@29 Same issues really.

Ears are oddly independent of the head's movement, fur also expands and contracts weirdly.

And for an animal, that sort of movement is even stranger than for a human. Animals rely heavily on the body, ears and tail to express emotions. Dogs don't smile, they wag their tail.

I've also never seen a cat or a dog open their mouth without doing something with it (like barking, biting, licking, etc)

Not very good, it's very obvious it's fake.

1. The hair. There are many things wrong with it: Not a strand of it moves even slightly when her head does. Also the hair on her shoulders just sort of expands and contracts and never affects anything above it. It also seems to be glued to her neck. And the hair with empty spaces in it looks as if it was sloppily masked off the previous background with Photoshop.

2. The body. It's obviously static with very minor variations. Real people in real situations don't sit still like a statue.

3. The neck. It's fairly noticeable that the skin doesn't wrinkle in the slightest as the head moves.

4. The animation itself. People don't continuously move their head and smile at random, or cycle through expressions. Now this of course is a demo, but it's probably noticeable with the intended realistic usage as well.

@2 If you want something done, instead of praying, just go and DO something yourself.

I'm not familiar with the regulations, but there's got to be something that can be done. Writing to your representative to suggest you think Bush be impeached, for instance. And vote for a less crazy dude next time.

I do not understand why this is so hard to grasp.

I'm saying he's LOGICALLY correct, while not arguing that he's MORALLY wrong.

His behaviour is NOT excusable.

You might want to read my post, I said exactly the same thing.

What you fail to grasp I think, that all I'm saying is that somebody being a jerk doesn't automatically nullify the meaning of what they say. Him saying "brush your teeth" in the most impolite way possible still wouldn't make it bad advice.

@WoooT

That's a bad example, because you're picking a very fuzzy characteristic. What is considered "simple" varies widely. Linux fans may in fact will claim that Linux is simple. If this seems weird that's due to different points of view. Linux is simple from the point of view of somebody who wants to understand the internals, Windows/Mac are simple from the point of view of somebody interested in the external behavior.

This is the kind of thing that turns into a flamewar precisely because it's so ambiguous and so dependent on personal tastes.

This article however is about people complaining about perfectly well defined statements. There's absolutely nothing fuzzy about "it has less memory" or "it doesn't come in different colors". So long they're not a lie, there's nothing to argue about.

I'd almost say that the Linux camp is less fanatical than the Apple one. There are wars and arguments of course, but you'll see people working on benchmarking and improving parts of the system. The obsessive fan probably runs the latest kernel which has the latest iteration of the scheduler. Some will try to make improvements of their own. That's a recognition of things not being as good as they could be, and that they can be made better.

Now just try to claim that the iPhone is lacking something and you'll have a heap of of rabid fans on you in an instant. Pointing that something is lacking will not result in a reply "Indeed, they should add that in the next revision", but outright denial that anybody needs such a thing.

@32 Somebody saying something in a blunt, rude and selfish way still doesn't mean there's no truth in it.

In fact, even if he doesn't care in the slightest about the firefighters and whoever might be burning to death due to the false positive, the comment still refers to a real problem that exists.

Just because he happens to be an asshole doesn't mean that there aren't many other people who decided not to use a detector for precisely the same reason.

If this was filmed, the activist should have used the opportunity to point that not all detectors have this problem. This could change some people's minds.

Note I'm not excusing his behavior. I'm just saying you can be a jerk and have a point at the same time.

Well, not all of them seem to be completely unreasonable. Even if impolite, some have a point.

I'm not very familiar with the space program, but the comment to the 13 year old is probably correct.

And the smoke detector comment even though insensitive makes an excellent point: False positives, especially of the kind that make the firefighters show up because you're having a bath are a very bad thing.

@19 Obviously there's some value to it being there. Otherwise it wouldn't be there in the first place. It'd have atrophied or never developed at all.

My point is that having half your brain shut down while the rest manages to remain working doesn't necessarily mean that the half that remains will be able to function correctly in that situation and produce something that has any relationship with reality.

More interesting stuff on brain hemispheres here:
http://www.hypnosisschool.org/50.php

@16 When you're suffering from brain damage that results in you losing the ability to read, understand speech, figure out where your body begins or ends, and completely lose your attachment to reality, which is more likely?

A. You happen by chance to also trigger some brain state that makes you figure out a cosmic truth
B. Your brain is so messed up that whatever you're thinking at the moment is most likely complete nonsense?

I go with B. There's lots of evidence around that the ability to bring the brain into any particular state via brain damage, chemicals, meditation, etc doesn't necessarily mean that whatever is being perceived has any relationship with reality.

A quote from http://www.geometricvisions.com/Madness/schizoaffective-disorder/visions.html for you:

One evening as I was walking across a parking lot at the California Institute of Technology, I looked up to see a Yin-Yang symbol in the sky stretching from horizon to horizon. Shimmers of energy radiated from Mt. Wilson to the North. I felt a deep chord resonating through my body, the vibration of the Universe penetrating deep into my bones. I was as tall as giant striding across that parking lot that evening.
At that instant I Knew. I knew my Purpose.
I had been walking to my weekly appointment with my therapist in downtown Pasadena. I hurried on to our meeting, and when I arrived I excitedly explained my revelation to her.
"Mike," she replied, "you're not making any sense".

Some people hear voices. Some also see recursive Ying-Yangs in the sky, hallucinate police car lights and fear that nazis are hiding in the bushes in the garden. I don't see why feeling there's some sort of energy is any more real than any of the above.

The general concept is called "furgonomics" (see the WikiFur entry).

Once people start thinking about anthro foxes, rabbits and wolves living together, they start wondering how does that actually work.

The obvious issues are how do you wear pants or sit on a chair if you have a tail. Or what does a chair for a taur look like?

The Freefall comic also made the point that the real world would probably be very annoying for an anthro wolf, due to being color blind, and hearing noise humans don't perceive at all.

A lesser known fact is that improved night vision implies sacrificing vision accuracy, so by human standards dogs need glasses.

Extended frequency hearing range sounds nice, but can actually be annoying. Some people can hear the noise coming from the flyback of a CRT TV. Those people get all the fun of trying to explain to others that they can't stand this infernal noise nobody else can hear, without getting to hear anything extra that's valuable.

A society with multiple species would need to compensate for differences in color perception, vision acuity, smell, sound perception and body shape, which would affect large percentages of the population.

@32 I tested in Linux under both Konqueror and Firefox. Konqueror doesn't react to the play button at all (works perfectly fine on other videos though), Firefox reacts but then shows that message. Maybe it's not happy with a non-IE browser? I find it very strange that MSNBC would need to restrict bandwidth usage.

@34 IMO it's the usual freaking out. The video (seen it thanks to #33) seems to be basically "OMG! Plastic gets through metal detectors!!1!". Well, DUH.

On one hand, a knuckle duster is a nasty weapon, and definitely not something the sort of thing that should be brought to school, no argument about it.

On the other hand, there's nothing new here. If you really want to hurt somebody, a school has plenty usable weaponry inside it like chairs, blackboard erasers and walls to bash somebody's head against.

Then you can add basic school equipment. A plastic right angle ruler, or one of those semicircular ones for measuring angles (forget what are the things called) would probably be quite usable as an improvised knuckle duster. Or just hold your keys between your fingers.

I get "Due to usage restrictions we are unable to provide this video", when I try to view this under Linux. Other videos on the site work perfectly fine though.

I have no clue if it works on Windows because I don't use it, but I imagine it should.

This is VERY uncool.

@28 As I suspected, you only see what you want to see. You point to the "adapting" part, completely disregarding the text that follows which says that there's a limit to it and that it's affecting the population.

Also, feeding on humans is effectively a death sentence, so it's not exactly a favorable adaption.

Basically two options: starve to death, or go try eat a human and get shot.

Yes, if faced with a bear I'd choose myself obviously, but I'd rather that encounter didn't happen in the first place.

@24,
For example:
http://www.uwyo.edu/news/showrelease.asp?id=11661

Your turn.

Also, classification isn't nearly that easy. There are many potential consequences to global warming, and added up together they'd amount to something quite difficult to ignore.

Even if you don't care much about the bears, having your house end up underwater one day would be quite annoying. And if you don't live in a place that'd be affected, you'll still feel the economical impact, as somebody's got to pay for fixing all that mess.

I bet that improving the levees in New Orleans would have been a lot cheaper than fixing all that damage.

@17 Polar bears don't float, they swim. And since they're not aquatic animals, they can't stay in the water indefinitely, so they still need some land to live on.

I'm one of those weird people who disagrees.

The real “Rembrandt” doesn't have any more value to me than a copy good enough that I can't tell them apart.

Of course, for somebody interested in analyzing the process of the picture's creation by trying to find what's under the visible layer of paint, and doing a chemical analysis of what Rembrandt sneezed into the canvas while painting, the actual original is needed, but this is something 99.9% of the people are never going to do.

I don't even think there's a really an original, since it's never been painted. The actual original is what Rembrandt intended to paint, and what came out is a lossy copy of that.