Comment Re:Considering his history... (Score 1) 144
"Blade Runner" one of the very few instances were the movie is better than the book it's based on, but it still owes a lot to the book.
"Blade Runner" one of the very few instances were the movie is better than the book it's based on, but it still owes a lot to the book.
Google "slit scan". It was an amazing process used to create the Stargate sequence, especially amazing because of the crazy amounts of manual work it took. Another iconic example of slit scan filming is the old opening sequence for "Doctor Who".
This forensic reconstruction of the original gels used in "2001" is a fascinating bit of movie archaeology: http://seriss.com/people/erco/...
I'm not one of these purists who thinks only practical effects are good, but "Blade Runner" is one of those movies that shows you don't need CGI to make a visually stunning movie. The only good CGI is CGI that doesn't look like CGI, or when you say, "I only know this is CGI because that can't be done in real life."
I just remembered that "District 9" was a good recent SF movie, and I thought the effects in that movie were excellent. Just enough to make it believable, not enough to look like you're watching someone playing a video game.
Yeah, I think the terms are used interchangeably these days.
There was, for all intents and purposes, no CGI in 1981. Computer effects at the time of Blade Runner were negligible and amounted mostly to wireframe 3D in computer displays. I mean "Tron" was was watershed of computer effects, and 95% its effects were hand-drawn animation and a crazy amount of compositing. It was an amazing triumph of visual effects, but it owes much more to the ground-breaking art direction than to the actual use of computers.
It's a shame the same can't be said of the sequel, which minus a couple of short scenes had absolutely nothing of interest to look at. OK, Olivia Wilde and absolutely nothing of interest to look at. In my house, we joke that the Futurama spoof of "Tron: Legacy" had better effects than the movie, and we're only half joking. It seems Big Hollywood has reached the limit of what can be done with CGI, not the limit of what can actually be done, but what their narrow tunnel vision and arrested creativity can provide.
Since you posted anonymously, it is sufficient to declare that almost everything you are stating is false.
If you consider this a disproportionate response, consider two things. First, one side is deliberately targeting civilians. The other side does everything it can to use its own civilians as shields. The fact that there is any debate about this after 70 years of this nonsense goes to show how effective it is to callously sacrifice the lives of your own people for the purposes of propaganda.
If no rockets had been launched in the first place then those 1000 Palestinians would still be alive. Period.
Whoops. Don't start introducing facts into evidence. Nothing good can come of that.
If someone declares their intent to kill you, then I think they are fair game. I'm all for taking people at their word.
Your rhetoric would carry a little more weight if there hadn't been a systematic attempt to destroy Israel since the year it was formed by the UN.
If your neighbor is constantly firing rockets into your country, targeting civilians, you might see things a little differently. If the Palestinians didn't have weapons, there would be peace. If Israel didn't have weapons, there would be no Israel. The "annexed" territory was land captured as the result of war of aggression started against Israel. In any other situation, people would recognize this, but it seems that anti-semitism is still deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness, especially on the Left.
Regardless of whether they sometimes go over the line in defending themselves, there's no denying that this situation was not started by and is not perpetuated by Israel. The "Palestinian" problem would disappear overnight if one of the many Muslim countries in the area would allow them to relocate. Israel didn't create itself. It was created by the UN, one of the very few useful things the UN ever did, and has fought several wars initiated by neighbors to defend its territory. But no one ever seems to care that the country is surrounded by a large number of people who are dedicated to its annihilation and the world seems to put people with this intent on the same moral level as a people who are simply trying to maintain their security. It's kind of hard to negotiate in good faith with people whose charter declares that their goal is to drive you into the sea.
The real "Palestinian" problem is that the Palestinians are pawns in a propaganda war against the Jewish people, and the world has been falling for this transparent trick for 70 years.
I know this may be blasphemy for a lot of folks, but I wasn't that impressed with "Do Androids Dream?". I think "Blade Runner" was a superior story, and of course, it's an excellent movie all around. I hope I don't have to turn in my Nerd card now.
I read this as part of a "Science Fiction" course in college about 30 years ago. I don't recall much about it except that I really dug the alternate-history aspect of the book.
I hope the movie happens and it turns out good. We need more good science fiction movies, because there haven't been many in the last 20-some years. I liked "Europa Report" but the format was pretty cliched, and the movie was almost the same as "Apollo 18", but less improbable. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering any really good SF movies since "Contact". I never saw the remake of "Solaris", but the original was amazing.
But we need more SF films. Most "SF" films today are just action movies or horror movies in a SFal setting, which is a fine way to do things, but it's not really SF.
