Oh man, I wonder which ISP will be the first to block access to a competitor's website.

On comcast? Go to Verizon.com = 28.8kbps.

If you're talking about May Day the dancing around naked and getting drunk then yes it's been around for centuries.

If you're talking about International Worker's Day then it started in America by its Unions. The Soviets liked the sound of "Worker's Day" since it played into their economic propaganda and co-opted it for their own purposes. But it's originally an American holiday in reference to labor vs capital.

Which is somewhat my point. Even experience developers will estimate wrong. Without a financial backstop a developer might think it will cost $100k, but actually costs $170k. Normally a publisher either eats their losses and cancels the project if it's $75k in and needs another $75k or else they up their investment in the project.

Kickstarter is great because you can get funding. It's fundamentally flawed because you are legally obligated to meet a deadline that even experienced developers miss a significant non-zero portion of the time. Kickstarter certainly has the potential to financially ruin people. If you are legally obligated to finish and finishing ends up costing twice what you budgeted then instead of just cancelling the project and your investors taking a hit--your investors can sue you to finish the project even beyond their investment. So what often happens is someone out of humiliation and threat works for another year for free and gives away a product that costs them money for every unit. Which again happens in the regular industry but often is diluted with other hits.

Nobody is a 100% hit machine. Nobody makes 100% of their deadlines and estimates. Instead of having flexibility to adapt as time goes on it seems like Kickstarter either showers success or ruinous failure on its kickstarter campaigns by its very design.

It can be open source, but still have licensed technology. For instance Shake's source code was available for I believe $100,000. But you couldn't distribute the code nor use any of the patented technology contained within.

If you license the Unreal 4 engine you get the source code. But you still have to pay to distribute your game based on that source code.

Yeah, I'll be very interested to see if once they start recovering stages they don't even start small on re-usability. Will they place one engine from a previous flight on a new flight with 8 brand new engines since they can lose one engine and still complete launch successfully?

I would point out another critical feature of Falcon and that is redundancy. NASA with the SSME had to make an engine that DID NOT FAIL PERIOD. If the SSME failed, you had a serious shit show.

Falcon 9 with 9 engines extreme redundancy built in. We've already seen a flight where an engine catastrophically failed without impacting the mission significantly. So unlike a SSME you don't have to refurbish the engines to perfection or risk mission failure, you can just replace engines that die as they die like a large RAID array.

On the up-side a half-finished product still meets the minimum requirements if he puts it on a server for download.

Judging the economy of a large scale (or even small scale) operation is hard. Tons of projects go over budget. In the case of kickstarter if you go over budget you're kind of screwed since you can't later raise the price. It's extremely easy to underestimate expenses when you haven't done it before.

Then again the honorable thing to do is to go back to your supporters and go "look I fucked up, I thought I had the price set in stone but then I forgot to account for payroll taxes. Please send an extra 10%. If someone did that for me on a project and it was actually an honest mistake (or so I thought) I would be willing to send a few extra bucks.

Ultimately though I do have a problem with companies that are attempting to profit by putting people at extreme risk financially. I know from running a rental company over this last year that I probably spend 30% more than what I would expect and I'm a spreadsheet junkie who loves strategizing these sorts of business plans. Without any experience these companies are taking advantage of people who are almost undoubtedly going to lose money with starry eyed dreams of success in order to fuel their own advancement. Kickstarter is going to take their fee even if the project doesn't deliver. There are other crowd sourced endeavors where the company brags about how you can get things directly from people for less--and when I look at the expenses I know come tax season/the first time their equipment needs repairs/time to rotate the tires etc that the reason these services are so cheap is because people who aren't professional ____ will underbid. They'll realize they didn't have a grasp on the finances and then quit and another sucker will take their place.

May day isn't a soviet holiday, it's originally an American Holiday for American unions.

To quote the almighty wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Let's not talk about delta force operators--most people in a panic won't be able to calmly go through the steps to correct a firearm failure with someone coming at them with a knife.

