I don't know of any citations for this, but what he describes is pretty much business as usual in the VFX world right now. Animators use the filmed footage and crummy NTSC reference to animate matching facial expressions as data received from tracking never has anywhere near enough resolution.

Avatar might have been different, but looking at the footage of the actors, you're probably looking at the magnum opus of some extremely talented technical animators.

There's a program that claims to be able to do it automagically...

Uhm. No. Most of the actors you saw on screen were keyed and then composited in to CG environments.

I was not trying to say it looked fake- not at all. I don't think it can be qualified as photoreal when a colorist has jacked up the saturation 200% (thank God it was turned down from the 400% Saturation it was at during early previews), but I also don't think that's a problem with any of the technology.

You and I are probably in total agreement that the textures, modeling, shading etc were all 100% up to photoreal par- they just weren't taken in a "photoreal" direction; a move I feel resulted in some real scenes (like your green screen helicopter) look fake because they were pushed past what we know is normal in comp or coloring.

What I was more trying to say was that the avatar technology was cool, but it's not some kind of omni-drug. It won't solve all of humanities woes and sometimes there are other methods that have already proven effective at something.

In VFX there are ten ways to do any one thing; and god knows I'm a fan of doing things a complicated new, expensive way just because it's complicated and new; but I just wanted to say, making actors younger has been done before, and the uncanny valley still hasn't been addressed.

PS: You have a website?

Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features. The uncanny valley was not addressed, so we have no idea how this "photoreal" technology stands up to that close inspection.

I'm far far FAR from unbiased on this, but if you wanted to speculate on making actors look younger, you'd still be better served looking at Benjamin Button.

Slashdot apparently uses something like this:
(^|[ ])http:[^ ]+

Anything beginning with http: and having at least one non-space character immediately following the : is made into a hyperlink, up to the next space character. (It does appear that there are some other delimiters besides space... the ^ character is terminating the URL in the preview, despite no intervening space character: http:%5B^ ]+ However, I'm certainly not going to make an exhaustive search of all such delimiting characters.)

This would work equally well if the slashes were omitted from the URL syntax.

P.S. My regexp knowledge is quite limited. Apologies if I've botched it.

And included text messages in "data"

I'm sick of paying 35 dollars a month for "unlimited" data that I don't use, and 5 dollars for 200 (or 4 Kbs) of text messages.

Most of the time I am on a wifi network; when I am not, I don't use much data anyway.

Stick the 3 GB price point at 30 dollars, 2 at 20; 1 GB at 10, etc.

Also, it should be further tiered based on what data connection you are using. Us original iPhone users got royally screwed when AT&T upped the rates because the 3g came out.

But who am I kidding? We all know if this happened, the starting price would be 30 dollars for 200 MB of data, and an additional 10 dollars for every 100 MB.

Err- what's not entirely true? You actually made the next point I was going to make- that even a non-"Effects" film these days can have up to 100 effects shots and most of those are invisible.

In my above comment, I was talking about CG characters, vehicles and environments since that's what the OP seemed to be referring to- my closer was going to be your comment, that what he thinks of VFX is actually pretty narrow.

If I had a dash cam and wanted to make that blurry driver who hit me look like he had a cellphone in his hand, it wouldn't exactly be the most challenging thing I've done.

The crummier the original source (dash cam, web cam, etc) the easier it is to blend in CG elements perfectly.

The higher quality the source (35mm film, RED 4k Camera, IMAX) the harder it is.

And, just FYI, Hollywood is easily capable of creating photo-realistic CGI- but most movie companies aren't interested in paying or scheduling for it. And that's not even considering the fact that all CGI has to be approved by the director- who many times DOES NOT know what looks right in the scene and says it looks too blue or too orange. The end result is that most VFX shots are "good enough" for the money and time allotted.

Lastly, there are many talented individuals out there who given enough time can do photoreal effects.

Here's just one example:
http://vimeo.com/5407991?hd=1

"Radios were sent to -Canadian Interoperability Technology Interest Group (Ottawa, ON Canada)"

Dear god. What are we going to do when we go to war with those french speaking queen loving northerners?! They will even be able to listen in on the Department of Defense frequencies! They will know our every move!

I demand that only DEFECTIVE radios are sent to Canada.

For maximum effect, I recommend that the radios only receive communications in the form of a poor impression of a Canadian accent- notably every word should be "Ay?"

(This post was a joke)