Fuck the deathstar man! Did you see that bat-girl laser compact?

"It will destroy ANYTHING!"

http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Tragically_Hip:Coffee_Girl

It's hard to leave your bed
The cool and hard summer sheets
Hangover hanging on by the fangs
Walk to work on wild feet
Get to the back door
Look around and turn the key
Turn on all the lights
Take down the chairs and make things neat

Hey, there, Coffee Girl
Beautiful and disaffected
It was perfect till
He came along and wrecked it

Your favourite mixed tape
You popped it into the deck
Don't care it's out of date
Old Cat Power and classic Beck
Beware Purveyors of Cool
With their compacts of one
Taking cannons to fools
When all you need's a BB gun

Hey there, Coffee Girl
Beautiful and disaffected
It was perfect till
He came along and wrecked it

One night he'll make you choose
I am sorry but he will
The hardscape or your shoes
When the moon's behind the hill

Hey there, Coffee Girl
Beautiful and disaffected
It was perfect till
He came along and wrecked it

Hey there, Coffee Girl
Hey there, Coffee Girl
Hey there, Coffee Girl
Hey there, Coffee Girl

>> ^darkpaw02:
You are right Stormsinger, you could use exactly the same tricks to save memory with polygons, and everyone does. A polygon model + textures certainly could be smaller in memory than a very detailed coloured point cloud, but what we should be comparing is the computational power needed to render polygon vs point-cloud models of similar complexity.
That this method could give the point-cloud method an advantage in that case seems plausible to me.
I don't think zoom is an issue. Take the case where there is just one single point in the cloud. If you zoomed in to the point where that one point filled your screen, all that would happen is that the point cloud search performed for each screen pixel would return the exact same point each time, and therefore be coloured the same.


I'm not a graphics programmer, but I shared an office with several for the last 10 years. A few things have rubbed off over the years.

With today's cards, computational power is not really the limiting factor...it's bandwidth. Moving a point cloud around in memory is going to take vastly more bandwidth than moving the equivalent object made with polys.

As for the zoom, there is no object that is a single point, you're thinking about it from the wrong direction. Ever seen one of those 10x demos? Where the screen repeatedly changes scale by a factor of ten, zooming from a view of the galaxy, down to a grain of sand on a beach? That's the sort of zooming I'm talking about. You can do that with polys...you simply cannot represent the galaxy (even a simplified version) as a point cloud and have the ability to zoom down to that kind of level. It requires many orders of magnitude more data with points.

As I think about it, all that's really beside the point. Here's what you need to know on this topic.
1) What is a polygon? It's a collection of an -infinite- number of points, specified by a -few- vertices, possibly augmented by various forms of texture maps to provide colors. Meaning it is vastly more compact in representation.
2) There is absolutely nothing that a point can do, but a polygon cannot.
So, which approach is going to be more feasible and more flexible? In bandwidth and memory, polygons are a hands-down winner. What's the advantage to points? None.

And we're not even starting to look at more advanced issues like reflections. How can you possibly handle those with point clouds?

SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE SUPERLATIVE

This is where Apple's closed system begins to fail. On the iPhone/Ipod Touch it was okay that you were heavily limited to Apple approved products, applications and functions. People have low expectations from smartphones or at least did when the first version came out.

This is a different beast entirely. Since it's more or less looking to surpass the netbooks in a number of areas, it will be judged by near-PC functionality, and well ... it comes up short. Sure once they've gorged themselves on micro transactions which push the actual cost of the device way above the $499 introductory price, having youtube, ereader, video, music and an office suite should be enough for most people. Who knows that might be just enough to make it sell well.

But the point is, many people will be disappointed it doesn't offer them the range of packages that a Windows or OS X based PC does. They'll miss the free 3rd party content that they already have on their PC/Mac or have bought and can't simply transfer over because it's not a desktop level OS.

I remember a study found that a large majority of netbook buyers who bought it purportedly as their first laptop ended up disappointed because there was a preconception that it would perform as well as a full fledged PC. Apple denizens who staved off until now for a cheap and compact PC will be likely left out in the cold in the same way.

