A lot of this stuff could be used on objects besides an opposing navy. Shore bombardment, radar installations. There's a lot of coastline in the world, and a lot of building has gone on along them. I'm sure there's plenty of worthwhile targets within 250 miles of the shore that they could shoot these things at.
Small bands of terrorists are a definite threat. And the navy should be(and most certainly is) developing techniques to defend against them. But that doesn't mean that there is no use for some bigger, faster, more powerful weapons.
Honestly, I think China's talk of using force to reunify with Taiwan is just talk. What would they gain if they militarily attacked the island? They'd end up destroying half of the economic resources that the island has, and the ill-will they'd gain from the United States and probably most of the rest of the western world would cause some severe political problems that would mess with their economy in massive ways.
The only reason they'd have to take Taiwan by force would be pride. And I don't think they're foolish enough to take so many steps back in the name of pride.
In many countries, being an architect is seen as more respectable as it is in the US. In fact, it's often used as a sort of title along with a name. Like a medical doctor would be Doctor Smith in this country, in Guatemala for example, you would often be referred to as Architecto Smith. (I may have spelled that wrong, I was there a couple years ago, and don't really know spanish).
I recently finished five years of architecture school, got my degree, and now I'd need three years as an architectural intern, then take a long and expensive licensing test before I could legally put "architect" under my signature. I find it mildly annoying that the word gets attached to other professions.
The money is not the biggest reason. I don't think anyone goes into teaching to get rich. A while back, my mom decided to go back into teaching, and she took a job in downtown Baltimore. She was all about changing the world for these kids. She started out all bright-eyed and enthusiastic about helping them learn.
She quit after a few years for a couple of reasons. Number one, the administration of the school was so negative and destructive. The principal would announce over the school intercom that she didn't feel like dealing with any trouble-makers today, so don't bother sending them to the office. One time she had to call down to the facilities people, because that was the only way to get anyone to do anything about the child hanging from the ceiling lights.
Secondly, most of the kids parents just don't give a damn. That led to an unwillingness to learn, as well as severe discipline problems.
Third, any authority she had as a teacher to control these kids has been basically stripped away by mixtures of political correctness, "self-esteem preservation", and crybaby parents refusing to accept that their kid is a problem.
After being assulted twice by her students, and having a knife pulled on her once (she taught in an elementary school), she had had enough. No amount of money imaginable could have kept her there. That place practically killed her spirit.
Rest assured, my mom made it very clear to my teachers that I was to be held responsible for my actions in the classroom, and the quality of my work. I was well behaved anyways, but I feared the repercussions were I to cause problems.
If I start publishing your most personal secrets in a national newspaper, which right is more important? My right to free speech or your right to privacy?
The way it works is that telling people my personal secrets may make you an asshole, but it shouldn't be illegal unless you obtained the information illegally. If I broke into your house and read your diary, I performed an illegal act. The information was gained illegally. If your ex-girlfriend hates you and starts telling everyone that you still wet the bed and that news gets around, it sucks for you, but none of your rights were breeched.
The whole tabloid industry is based around getting as many of the most personal secrets as possible for publishing. The people who work there are probably some of the most perverse, unsavory, and useless human beings around, but as long as their information gathering techniques don't break any laws, it's hard to stop them from publishing stuff.
I don't think most of the iTMS customers are being driven to the store by the RIAA's lawsuits. All along, there have been lots of people saying that they downloaded music from P2P because it was convenient, and they only did it illegally because there was no decent legal alternative.
Apple's business model is to make things even more convenient, allow people to be honest, and offer it at a price that's not much worse than free.
Sure, there are still plenty of people out there just downloading whatever they can find for nothing, just as there are people who shoplift in brick and mortar stores. But that doesn't mean there's no money to be made in selling stuff.
Awwww. OSX has been out long enough that if a piece of software hasn't been moved over, the company that owns it doen't see the value, and it will probably never be ported. There are years of old machines that can run OSX, you can buy one used for pretty cheap. Go spend a little money on something faster, and that performance hit won't even be noticeable. And then you can stop living in the past, talking about the good ol' days, and shaking your fist at all the kids zooming by on their fancy G5's.
