listed in black in white the agreement.
Really? If that's so, why did Apple hem and haw over investigating other issues (like "it might use VoIP" at one point) as the reason for delaying a decision, before settling on the "duplicating core functionality" excuse over the dialer and contact management functionality, not texting.
Given that 95% percent are accepted without any issue at all, leaving only 5% of questionable apps, the argument that Apple is rejecting apps willy nilly is not exactly a good reflection of reality.
Percentages aren't the issue. The fact is that Apple has accepted apps (GoodReader is an example) and then demanded that functionality be removed in updates before accepting updates, and has delayed or rejected apps for reasons that are just as applicable to apps that it has accepted. This indicates that the review process is inconsistent and arbitrary, not only between different apps, but for the same app over time.
That creates a risk that developers may accept when Apple's App Store is, in effect, the only game in town, but which becomes less tolerable the more that there are other outlets to reach large number of mobile users. Of course, established Apple-targeting developers, for whom it is easier to continue to develop for Apple than to switch to targeting a different platform (especially those not using cross-platform tools to start with) will be more attached to Apple even as the market shifts; the leading sign of a sea change will be where the new development firms go.
The survey is of developers using Appcelerator Titanium, a cross-platform development tool whose whole selling point is that you can use it for different mobile platforms. So, obviously, that's a place where you are more likely to find people that think the currently most popular app market is the best short-term target but something else is more promising in the long-term, since a big the whole appeal of the development tool over platform-specific tools is that it allows the developer security if they don't think the current best target platform is also the long-term best target platform.
If you polled developers who use a iOS-specific dev tool, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think iOS is the best in the long-term, and if you survey developers who use the Android Eclipse-based dev environment, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think Android is more attractive in the short-term.
Yes, I can buy gold through a broker but I'd rather have an old-style bearer/non-registered "gold certificate" issued by an insured, regulated entity such as a bank.
Yeah, but there is very little incentive for banks to issue such certificates unless -- as they did when representational currency, rather than fiat currency, was the primary form of currency -- they can issue a greater number of certificates than they have actual gold reserves (otherwise, its a money-losing proposition, as managing the reserves and exchange operation -- and securing the underwriting you state a preference for -- all cost money.) This tends to go directly against the reasons that the people who do so prefer gold (physical or claims on gold held by someone else) over fiat currency as a store of value in the first place.
A major advantage of certificates is you don't need an ATM - you can order them by registered mail or buy them at a bank lobby.
That's obviously not a major advantage of certificates, as you can quite easily sell physical gold by post or over-the-counter at a bank or retail outlet.
Another advantage is they can be serialized and marked "void until issued" with the bank teller or ATM machine validating the certificate at the time of purchase, reducing the risk of theft.
From the perspective of most of the people that prefer an alternative store of value over central-bank-issued fiat currency, commodity-backed bearer certificates be subject to invalidation by corruption of the record-keeping system of the issuing entity is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
In fact, from the perspective of most of the people that prefer an alternative store of value over central-bank-issued fiat currency, commodity-backed bearer certificates relying on the continued existence of the issuing entity is itself a disadvantage. One of the major reasons people seek such alternatives is as insurance against the collapse of established institutions.
but all in all I think major us newspapers do a pretty good job in presenting this admittedly complicated and theoretical stuff, particularly when read with a bit of skepticism.
All in all I think that they mostly waste space. The only useful information in most major media on any scientific issue is that something was published, the general subject matter, and the identification of the research team that allows someone who cares to use the internet or other research sources to find actual useful information. The information characterizing the methodology, specific results, and characterization(s) of the meaning of the research are usually so bad as to be of negative value.
and so am I, it's a funny article and an easy target. But when the science being reported on turns out to be dodgy (sugar causes diabetes, salt causes high blood pressure, high fructose corn syrup causes etc), the write-by-numbers approach with its rote opposing opinions and seemingly spineless journalistic waffling can remind readers not to get too caught up in the latest theory du jour.
Actual competent reporting could do that far better.
For that matter, just not reporting on the stuff that the outlet doesn't have the ability (or isn't willing to devote the space) to competently report on would do that better, as well.
There are plenty of reasons to mock news coverage of scientific papers; but how exactly do you have a complaint when a journalist clearly states that someone else (not the journalist) is making an assertion when that is, in fact, true?
True does not mean useful. If you aren't competent to assess the research beyond simply reporting what other people claim its import is, you aren't competent to report on it at all.
That is the entire point of having an open source project is that the developers don't have to be experts.
I would rather strongly disagree that this is the, or even a, point of having an open source project. An open source project has no less need of domain expertise in the area it focusses on in its governance than a closed source project.
