Very insightful post. I absolutely agree. I recently setup my own server for music and, eventually, video and e-mail. Now when I want to run an application that I can't install on my work server, or I'm stuck somewhere with Net access, but nothing to do... I contact my server, install the software, or stream my digital media, and I have access to all of the data I want on my terms. When I'm traveling, I can take digital photos and send them home.
Stepping back in time, in college I used Linux almost exclusively one year. I setup the system to do Appletalk networking and Samba networking and was able to access my compter's drives from anywhere on campus. I walked around without any floppy disks (which could break and loose data) and could log on to any free computer in the cluster and do my work.
Once you get used to having your own networked server, nothing else will do. One barrier I see right now is that server administration is probably too complicated for the average computer user. Securing the machine needs to be easier, back ups need to be easier, and setting up secure remote access needs to be easier. The other barrier is ISP's treating broadband as 'smart TV'. Capping uploads at a slower rate than downloads and banning the use of server software severely limits the utility of a broadband connection. Our salvation so far has been MMORPG's and X-Box live. Games need fast connections in both directions and run server processes to support multi-player gaming.
There is a balance that can be struck here. Right now, big companies think they have to control the hardware and the content. But there are a lot more computer users than there are hosting and content companies. What if Sun sold an easy to administrate home server? The entertainment companies could sell you a license to serve content from your home server to any of the devices that you own. Any display device would just be a dumb terminal to the content. Consumers would be happy; they can access their content on any device they wanted, when they wanted.
This scheme could run up against the DRM debate... but what if you owned a portable networked media player? It has a key to access your home server and the content you purchased. If you want to go to a friend's house and listen to music or watch a movie you own, just take your access device and hook it to your friend's TV. Now you can do what we've always done; loan content to friends on a limited basis or share the experience of content with a group of people, but when you go home, you take your movies and music back with you. Heck, the server could have a loan-out feature. Issue a temporary key to your friend to access your content; there will be no more scratched CD's or DVD's that you will never see again. And content companies would really be dealing with a market they are used to. They still made money when I could bring CD's to a friend's house and listen.
Whoever figures out how to make 'information furnaces' easy to use, standardized, and cheap, is going to eat everyone's lunch. Tivo showed that people are ready for it; we just have to convince the content producers that they can make money without restricting their users.
Every second you use an electronic device, you are actually utilizing fossil fuels or nuclear power. Very little of the power that we use is generated by renewable sources of energy. Then think about: the computers used in the data center that hosts the movies, the lights for the data center, the chemicals used in the air conditioners and the air conditioners themselves. How about the gas used by the technicians who drive from home to the data center to keep the lights on.
Think about the fuel trucks for the film production crews. How about the propane used to cook the cast and crew dinners. The sets that are built and thrown away. The trash created by everyone involved.
Compared to all of that, the production of the DVD disk is a miniscule part of the environmental impact of movie creation and distribution. You have a point that DVD's can be wasteful. The studios will create far more copies of Shrek 2, Stealth, and the Dukes of Hazzard then we will really need. Personally, I take care of my disks and plan on being able to watch them for as long as I have a player that can play them.
The very act of keeping a human being alive at a 21st century level of comfort is an environmentally unfriendly act. Objecting to DVD disks on the basis of environmental impact is a silly argument at best, given the context above. If you are that concerned about the environment, start by advocating cleaner means of generating electic power and making electronic equipment easy to recycle. That will make more of an impact then complaining about DVD's.
I always felt like the time penalty mostly effected on-line purchase. I can walk into a store and get something I want or need right away. Even the best on-line stores can only promise overnight delivery. And then you may lose time if you happen to miss the delivery truck at your house.
I've had two-day shipping take a week to get to me: a day for processing before shipping, two days in transit, and then a day where I miss the delivery guy and have to pick up the package at the processing center.
In my mind, what hurts local sales are:
* Sales Tax * Gas Cost * Lower Selection
What helps on-line sales:
* Larger selection * Easier access (In real life, you have to travel between stores; on-line, stores are essentially all located in the same place) * No sales tax
With on-line purchases, I tend to see shipping as equivalent to tax; it's a cost on top of the price of the item. If I want the shipping time to be minimal (to try and match the convenience of in-store purchase), then I pay almost as much as sales tax in some places. But sales tax is currently high enough in many places that shipping is still a good deal.
So the first thing is: states have to lower or eliminate sales taxes. Massachusetts just had a tax holiday. And a lot of people came into that state to buy. Then Rhode Island, wrong-headedly, started reminding people of the RI use tax on out-of-state purchases (which I think is an illegal tariff, but the law disagrees). People aren't going to pay more tax on something they already paid taxes on, especially if it is impractical for the state to track down violators.
States have tried to address on-line purchasing by trying to tax it, which is difficult. But it is relatively easy to make goods cheaper in-state by lowering something they have direct control over. Then your residents might be more willing to patronize local businesses and not travel out-of-state or order on-line.
