Comment HTC One mini (and probably more) (Score 1) 259
http://www.htc.com/us/smartpho...
Nuff said.
Comment Original article... (Score 2) 88
Here's the original article (paywalled, Science magazine):
https://www.sciencemag.org/con...
Comment transliteration (Score 5, Informative) 275
News at Nine: transliterations of names can be tricky... Some parts of the world use different alphabets...
Comment Incorrect summary. (Score 3, Informative) 379
Please. Get your facts straight.
the default init system for Linux architectures in jessie
Comment Told you so. (Score 2) 320
Winter *is* coming.
Submission + - Pest is still active - One country is still struggling with the bubonic plague (qz.com)
robdkappa writes: It may be 2013, but the African island of Madagascar is facing a public health threat straight out of the Middle Ages: At least 20 people in the country’s northwest died last week from the bubonic plague, and 2012 saw some 256 plague cases and 60 deaths—more than in any other country in the world.
One major problem seems to be the rat-infested prisons like the notorious facility in Antanimora, which holds 3,000 inmates. The International Committee of the Red Cross in October warned that the facility’s overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions present a serious plague threat—not just to prisoners, but to those outside its walls, too, since inmates’ relatives can catch the disease when they visit the facility, and detainees are often released without having been treated.
To stem infections, authorities have been disinfecting the prison and trying to trap rats. But from the looks of this October ICRC video, officials face an uphill struggle. Prisoners are shown jammed together in cramped quarters teeming with insects and rodents.
One major problem seems to be the rat-infested prisons like the notorious facility in Antanimora, which holds 3,000 inmates. The International Committee of the Red Cross in October warned that the facility’s overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions present a serious plague threat—not just to prisoners, but to those outside its walls, too, since inmates’ relatives can catch the disease when they visit the facility, and detainees are often released without having been treated.
To stem infections, authorities have been disinfecting the prison and trying to trap rats. But from the looks of this October ICRC video, officials face an uphill struggle. Prisoners are shown jammed together in cramped quarters teeming with insects and rodents.
The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting 251
The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting:
"Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."