Secondly, who gives a shit? Let's say this thing fails 1% of the time. Something like 10% of all police fatalities were with their own firearm. You're only looking at one failure mode, this might introduce one failure mode (electronic failure) but it eliminates a 10x worse problem. And that 1% failure I imagine is actually pretty high. In reality it should be trivial to keep it at less than 1%. If you included a reset button and it was a transient bug you could just as easily in less than a second clear a software glitch. Meanwhile you're avoiding a problem that is probably at least 1,000% worse.

Yeah this definitely isn't a direct electrical generator. But it could be far more easily distributed throughout a vehicle. Instead of every piston needing to be mechanically linked you could have them spread throughout the car and arranged somewhat arbitrarily (except for vibration considerations). So from that perspective they are kind of direct in that electricity comes directly out of a self contained unit instead of needing an engine connected to an alternator. Each piston is creating electricity. Technically even some sort of fusion plant isn't "directly" creating electricity unless the electrons just decided to leave the gasoline of their own free will. Even a solid state device like a peltier generator isn't "directly" extracting electricity, it's converting thermal to electricity. This isn't "directly" extracting electricity but it is just about as directly as is physically possible extracting electricity from the mechanical energy of combustion.

Of course. The great thing about electric cars is that you have tons of torque instantly available. This is just for charging batteries. As long as you aren't accelerating indefinitely they can make up the high power drain from the acceleration while cruising.

I'm perfectly OK with the tradeoff though of having the car drive on sunny days and then have a manual operation mode when a blizzard crops up.

Or for that matter, I was driving along the interstate yesterday when a Tornado siren went off. Even I wasn't entirely certain what to do, but it's certainly a problem that could be solved with technology. My phone knew that the tornado siren was activated since it received an emergency text message simultaneously. Unlike me, the car would have instantly known where the nearest off-ramp was and could have taken me to the nearest safe structure assuming it deactivated the LIDAR and relied on stereo optical cameras for "emergency" navigation. Or I could have driven even if I hadn't driven in years at 40mph down a freeway to an offramp and parked. That's an easy enough skill to manage.

But let's look at it from a worst case scenario. Even if I couldn't drive and Google just pulled the car over along the road and said "In the event of debris, exit the vehicle immediately and find a low lying ditch to take cover. Cover your head, and do not hide in an overpass." I would have gotten wetter but would have remained about equally safe. Meanwhile all of the terrible drivers who seemed to want to murder everyone on the interstate would have been far less likely to kill me. I think all things told even in the very worst case scenario I would prefer the automatic car for "net safety". And in the case of snow, it doesn't appear people know how to drive in the snow either, so I can't see performance being *that* much worse than the status quo.

Because if the market for x86 is destroyed by ARM there will be no more high end x86 market. ARM would love AMD to take the sidelines and cede the market entirely. Then they'll try to sell you an ARM desktop.

Intel is wise enough to see that they need to be a competitor now or be a has-been later. But AMD might recognize this and figure that Intel can do the hard fighting for x86 continuity and then just reap the rewards.

That's not necessarily true. With a deep framebuffer you can have multiple ZSamples including occluded objects. For DOF that would be perfectly sufficient and a 2.5D point cloud. Conversely you could have a perfectly detailed 3D scene but use a per-pixel camera projection of your plate to refocus but have occlusion artifacts.

2.5D/3D isn't terribly important for DOF calculation. Then again even with the Deep image you still would have problems with reflections on curved objects and refraction etc.

The market is brutal. If he had said "I tried to get a job at Pixar, SPI, Dreamworks etc but I couldn't make the cut" I would give the guy some slack. But if you're going to claim that you're hot shit an award winning animator and the only unemployable because you didn't suck up to the right people then I'm going to call you on it. Plenty of people aren't employed due to lack of talent/practice/training in this industry. But don't say it's because you didn't go to the right parties or you didn't hold the door open for a recruiter.