Which brings me to state and federal gasoline taxes. Taken together, in some places this can add almost a dollar a gallon. Here again, I'm using Rhode Island because I live there and it has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. Rhode Island has a unique advantage in that the whole state is about the size of the New York metropolitan area, but isn't as densely populated. It would be pretty easy to get people to drive to the mall and spend money since most items can be obtained within 20-40 minutes of their residence. Just make gas cheaper by cutting the taxes on it.
The selection issue is harder to address. Brick-and-mortar stores are physically limited. On-line stores hide this behind a facade, so the user sees their capacity as effectively infinite.
Interestingly, for many computer products, I've found the brick-and-mortar stores to often be competitive. If they skipped the rebates and just offered the lower price, the time saved by not waiting for shipping would be worth driving over and buying.
Ironically, the party in power in the U.S. should have been perfectly equipped to deal with this issue by lowering taxes. Traditionally, the Republican party platform was supposed to be about smaller government and getting it off peoples' backs. Unfortunately, both parties keep making government bigger and more intrusive; the difference is mostly in where they want to spend the money. Republicans like defense and Democrats like social services. We can't wean governments off of sales, gasoline, and other taxes unless we make our government cost less.
Then I want power drills placed next to aspirin in the drugstore. I've heard your fancy theories about constricting blood vessels in the brain and sinus pressure causing headaches, but I know for a fact that there are actually demons in my head that are causing the problems. And every right-thinking person knows that the only way to get rid of demons is to drill holes to let them out.
At the very least, people should know about both treatments so they can make an informed choice.
There are many reasons that their approach is better than the one you posit. The most important is that they actually have a platform to continue to make improvements. They figured out how to make the electronics replacable and how to construct a tether for power. They are also on their way to having adjustable buoyancy.
Other posters have pointed out that submersible motors can be had relatively inexpensively. Next summer, they could spend another $100-200 and get thrusters installed. Or install pumps to control the ballast. They could install microphones or get a better camera. Heck, with something like this, they could inspect boat hulls underwater and make enough cash to make improvements.
I figure you are probably just trolling, but it seems worthwhile to point out that this thing has a lot of potential.
On of my family members recently got rid of their X-Box and switched to Nintendo for the very reasons you are citing. She grew up with a bunch of different game systems, but ultimately ended with a Super Nintendo and she was hooked.
Flash forward a few years and she and her husband purchased a new X-Box. They didn't end up playing it much. They found many of the games were just too complex to play casually. They wanted to be able to pop in a game and play for a few hours without having to go through boot camp.
The GameCube ended up being the perfect system. It had updated versions of many of the games they liked from old Nintendo systems (F-Zero, Metroid, Mario Kart), they are pretty easy to learn, and they had more options for playing games together. They weren't really into multiplayer FPS, but they would race each other in Mario Kart any day.
Just a little empirical evidence to support your point. As video gaming becomes more popular, more niches are going to open up; Nintendo is probably smart to stick with the family space. Heck, even hardcore gamers like to play games like Lumines every now and then. Personally, I wish Katamari Damacy was on the GC.
Seeing as you were (are?) in high school at the time, I could see how you could see slipping the password to a few trustworthy people as harmless, but apparently it wasn't. In my eyes, you are as guilty as the people who used this information for harmful ends, because you enabled them.
Okay, so you were curious and figured it out. I would have hung onto that password if I needed it to get around something to do my actual work. And perhaps I would have used it to help a friend out in a similar situation (which is also a dumb high school thing to do. No one can get you in more trouble then your friends).
If you truly cared about the Orwellian tactics of the school admins, then 'cracking' the password and spreading it isn't the right thing to do. The right thing to do is get your facts and arguments together and meet with the principal, the school board, and other responsible parties. It is pretty likely that they won't agree because they instituted the policies and, while they might be smart people in other areas, are probably sheeple with computers.
So the next step is go to the papers with a sexy headline and the facts. In my experience small-town papers love to skewer the local government and the school if they get the chance. And the larger papers will soon pick it up. That is properly exercising your civil rights.
That said, I can't really condemn you for what you did. I was a smart kid in high school, but everyone does dumb things as teenagers. Comes with the territory. But if you are still in a position to do what I suggest, go for it.
At the very least, civic activism is good experience and makes a nice essay for college applications. Also, a student who handles situations like these firmly, but politely and responsibly, is usually accorded greater freedoms and a larger say in school matters than snot-nosed kids who cause over-worked teachers hassles.
I just bought a Harmony remote about a month ago. It took a phone call to the company to get it to work with my somewhat difficult setup, but once it did, three words: Worth every penny.
Even if it didn't quite function as designed, it would still be worth it. Call up the manufacturers of your components and ask how much it would be to get an OEM replacement remote. Probably about $50 a piece. If you have a TV, Satellite Box, and DVD player, you are talking $150 to replace all three.
