abdias

Good times! I never came across Tracer or Sculpt 3D, but I did start out with Real 3D [1] which actually was created in 1983 for the CBM64 and later came to the Amiga in 1990.

About the same time Lightwave 3D [2] came out which first was bound to Newtek's famous VideoToaster but of course someone found a way to emulate the hardware so "everybody" could use it :) even for us who needed PAL (disk swapping was a thing back in those days).

I recon that Blender is a very capable 3D software as well (and as a NLE video editor (!)). I never got around to properly use as I was a customer with Newtek but I kind of giving up on Newtek so I might dig into the massive information and tutorials out there for Blender.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realsoft_3D

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D

Unfortunately, performance doesn't come free on a computer. Have you tried limiting the number of CPUs Firefox uses?

You can see a setting "Performance" in the first tab, uncheck the "Use recommended.." and reduce the number of CPUs it suggest. Maybe that'll help?

Well, one reason could be that Saudi-Arabia is planning so-called "smart" cities and Google wants to be in the center of it all (a UN driven program - IMO a potential tyranny sprayed in rose perfume).

https://www.saudismartcities.net/

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/success/Sa...

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingo...

Is there a chance we could get MAFF: (and MHT:) protocols as well and let our web-extension handle those (single-file archived web pages if anyone wondered)?

This would allow us to (again) associate the Firefox browser with for example .maf files and have them displayed in the browser via the extension. (I'm sure there must be thousands of archived pages out there that currently are a hassle to view - it would be great to get support for those).

PRISM is/was a small program. "Upstream" programs is the what most should be worried about and goes sort of around companies (and anyone/anything else).

Though, some companies are handed a court order to "share" their data (quarterly, about 80 companies so far). And NSA has standard rates for this.

> As far as I understood the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used centralised servers with backdoors

In fairness, it was eBay that first bought Skype [1] in 2005 centralizing the data. eBay then sold it to a private investor group which Microsoft then bought Skype from [2] in 2011.

Following the Snowden leaks as well as the information from Bill Binney, NSA scoops up the data regardless..

1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/122516/article.html

2: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

Why do people assume posts on the front-page are driven fully automatic + some secret juicy for points and what have you?

Why wouldn't YC just use a human (or two) to bump/nudge posts they would like to climb or expose according to their agenda/internal policy?

It you monitor the hot page, there is a clear political bias, topical bias, as well as temporal peaks of movements/ranking indicating that would be the case - too complex for any ML currently to predict. Just my 2 cents.. keep it simple.

How will you deal with fair-use?

There is absolutely no reason for any government to have this capacity unless it is to target potential dissidents and critics of their political agenda (as well as training "pre-crime" tech).

Intel regarding terrorist-attacks and crime comes almost exclusively from HUMINT, not SIGINT.

This type of installment (which is basically already in place) reverses, in effect, the principle of a person being innocent until proven guilty (by due process) by deeming anyone a potential criminal as default. This is highly unacceptable in a society claiming to be free.

This reminds me of East-Germany's Stasi police - on steroids.

You could actually take any ancillary chunks into consideration, ie. chunks starting with a lower-case first letter. These are non-critical/mandatory.

Deflating can be applied to some chunks, but not at will. The zTXt chunk can be compressed while for example the tEXt chunk cannot. The newer iTXt chunk can vary.

The two former are limited in scope and language encoding support, so iTXt is typically used for extended textual data such as XML/XMP etc. But if is saved compressed or not depends on the PNG encoder/host used (there can also be multiple instances of these chunks in the same file).

Photoshop for instance saves uncompressed, I guess to give fast access for performance reasons (ie. file viewers using galleries for numerous images while displaying their meta-data).

Yes, YOU, and me. We can all do our own research to discern what is fake or not.

> China, gov't has evolved to a whole new level, they don't manipulate media with fake news, but with selected truth.

This is unfortunately nothing new. They did this in the USSR and East-Europe, and even in "free" countries such as Norway where there was one single national government-owned broadcaster (NRK, similar profile as BBC in the UK) feeding propaganda for the socialist labor party in the political areas. Satellite dishes was forbidden up till late 80's, and the first commercial national broadcaster (not via satellite) came about in 1993 IIRC (the gov't channel was BTW ad-free and financed through a TV-license, giving you the right to own a TV and radio).

This is organized censorship and I have been around long enough to see this come and go in various places.

I'm sorry, we don't need any company, corporatistic organization or government to tell us what is factual information. We can discern this ourselves, we can do the necessary research ourselves, and most of us has the experience and ability to call BS when we see it.

I am a bit worried for the younger generations though who's only source of information seem to be in many if not most cases, sites like Facebook, Google and so forth. That combined with a filtered mainstream media and a very poor education system could easily lead right back to where East-Europe were only a few decades ago, but with a different style and flavor as well as refined techniques and better ability to push targeted and effective propaganda to the masses. This is history, not conjecture, don't let it repeat.

Not OP, but here is one related source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin02...

I do not think the technology involved artificially generated voice though, but simply morphing someone's voice into sounding as the target voice.

You mean, like they did pre-2000 [1]? Don't know how good this would sound today, but nevertheless interesting.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin02...

Nice and simple. I had no problem with with UI and I found the music I was looking for (incl. my own :) ).

In the early 90s I created a small custom language. The purpose was to learn/build a compiler though, but other projects came along so it was eventually scrapped. I did get fruits from it though in terms of how compilers work.

I also came up with an idea to build a common intermediate compiler so you could use C/C++, asm, BASIC, custom language etc. on top, then a descriptor/translator file would compile to a common assembler base. This was on the Amiga (and some years before .Net).

It's a funny story but also shows how pathetic (IMO) some companies and organizations become. They just don't realize the cat is already out the bag. "Damage control" should not be used for censorship. This is clearly fair use (satire).

And in general about YouTube and similar companies: This is what happens when the court principle of innocent until proven guilty is inverted to be guilty until proven innocent.

There is a reason why freedom of speech is the first amendment in the US constitution, and Google (and other companies) should adhere and respect the intentions behind it.

Why don't UK government leave that responsibility to the parents which are to decide what their children are allowed to watch or not. In the old Soviet the communists very much wanted government to replace both parents and God - seems like that idea has gotten new fuel in the UK.

Thanks, I stand corrected. It was a fun theory though and it will probably not go away anytime soon.

Kubrick himself claimed HAL stood for "heuristic and algorithmic" according to this article:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...

^ famous last words.. :)