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Comment Re:Prediction (Score 2) 465

Step 1. Someone figures out who the acress is. Step 2. A quick lesson in the "Streisand Effect".

Perhaps she was warned about the "Streisand Effect", and thought to herself, "an actress who continued working successfully well after her 40s? Sounds good to me!"

Comment Re:Updates to phones (Score 2) 309

Also why would a manufacturer spend money updating your phone when they rather you buy a new one?

I'm sure Apple would also rather everyone buy a new iPhone every year, and yet they bend over backwards to get the latest OS working on every conceivable model they have sold. Same with the Google phones, from what I understand.

The manufacturers who ship Android phones and then never publish updates obviously don't care one bit about their customers experience. It's as if they don't even perceive the people they sell to as "customers", but rather as "transaction generators". This approach might work fine for these businesses, but it's bad for the people who end up buying from them.

Comment Re:TV has been great for our kids (Score 1) 210

I did not say that TV was a requirement for a child to develop, so why the straw man?

All children should have limited time in front of the TV, because they should be out doing things with family and friends. But there is no way to severely restrict or eliminate TV, nor to suggest that it isn't a good avenue for learning.

I did not intend a straw man at all. You seemed to be implying that TV was needed (or significantly helped) your son to develop speech, therefor this science is nonsense. I was countering that with the fact that your son was over 2, and this study is specifically about kids under 2. Also, for a ~2 year old who is not in school, "much of the day" must be like 6-8 hours.

What works for your kids does not debunk general scientific guidance or support a position that it is nonsense. I'm glad you found something that works.

Comment Re:TV has been great for our kids (Score 1) 210

This is just nonsense.

My son wouldn't talk till he was over 2 years old. We were starting to worry. Then he discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly he wanted to say the names of the engines and he learnt his colours too. [...]

Billions and billions of kids have developed fine without any TV at all, it's not necessarily nonsense. There are always outliers and special circumstances that are contrary to "normal", but that is not to say that spending "much of the day" with a TV is helpful to most kids under two years old. There is a big difference between a kid who is over 2 years old discovering Thomas The Tank Engine compared to someone who has not even turned one spending much of the day watching TV.

Comment Re:As compared to... (Score 1) 210

[...] is there ever a good answer to distracting kids so you can do laundry, make food, take a shower or other necessary tasks?

This finding seems to be specifically about kids two and under. It's not that hard to wrangle those kids and make dinner at the same time. They will slow you down for sure, but, for much of the time they can't even walk. The thought of an 11-month-old being plopped in front of a TV or a tablet for "much of the day" frankly makes me sad.

Comment Re:Amid all the FUD... (Score 1) 98

I'm having a hard time coming up with anything negative to say about the new timeline based layout. For those of you that have enabled it, what are your thoughts?

I don't use Facebook, so maybe I'm not the best person to answer your question. But, I was there today and attended several sessions, so I saw a lot more about how they are thinking about this stuff. It is really slick. From a technical and UI point of view, it's a really nice combination of the existing Facebook and Twitter and Google+.

The abstract purpose of the timeline was made lucidly clear, and it's pretty obvious that, if you don't think too much about how it is appealing to essentially ones naturally narcissistic slants, it's totally great in many ways. However, exactly how it works was less clear. What other people see of your timeline was characterized differently throughout the day. This could be just poor communication, or internal confusion about how it works. It was mentioned that other people will get a magically generated view of your timeline that matches interests relevant to them. My take on this was that, eg, you, a sailing fan but not into technology, if you were to be friends with Larry Ellison, his timeline to you would be populated with tons of sailing stuff but nothing about Oracle. That was contradicted at other talks, so I'm not really sure. It seems kind of mushy either way. Perhaps the speakers were just mixing up pronouns...

If you are someone who has a decent attention to detail, and decent taste, and will carefully curate all your stuff, it seems like it will be great. However, I suspect that comprises about 0.5% of all facebook users. What will the "giant photo" be on the majority of timelines? Who will make sure that this giant single document containing years of data will be appropriately "shared"? What does it look like when something profoundly bad happens to someone (dealing with death, divorce, etc)?

It reminds me of Windows Metro -- In the absolute best case, it's beautiful and great and highly functional. How will the average case work, though? My prediction is, "far from great".

Aside: The keynote was completely lame. A large group of Facebook employees were laughing uproariously to the unfunny jokes, and applauding and cheering to slides before the slide even appeared. I've never noticed this at any other tech keynote, is it normally done this way?

Comment Re:Google lost my trust when I became an app user (Score 2) 170

Considering Google's core functionality is ADS and SEARCH, and everything extra is literally done on employee spare time (20% to be exact), I don't think you can honestly expect a timeframe unless Google decides to hire people specifically for it.