You can get the Harmony 676 at New Egg for about $110. Then you take the batteries out of your OEM remotes and put them in a drawer.
Sure, it is a bit of an extravagance, but they really do work well. It is hella cool to see your entire home entertainment system turn on and set itself for whatever you are doing. My family used to have trouble using the system; I think they'll find it easier now.
Anyway, off-topic. PC's are definitely not as easy to use as consumer electronics. Granted, VCR programming might still be a little difficult, but my cheapo VCR can set its own clock and has a simple schedule system for setting channels and duration. How often have you had to open up your DVD player, TV, or VCR to upgrade components? Have you had to flash your TV's firmware?
I think it comes down to: do you see Internet service as the same as sewer service, water service, electrical power, or public highways?
Other posters have pointed this out already, but the public owns the core Internet protocols, since they were financed by the American taxpayer. So in some sense, this isn't like wiring the U.S. for telephone service, where a private company came up with the standard and took the hit for startup costs.
It isn't exactly like public highways either. Private roads existed in the U.S., but only the government had the resources to build the interstate highway system. In way, however, they don't really build and maintain that system; they contract out for companies to handle those chores. The only thing the government doesn't farm out is enforcing the rules of the road.
The more I think about it, most major infrastructure projects in the U.S. have been combinations of public and private funding. Government universal service fees funded nationwide phone and electrical service. The Internet is publically specified but runs mostly over commercial communications line.
I think that means we should not preclude the possibility of government-provided service. The scenario you are describing only comes into play if the government ISP is the ONLY choice. Right now, if I don't want to play by an ISP's rules, I change ISP's. That's capitalism. Government broadband is just co-ops for Internet access.
Re:Museum of Science Exhibit - More Info
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Filling Up On Algae
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I've seen the exhibit... it's actually kind of cool for basically a huge tank of algae. I don't think it really demonstrates the process completely, but is meant as more of a demonstration.
People click Yes without thinking, because thinking doesn't do any good. If they look at the certificate, it just has a long string of numbers and the name of a corporation they probably never heard of claiming that this is okay. How does the average user know what this information is and if it is even accurate? If the whole page is spoofed, why couldn't they spoof that too?
In addition, some sites, like yahoo, use a central server to authenticate you and then redirect to the resource you were requesting. So the browser asks you: "Do you trust login.yahoo.com"? And the user thinks: "What's this? I requested mail.yahoo.com. Is this a virus or adware or legitimate?".
Most people are hopping on to buy something from Amazon and E-Bay. They don't have the time or inclination or know-how to research every certificate they see on-line. So they trust pretty much everything because they can't get anything done if they don't.
If there's anything about Internet security that needs fixing, it's that.
One of the obvious reasons is that Firefly was a science fiction television show, which is generally a fairly nerdy entertainment. In addition, Firefly is generally regarded as a very good science fiction show that some might mention in the same breath as Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Babylon 5.
You probably could argue that TV is generally lame, and that is difficult to dispute. However, I've found Joss Whedon's work to be generally better than most of the shows out there. He deals with a lot of interesting themes in a very entertaining way without talking down to his audience.
More than that, he takes risks with his work. He kills off beloved characters if it serves his story, regardless of the fan reaction. He did a show that was almost entirely without dialogue and an hour-long musical episode.
These approaches could have ended up as cheap gimmicks, but usually they worked really well. I think a lot of people want to see entertainment that does try to be different. I think geeks and nerds are used to seeing value in things that other people might not understand.
Is a sci-fi movie ultimately stuff that matters? Perhaps not compared perhaps to environmental issues, war, and politics. But life has to be about more than that. Art, music, and culture have their places as well. Wide availablity and low accessibility don't necessarily disqualify popular mediums from being art and being important in its own way.
It sounds like you haven't really seen any of Mr. Whedon's work. I suggest you rent a few of the Buffy TV series DVD's or the Firefly collection and try it. You might find you like it, or at the very least, have a more informed dislike of it.
A music download service with Google's visibility probably would be the system to crack things wide open. I wonder if it might be the only way to finally be rid of DRM. This theory has 2 assumptions:
Assumption: Most people download movies, TV shows, music, etc. because the current legal services are too complicated (e.g. another program to learn, confusing rules on use, inconvenient to setup, etc.).
Assumption: Most people also download the above items because they aren't available digitally when people want them. That is, Spiderman 3 might come out in theaters and some people might want to buy the movie for home use the day after they see it in the theater.
If you could Google for digital pay media and the content you want is found when you want it, and there is an easy way to pay for it, then I think people would do it. iTunes proves this to an extent, but many users don't the bandwidth or the technical know-how to install it (scary as that might seem).
There are many disadvantages to p2p systems: it can be hard to find what you want, for some tools you have to queue up to download it from the people who have it, and when you finally do get it, it might not be what you were expecting.
