Posts by Rich of Observationz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Like the UK's statutory ban on 'repetitive beats'?
-
It’s actually turning out to be a hard venue for anyone to use for a gig
Explain to me again why the government is best suited to run bars and the private sector to run prisons and schools?
-
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
the big guys were still trying to charge not just by the byte but by the hour
NZ was rather different to the UK back then, I guess.
What happened in UK was that BT introduced a service where a provider got a percentage of the call toll for using an 0845 (?) number. This meant you could economically run an ISP without doing any billing, and that was the model until broadband came in. You could even start a virtual ISP at negligible outlay - just fill in some forms, get a number and try and persuade people to use it.
-
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Paul Brislen,
Sorry, but none of that does anything for me (didn't we have Dr Who in 405 lines when I was a three-year-old?)
I'd almost always rather read a book - for one thing, my input bandwidth for reading is many factors faster than watching. Now, book DRM is something I fully object to.
-
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now
Guys, just give up the telly, Go to rehab or something. I got rid of mine in 2007 and I so haven't missed all the time I wasted looking at little moving people..
-
Hard News: Did Holopac change everything?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yeah, but you could have made a cartoon band in 1928 using hand-drawn animation and projected it at an award show.
I think having a reference is a harder test.
(Incidentally, I saw the movie 'The Ghost' the other day and they seemed to be using (bad) CGI for B-reel stuff. Like waves, and a plane taking off. In the latter case, they had an sequence with a CGI large airliner followed shortly by a real light aircraft, and the difference was very obvious. I guess this was done to save money, though how much does it cost to point a camera at the ocean?
Or, it may have been a new cinematatographic technique that just 'looks' like bad CGI).
-
It seems to me that we aren't far off photo-realistic CGI (I'd suggest something like a Turing Test - can watchers differentiate between a filmed scene with actors and the same scene created with CGI).
Then it'll get cheaper, so maybe in 20 years we'll have desktop photo-realistic CGI - just make storyboards and the computer will do the rest. With a library of the world's living and dead actors.
I imagine this will be enthusiastically taken up by pr0n. If you can have photo-realistic characters that take direction, are eternally priapic and guaranteed over-18, why bother with performers?
-
Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Instead of posting geotagged pictures of their shiny new helicopters on Facebook, with predictable results.
-
Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Hebe,
According to the Herald it's being paid for by the Anglicans business interruption insurance.
Apart from whether their 'business' was interrupted, I'd question if an 'Act Of God' was a self-inflicted harm in the cae of a church?
-
...am I not the only one to see a connection between the world-view of the string-em-uppers, and the world-view of the counter-jihadists and PNAC'ers?
You are not. It's a deliberate narrative based on giving people groups to fear and despise, and then depicting government as 'protecting' them with cops, jails and troops.
That's why, although politicians like English might be rationally attracted to reducing the jail population (reduced justice costs, crime and dependency), they fall back in the end to the jails'n'cops motif. It keeps the people from identifying their *real* enemies.