That device sounds like a parietal accelerator wound into a loop. French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit suggested it would make an ideal submarine propulsion method.

My guess is that the depth of the film has to be small for the flow to remain stable and entrain all the water.

For all those slashdoters that work at apple: Make sure you let your Marketing department know that this has cost them a long time customer.

I have a powerbook G4 and I recently bought a mac mini for my wife.

I was planning to get a new Macbook for Xmas.

However hearing about this has changed my mind.

Same here, I was considering bying yet another Powerbook (it'd have been the fourth in a row, out of seven Macs) as a replacement for my 2006 model whose battery died recently, and intended to upgrade to MacOS 10.5 in the process.

Now, I'll just wait until either Apple renounces this policy or simple and effective solutions for fixing this defect (here it is considered a defect of the video output function) become popular.

I will not let a company dictate what my fair use rights are. I'm disappointed, its so short sighted on Apples part. Technology companies should stick to technology and let our courts and elected members of government worry about our rights and rights of content producers (admittedly they haven't done a good job either).

I'll go one step further and will not even let our courts and elected members of government worry and decide about our preexistent, inalienable and absolute rights, whether we are content producers or consumers (or, increasingly, both at the same time).

I moved away from BigParties because of this (that and stability issues). I know from the LastLegislativePeriod that they won't let me play is my own content (I created it, I own the copyright) and home videos over a projector...

Handcrafting a scenery is just another form of procedural generation, at the core. The crafter follows his or her own heuristics and combine them with specific content models and elements as a source, while remaining within the technical constraints projected for the end-result.

How do you make, say, a RTS map ? You start by stating your goals: there will be N starting bases, the landscape will include M ridges so that the length of path between each base is balanced, and each will have access to pretty much the same amount of ressources, etc. Then you just lay out all those required elements down in a fractal or geometrical way, and that process may have a lot in common with some pathfinding algorithm.

Of course, the crafter is not limited a priori in terms of sources and methods, but then anything you may think about including into your one-time work could just as well be set to end up included in the generatio nalgorithm that mimics your handcrafting. Just because right now an human has a much vaster culture than a piece of software, does not mean heuristics might not one day be able to piece out elements from, say, news websites or art libraries.

The point of procedural generation is not to machine-generate content, rather to humanize the machine and its content, so I will not be one bit surprised when game content generation becomes a fully-recognized branch of AI research. Could Turing tests be one day judged by art critics evaluating proposed 3D models and scenes, or scripted events ?

The article's mention of choosing between a handcrafted skybox and a generated one is not that far from it: soon enough game studios will be considering the "tastes" of the many different content-generation tools.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading an excellent short story by Greg Egan entitled "the mitochondrial Eve", which shows a "war" between antagonists groups of crazy fanatics all hell-bent (for the sake of both their racist and anti-racist prejudices) on finding the exact genealogical line for each human on Earth through the identification of, for one group (the partisans of Eve) the set of mitochondrial DNA mutations (of which the author reports there are about 50 in total for all of mankind), and for the other group (the children of Adam) through the use of the mutations on the Y chromosome.

*SPOILER*

The protagonist spectacularly proves them all wrong using fancy quantum physics experiments and explaining all the many discrepancies each group has in their respective all-encompassing genealogical trees with the simple hypothesis, backed by his scientificevidence, that mutations occur preferably on the same spots of the DNA.

Science and faith are not mutually exclusive, if you delimit their domains: faith for things metaphysical, un(dis)provable either way ; science for all the mundane, observable / measurable things. That's the Discordian way.

The only kind of vote that provides all the change and hope you want, instantly !