Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.

Take a look at Before VFX, which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.

Now to get rid of the actors...

This keeps coming up on Slashdot, and it's mostly a non-issue. The only reason it's an issue now is that hobbyist 3D printers are so crappy that they're used mostly to produce copies of game and movie related decorative items.

If you use one to make a dashboard knob for a '57 Chevy, there's no IP issue. Design patents are only for 14 years. You can't copyright a functional part, and most functional parts aren't original enough for a utility patent. There's a robust third-party auto parts industry because of this.

When 3D printing in metal really gets going, it's going to be a Joe Sixpack thing. The same people who own welders will own 3D printers. If you do not presently own at least one power tool, you will probably not have a 3D printer.

Yeah, I went looking that setting pretty quickly because you're absolutely right - it went from "interesting" to "meh" to "how the heck do I disable that?" over the course of a couple hours.

It perhaps works better with their own wallpapers, but I use my own photos and it got annoying pretty quick.

As long as the killbots have a preset kill limit, I think we'll be okay.

This is pathetic. They blew through $500K and they don't even have a demo. Reading through their stuff, it seems like all they really intended to do was a standard fighting game with a sword-like controller and better fighting mechanics. Nothing indicates that you'd feel a blow when you hit something, or when you got hit. A Kinect can do that. Even the old-model Kinect.

There's some handwaving about force feedback, but nothing about how to actually do it. It's not impossible, and you can do better than just putting a buzzer or vibrator in the sword. It would be amusing to put a gyro in a gimbal inside the sword. Normally, with the gimbals unlocked, the sword swings freely, but when you get a "hit", the gimbal clutches lock and you feel your wrist wrenched as the sword will no longer rotate.

And why the hell do they have a Tesla coil driving a Jacobs ladder in their video?

Given all the other contraptions the Professor managed to put together - do you really think a bicycle-powered electric razor was out of the question?

I don't know if Intel would be any different; but my understanding is that the 'openness' complaints about the Pi have something to do with the fact that BCM usually won't even spit on you without an NDA and an order for a zillion trays of parts, so it's nigh-impossible to recreate the system without either a massive minimum order quantity or a special relationship with them.

As you say, production costs, for things like multilayer boards, tend to make having the PCB layout files less practically relevant to most; but you can at least buy small quantity PCB fabrication, though it'll cost you.

It's an ugly story. In their quest to hit lower TDPs a few years back, Intel puked out a bunch of Atoms that are based on SGX540(maybe 545, I forget, doesn't matter from a driver standpoint) GPUs licensed from PowerVR. The 'GMA500', 'GMA600', 'GMA3600', and 'GMA3650' are all of this cursed race. Any of the other GMAs are Intel GPUs, which do indeed have decent drivers.

I have no idea why they went with the horribly shit Atoms for their 'open' board; but they did.

The one thing that might prove interesting is that it is allegedly fullly open (aside from the PowerVR GPU drivers) which (assuming Intel isn't lying or using "'Open' as in a block of magic numbers" definitions, this board, although based on UEFI, might actually be the first Intel product in quite a while to be well documented enough to be a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS target. Even better, it might provide insight into some other products using the same chipsets.

The GMA600 is a real shit sandwich (Oh, sure, I really really want to fuck around with a PowerVR SGX545 and it's utterly shit proprietary driver on my 'open' dev board); but $200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes (I suspect that there are a bunch of PC/104-format users looking enviously at this board right now, and wondering why Intel didn't answer their prayers instead).

Now, given the prices of Intel's own faster, better, comes-with-case, consumer offerings (their 'Next Unit of Computing' boxes being a good example), this is a poor consumer offering; but it's pretty damn cheap by the standards of similar products.

When I tried it (on an iPhone 5), it does seem - as in the demo video - the apps have to have been opened very recently.

This seems to be related to how iOS 7 handles multitasking. I wonder if disabling background updating of apps would fix it? Later yesterday (after I played around trying to replicate this bug) I disabled background updating, mainly to try to address the poor battery life suckage iOS 7 seems to have introduced on my phone...

No, it just means he's at least 25 years old.

I suspect that there's at least one other variable: There is a large universe of things that the techies say are safe and doable, if done according to their advice. However, by the time the plan actually gets executed, it is fairly common to discover that... certain liberties were taken... (in fairness to the techies, often against their advice) in some of the expensive-and-boring-safety-features parts of the plan. This leads to a rather smaller universe of things that techies say are safe and doable and which are implemented safely in practice.

Anybody who actually thinks that techies don't know stuff about the world, and science is, like, a social construct, man! is probably a fool.

Anyone who is strongly suspicious that, while the techies do indeed have the knowing and the doing of many things, they may not have the good of the locals at heart (never mind the bean counters and suits at HQ), is just a reasonable student of history.

A pure irrational fear of technology is one thing. The agreement that, yes, technology is powerful; but proposals involving the deployment of power are... not history's most glorious chapter... is much harder to argue with.

Nuclear plants are rather trickier than some industries to redevelop (the fuel casks are stuck in regulatory limbo, the rest of the plant is just a massive structure, much of it radioactive enough to reduce the otherwise significant scrap value and require special procedures, built durable enough that it'll be expensive to demolish) which increases the odds that Maine Yankee HQ will do their best to classify the site as some sort of minimally-operational status in perpetuity, because hiring a couple of guards to wander around and punch the clock is cheaper than fully pulling out, leaving the town with a big derelict structure.

They are hardly alone in that, though. All kinds of industrial processes (especially anything inherited from the good old days when Men Were Men, Cigarettes were a health food, and PCBs were a Miracle of Science), even if their buildings are cheaper to tear down, leave the underlying site in lousy enough shape that it's usually cheaper just to say 'eh, fuck 'em' and choose a greenfield location somewhere else. Even something as minor as a gas station can be Wacky Remediation Fun Time if their storage tank leaked before they went under or moved.

(The only other aspect, though the article is polite, or feckless, enough to ignore it, is that nuclear plants operate under an NRC license, which is of limited duration unless renewed, which requires a variety of testing steps, so their demise is probably rather more predictable than the usual '$FOOCORP moves to China to save 10 cents per widget' story. If your town is basically fucked without its resident nuclear reactor, you really want your town leadership to be well informed(or doing their best to batter down the doors and demand to be made aware) of exactly where in the lifecycle the reactor is, whether HQ is looking for a renewal, whether there are issues that would scuttle that, etc. Predicting a 'Haha, Outsourcing Surprise!' event is relatively challenging. Predicting whether or not a reactor will get recertified or mothballed may not be trivial; but it's a much better defined problem. My guess is that there's a really ugly backstory there. Either the town ignoring the problem to bask in the present, the operator stonewalling/flimflamming the town until it was time to give them the shaft, some of both, some other flavor I'm not thinking of; but that would be the one major wrinkle distinguishing a reactor from any other 'industrial site not easy to remediate'.)

It sounds like the (sadly not atypical) story of what happens to a company town when the company leaves, more or less regardless of the flavor of company.

The fact that a bunch of nuclear waste casks prevent any redevelopment of that part of the site certainly doesn't help (though, nuclear plants are one of the flavors of facility that are wildly expensive to shut down permanently even if they could get rid of the casks).