Shameless plug time!

I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.

The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).

If you're interested, here's our public GitHub and YouTube

It's called Silverlight.

Actually not...I do stuff with intellectual property for a living, including replication management and licensing for music and film.

DVDs in retail packaging (cased, 4/0 cover, 4 color disc face, shrinked, top spine label, etc.) can cost well below 50 cents when produced in very large quantities. The last batch I had made came in at about $1.05 a disc, and was a short run for a small publisher.

As for old films: The publisher/studio is contractually bound to pay residuals/reuse on DVDs for the entire life of the copyright. SAG/DGA/WGA want their (pitifully small) cut. For the soundtrack, the AFM wants their cut. IATSE also gets a cut, which helps fund pension and health plans. This list goes on.

The point is, a certain amount of money does, in fact, flow to the original artists.

Yeah, tankers are vulnerable.

The one point of vulnerability in a wind farm is probably the power cable assembly...But if enough farms get developed, then a mesh network develops as well, insulating against single-point failures.

Unlike those major fibre chunks some captain was bribed to drag anchor over...

Another issue is that offshore oil platform are much more easily attacked by an enemy. If we are pumping 30% of our oil from offshore rigs, and we get attacked by an enemy, we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.

Related to that:

I use some very high end printer's inks...As in letterpress, woodblock printing, and whatnot. I've never payed more than $400/gallon equivalent. There are some specialty pigments that can seriously cost, and I've gotten those in 200 ml jars. A standard carbon black is dirt cheap, especially in bulk.

On the commercial side of things, offset litho inks can be had for less than $10/pound...Same ink that prints the world's magazines and books.

Inkjet ink is a ripoff, and yes, we are stupid.

There are some good laser printers...and some inkjet companies that tout cheap cartridges. It is time for people to smarten up.

From what I hear it's not accurate at all. I haven't bothered to take it myself: http://apps.facebook.com/whatsyourmye_fiukha/?refsrc=feed_short1&_fb_fromhash=05e2f9689bf6e1e7cca839d4511ed6a9

Cubase or ProTools

Damn, did you just open one hell of a can of worms...Because there is a hell of a big world beyond Cubase and ProTools.

Cubase hasn't been considered a joke for a while, which is good. It's not a bad program.

A large number of the current DAW systems are very, very good, and have a place amongst serious musicians, mixers and composers.

Digital Performer still ranks supreme for a lot of music producers and film/TV composers (Zimmer, Elfman)...And it can utilize the PT audio system, cards and interfaces. It still has superior MIDI capabilities in some areas and does some nifty things with monophonic pitch detection.

Logic also has a place amongst the serious, though a smaller place.

And speaking of Steinberg, Nuendo is Cubase+everything needed for film, complex surround, specialized file formats etc. Cubase is the low-midgrade Steinberg product: Nuendo is, and always has been the flagship, dating back to its very, very brief days on the Irix platform (no, really).

Now, if we look at the very high end, we have some tools like Merging's Pyramix, Fairlight's impressive stuff, and for hardware, Euphonix, Harrison, Studer (yes, they make digital consoles), and even Otari for broadcast. But I digress.

Of course, the biggie DAW on Linux is Ardour. It supports CoreAudio (OS X) or ALSA/FFADO...No support for Windows users though. But why bother trying to program around Microsoft's inefficiencies? Ardour is very much a serious player. They had a partnership with Solid State Logic for a while, and put out a good package.

Cubase occupies a place in the market that I would describe as prosumer to pro...I wouldn't describe it as one of two 'serious' options. I would describe Cubase as the Honda of the audio production world: It does everything it needs to, but it's no Cadillac, no Rolls, and definitely no Oshkosh truck.

Shut yer analog pie hole...yeah...or something.

OK, instead of debating pot (Sched. 1), why don't we debate the equivalent, legal, pill. After all, your entire last sentence describes the symptoms of our war on drugs, NOT the symptoms of marijuana use.

Sure. People die from impairment. Pot, booze, opiates, Oxycontin...cell phones, pets or children in the back seat...dashboard TVs...but I digress.

Marinol (Pure THC) is a schedule 3 drug. What we have is a tacit acknowledgment by the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, the US government, and state governments across the nation that pure THC has a valid medical use and is of so little risk that it is a schedule 3 drug.

Yes, pot has problems. yes, it causes cognitive and memory loss issues...the problem that most people have is one of disproportionate response. THC is less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco, and that has been clinically shown.

When someone gets drunk, orders a pizza and masturbates in the privacy of their home, you don't automatically respond with a SWAT team. When someone smokes an 8th and drives, then we rightfully throw the DWI book at them...however, we also send them to jail for years, whereas a drunk gets probation.

It is a matter of proportionate response, and right now, we are seeing cancer patients getting tossed in jail, a mayor's dogs getting shot in a botched SWAT raid, and the symptoms of a war on drugs that are doing more harm than the drugs, per your last sentence.

In parting, a little trivia: MDMA (Ecstasy) was used clinically on and off for quite a while after its initial discovery in 1912 until its scheduling (I) in 1985. We are now studying this 'dangerous raver drug' as a possible treatment for PTSD. Our perceptions about an individual drug are rarely shaped by medicine, but routinely shaped by politics and FUD.

The point is if you don't file your plans the town will send a poor fucking co-op student out there to mark the fucking thing on the map.

The thing about Northern Virginia is that the rules are different. Nobody wants to know, and nobody cares about random fibre lines. The local governments just want to ignore it. Fort Belvoir, CIA, NDRO, Tyson's Corner complex, the multitudes of defense contractors linked to or serving active DoD operations (Lockheed, EADS, Boeing, SAIC, Northrop, Raytheon, GD, UT, L-3 Communications, ATT, etc.) all have 'off map' needs. No Northern Virginian government just sends their poor co-op students out to map stuff. The local governments don't want to touch that mess. Better to just make it someone else's problem. Fairfax County doesn't care if 'black' lines get cut, because the Fairfax County voters don't care if lines get cut. I know a guy at a datacenter in Reston who was bird watching. He had a pair of decent binoculars. After a few minutes on his lunch break outside his building, a black SUV shows up, and they pester him with questions before telling him to stop and go back inside. He still has no idea which of the dozen building visible from his the US government has interests in.

I've done it...

Not only have I played with a monotype, but I know some people who have computer controlled solenoids on the air tower. Basically, they can run their monotype via computer. A text document is rendered into a virtual paper tape, then spat out via the control board to a solenoid manifold on the air tower. Awesome stuff.

Newspaper Linotypes could be linked to a teletype, and could take wire service stories and cast them in real time while receiving. It ran the machines really, really hard.

Now, we could go back further: I have cast type the way Gutenberg did...With a hand mould and matrix. The first mass reproduction technology...

I didn't expect to see any typecasting comments in this article. It was a fun surprise.