I actually totally get Amazon's logic on this one. If there's only a $10 extra profit on each drone delivery (something I'm sure tons of people in range of the service would pay for in order to get their item in half an hour), and if we assume each drone operational cycle takes one hour (delivery, return, charging), then that's $240 a day. Doesn't take a lot of days to justify the cost of a drone with a return like that.
Except that you have bought them; you just haven't realized it. Energy density of li-ion batteries has grown by about 50% in the past five years. Have you seriously not noticed how cell phone and laptop battery mah ratings keep growing while they keep making the volume available for the batteries smaller?
It's big news when a new tech happens in the lab. It's not big news when the cells first roll off a production line.
Most new lab techs don't make it to commercialization. But a lucky fraction of them do, and that's the reason that you're not walking around today with a cell phone with a battery the size of a small brick.
If everyone last person was going to be driving electric cars tomorrow, yes, that would be a problem.
Given that that's not the case, and for decades it's always going to be such that the people whose situation best suits an electric car are going to be the next ones in line to adopt them, then no, it's not a problem. You really think people can't build curbside/parking lot charging stations over the course of *decades* if there seems to be steadily growing interest in EVs?
As a side note, I don't know those exact neighborhoods in your pictures, but in my experience, most people who live in such places don't own *any* car.
Actually, 800 is quite a sensible number. At an average speed of 60 miles per hour (aka, factoring in driving / bathroom / meal breaks), that's 13 1/2 hours of driving - a good day's drive. Throw in a few more hours driving time / a couple hundred miles more range if you charge while you're taking your breaks. Once you get that sort of range, charge speed becomes virtually irrelevant because it happens while you're sleeping (and getting ready for bed / getting up in the morning). A regular Tesla home charger could handle that sort of load.
I agree with you that a half hour charge isn't actually that onerous, but it definitely will scare off people who are used to filling up faster. And charge stations that can do half hour charges on 300 miles range (150kW+ for an efficient car, more like 250kW for a light truck) are exceedingly rare as it stands. A charger that powerful isn't some aren't some little wall box with a cord hanging off of it, it's the size of a couple soda machines put together (bigger if you add a battery buffer so that you don't need a huge power feed) that feeds so much power that its cable has to be liquid cooled and which costs around $100k installed. Ten minute charges are, of course, around three times that size. I've only ever come across mention of *one* charger in the ballpark of the required 750kW to charge a 300 mile light truck in 10 minutes - an 800kW device custom made a couple years back for the US Army Tank Command. I have no clue what it cost, but I'm guessing "Very Expensive".
I'm not saying that the problem is intractable, by any stretch, I totally believe that we're going to transition over to EVs. I just question the sort of time scales that a lot of people envision. The average car on US roads is 10 years old. Implying an average 20 year lifespan. And many cars don't get scrapped then, they just go to the third world. Even if you suddenly switch all new car manufacturing over to EVs, you're talking decades to replace them. But of course you can't just switch over like that - even if everyone was right now sold on the concept of EVs with current tech, you're talking at least a decade, possibly more, to tool up to that level of production. But of course, not everyone is right now sold on the concept of EVs with current tech.
Realistically, you're looking at maybe a 40 year transition. I hate to say that, because I love EVs, but I'm not going to just pretend that the reality is other than it is.
I'll also add that while fast chargers are big and expensive, the size and cost actually are comparable to building a gas station on a per-pump basis, and the economic argument works out for making them even if there's only a reasonable (50% or less) surcharge on the electricity sold and if they're only selling electricity a couple percent of the time. But you need to get a couple percent of the time usage to economically justify them - one person stopping for 10 minutes every few days just isn't going to cut it. And not every EV is going to stop at every charger even if they're driving on the same route - if your chargers are that far apart, then that means you're pushing people's range so much that they're not going to be comfortable driving that route. All together, this means that if you want to have fast charging infrastructure economically justifiable in an area you need high EV penetration, where several dozen EVs driving long distances will be going by each charger every day - even out in the boonies. And when you're talking at prices on the order of $100k per unit, you're no longer talking about a range where peoples' goodwill toward EVs or interest in having a loss leader outside is going to pay for them.
Basically, while busy interstate routes on the coasts and the like can economically justify them with a small fraction of a percent of people driving EVs, out in the boonies, they're going to be stuck with smaller, cheaper, slower chargers for a good while. Unless people are willing to pay a big surcharge on the electricity sold, that is (500% surcharge instead of 50% = 1/10th as many vehicles needed).
Sounds like my case. Increasing couldn't get wear contacts any more without problems, hated all of the problems of glasses, was scared of the surgery... and it was just nothing. Seriously, how can instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to-do list?
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce