Yes, the name of this thread is ridiculously out of proportion to the actual facts, but I thought I'd give a whack at this sort of article naming since the general media loves to do it so much.
Basically, human brains and their pattern recognition make for better tools in certain cases of protein folding than their simulations do, and so they turned protein folding into a video game. I want to download it now.
Read the copyright part. That's nonsense. It doesn't make sense that the writers of a song can be DEAD, some other company making a dubious claim to copyright, and a third party who by all rights has NO claim to having written the song or paid someone to write it for them can just sign some papers in a back room and suddenly demand royalties. They don't deserve it! They did nothing, they get NOTHING, good day sir!
It's nonsense like this that gives copyright law a bad name. Maybe people who don't have anything to do with the creation of a work of art shouldn't be able to "buy" credit for the work, hmm? Maybe that should be a thing?
I guess the other thing that bugs me is a song that's over a century old somehow isn't in the public domain. How does that work? What sort of legal loopholes allow a song's copyright to transcend the life of it's creators?
This has been an annoyance for a while. The History Channel has a somewhat recent habit of doing CG recreations of historical events. That's all well and good, except the CG is somewhere between N64 and Dreamcast in quality. Even that would be laughable but tolerable except that they advertise this CG in advance as "the latest state of the art computer animation". Liars! Even assuming as they seem to that their audience has no video game players, they have to at least acknowledge that their viewers MAY have seen Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or, heck, even Up (awesome movie by the way). Everyone knows what good CG looks like.
It's an annoyance. Before anyone says "so what, do you expect them to tell the audience their CG sucks in advance?", well, not really. I expect them to either make their CG good enough to match their claims, or to simply not make that claim. Just say you did computer simulations. Still though, considering they (apparently) used Wings3D to make these "recreations", they're clearly on a budget.
Alright, so I downloaded Google Chrome on Friday on the advice of the bumster dumpster, and fucking love it. Only problem is, I now have to re-log in through the new browser, and I can't remember my TC password.
The only reason I'm logged in now is because I just opened Opera to be able to post. The system is being stubborn about sending it automatically (I tried twice already). Can someone manually reset my password, or e-mail me (illbeunderyourstars@yahoo.com) my old password?
This further solidifies my belief that today, more than ever before, we need to SLASH space exploration budgets and pour more money into social welfare programs. The more likely it is that every man who has ever looked at the stars and dreamed that we weren't alone was right, the angrier I get. There is nothing in space worth knowing or seeing. Just dead rocks. My life, and all the resources of humanity, are much better spent on projects on this Earth. Why, I'm furious that they even spent the money on this project... that's tax money that could have been better spent not winning the wars in the East, or not improving school test scores... or better yet, it could have been better spent on generous Federal bureacrat pensions! :cuss:
Ooh--sorry... I was channeling the Tendo City sentiment en masse for a minute there.