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Comment Re:Is google now about to become a target? (Score 4, Insightful) 311

Charlie Hebdo themselves are responsible for provoking this tragedy

Just like women that get raped are "asking for it" when showing cleavage, right? So, in public they must conceal their body under a burqa, right?

Repeat after me: You cannot tell a journalist what to write just like you cannot tell a woman what to wear.

Comment Not going to happen (Score 1) 141

No, they're not. But not only because 3D screens and purchasable 3D media need to become mainstream first, but because not even normal 2D video is "mainstream". Allow me to elaborate:

If you're an amateur photographer with a camera, you have a multitude of free or low cost tools at your disposal (cameras/phones and software) that will make your photography suck appreciably less. Even if you're pretty serious about it and your photos are quite good, the average person that you show them to will swipe through your entire portfolio in a few seconds and move on. People take photography and photos for granted. Photographs nowadays are EVERYWHERE and people are just not going to invest time in looking at them. For good or bad, they just won't.

The same is starting to happen with videos. Everybody carries a video-shooting camera with them nowadays, but the videos that are being shot with it are the equivalent to un-edited snapshots and they just suck. If you're lucky, your video snapshot will be of some journalistic value and a news outlet will buy it off you. But other than that, it's just crap. Making a good video without good equipment and without good software (pirated software doesn't count!) is a pain in the ass. There is also no low-cost video-editing software that is up to the task of making your video not suck, IMHO (I'm open to suggestions!).

Adding to all this is the fact that videos just take time to watch. So, the proud owner of a video-capable DSLR or smartphone will pretty much be asking his/her friends to go through several minutes of shaky, badly-lit, unedited footage of some event that made them feel in a certain way, but took absolutely no pains to transfer that feeling to video. And now we get to watch this in 3D?! This must be a nightmare coming true! Look, home-videos are OK for what they are. They have had their place since the VHS days, but that's about it. Shooting them in 3D is not going to add to the experience. People will see your video in their Facebook news feed or whatever, click on it, watch the first 10 seconds and move on. Like photos, videos nowadays are also everywhere.

And the worse thing is that you can't really make them suck less. The cheap video-recording devices are there. We now need cheap video-editing software to go with it that will target the mainstream crowd (I would kill for video-editing version of Lightroom, for example). We need to create a "middle-class" of video-shooters that will have a creative interest in looking at 3D capabilities. Once we have this and once this has become mainstream, we can discuss about adding the 3D functionality into the stew. Before that time, 3D is just fluff.

Comment Re:No African OT either.... (Score 1) 327

The iPhone in China is priced at about $1000, which is about $250 higher than in the US. At the same time, an average Chinese factory worker earns $1.36 per hour, i.e. about $220 per month, which is about 16 times less than in the US. This may be about double than what they would get at the family farm, and the wadges are rising rapidly, but they still have a long way to go before they can afford the commodities they are producing (notice how I'm not talking about golden cars here, but about stuff people in the "western world" throw away every couple of years). So don't pretend you are some kind of benefactor, because you actually aren't.

And BTW, "we" are all those responsible for this situation, since I'm typing this in a high-end phone, but the least I can do is show some acknowledgment and respect for those that produced it.

Comment Re:Advance to Go (Score 1) 155

That's because you stuck to the rules. I once played it with a couple other, ahem, more creative players that turned it into an awesomely funny haggle game, by more or less inserting a "trading" round at the end of each turn in which they would offer money+estates for other player's assets that would offer them a strategic advantage. The face value of the offer would more often than not exceed the price of the haggled item. It was out-of-the-box, emotional and very entertaining.

Comment Re:No African OT either.... (Score 0) 327

You got everything right but ignored the fact that they ask for longer hours because they are paid peanuts. Since asking for a raise will get them sacked, all that is left for them to do is to enslave themselves to the enthroned employers.

Maybe they are better off working in a factory than in agriculture, but we shouldn't pretend we give them the freedom to decide for themselves what is best for them when we are pretty much holding a knife to their throats.

Comment Re:This is not a suprise (Score 3, Informative) 139

This happens in Germany as well. When we applied for a government grant we had to present a detailed project plan and describe the "deliverables" in ridiculous detail. The people in the review committee weren't idiots, they knew that the plan was bullocks, but you had to include it anyway. Back then I attributed the whole thing to the german obsession with planning.

Comment Re:They couldn't wreck the movement from the outsi (Score 2) 217

I think you are rather confused with the meaning behind EEE.

The EEE strategy of MS was harmful, because MS used its monopoly to screw up widely used open standards, thus eliminating competition at birth. This was bad not only for startups, but for consumers as well. Remember IE6?

As the article that you linked to yourself describes, there are a lot of Android versions that are based on the open source version of the OS. Google is actually giving its competitors the Android code for free, thus enabling them to enter the market, rather than shutting them out of it. Lack of other Google services is actually a feature in many of these cases (like in Chinese implementations). If you weren't allowed to use Google as a search engine in such competitor Android implementations (as if, for example, by means of a malicious code license) then *that* would be EEE, because Google would be using its search monopoly as leverage to prevent a competitor from entering the mobile OS market (as in Embrace the mobile OS technology by open-sourcing Android, Extend it with the Google search feature, and Extinguish it by showing everyone how lame those other Android phones are that don't have the Google search feature). As far as I know, this is not the case. You can even get the closed-source Google apps to play on a Kindle Fire, for example. There is definitely some bad karma created at Google for abandoning the open-source projects, but this is not a case of EEE. And on the other hand, who said that Google was obliged to invest into the open-source projects indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the exact license of each piece of Android code, but, in general, once it has been open-sourced the community will decide when it's time for the software to die. If Google stops development of an open-source app and the app dies, then it is *our fault* for not picking up where Google left off.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Google fanboy or anything, but the EEE technique that MS pioneered is *very* harmful and evil. We have to make sure we don't cry "wolf" at every sign that might resemble it, even if open-source fans (like me) have to come to the defense of a multibillion corporation like Google. Otherwise we will get no reaction when shit does in fact hit the fan, like we had with the OOXML fiasco.

Comment Re:Does the job still get done? (Score 1) 688

Humans will be necessary to make new machines and repair those that break down. Administration, supervision and similar tasks will create jobs. Also, the work that is left for humans to do can always be spread out to more humans, so that everyone works part-time. Instead of having 10% of the humans work full-time and the rest just sitting around, you can distribute that work to all humans and have them work only 10% of their time.

Comment Re:Has its uses (Score 1) 302

Wikimedia Commons comes close to the archive model you are describing. The very small amount of video meterial there is only an example of how carefull one has to be with copyright these days and how hard it is to get your hands on decent quality footage whose copyright has expired.

Comment Re:James Tour made me a Comp Sci (Score 1) 187

That's a pity, because chemical engineers usually leave the actual chemistry to the chemists. Chemical engineering is more about process design, process control, upscaling and debottlenecking. You mostly get the chemical process outlaid by the chemists and you "only" have to worry about everything around it. We have started to dabble with material design, but you can be a good chemical engineer without a profound understanding of chemistry. Chemistry is mostly about the basic "what" and "how" whereas chemical engineering is about "how fast" and "how much".

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