Just because the current main developers aren't that great of security doesn't mean security is compromised, actually its the opposite, they can get security advice from professionals and other people who are good at security.
Which would be fine, if security was a peripheral concern. If security is the core concern, it needs to be the central thing around which the basic design is built, which means that there needs to be a good understanding of security going into the basic concept and high-level design before a line of code is written.
Otherwise, there is no reason even to consider the release for its intended purpose; you are likely to be closer to the goal starting from scratch with people who do know what they are doing when it comes to security.
At the highest conceptual level, sure, but at that level there's not a lot to distinguish Diaspora from other open social networks, except that Diaspora is less mature and doesn't have open protocol specs which support independent implementations.
Below that level, when you are talking about Diaspora specifically rather than the abstract concept of an distributed social network that isn't centrally controlled by one party, Diaspora doesn't seem as sound.
The first clue is that they intended to release a secure distributed social networking platform and that the first thing they released publicly was an application, not documentation of the security model and federation protocol.
If you had a good design for the security model and federation protocol, you can implement an application leveraging using any usable tools (and Rails, used correctly, would probably be quite serviceable in this regard.)
But you probably aren't going to just stumble into a secure distributed application if you don't start with a solid foundation, no matter what platform you use.
But you get a 1 million gift. This should be taxable. I am not an accountant, it probably depends, but this looks like a gift and could be considered income that is taxable. I am not sure you can deduct it before taxes if you spend it on marketing.
Your ability to deduct the amount of an expenditure from your income as a business expense is generally not dependent on the source of the funds. So, if you spend $1 million for a purpose for which it is a deductible expense, you can deduct it. If you happen to also have received $1 million in taxable income which was used to pay that expense, then those will normally exactly offset with no net tax impact.
Probably not. The problem with the Segway isn't the purchase price, its the cost of transforming the rest of the world so that it offers much of a value proposition at any price outside of a few highly-specialized niches. I think Kamen recognized this when he initially hyped it: the reason for the initial hype about how it would revolution everything and make people change how they live, how cities are built, etc., wasn't just an optimistic hyping of the effects of the device, it was an attempt to get people into the mindset necessary to make the device successful: the only way it could be significant outside of a few highly specialized niches is if, in fact, people changed their lifestyle, rebuilt cities, etc., all to accommodate it.
However, successful mass-market products -- including the ones that do end up motivating those kind of major changes, like the automobile -- are ones that work very well with existing lifestyles and environment, while at the same time offering more benefits as people adapt their own lifestyle and the environment to the product.
That's what unions do....they are trying to sneak through laws here in the USA to make union membership compulsory...
No, they aren't trying to sneak through such laws.
The only significant recent effort by major unions to change US law on union membership condition has been an effort to allow card check rather than secret ballot elections to establish a union.
Whether union membership is mandatory where a collective bargaining agreement exists is a matter of state labor law, and unions have always overtly preferred that it be so (there's no "sneaking" involved there, nor has there been any significant recent movement on the issue -- the only substantive effort I'm aware of to change state laws in this area is a move in Pennsylvania to adopt a position, as allowed under Taft-Hartley and already done by 22 other states, prohibiting union and agency shops.)
Slashdot Mirror
Like, say, large-format (e.g., IMAX) presentation or even theater-vs-home-theater presentation, there's some films that inherently are well-suited to 3D adding value if done correctly, and some filmmakers that are good at taking advantage of that. The more studios try to throw 3D at everything, the more they are going to miss, either because the movie wasn't right for 3D to add much or because the execution was bad.
The runaway success of Avatar itself and its 3D presentation (along with the lesser but still notable success of certain other 3D films in the handful of years before Avatar) encouraged studios to throw 3D at lots of things (IIRC, in some cases, adding it to things already late in production). So its not surprising that lots of those have had 3D that is less compelling to audiences than was the case with Avatar.
The in-story relation of the prequel trilogy makes the clean and artificial look of most of the things in that trilogy, compared to the used, worn, and slightly badly fitting look of most of the original trilogy (a look which, to an extent, the prequel trilogy also has in the places where it makes sense from a story perspective) make sense.
The Newton wasn't really the first device of that type; at least Psion and Atari had devices of the type on the market years before.
Well, it does, but that doesn't mean the liability would be the same as for other acts of that type, because, of course, both criminal and civil laws often have provisions which treat children, especially very young children, different in terms of liability.
I'm not sure how stating a fact that would, if one ignored a critical factor, tend to support a conclusion that you find distasteful makes someone a "moron".