A Google service with torrents from legitimate content providers for a fair price, would stomp all over the grey and black market. It would be quick and reliable and you would be downloading from fast servers rather than relying on single points behind a cable modem. And if the Google service is popular enough, there wouldn't be a need for DRM.... it would be so simple to access and pay for, that it would be more convenient for people to download a legal copy when they wanted it then find and download an illegal copy.
To my mind, I see two justifications for using adblockers:
1. Cost of bandwidth/time to download 2. Computer stability
Depending on the ad implementation and your connection speed, you are paying to download ads from the web site. The 32K+ of images, flash, etc. that you are downloading per page you visit puts stress on your ISP and connection. For slower connections, it is also spending your time since you have to wait for the ads to download.
Some browsers, depending on the page design, can't render the page if the ads haven't finished downloading. If the advertising server is slow, access to content is impaired by something that isn't content. This is a problem for the user who wants the content and to the provider, since a slow site is often dismissed by the user.
As far as computer stability: How many times have a Java or Flash-based ad slowed your browser to a crawl or outright crashed it? Pop-ups can clutter your computer until it is unusable.
TV ads don't crash your television, are paid for by the advertiser, not the audience (well, the cable TV use case makes this debatable), and have relatively minimal impacts on your time and ability to receive a TV signal. Until web advertising is as well-behaved as TV or print ads, I think users have the right to block them as malfunctioning programs.
Pretty good. Just to keep things even, Caltech aren't the only ones to tweak the noses of some big schools during a football game. MIT has had its fair share including:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1990/H-Y/H-Y. ht ml
The better hack, in my opinion, was the balloon they inflated at mid-field during the Harvard-Yale game that read MIT. They don't appear to have that exhibit on-line.
You can't necessarily take the radio script word-for-word. There are obviously no visuals, so there is a need for more words to describe the environments and to fill time.
Movies have a lot of visual elements that take time away from dialog. There are establishing shots, transitions, etc. There are also cases where something that takes a long time to describe with words actually happens very quickly in real time.
It can also be tedious to be constantly commenting on the action. "Sin City" frequently fell into this trap with its noir-style monologues. I can see that he is tired and lighting a cigarette; you don't have to tell me that too.
I was watching "From the Earth to the Moon" and one of the characters who was describing the Apollo 1 fire made the point that it may have taken two or three minutes to say what happened, but the whole thing was over and done in about 15 seconds.
A lot of people complained that the Spiderman movies missed a lot of Spidey's one-liners, but visually the fights had to be fast and brutual to make it believable that super-beings were having it out. They move faster and hit harder than normal people. And there just isn't a lot of time for dialog when your head is being busted in by an armored tentacle.
Somebody reading this post is probably tallying up what I say is longer and shorter in both mediums and saying, "Well, by his math, there should still be time for all of the parts we love." The point I'm making is: each medium has different constraints; dealing with those constraints is the difficult and fun part of making content for that medium. MP3 software for desktop machines and embedded hardware have significant differences in implementation and interface.
That said, it doesn't sound like the makers of this movie did a good job dealing with those constraints. I would have sat through another 10 or 15 minutes of the movie to get some of the guide entries back or to explain the 'logic' behind some of the events in the movie.
And I am disturbed by the screenwriter's admission that he really didn't understand improbability. DA had lots of dialog from Trillian and others in the books commenting on the fact that very convenient things kept happening because the ship was doing it. DA got to have it both ways: he got a plot device that could string the story together AND everyone accepts it because the characters all realized that improbable, but fortuitous things are happening. It's self-referential humor, which Hollywood should be very good at by now. Sounds like they blew their chance there.
I hope the movie is still good, but this article really gave me concerns. Sadly, we vote with our dollar before seeing the film.
An interesting factoid, but the quote you selected actually states that the lunar dust MAY smell like exploded fireworks. Mr. Hirasaki notes that the lunar dust may not be the only explanation. The crew mentioned that they smelt "a 'strong odor of burnt material' was noticed following the S-IVB stage separation when the crew opened the CSM tunnel".
Do to the way the human nose works, it is possible that the smell from separation never went away, the astronauts just got use to it and ceased to smell it anymore. It is a sealed space, however, so someone who entered after the flight may have noticed the smell again.
It probably was the dust, but the article you quoted doesn't say this definitively.
Subversion might be a better option now. It isn't that hard to setup and you can front it with an HTTP server. You are probably more likely to get HTTP through a firewall than some other protocol like CVS' or Subversion's home-grown protocol.
The added bonus is that you can use mod_auth to control access and can use your portable Firefox or Subversion client to access your data anywhere.
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Very insightful post. I absolutely agree. I recently setup my own server for music and, eventually, video and e-mail. Now when I want to run an application that I can't install on my work server, or I'm stuck somewhere with Net access, but nothing to do... I contact my server, install the software, or stream my digital media, and I have access to all of the data I want on my terms. When I'm traveling, I can take digital photos and send them home.
