And I have to say that it was one of my favorite Pixar movies, among the best. The main characters have much more depth, and are so much more human than I expected them to be.
Also, that montage in the beginning, with just one scene from near the end, would make a beautiful short.
It’s a pretty nifty system of communication, with live concurrent editing, playback, and a host of other cool features. Most importantly, though, is that they’re opening the protocol, so waves really do have the potential to become the sort of standard that replaces email, IM, and so many of our older communications.
Here’s the video (which is long but worth it):
Would someone just pay the guy off already? He now plans to not only make the tall ships enter one at a time, with lights off, at night - he’s going to keep them under lock and key at some of the south Boston piers that he can ban access to.
This is a $50 million tourist event that Mayor Menino is basically trying to kill because Boston doesn’t directly receive any of the tourist money: sales tax and such go to the Commonwealth of Massachusett’s coffers, and Menino doesn’t want to have to spend anything extra on security, even though the Tall Ships organization itself has promised to pay for a good deal of the security. In short, Menino is demonstrating about as much foresight and reasoning ability as a spoiled toddler.
Ah yes, lets prioritize it to dropouts, teen mothers, and criminal offenders. Because they all have such a reputation of being strong participators in our economy.
Newspapers are meeting in secret to try and collude over putting paywalls up. Hey, as one comic pointed out, this internet thing isn’t exactly new. They’ve had 15 years to modernize themselves. Of course, staying in the tank for a single political party hasn’t exactly helped their cause either.
Michael Graham and Bloodthirsty Liberal are both commenting on the most recent display of tolerance and peace activism by Cambridge citizens.
Especially not to right wing politics, such as libertarian ideas about the 2nd amendment. But of course we already knew that.
Oh wait, forget that I mentioned that, it just might happen. Anyhow, foods are being rated for how environmentally friendly they are, and measures are going to be taken to encourage more environmental eating.
I’ve got just one thing to say to any politicians or environmentalists who try to change what I eat to meet their idea of earth friendliness: Bite me.
Holding bible study groups in California may subject you to legal prosecution, at least in San Diego.
You know, when Jefferson wrote about church and state, he meant that the state couldn’t stop religion from the use of any public facilities. And then he attended religious services in the capital building just two days later. The modern atheist interpretation of Jefferson’s writing is just twisted and wrong. And fascist, in all the original ways that term ever meant.
Maybe it has something to do with the massive looting taxpayers are letting the public employees take?
And Dems think the private sector is corrupt? Yeah…
At my new job I’m working on a web app, which isn’t too far off from the typical deployment of modern web applications: someplace somewhere (who knows?) there’s a server farm, but that server farm isn’t running our application. Instead, they’re running a distributed (so that any one processor can go down and nothing is lost) instance of an emulator, which is running a whole bunch of virtual servers. These virtual servers are also distributed, so that any node can go down and nothing is lost. On this virtual distribution of servers the applications reside – but they’re not just running the services directly! Nope! Instead, the services are distributed among a host of applications, so that individual services can be troubleshot or upgraded individually, but even that’s not virtual and isolated enough. Inside any given application, the services aren’t run directly, but instead are run in separate, protected threads that are all surrounded by error handling protocols, and there the service is finally allowed to run. And this is all standard practice!
It’s layers upon layers of abstraction, to the point where any punch card engineer would blow a gasket, and probably just break down and cry. I think it’s awesome.
Well, beyond the software. Recently there’s been some discussion that the rough amount of processing power for a human brain equivalent computer seems to be close to available with GPGPU machines – essentially, machines that are just a whole bunch of graphics cards strapped together. Indeed, there are researchers specifically looking at bringing together research on AI onto GPGPU machines.
However, even if the raw processing power is there, the thing that is being overlooked about such devices is the nature of their computation: they’re not MIMD, but are instead SIMD. What does that mean? Well, basically, while they can indeed run an algorithm on a whole bunch of different pieces of data at the same time, they only run one algorithm on all of that data. The massive parallelism of the brain, on the other hand, seems to be running a whole bunch of different algorithms on a whole bunch of different data, which is MIMD.
I don’t think oil is a bad thing – it’s an incredibly useful chemical, with incredibly hard to match energy density. It’s also responsible for the majority of our plastics. It’s also one of the fundamental commodities of our economy, which is why I think environmentalist’s attempts (and successes, thank you Democrats) to block our domestic development of it at every step are not just misguided, but, in some ways, evil. That being said, any technology which reduces our dependence on oil is cool and valuable, like finding a way to use lead in place of gold.
Check this out: a way to convert plant matter straight to HMF, the main chemical used in many of our plastics, which we typically derive from oil.
The house that Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron supposedly lived in is for sale. Cool place.
Cause they’re all true. And the libertarians are switched on the very last row. What’s amazing is how much the popular culture thinks that the right is the side that wants to restrict your freedom…
Great. Now, because Americans only looked at skin color before they voted, we’re getting a supreme court judge who makes decisions based on skin color. Nothing like a little racism at the highest levels of our government.
She doesn’t have much of a record on property rights, either – which is to say that given the opportunity, she’s tended to stand on the state taking them away.
At least in Maryland. You know, the U.S. has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, you wonder if there’s a similar effect with businesses?
As I’m starting my new job tomorrow, blogging will be a bit lighter, since I won’t be using the middle of the day to post.
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