Insofar as "piracy" is a common, if somewhat informal, term for acts which violate copyright law, sure. At least, it is if the SDK is protected by copyright, if the work you create is a derivative work under copyright law, and you have neither a license to use the SDK for the purpose nor the protection of an applicable exception to copyright law.
While, absent litigation on the specific cases, there's may be some room for debate, I'd expect that most uses of a leaked Sony SDK to create homebrew PS3 software, and the copying and distribution of such software after it was created, be "piracy".
Yes, that's what issue advocates, paid and unpaid, with and without financial interests at stake, do.
There might be a place to argue about the ethics that apply to issue advocacy, but they aren't the same as those that apply to an entity that holds itself out as a news organization.
The ethical burden of a news organization are directly related to the idea that a news organization, as such, holds itself out as something different than an issue advocacy organization or an individual issue advocate.
No, he wasn't a socialist, for all that the Nazi Party had "socialist" in its name.
Yes, and the official name of the North Korean state translates to "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but that doesn't make North Korea a democracy.
Capitalism tends to monopolistic blackmail, which is why intelligent advocates of economic systems organized for the common good as far back as Adam Smith have argued against allowing economic policy to disproportionately favor the interests of the capital-holding/mercantile class.
Oddly enough, the word "capitalism", originating in the 19th Century and popularized by Marxist writers using it as a label for the 19th Century system in advanced industrial countries that they advocated needed to be replaced is often used in a rather equivocal way to refer to that system, the economic system of modern advanced countries, and the economic systems advocated by classical economic theorists like Smith, as if those all were the same, or even similar, systems; however, its obvious to any sensible observer that those systems are completely different -- the 19th Century system to which the name "capitalism" was first attached was driven by policies of the precise types Smith warned against, and the modern economies sometimes labelled "capitalist" are, virtually without exception, systems which have thrived precisely because they adopted many of the proposals that 19th Century critics of capitalism demanded in the Communist Manifesto.
The "monopolistic and oligopolistc" schemes of Victorian times are the heart of the system the word "capitalism" was first widely used to describe, and they very much serve the interests of the capitalist class. They are not, in any reasonable sense, "anti-capitalist".
The question makes no sense. The statement I made was that "ethical news organizations ... don't allow employees who are also paid advocates for a product or cause to address that cause through the news organization without disclosing that interest."
Al Gore is not a news organization, or an employee of a news organization, so that statement has no applicability to him.
Government did it once to force dollars into the market, it can do it again. What it can't ban is gold coinage.
Insofar as the federal government can ban, restrict, or punitively tax private ownership, possession, or trade in gold bullion, it can certainly just as well ban, restrict, or punitively tax private ownership, possession, or trade of gold coins, foreign or domestic.
The point is that ethical news organizations -- which Fox News, credible or not in doing so, pretends to be -- don't allow employees who are also paid advocates for a product or cause to address that cause through the news organization without disclosing that interest.
Really? If that's so, why did Apple hem and haw over investigating other issues (like "it might use VoIP" at one point) as the reason for delaying a decision, before settling on the "duplicating core functionality" excuse over the dialer and contact management functionality, not texting.
Percentages aren't the issue. The fact is that Apple has accepted apps (GoodReader is an example) and then demanded that functionality be removed in updates before accepting updates, and has delayed or rejected apps for reasons that are just as applicable to apps that it has accepted. This indicates that the review process is inconsistent and arbitrary, not only between different apps, but for the same app over time.
That creates a risk that developers may accept when Apple's App Store is, in effect, the only game in town, but which becomes less tolerable the more that there are other outlets to reach large number of mobile users. Of course, established Apple-targeting developers, for whom it is easier to continue to develop for Apple than to switch to targeting a different platform (especially those not using cross-platform tools to start with) will be more attached to Apple even as the market shifts; the leading sign of a sea change will be where the new development firms go.
The survey is of developers using Appcelerator Titanium, a cross-platform development tool whose whole selling point is that you can use it for different mobile platforms. So, obviously, that's a place where you are more likely to find people that think the currently most popular app market is the best short-term target but something else is more promising in the long-term, since a big the whole appeal of the development tool over platform-specific tools is that it allows the developer security if they don't think the current best target platform is also the long-term best target platform.
If you polled developers who use a iOS-specific dev tool, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think iOS is the best in the long-term, and if you survey developers who use the Android Eclipse-based dev environment, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think Android is more attractive in the short-term.
Yeah, but there is very little incentive for banks to issue such certificates unless -- as they did when representational currency, rather than fiat currency, was the primary form of currency -- they can issue a greater number of certificates than they have actual gold reserves (otherwise, its a money-losing proposition, as managing the reserves and exchange operation -- and securing the underwriting you state a preference for -- all cost money.) This tends to go directly against the reasons that the people who do so prefer gold (physical or claims on gold held by someone else) over fiat currency as a store of value in the first place.