Stepping back in time, in college I used Linux almost exclusively one year. I setup the system to do Appletalk networking and Samba networking and was able to access my compter's drives from anywhere on campus. I walked around without any floppy disks (which could break and loose data) and could log on to any free computer in the cluster and do my work.
Once you get used to having your own networked server, nothing else will do. One barrier I see right now is that server administration is probably too complicated for the average computer user. Securing the machine needs to be easier, back ups need to be easier, and setting up secure remote access needs to be easier. The other barrier is ISP's treating broadband as 'smart TV'. Capping uploads at a slower rate than downloads and banning the use of server software severely limits the utility of a broadband connection. Our salvation so far has been MMORPG's and X-Box live. Games need fast connections in both directions and run server processes to support multi-player gaming.
There is a balance that can be struck here. Right now, big companies think they have to control the hardware and the content. But there are a lot more computer users than there are hosting and content companies. What if Sun sold an easy to administrate home server? The entertainment companies could sell you a license to serve content from your home server to any of the devices that you own. Any display device would just be a dumb terminal to the content. Consumers would be happy; they can access their content on any device they wanted, when they wanted.
This scheme could run up against the DRM debate... but what if you owned a portable networked media player? It has a key to access your home server and the content you purchased. If you want to go to a friend's house and listen to music or watch a movie you own, just take your access device and hook it to your friend's TV. Now you can do what we've always done; loan content to friends on a limited basis or share the experience of content with a group of people, but when you go home, you take your movies and music back with you. Heck, the server could have a loan-out feature. Issue a temporary key to your friend to access your content; there will be no more scratched CD's or DVD's that you will never see again. And content companies would really be dealing with a market they are used to. They still made money when I could bring CD's to a friend's house and listen.
Whoever figures out how to make 'information furnaces' easy to use, standardized, and cheap, is going to eat everyone's lunch. Tivo showed that people are ready for it; we just have to convince the content producers that they can make money without restricting their users.
Right on, comrade!
Everyone knows that pornography is just a tool to deprive us of our precious bodily fluids!
Every second you use an electronic device, you are actually utilizing fossil fuels or nuclear power. Very little of the power that we use is generated by renewable sources of energy. Then think about: the computers used in the data center that hosts the movies, the lights for the data center, the chemicals used in the air conditioners and the air conditioners themselves. How about the gas used by the technicians who drive from home to the data center to keep the lights on.
Think about the fuel trucks for the film production crews. How about the propane used to cook the cast and crew dinners. The sets that are built and thrown away. The trash created by everyone involved.
Compared to all of that, the production of the DVD disk is a miniscule part of the environmental impact of movie creation and distribution. You have a point that DVD's can be wasteful. The studios will create far more copies of Shrek 2, Stealth, and the Dukes of Hazzard then we will really need. Personally, I take care of my disks and plan on being able to watch them for as long as I have a player that can play them.
The very act of keeping a human being alive at a 21st century level of comfort is an environmentally unfriendly act. Objecting to DVD disks on the basis of environmental impact is a silly argument at best, given the context above. If you are that concerned about the environment, start by advocating cleaner means of generating electic power and making electronic equipment easy to recycle. That will make more of an impact then complaining about DVD's.
No, no, no... It didn't slip under anybody's radar. That movie showed up on theater-goer's scopes like a great big 747 of suck.
I always felt like the time penalty mostly effected on-line purchase. I can walk into a store and get something I want or need right away. Even the best on-line stores can only promise overnight delivery. And then you may lose time if you happen to miss the delivery truck at your house.
I've had two-day shipping take a week to get to me: a day for processing before shipping, two days in transit, and then a day where I miss the delivery guy and have to pick up the package at the processing center.
In my mind, what hurts local sales are:
* Sales Tax
* Gas Cost
* Lower Selection
What helps on-line sales:
* Larger selection
* Easier access (In real life, you have to travel between stores; on-line, stores are essentially all located in the same place)
* No sales tax
With on-line purchases, I tend to see shipping as equivalent to tax; it's a cost on top of the price of the item. If I want the shipping time to be minimal (to try and match the convenience of in-store purchase), then I pay almost as much as sales tax in some places. But sales tax is currently high enough in many places that shipping is still a good deal.
So the first thing is: states have to lower or eliminate sales taxes. Massachusetts just had a tax holiday. And a lot of people came into that state to buy. Then Rhode Island, wrong-headedly, started reminding people of the RI use tax on out-of-state purchases (which I think is an illegal tariff, but the law disagrees). People aren't going to pay more tax on something they already paid taxes on, especially if it is impractical for the state to track down violators.
States have tried to address on-line purchasing by trying to tax it, which is difficult. But it is relatively easy to make goods cheaper in-state by lowering something they have direct control over. Then your residents might be more willing to patronize local businesses and not travel out-of-state or order on-line.
