>> ^SveNitoR:

>> ^skinnydaddy1:
So, the guy animates on a computer that uses 4 times the amount of materials that is in a mobile device. Just to tell us our love of gadgets is enslaving people who can only be freed by starting a war to kill the dictator and if we do that, we get antiwar animation pointing out how we are war mongers and now everyone hates the war mongers because they started a war and the only way not to make the rest of the world like them is to give up everything and live like a third world country while no other 1st world country does the same thing.
Right....
Define hypocrisy.

No, he claims that our extreme consumption patterns have negative effects, not that we should invade countries. We buy new, throw away, buy new, throw away... and so on. This is a quote from someone, whom I unfortunately forgot the name of: "We buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't care about".


Sorry, still can't muster up enough to care anymore. Its just gotten to the point where some Self-righteous ass has to tell me how terrible a person I am because I got up this morning had a cup of coffee. SO instead of wasting their time creating an animation telling me I'm a horrible person. Take that time to volunteer and do some real work for once. I no longer will apologies for the way I live. I do not spend more than I have and if other people do that its their business. I know, I know. I sound like a douchbag. But to me now, So does the guy who created the animation. At what point do I get to live my life with out criticism? With out someone telling me what I should or should not do?

I've told this story in another of a video comments not long ago. I spent 5 months in and around Europe not long ago doing contract work. The job had me going from city to city just about every week. In EVERY city the second someone found out I was from the U.S. I had to hear about how we were destroying the world. The hypocrisy of being criticized by some ass holding blackberry or Iphone or netbook or whatever just because I was from the U.S. really really got to me. And if I said I have heard this before they just get really pissed like what they were saying was so different then what the last 10 people said.
I know its trendy to look progressive and forward thinking about the impact of what just owning a cell phone can be but FFS change your own life and live by example not by yelling at the Evil American. and before you say it. No I do not have to watch the video, but I did receive the link to it by someone saying how clever it was. So instead of the Funny I was looking for I got the "your killing the planet by breathing" video.

Sigh, Ok, I've ranted enough here. I really did not mean for it to go this long but explaining it never seems to fit in to a few line.

This rant brought to you by "Douchbag American" If the rest of the world don't like it. Blame the U.S.!

>> ^skinnydaddy1:

So, the guy animates on a computer that uses 4 times the amount of materials that is in a mobile device. Just to tell us our love of gadgets is enslaving people who can only be freed by starting a war to kill the dictator and if we do that, we get antiwar animation pointing out how we are war mongers and now everyone hates the war mongers because they started a war and the only way not to make the rest of the world like them is to give up everything and live like a third world country while no other 1st world country does the same thing.
Right....
Define hypocrisy.


No, he claims that our extreme consumption patterns have negative effects, not that we should invade countries. We buy new, throw away, buy new, throw away... and so on. This is a quote from someone, whom I unfortunately forgot the name of: "We buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't care about".

So, the guy animates on a computer that uses 4 times the amount of materials that is in a mobile device. Just to tell us our love of gadgets is enslaving people who can only be freed by starting a war to kill the dictator and if we do that, we get antiwar animation pointing out how we are war mongers and now everyone hates the war mongers because they started a war and the only way not to make the rest of the world like them is to give up everything and live like a third world country while no other 1st world country does the same thing.

Right....
Define hypocrisy.

>> ^rottenseed:

i love the voice work. And can somebody explain to me the warlord part? I'm in a bubble over here


It's simple really... Steve Jobs eats baby kittens.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Animation, gadgets, cell phones, Steve Jobs, guilt, Congo' to 'Animation, gadgets, cell phones, Steve Jobs, guilt, Congo, mark fiore' - edited by kronosposeidon

This robot is an insane uncle-gadget/terminator/voltron/magneto/replicator/robocop/agent-smith/i-robot of murderous rampaging doom.
If you need me, I'll be in my time machine, heading for when this all blows over.

Thank you, Shankar! My mind is sufficiently blown! Go, go Gadget skates!