That's obviously not a major advantage of certificates, as you can quite easily sell physical gold by post or over-the-counter at a bank or retail outlet.
From the perspective of most of the people that prefer an alternative store of value over central-bank-issued fiat currency, commodity-backed bearer certificates be subject to invalidation by corruption of the record-keeping system of the issuing entity is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
In fact, from the perspective of most of the people that prefer an alternative store of value over central-bank-issued fiat currency, commodity-backed bearer certificates relying on the continued existence of the issuing entity is itself a disadvantage. One of the major reasons people seek such alternatives is as insurance against the collapse of established institutions.
All in all I think that they mostly waste space. The only useful information in most major media on any scientific issue is that something was published, the general subject matter, and the identification of the research team that allows someone who cares to use the internet or other research sources to find actual useful information. The information characterizing the methodology, specific results, and characterization(s) of the meaning of the research are usually so bad as to be of negative value.
Actual competent reporting could do that far better.
For that matter, just not reporting on the stuff that the outlet doesn't have the ability (or isn't willing to devote the space) to competently report on would do that better, as well.
True does not mean useful. If you aren't competent to assess the research beyond simply reporting what other people claim its import is, you aren't competent to report on it at all.
Ah, but that's exactly the problem.
Its been written already (and made available to the public), but not designed -- at least, not for security, its notional primary purpose -- yet.
This puts the cart rather far before the horse.
I'm interested in knowing the justification for your implicit premise that there is never any skepticism about the safety of closed-source software.
I would rather strongly disagree that this is the, or even a, point of having an open source project. An open source project has no less need of domain expertise in the area it focusses on in its governance than a closed source project.
Which would be fine, if security was a peripheral concern. If security is the core concern, it needs to be the central thing around which the basic design is built, which means that there needs to be a good understanding of security going into the basic concept and high-level design before a line of code is written.
Otherwise, there is no reason even to consider the release for its intended purpose; you are likely to be closer to the goal starting from scratch with people who do know what they are doing when it comes to security.
At the highest conceptual level, sure, but at that level there's not a lot to distinguish Diaspora from other open social networks, except that Diaspora is less mature and doesn't have open protocol specs which support independent implementations.
Below that level, when you are talking about Diaspora specifically rather than the abstract concept of an distributed social network that isn't centrally controlled by one party, Diaspora doesn't seem as sound.
The first clue is that they intended to release a secure distributed social networking platform and that the first thing they released publicly was an application, not documentation of the security model and federation protocol.
If you had a good design for the security model and federation protocol, you can implement an application leveraging using any usable tools (and Rails, used correctly, would probably be quite serviceable in this regard.)
But you probably aren't going to just stumble into a secure distributed application if you don't start with a solid foundation, no matter what platform you use.
Your ability to deduct the amount of an expenditure from your income as a business expense is generally not dependent on the source of the funds. So, if you spend $1 million for a purpose for which it is a deductible expense, you can deduct it. If you happen to also have received $1 million in taxable income which was used to pay that expense, then those will normally exactly offset with no net tax impact.
Probably not. The problem with the Segway isn't the purchase price, its the cost of transforming the rest of the world so that it offers much of a value proposition at any price outside of a few highly-specialized niches. I think Kamen recognized this when he initially hyped it: the reason for the initial hype about how it would revolution everything and make people change how they live, how cities are built, etc., wasn't just an optimistic hyping of the effects of the device, it was an attempt to get people into the mindset necessary to make the device successful: the only way it could be significant outside of a few highly specialized niches is if, in fact, people changed their lifestyle, rebuilt cities, etc., all to accommodate it.
However, successful mass-market products -- including the ones that do end up motivating those kind of major changes, like the automobile -- are ones that work very well with existing lifestyles and environment, while at the same time offering more benefits as people adapt their own lifestyle and the environment to the product.
No, they aren't trying to sneak through such laws.
The only significant recent effort by major unions to change US law on union membership condition has been an effort to allow card check rather than secret ballot elections to establish a union.
Whether union membership is mandatory where a collective bargaining agreement exists is a matter of state labor law, and unions have always overtly preferred that it be so (there's no "sneaking" involved there, nor has there been any significant recent movement on the issue -- the only substantive effort I'm aware of to change state laws in this area is a move in Pennsylvania to adopt a position, as allowed under Taft-Hartley and already done by 22 other states, prohibiting union and agency shops.)