>> ^StukaFox:
So I live on this really steep hill in Seattle. Last year, the hill became a sheet of ice after a week's worth of snow compacted. And I said this phrase easily a dozen times to people attempting to drive down the hill:
"Don't go down the hill, it's all ice."
And the various responses I got were:
"Fuck you!", "I got four wheel drive!", "Stop telling people what to do!", "I have a Subaru!", "Fuck you!"
All of which were usually followed by:
"... stupid asshole telling what to do I can drive on ice OHFUCK!" -- WHACK!
Moral: lulz, schadenfreude!


I told a guy (not you, not Seattle) "thanks, I'll be alright". Then I went over the crest, down the ice-covered street, past the dozen or so crashed cars, stopped at the bottom, signaled, made a left onto a busy street.

I had studded tires on my truck.

So I live on this really steep hill in Seattle. Last year, the hill became a sheet of ice after a week's worth of snow compacted. And I said this phrase easily a dozen times to people attempting to drive down the hill:

"Don't go down the hill, it's all ice."

And the various responses I got were:

"Fuck you!", "I got four wheel drive!", "Stop telling people what to do!", "I have a Subaru!", "Fuck you!"

All of which were usually followed by:

"... stupid asshole telling what to do I can drive on ice OHFUCK!" -- WHACK!

Moral: lulz, schadenfreude!

OK, yes, being energy efficient is great, and my wife and I are currently hunting for a house to buy and renovate, with the idea to make it as energy efficient as possible. BUT... you've gone a bit overboard on some of your ideas.

To suggest that everyone should have tiny windows is insane. Windows are brilliant for a large number of reasons:
* Free light
* Free solar heating when it's cold (including heating up a large mass like a brick wall to radiate heat inside the house)
* (most importantly for me) Removes the feeling that you're living inside a tiny box... large windows overlooking a garden or nice view can turn an otherwise normal room into a peaceful oasis.

Definitely do all you can to reduce heat loss from the house through them when it's cold, or heat entrance to the house when it's hot... but getting rid of windows is NOT the way to live. Not in any sane sense of having quality of life. And suggesting that people have sheets of plastic over their windows really is a little horrendous. That's utilitarianism taken to extreme. It may work, but your house will resemble a shanty town.


LED lights would be great to have except that there are NONE that are anywhere near to bright enough to replace even moderately bright incandescent bulbs at a pricepoint less than $100... so until they become a logical choice it's compact florescent for our house at present.

You haven't really even touched on passive heating/cooling, and you're very much only thinking of keeping a house warm when it's cold rather than cool when it's hot. I live in Melbourne Australia, today the temp is going to be 44C (111F), which is STINKING hot by anyone's measure. But it also gets down to single digit temps (40s F) in winter... so we have to have homes that can be good both ways.

One of the best ways to keep a house cool is to keep air moving through it. If you have vents/windows up high you can have them open to vent off hot air that rises, and window down low open to draw in cooler air from outside. This is one thing our current house lacks. It may have lots of windows we can open to let air through, but being that they are all about midpoint through the wall it is infuriating to have the house too hot and yet a change has come through and it's lovely outside but you can't coax the air through the house.

* Insulate as much as you can afford.
* Build the house (when you're doing so from new) such that it takes best advantage of the sun for the given times of year.
* Install Solar Panels for electricity
* Use an on demand gas hot water system (so you're not heating a large container of water and have it sit there), and even better have it be a backup to a solar hot water system
* Install Rain water tanks
* Use dual flush toilets (amazing that they are not common in the US)
* Use evaporation cooling over refrigerated
* Use as much passive heating/cooling as you can.

Crying foul of how inefficient things like stoves/fridges are is a little pointless, as other than getting the most energy efficient ones you can when buying, what can you really do about it?

Definitely think about energy and insulation and actual energy usage, but you don't have to live in a sealed, windowless box in order to live efficiently.

>> ^blankfist:
You'd think at the moment when your best friends were about to be thrown into a trash compacter and destroyed you'd get past that petty 'we can't let humans know we're alive' nonsense and yell for them to stop!


Yeah, they put that brat kid into therapy over a single new -at the time- toy. What makes the entire collection worth so much money in the last movie now worthless?

You'd think at the moment when your best friends were about to be thrown into a trash compacter and destroyed you'd get past that petty 'we can't let humans know we're alive' nonsense and yell for them to stop!

Well the problem is that TV oversimplifies things inorder to maintain its retard audience and allow its producers to have an easy job fiting in just enough compacted shit before the advert brakes.