I think at one point in the summer our family was around 210 GBs for ONE month. Comcast is sitting at 240 or 250 right now in our area. Primarily three sources caused it: 3 PCs, one XBox 360, various storage or otherwise Internet/Network connected gadgets. These are the specific sources that use so much bandwidth: Netflix (HD & SD), Internet Surfing & Usage + XBox 360 & PC Games (download and play), Digital Purchases (HD, SD, backups, Games, and music), and then miscellaneous streams and downloads (but, these would be less that one gigabyte)

It's the digital media that causes the most usage; especially HD rentals or purchases (each weighing in at 4-9 GB each).

At first these boards really annoyed me, they have 20mhz processors, faster than the PCs in my high school computer lab, and are used mostly to switch a few lights on and off.

After I bought one to work on projects with some other people, I realised that while they are an immense waste of processing power, these things make bread-boarding a hell of a lot easier than when I had to pull and flash chips for every firmware revision. There is also all the time you save by not having to rebuild the basics of voltage regulators/ output resisters and such for every project.

I suppose I'm still stuck in the past, but when I hear of people selling consumer gadgets that have a barely utilised arduino inside ( I have met people that do this), it makes me cringe.

I get that things pass a price threshold where devel time becomes more expensive than underutilised hardware, but I still can't seem to completely get over my moral indignation. Won't stop me from using one though, and at ~$20 a pop, I'll probably get some more.

I think the problem is that they don't give them enough to even be able to figure out what the things are, at least initially.. Of course they don't know what a 3.5 floppy is, but if you gave them a reader with it, they might piece it together. You might as well give them a circuitboard and ask them what it is, or a diode, oh surprise, they can't figure it out. Oh wait, here's a small gray box with no context, what is it? Oh these silly kids

It was better once they started giving them the means to figure it out. They should have just piled a bunch of random stuff together and let them figure out what items go together

>> ^spoco2:

Yeah, because kids shouldn't know what a knife is (~2.5 million years old), or a book (1500 years or so?), or a car (350 years or so).
It's not to do with the things being older than the kids, it's that they are technology that has had a very short lifespan (relatively), and therefore are things which are just not used in day to day use any more and so are not recognisable to kids any longer.
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>> ^mxxcon:

well, they are showing "30 year" old things to like 7-10 year olds. obviously they shouldn't know what it is.


Yeah, because kids shouldn't know what a knife is (~2.5 million years old), or a book (1500 years or so?), or a car (350 years or so).

It's not to do with the things being older than the kids, it's that they are technology that has had a very short lifespan (relatively), and therefore are things which are just not used in day to day use any more and so are not recognisable to kids any longer.

Your video, Cute French kids try to figure out vintage tech gadgets, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^westy:

An actual good and lagitimate use for the ipad !
Just needs to be made more sturdy and allot cheeper and u have a good toy for young kids.

If the I pad was 1/4th its price then it would be a pritty nifty toy/gadget however at its current price its a waist of money that can be spent on far more usfull devices.
Its mental to me that people spend £800 and more on iphones. and seem to think its good value because its "free" on a £35 a month contract for 2 years. I mean £35 a month ! lol i guess its for the same sort of people that like designer clothes.
Strangely becuse Ipad has become so ubicutoise and has such a large market people start developing good software for it and in the end you have good software on the device forcing people to buy something thats overpriced to access it.


Now I know why you can't spell. It's not lysdexia, you're just dumb.

£35 a month is great value for a connected media device.

>> ^ant:

Ugh, I feel old and I am not even mid 30s yet (will be in a few days!


I feel old and I'm not even mid 20s....

It's inconceivable to me that they don't know about floppy disks, Gameboys and vinyl.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

I wonder if you could paint the whole face, wire the mask up with soft circuits and then connect to an arduino or something similar to run a programmed animation loop. I suppose you could make the animation random but still symmetrical pretty easily, actually. It's just a matter of whether the soft circuits themselves generate enough heat or if something will need to be added.