Google apps is billed as:

24/7 Phone support and 99.9% uptime guarantee
25GB storage per user, no ads
Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability
Virus and spam protection by Postini

And it costs real money. That hardly sounds like a pet project of individuals. I agree with OP, the support and feature parity does not live up to what a normal person would expect.

Comment Re:Over-inflated importance (Score 1) 425

Are you saying changes like that are equivalent to burning every copy of the story and cleaning Humanity's mind of Star Wars altogether?

So the story teller has changed his story. So. What? Art isn't an engineering problem and entirely lives in the realm of ideas - YOUR ideas. If you don't like a certain performance (i.e. recording) of something then continue to enjoy whatever performance you do like. Life's really that simple.

Corollary: You might ultimately learn to enjoy the minor differences.

You make an excellent and valid point. I omitted that viewpoint in my statements.

But your point is not in contradiction to mine. The fact is that Lucas has removed the original from practical existence. He has intentionally literally destroyed all decent interpositives and internegatives of the original cut. He has literally destroyed all prints made for theatres. What exists of the original movie is a flawed print duplicated to VHS or Laserdisk, a paltry 400 lines of resolution, compared to a 4k or 8k scan that is normally used for archiving. He had, in his hands, a restored "original negative" of a fully restored and cleaned and re-timed version of approximately the original cut. This "original negative" was apparently stunning. He then destroyed that, in order to add Jabba to it.

Lucas can and should be able to do anything he wants to his forks of the movie. That's totally fine with most people, I think. But he should not be able to, for all intents and purposes, remove the original film, a film that is significant to millions of people, he should not be allowed to remove it from existence.

There is no way to watch the original Star Wars on anything better than youtube quality, and that is a crime against culture.

And, by the way, I do enjoy the "special edition" Empire Strikes Back. It is tastefully done, and it doesn't introduce new content or characters. If I take off my "original hat" and think about it, I would probably buy the Blu Ray set solely to have this movie.

Comment Re:Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restorati (Score 1) 425

It is possible to re-assemble that restoration, which by all accounts is stunning.

I've still got my laserdisc set. Just nothing to play them on at the moment...

The first laserdisk release was rehashed in the mid-2000s dvd release of "the originals", so you can get the original cut. However, it is taken from a badly damaged interpositive, and is not anamorphic, so it's missing a lot of information. There was a later laserdisk release of the "Special Edition" theatrical release, but the coloring was botched, and it is also not anamorphic, AFAIK. (I've never had a laserdisk player, but I think that's correct.)

Neither of these will do. FFS!, the negatives exist in some vault. All it would take is someone skilled with glue and a blade a couple weeks to re-assemble them and you'd have a fully restored 8k 4:4:4 copy of a film that is universally considered to be of significant cultural importance. Instead, we have zilch. It's a travesty.

Comment Re:Over-inflated importance (Score 1) 425

So STFU, get out of Mom's basement, and get a life already.

I don't live in a basement. I am not a fanatic. But it's been pretty well documented that Lucas has grossly mishandled Star Wars et al. It's not about consumerism, or artistic qualities, it is about integrity. The issue is about how Lucas has destroyed a significant part of the culture.

As it has been said, "The only people who haven't seen Star Wars are the characters in Star Wars". It is sad that Star Wars is currently lost,

It's an important movie, I'm sure you will agree? It should exist in some form? It doesn't, due to solely to Lucas. The new movies -- love them or leave them. But it's a travesty that such a monumental work has been destroyed.

Comment Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration (Score 5, Informative) 425

There is an exellent article outlining what Lucas has done to the original negative. tl;dr: in the 90's Lucas restored the negative of the original release, and then subsequently nearly completely butchered it while at the same time destroying all copies of the theatrical release (except privately owned vhs and laserdisks, of course). At this point the only thing that exists is a 1080p scan of the film. All of the restored negative does still exist, though. It's just not assembled into something that could produce anything. It is possible to re-assemble that restoration, which by all accounts is stunning.

Comment Re:Gosh, streisand effect much? (Score 1) 213

I don't have an iPhone as I am not a moral vacuum and so would never have heard of this app normally but now I have... good job Apple. [...]

Alright all your Apple cultists, time for you to loudly protest that: vote with your dollars[...]

Ready? GO!

Does HTC fare any better in this regard? Is anyone higher rated by Greenepeace, EPA, etc, than Apple? Is there some magical bamboo and seaweed phone that is in the ballpark of an iPhone? Is there a better (and feasible) way to do this? Do tell.

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