Which brings me to state and federal gasoline taxes. Taken together, in some places this can add almost a dollar a gallon. Here again, I'm using Rhode Island because I live there and it has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. Rhode Island has a unique advantage in that the whole state is about the size of the New York metropolitan area, but isn't as densely populated. It would be pretty easy to get people to drive to the mall and spend money since most items can be obtained within 20-40 minutes of their residence. Just make gas cheaper by cutting the taxes on it.
The selection issue is harder to address. Brick-and-mortar stores are physically limited. On-line stores hide this behind a facade, so the user sees their capacity as effectively infinite.
Interestingly, for many computer products, I've found the brick-and-mortar stores to often be competitive. If they skipped the rebates and just offered the lower price, the time saved by not waiting for shipping would be worth driving over and buying.
Ironically, the party in power in the U.S. should have been perfectly equipped to deal with this issue by lowering taxes. Traditionally, the Republican party platform was supposed to be about smaller government and getting it off peoples' backs. Unfortunately, both parties keep making government bigger and more intrusive; the difference is mostly in where they want to spend the money. Republicans like defense and Democrats like social services. We can't wean governments off of sales, gasoline, and other taxes unless we make our government cost less.
Then I want power drills placed next to aspirin in the drugstore. I've heard your fancy theories about constricting blood vessels in the brain and sinus pressure causing headaches, but I know for a fact that there are actually demons in my head that are causing the problems. And every right-thinking person knows that the only way to get rid of demons is to drill holes to let them out.
At the very least, people should know about both treatments so they can make an informed choice.
There are many reasons that their approach is better than the one you posit. The most important is that they actually have a platform to continue to make improvements. They figured out how to make the electronics replacable and how to construct a tether for power. They are also on their way to having adjustable buoyancy.
Other posters have pointed out that submersible motors can be had relatively inexpensively. Next summer, they could spend another $100-200 and get thrusters installed. Or install pumps to control the ballast. They could install microphones or get a better camera. Heck, with something like this, they could inspect boat hulls underwater and make enough cash to make improvements.
I figure you are probably just trolling, but it seems worthwhile to point out that this thing has a lot of potential.
On of my family members recently got rid of their X-Box and switched to Nintendo for the very reasons you are citing. She grew up with a bunch of different game systems, but ultimately ended with a Super Nintendo and she was hooked.
Flash forward a few years and she and her husband purchased a new X-Box. They didn't end up playing it much. They found many of the games were just too complex to play casually. They wanted to be able to pop in a game and play for a few hours without having to go through boot camp.
The GameCube ended up being the perfect system. It had updated versions of many of the games they liked from old Nintendo systems (F-Zero, Metroid, Mario Kart), they are pretty easy to learn, and they had more options for playing games together. They weren't really into multiplayer FPS, but they would race each other in Mario Kart any day.
Just a little empirical evidence to support your point. As video gaming becomes more popular, more niches are going to open up; Nintendo is probably smart to stick with the family space. Heck, even hardcore gamers like to play games like Lumines every now and then. Personally, I wish Katamari Damacy was on the GC.
It could render sound in ASCII?
The mind boggles.....
Seeing as you were (are?) in high school at the time, I could see how you could see slipping the password to a few trustworthy people as harmless, but apparently it wasn't. In my eyes, you are as guilty as the people who used this information for harmful ends, because you enabled them.
Okay, so you were curious and figured it out. I would have hung onto that password if I needed it to get around something to do my actual work. And perhaps I would have used it to help a friend out in a similar situation (which is also a dumb high school thing to do. No one can get you in more trouble then your friends).
If you truly cared about the Orwellian tactics of the school admins, then 'cracking' the password and spreading it isn't the right thing to do. The right thing to do is get your facts and arguments together and meet with the principal, the school board, and other responsible parties. It is pretty likely that they won't agree because they instituted the policies and, while they might be smart people in other areas, are probably sheeple with computers.
So the next step is go to the papers with a sexy headline and the facts. In my experience small-town papers love to skewer the local government and the school if they get the chance. And the larger papers will soon pick it up. That is properly exercising your civil rights.
That said, I can't really condemn you for what you did. I was a smart kid in high school, but everyone does dumb things as teenagers. Comes with the territory. But if you are still in a position to do what I suggest, go for it.
At the very least, civic activism is good experience and makes a nice essay for college applications. Also, a student who handles situations like these firmly, but politely and responsibly, is usually accorded greater freedoms and a larger say in school matters than snot-nosed kids who cause over-worked teachers hassles.
If you press it, the label changes to "Do not press this button again."
I just bought a Harmony remote about a month ago. It took a phone call to the company to get it to work with my somewhat difficult setup, but once it did, three words: Worth every penny.