Tv is fundamentally fucked and it has been for ages if you watch tv debates or the news you will see what I mean subjects that require a good 2-3 hour discussoin are gone over in 6-10 minute segments its a fucking joke and a diservice to the public.

the climate change thing will not be a simple case of YES EARTH IS DYING OR WE ARE HAVING NO AFECT ON ANNYTHING

the rality will be in some cases pumping gass and random shit into the enviroment will do damage in others it will be neglagable compared to enviromental factors , and in other cases it will be just a mixture of things so much so that you would not be able to scentifcly prove or study it, In the same way that we can only predict tomorrows weather with 60% certainty despite having huge super computers and established mathematical models working on it.

The important thing is that We don't let the media and generally moronic people combine all the issues into one single issue that is then debated.

Im pretty sure that regardless of what affect things have on the weather a human breathing in toxic chemicals is not good for your helth, im allso prity sure that reducing bio diversity allso reduces avalable food sources. allso polluting and abusing fresh water removes our ablity to drink and servive.

so regardless of if the earth is heating up because of us or not the fact is we need to look after things that are important to our survival.
and regardless of it being a natural or man made fenomnum it dose appear to be happening so we still need to work out ways to deal with it.

aside from the global warming debate if we actually move away from limited fuels that also happen to pollute then we will start to find sustainable fuels that not only do less damage to the environment but also don't run out reducing the need for wars.

^Crake - There are actually many more words related to snow. However, they are very spcific; fluffy snow that blos away has it's own word, hard, compact snow has it's own word, wet snow, hard snow (ice pellets), etc. They all have a specific word.

Glad you enjoy it guys.

There have been compact homes for 80 years - it's called a trailer. What's innoh-vah-tive about those is that they come with wheels and a hitch...

---

This is neat, but only in the sense of an architecture student's term project.

It's not very practical, especially in a place like NYC (she gives by example). Because they are not stacked, they are wasting vertical space. And all the windows are nice, if you have a view, but if you are putting a community or dorm like she mentioned, then guess what - your view is of your neighbors, and kinda boring. I would also assume that the soundproofing and bed material is not that great, making it hard for certain dorm-room 'activities'.

Compacted spine?

I've used the braid before, but it's definitely not as compact for storage as the knot-prone elbow loop.

>> ^quantumushroom:
These liberal media elites really do live in a bubble. It's simply not possible for them to believe that anyone thinks differently than they do, to the point they believe "the enemy" must all be paid shills. Were there 10,000 peaceful protesters, the libmedia would seek out the one 'everything = hitler' nut. That same nut can be found at every large political rally on all sides.
Nothing new for biased libmedia. Notice how the people favoring more gun control are always "concerned citizens" while the pro-Second Amemdment folks are "the gun lobby"?
If you think Obamarx Medical Tyranny is going to stop at whatever the hell this new abortion of a bill contains, I'm here to remind you it's just a stepping stone to the taxocrats' real goal of socialized medicine.
If you're a "concerned citizen" for socialized medicine, you'll supposedly get everything you want, except high-quality care and the means to pay for it. If you define success by efficiency and effectiveness, government has a rather crappy track record on just about everything.

The point is that what these people are protesting IS NOT EVEN REAL. You see, if if liberals had come out en-masse in 2003 to protest Bush's "plan to bomb and invade Florida", and actively disrupting any actual debate on the topic of war, you might have had something comparable to the current situation.

The current pack of protesters have gotten all the facts lies that causes their anger from Glenn Beck, Palin, O'Reilly and Limbaugh. People that simply cant be trusted because they LIE ALL THE TIME. They quote actual bills out of context, they flat out invent "facts" about it, and they compact it into ridiculous little slogans like "death panel" to tick of people who they know will never bother to read the whole thing. Then they incite people to go ballistic over these "issues", that arent really issues at all because THEY ARE NOT BASED ON ANYTHING REAL, just on lies.

It's not about people not having the right to protest, of course they do, its about lying to people so that they'll protest things that don't exist, thereby suppressing the ACTUAL debate, the ACTUAL issues, and the ACTUAL bills. You see, I think most liberals would love to hear what other people think about these issues, I think they'd love to work with people to improve upon it, to make it the best possible reform for everyone, or even to have others explain why there shouldn't be a reform at all. But instead the tactic seems to be to deafen and dumb down the debate as much as humanly possible, and that really just is political bullying, not debate or free speech.