The vacuous thing about the slippery slope argument is we can't drag you out in public and have you admit you were wrong a couple of years down the road.

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.

How can you tell if the logic is "faultless" if you don't start with the sort of rigorous and objective definitions that you have in math?

There is nothing objective about mathematics. Trace a mathematical proposition down, and it rest on axioms and definitions -- social and linguistic conventions. Those conventions have historically proven to have pragmatic value, but the question of what's pragmatically valuable is a subjective one; you cannot objectively demonstrate the value of going to the moon, or building a bridge, or even developing a new life-saving medical treatment.

The idea that math is some pure realm of eternal verities is Platonic bullshit.

A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean.

If you can write what a work of art is intended to mean, then you don't need art to say it, you can use ordinary prose. (Taking poetry and literary writing to be art rather than ordinary prose.)

What if you have a rock band, and replace the members one by one, but then the original members re-unite to play their classic tunes, but then both bands go on tour together?

I was delighted to learn that my hometown has a real-life example of the Ship of Theseus conundrum: the USS Constellation.

"Identity" is nothing but a social and mental convention.

Which of those would be useful to Google or another company that writes a lot of software?

If you're writing software, you ought to be writing technical documentation. I think English majors would have some useful skills there. I greatly appreciated having tech writers around to clean up my muddied prose (and also to worry about what should be boldface, what should be italic, and the like.)

We knew you'd say that.

The difference being, the A in CS will usually be an objective measurement, whereas the A in English will be dependent on adopting the grader's ideological hobbyhorse and imitating the style of whatever postmodernist gobbledygook is currently popular.

Those upper level english courses require a lot of rigors thinking

I'm sure they did.

More importantly it ignores labor costs. Simply listing the price of the materials isn't an apples to apples comparison to the robotic hand which needs someone to setup the 3D printer, and then actually assemble the hand (Probably takes someone with a working hand to perform the threading of the cables etc.)

Well, not only that but most people don't know how to operate a 3D printer, nor how to customize the hand to fit the individual. So while the $42,000 hand includes the professional services involved with fitting the device, the 3D printed one depends on a charitable donation from the 3D printing operator to do the work. It won't be much but it's all probably going to be significantly higher ($400-$1,000) for the human being to operate and configure the 3D model for the individual.

I bet there are only $100 worth of aluminum, gold, silicon and acrylic in the $42,000 hand too.

This drives me crazy when people don't include the costs of labor. It would be like someone getting a car donated to them and saying "Wow cars only cost $200 for a title and registration! Why do people pay thousands of dollars for a car!?" Because someone gave you one for free!

I work in film production. I have a $50k camera that I rent out. On most productions your total rental per day will be about $2,000 a day. Now you could say that you could shoot a TV commercial for "only $2,000 in rentals!" But that ignores the fact that cameras don't operate on their own, lights don't just place themselves, actors should be paid for their skills, assistant directors need to keep production on schedule, locations need to be paid for the rights to use their property etc. So yeah it "only costs $2,000" as long as you ignore the $20,000 per day in crew costs for a small production.

People who say a film only costs $20,000 to make are either productions that somehow shot and finished in 1 day or else they're saying that their crew's time was worth nothing.

If I spent $10,000 on a 3D printer. I couldn't just open the box and push the "Give me a 3D Prosthetic Hand" button. I would either need to spend a good week or so learning how to print ($100 an hour * 40 hours = $4,000) or else spend $1,000 on a professional to setup and configure the scene/hand for me specifically. /Rant.

3D printers printing weak plastic is only temporary. It's only a matter of time before we have ceramics or plastics as strong as milled steel billets.

You couldn't find a job at any of the studios? What did you do to piss people off? I know plenty of people without any connections who are doing just fine finding animation gigs. I hate to be "that guy" but the only person who I've ever heard about making the right connections was someone who showed up in town, didn't get anything within a couple months of showing up and complained that the whole system was rigged and left. If you are blacklisted you must have been a world class asshole to a lot of people.