Even if it didn't quite function as designed, it would still be worth it. Call up the manufacturers of your components and ask how much it would be to get an OEM replacement remote. Probably about $50 a piece. If you have a TV, Satellite Box, and DVD player, you are talking $150 to replace all three.
You can get the Harmony 676 at New Egg for about $110. Then you take the batteries out of your OEM remotes and put them in a drawer.
Sure, it is a bit of an extravagance, but they really do work well. It is hella cool to see your entire home entertainment system turn on and set itself for whatever you are doing. My family used to have trouble using the system; I think they'll find it easier now.
Anyway, off-topic. PC's are definitely not as easy to use as consumer electronics. Granted, VCR programming might still be a little difficult, but my cheapo VCR can set its own clock and has a simple schedule system for setting channels and duration. How often have you had to open up your DVD player, TV, or VCR to upgrade components? Have you had to flash your TV's firmware?
Somebody is getting interviewed about the science of Star Wars. Again.
I think it comes down to: do you see Internet service as the same as sewer service, water service, electrical power, or public highways?
Other posters have pointed this out already, but the public owns the core Internet protocols, since they were financed by the American taxpayer. So in some sense, this isn't like wiring the U.S. for telephone service, where a private company came up with the standard and took the hit for startup costs.
It isn't exactly like public highways either. Private roads existed in the U.S., but only the government had the resources to build the interstate highway system. In way, however, they don't really build and maintain that system; they contract out for companies to handle those chores. The only thing the government doesn't farm out is enforcing the rules of the road.
The more I think about it, most major infrastructure projects in the U.S. have been combinations of public and private funding. Government universal service fees funded nationwide phone and electrical service. The Internet is publically specified but runs mostly over commercial communications line.
I think that means we should not preclude the possibility of government-provided service. The scenario you are describing only comes into play if the government ISP is the ONLY choice. Right now, if I don't want to play by an ISP's rules, I change ISP's. That's capitalism. Government broadband is just co-ops for Internet access.
I've seen the exhibit... it's actually kind of cool for basically a huge tank of algae. I don't think it really demonstrates the process completely, but is meant as more of a demonstration.
For those looking for more info, check here: http://www.mos.org/doc/1334
People click Yes without thinking, because thinking doesn't do any good. If they look at the certificate, it just has a long string of numbers and the name of a corporation they probably never heard of claiming that this is okay. How does the average user know what this information is and if it is even accurate? If the whole page is spoofed, why couldn't they spoof that too?
In addition, some sites, like yahoo, use a central server to authenticate you and then redirect to the resource you were requesting. So the browser asks you: "Do you trust login.yahoo.com"? And the user thinks: "What's this? I requested mail.yahoo.com. Is this a virus or adware or legitimate?".
Most people are hopping on to buy something from Amazon and E-Bay. They don't have the time or inclination or know-how to research every certificate they see on-line. So they trust pretty much everything because they can't get anything done if they don't.
If there's anything about Internet security that needs fixing, it's that.
One of the obvious reasons is that Firefly was a science fiction television show, which is generally a fairly nerdy entertainment. In addition, Firefly is generally regarded as a very good science fiction show that some might mention in the same breath as Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Babylon 5.
You probably could argue that TV is generally lame, and that is difficult to dispute. However, I've found Joss Whedon's work to be generally better than most of the shows out there. He deals with a lot of interesting themes in a very entertaining way without talking down to his audience.
More than that, he takes risks with his work. He kills off beloved characters if it serves his story, regardless of the fan reaction. He did a show that was almost entirely without dialogue and an hour-long musical episode.
These approaches could have ended up as cheap gimmicks, but usually they worked really well. I think a lot of people want to see entertainment that does try to be different. I think geeks and nerds are used to seeing value in things that other people might not understand.
Is a sci-fi movie ultimately stuff that matters? Perhaps not compared perhaps to environmental issues, war, and politics. But life has to be about more than that. Art, music, and culture have their places as well. Wide availablity and low accessibility don't necessarily disqualify popular mediums from being art and being important in its own way.
It sounds like you haven't really seen any of Mr. Whedon's work. I suggest you rent a few of the Buffy TV series DVD's or the Firefly collection and try it. You might find you like it, or at the very least, have a more informed dislike of it.
A music download service with Google's visibility probably would be the system to crack things wide open. I wonder if it might be the only way to finally be rid of DRM. This theory has 2 assumptions:
Assumption: Most people download movies, TV shows, music, etc. because the current legal services are too complicated (e.g. another program to learn, confusing rules on use, inconvenient to setup, etc.).
Assumption: Most people also download the above items because they aren't available digitally when people want them. That is, Spiderman 3 might come out in theaters and some people might want to buy the movie for home use the day after they see it in the theater.
If you could Google for digital pay media and the content you want is found when you want it, and there is an easy way to pay for it, then I think people would do it. iTunes proves this to an extent, but many users don't the bandwidth or the technical know-how to install it (scary as that might seem).