I was a complete social recluse during highschool, for a number of reasons, and I spent all my time either being miserable at school, or locked in my room at home, on the computer. A week before I graduated, my mom gave me a pamphlet about a company sort of like outward bound, that did a bunch of backpacking trips. The pictures in it were beautiful, and I ended up choosing the 41 day trip in Alaska, not really having any idea what I was getting myself into. My previous outdoor experience was limited to a couple camping trips in cub scouts when I was like 10, and playing in the small wooded area behind my house during middle school.
Anyways, I ended up going on this trip, entirely underprepared for it. When I first got to the airport, and some of the instructors for the trip picked me up at the gate, we were talking, and my lack of knowledge of anything useful for the trip, as well as my general unsocial-ness led them to tell me that they weren't sure the trip was for me. And I certainly had no idea at the time that I'd spend the next 6 weeks without toilet paper.
Long story short, it ended up being, by far, the greatest experience ever, one of those life changing deals. Damn hard work, but the personal rewards were great, and the scenery up there is beyond belief. I did another 30 day trip up through some of the Yukon a few years later, and that was equally awesome.
Unfortunately, I haven't been on any good backpacking trips since then, mostly because college has required too much time and work. Especially needing those internships to graduate. (Although I did manage to get an internship in the jungles in Belize. That rocked.)
I guess the point is, if you can fit a trip like that into your schedule, budget, it's so worth it. Although working at Pixar would undoubtedly kick ass as well.
I was not implying that details only involve aesthetics. The point that I was trying to get across that an issue like noise reduction has become more than just a detail for Apple. A detail in that sense would be maybe adding little dampening pads where a fan is bolted to the case. But Apple went further and designed the whole system around thermal zones and a large number of computer controlled fans.
At that point, it goes beyond a detail, and is one of the defining elements of the computer's design. And I hope a lot of people appreciate how the goals of thes powermac designers/engineers involve more than just putting the fastest processor available into a box in the cheapest way possible.
I'm mostly disappointed that they still haven't announced new monitors. I don't want a sleek aluminum G5 sitting next to one of those dated looking plastic cinema displays, with a three inch border around the screen. New displays!
That's not attention to detail, that's just a different methodology. Not going the cheapest way possible. For attention to detail, notice the lack of cables all over the place inside the computer, or how the little capacitors and other components on the boards are colored to match the internal design. It may be silly in some ways, but when designers care enough to try and make the inside of a computer beautiful, I find that kind of comforting.
Some places are still like that. My gf works at a library, and you just have to sign up for a block of time, and you can use it for free as long as you live in that parish. When I visit there, half the computers are people without computers either typing out papers, or checking their hotmail accounts. The other half are kids playing numbers games or watching little videos on the disney website.
Yeah, but it'd be faster for me to drive out to compUSA and move some files across firewire than to download a couple gigs over my crappy cable connection. And I can be reasonably confident that I'm not downloading malware pretending to be microsoft office.
Oh, stop being so pessimistic. I'm 24, I just graduated from architecture school. I've got a brain full of ideas, lots of energy, but not much money.
How am I supposed create and share all of my ideas? I guess I could wait 30 years, and hope everything works out well, and I'll find the resources to build some really cool things. Or maybe I could dabble in a virtual world where the costs are lower, things move faster, and there's plenty of interested people to share my work with.
That being said, in second life, land prices are so high that it can be hard to make big things. But it's still a whole lot easier than real life.
Really, what would be perfect for this whole MAME rom issue would be for someone to create the equivlent of the iTunes music store, just geared towards old, obsolete arcade games. Gather all the roms together, make them accessible through a clean, easy, and reliable interface, and charge a reasonable price. Just like in the music world, it wouldn't end all of the illegal copying going on, but it would create a decent alternative.
