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Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 267

Sorry but if you can afford a Tesla you ARE on the fringe!

Not really. We had a 2005 Pontiac minivan. Between acquisition cost, gasoline, repairs (and repairs and repairs), and depreciation, it cost us $50,000 over three and a half years, and that was before the inflationary boom when steak was half the current price.. We had to unload it due to the gas and repair costs and ate it so hard on the depreciation.

The Tesla is slightly more expensive than that, and that was aimed squarely at a typical young American family. The 10-year cost on a Tesla model S is going to be a lot cheaper, not to mention the model 3. It's simply a matter of financing.

Comment Re: Best outcome (Score 2) 201

when the US petrodollar is completely decoupled from oil it loses about 5/6ths of its value intrinsically. The subsequent run on the currency could be an order of magnitude higher. Putin knows this and so do the Chinese but don't look to the Chinese to suddenly weeken its largest single purchasing market. The IMF will likely try to float SDRs to replace FRNs as the world currency but Russia and China stand to gain little by supporting it. Don't keep your long term wealth in current financial instruments.

Comment Re: Bash is a very crappy programming language. (Score 2) 329

To be fair, perl had these problems in the early 90's and "taint mode " was introduced to protect against them and unforseen future variations on them. I seem to recall a release of PHP in the past couple years has adopted some of the same techniques. Bash folks won't be able to achieve a great result over a weekend. That we're here two decades later tells you most of what you need to know about the appropriateness of selecting bash for this kind of work.

Comment Re:If there's a systemic problem (Score 1) 185

If there's a single systemic problem with HTTPS, it's that we're still largely relying on Certificate Authorities which charge a lot of money. The expense and complexity discourages people from using SSL more ubiquitously.

I don't think that's really it - I can get as many commercial-grade SSL certs for 7 bucks as I want. I got a couple at Namecheap for $2 when they were running a special. That's a large coffee at McDonald's. I've purchased 5-year wildcards for $150.

How cheap does it need to be to be usable? For most people setting up a CA takes more time than $7 is worth.

If there's an immediate problem, it's the default root stores. Why would I trust the US DoD to sign certs for Google, or, heck, even my own mail server? A default install of most browsers and OS's will. Oh, but we should be afraid of the NSA exploiting heartbleed? Heh, ceilingcat don't need no protocol exploits.

Comment Re:Impressive but a bit much... (Score 1) 134

However, I could still easily tell that these were not real world images.

I was thinking they weren't blurry enough. The camera pans should have depth-dependent motion blur compensation to make the look more convincing. Since they have the 3D model, this is simply a matter of having the time to program the algorithm - all the parts are well-known. They'll be hearing from Hollywood when they get that and perhaps a bit more accurate lighting (but, hey, throw the thing on a tracing farm for Hollywood money). We're probably not too far from principle location photography consisting of a small crew with a .1mm laser scanner for blockbuster-level movies. Even with the cost of the render farm, it's still cheaper than housing hundreds of people for weeks or months. All the data in this video says we're only 7 Moore's doublings away from realtime photoreal, which is pretty darn amazing.

While the narrator is talking about a thousand artists on a game, I don't think he's implying that this technology replaces them all. If somebody needs the chandelier in the cathedral to swing ('cause Nightcrawler just ported onto it e.g.) then they will still need modelers to handle all the mechanics. But I bet this tech saves them a bunch of time on modeling and texturing. They can either do with fewer artists (the crawls at the end of blockbusters are insanely long) or the existing number of artists can do more amazing things.

I'd still rather see five fewer modelers and one more great writer, though.

Comment Re: This is huge (Score 1) 308

Antarctic ice has actually increased significantly in the recent cold period (see the ancient Asian maps), at the same time as desertification has been on the march. It's hard to comprehend just how much water is locked up in the *miles* thick ice sheets. And yes, of course no matter low the oceans get, humans will move down to the seaside and build settlements. Whenever the oceans rise again those people will be affected, inevitability, and they will be both the subsistence poor and the wealthy in their mansions.

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