There are many disadvantages to p2p systems: it can be hard to find what you want, for some tools you have to queue up to download it from the people who have it, and when you finally do get it, it might not be what you were expecting.
A Google service with torrents from legitimate content providers for a fair price, would stomp all over the grey and black market. It would be quick and reliable and you would be downloading from fast servers rather than relying on single points behind a cable modem. And if the Google service is popular enough, there wouldn't be a need for DRM.... it would be so simple to access and pay for, that it would be more convenient for people to download a legal copy when they wanted it then find and download an illegal copy.
To my mind, I see two justifications for using adblockers:
1. Cost of bandwidth/time to download
2. Computer stability
Depending on the ad implementation and your connection speed, you are paying to download ads from the web site. The 32K+ of images, flash, etc. that you are downloading per page you visit puts stress on your ISP and connection. For slower connections, it is also spending your time since you have to wait for the ads to download.
Some browsers, depending on the page design, can't render the page if the ads haven't finished downloading. If the advertising server is slow, access to content is impaired by something that isn't content. This is a problem for the user who wants the content and to the provider, since a slow site is often dismissed by the user.
As far as computer stability: How many times have a Java or Flash-based ad slowed your browser to a crawl or outright crashed it? Pop-ups can clutter your computer until it is unusable.
TV ads don't crash your television, are paid for by the advertiser, not the audience (well, the cable TV use case makes this debatable), and have relatively minimal impacts on your time and ability to receive a TV signal. Until web advertising is as well-behaved as TV or print ads, I think users have the right to block them as malfunctioning programs.
Pretty good. Just to keep things even, Caltech aren't the only ones to tweak the noses of some big schools during a football game. MIT has had its fair share including:
. ht ml
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1990/H-Y/H-Y
The better hack, in my opinion, was the balloon they inflated at mid-field during the Harvard-Yale game that read MIT. They don't appear to have that exhibit on-line.
You can't necessarily take the radio script word-for-word. There are obviously no visuals, so there is a need for more words to describe the environments and to fill time.
Movies have a lot of visual elements that take time away from dialog. There are establishing shots, transitions, etc. There are also cases where something that takes a long time to describe with words actually happens very quickly in real time.
It can also be tedious to be constantly commenting on the action. "Sin City" frequently fell into this trap with its noir-style monologues. I can see that he is tired and lighting a cigarette; you don't have to tell me that too.
I was watching "From the Earth to the Moon" and one of the characters who was describing the Apollo 1 fire made the point that it may have taken two or three minutes to say what happened, but the whole thing was over and done in about 15 seconds.
A lot of people complained that the Spiderman movies missed a lot of Spidey's one-liners, but visually the fights had to be fast and brutual to make it believable that super-beings were having it out. They move faster and hit harder than normal people. And there just isn't a lot of time for dialog when your head is being busted in by an armored tentacle.
Somebody reading this post is probably tallying up what I say is longer and shorter in both mediums and saying, "Well, by his math, there should still be time for all of the parts we love." The point I'm making is: each medium has different constraints; dealing with those constraints is the difficult and fun part of making content for that medium. MP3 software for desktop machines and embedded hardware have significant differences in implementation and interface.
That said, it doesn't sound like the makers of this movie did a good job dealing with those constraints. I would have sat through another 10 or 15 minutes of the movie to get some of the guide entries back or to explain the 'logic' behind some of the events in the movie.
And I am disturbed by the screenwriter's admission that he really didn't understand improbability. DA had lots of dialog from Trillian and others in the books commenting on the fact that very convenient things kept happening because the ship was doing it. DA got to have it both ways: he got a plot device that could string the story together AND everyone accepts it because the characters all realized that improbable, but fortuitous things are happening. It's self-referential humor, which Hollywood should be very good at by now. Sounds like they blew their chance there.
I hope the movie is still good, but this article really gave me concerns. Sadly, we vote with our dollar before seeing the film.
An interesting factoid, but the quote you selected actually states that the lunar dust MAY smell like exploded fireworks. Mr. Hirasaki notes that the lunar dust may not be the only explanation. The crew mentioned that they smelt "a 'strong odor of burnt material' was noticed following the S-IVB stage separation when the crew opened the CSM tunnel".
Do to the way the human nose works, it is possible that the smell from separation never went away, the astronauts just got use to it and ceased to smell it anymore. It is a sealed space, however, so someone who entered after the flight may have noticed the smell again.
It probably was the dust, but the article you quoted doesn't say this definitively.
How did you get in here?
Somebody call Security! Take that man's geek credentials and escort him to the door!
Subversion might be a better option now. It isn't that hard to setup and you can front it with an HTTP server. You are probably more likely to get HTTP through a firewall than some other protocol like CVS' or Subversion's home-grown protocol.
The added bonus is that you can use mod_auth to control access and can use your portable Firefox or Subversion client to access your data anywhere.
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It's quiet. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.