Well that thermochromic ink is pretty nifty (with the fabric/acrylic ink base). It's been around awhile--like "Mood Rings", but like @blankfist says, "It's Awesome!", due to the application an idea this guy used (now I've got to see if "Rorschach" in the movie uses anything like this or just flat-out uninspired CGI). Imagine using a wider or more controlled version of the thermochromic ink with something like meta-materials; that will come out soon enough (the neater stuff is military only here in the US I would assume). It was found recently that the meta-material molecules set themselves up automatically into Möbius symmetrical setups or "M.C. Escher" topology. If you combine the paint (if possible) afterward, I'll bet you'll be able to get some literally eye-popping effects. Maybe just not the type the military would want. Especially, if you can adhere the "ink finish / lacquer" to the inner portion of the (typically, meta-materials are aiming for "see-through" optics--which is why the topology and structure is very interesting) meta-material.

Really off-topic after this:

Using what @xxovercastxx said, adhering it (maybe with multiple type of thermochromic inks--giving it a far wider chromatic range, at varying temperatures) internally and using the meta-material you might be able to go from invisible to Abrams Tank to Porsche. You'd have to insulate the inner layer somehow to give you very fine control over the temperature or perhaps you could just flat out use electricity to change the colors. I'd imagine changing a thermochromic ink from reacting to temperature to electricity (or hell, anything kinetic: sonic waves, magnetism, etc...) wouldn't be very hard as they are closely related in the first place. You could essentially use light if the inks are responsive enough and it doesn't require a "non-stop" wave of photons; if you could make it behave like a switch that would be perfect. Then throw in some nano-technology with atomic manipulation and you'd have something incredible.

Hell, I wouldn't put something like that one the battlefield; it'd be a damned work of art! Plus, it'd probably cost more than a full-wing of F-22s just to develop; but the stuff that would come out of a development project like that would benefit humanity for a long time.

<sarcasm>Nah, let's just keep building more military.</sarcasm> At least, I know a lot of scientists try to use our addiction to the "military-industrial-complex" as a way to GET some key technological advances made. NASA does the same thing, but they tend to be better at it per dollar spent.

Möbius Symmetry link goes here.

PS: I like to include M.C. Escher (painter--think Inception as well as August Möbius (mathematician; and famous for his Möbius Strip topology of a a finite(?) two dimensional plane twisted at one end (pick a corner ) then connect it to the opposite side (make sure "top" meets "bottom"). Adding electronics I'm sure will be, if not already, worked on heavily. Especially, as I said in military type technologies (cloaking armor, etc...) But, with these you could--with enough precision make an Abrams Tank look like an Edsel. Although shooting it will kill that effect fairly quick (although I'm sure mitigation of visual anomalies will greatly depend on angle-of-view and distance) --

"Hey! That Edsel has four and one-half wheels! Ford is outrageous; why would we by this lemon!?!" His cousin responds right after;

"Bob! I got no idea whatever your sayin!?!" "It clearly has four wheels on my side!!!". "I thought Edsels were black?"

Another off-topic bit about "Edsel(s)":
Not the doo-wop group (although, the group is related to the real "Edsel"; they changed their name after the Edsel came out to capitalize on the name recognition from: "The Essos") that my dictionary keeps telling me it is; "Edsels <--with the "s" is misspelled according to the THREE combined English dictionaries. WTF? Typically I try to only misspell when I'm doing something as above in the first sentence by "Bob", "sayin" is part of my colloquialisms for them. I know, I tried hard for that "50's" feel... Yes, this is also so far off topic that I should just blog it. Can one of the admins throw a gadget in for us to use in our posts--like this, to count the topic changes. Perhaps a grammar-Nazi™ one!. Done!

P.S.- I didn't check for continuity logic or reading comprehension (and at this length, it's always needed--as it can sound like buck-shot mentally). Take as is. That reminds me: I should make a "colloquialism" English dictionary add-on for Firefox with auto conversion and "by decade" setups. It'd be fun (there's probably one around already ).

Merry Christmas everybody.
Also, the mask rocks! I also added one-helluva-edit after thinking about it; it seemed worth the trouble to bring up.
So hopefully you read it and didn't feel like I was wasting your time. Long posts are like that.