There are, of course, a lot of practical issues that would make this very difficult to do. There are a whole lot of little game developers, it'd probably be hard to track down who owns many games, and offering newer games along side older ones would complicate a lot of things, least of all the pricing issues.
I think the most basic problem would be that water is pretty heavy. Lead is heavy too, but it probably takes a significantly larger mass of water to create a barrier similar to a mass of lead. And then you need to create some sort of container, which would have to be pretty heavy duty to protect the water from the extreme temperature changes you tend to find in space. That container would probably end up being almost as heavy as whatever shielding the water replaced.
Yeah, but then how are you going to know what to look at? Just browse through random addresses, hoping to find a useful photograph of a decent building?
Did you watch any of the trailers for The Incredibles? You can download one for free from apple.com. It really doesn't seem to have much in common with any of the other super hero movies that hollywood has been spitting out lately, other than the fact that it has "super heros" as main characters.
Most buildings worth looking at probably already have pictures available online. Professionally taken pictures, interior, and exterior. And probably a lot of other interesting information about the building.
I don't see how this system would be all that much more useful than a google search for your purposes.
And watching some of the making of dealies, I learned that they record the actors doing the voices before any of the animation, and they record video as well as audio. Then the facial expressions and gestures that the actors make are often used a points of references for the artists animating the characters.
I spent some time living on a coffee plantation in Guatemala, and I found it amusing that they worried about impatients. A flower my mom was constantly planting and trying to maintain in the gardens around our house back in the states, on the coffee plantationthey were a hated weed. The guy who owned the plantation told me that they were horrible, because if you cut them up, each piece would just turn into a new plant faster than you can imagine.
My point was that that shouldn't matter. Like in my books on the porch analogy, you might know that those books belonged to somebody else, but when they get left on your property, then the original owners really don't have a valid complaint when you do with them what you wish. Monsanto should be suing the farmer from whom the pollen blew, for distributing protected material.
Now that I think about it, it's a lot like the RIAA and filesharing, but instead of me using kazaa to download files, some sort of malware downloads the mp3's to my computer without me telling it to. Should the RIAA come and sue me for having those files now? No, they should go after whoever distributed them.
The guy wasn't infringing on their patent. He didn't make those seeds. If I pulled my car up in front of your house in the middle of the night, threw an box full of books onto your front porch, and then drove off, could I then drive over to the police station and tell them that you stole my books? What if I waited a week, and in that time you sold those books? Are you a theif then?
I fail to see how this is any different. Except maybe that in the case of crops, cross pollenation not only adds the genetically modified stuff to this farmers field, it also reduces the amount of non-modified seeds, because only so many seeds can be produced in a given amount of space. That hardly seems fair to the farmer.
That's a bit of an overgeneralization, and I hope you don't really feel as strongly about what you said as it sounds. While it's true that some games require a huge time investment (especially rpg's), it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
Games have undoubtedly gotten more complicated. This isn't due to a lack of innovation, it's due to new technologies allowing lots of innovation. The fact that there's a huge amount of money involved in the game industry has spawned many companies that just respin older games hoping to make a quick buck, but that doesn't take anything away from newer games that are innovative and good.
Well designed games have a level of depth that can suck you in for a long time (replay value), but also have a well designed learning curve. It's hard to do, but not impossible. I spent dozens of hours playing Grand Theft Auto 3, to the point where I still have all of liberty city pretty much memorized. But my best memories of the game are from when I first rented it from blockbuster for a few days. I hadn't gotten any of the weapons, only one third of the city was available, and I hardly bothered with the missions. But just driving around the city, running from the cops was really easy to pick up, and hella fun.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of this stuff could be used on objects besides an opposing navy. Shore bombardment, radar installations. There's a lot of coastline in the world, and a lot of building has gone on along them. I'm sure there's plenty of worthwhile targets within 250 miles of the shore that they could shoot these things at.
Small bands of terrorists are a definite threat. And the navy should be(and most certainly is) developing techniques to defend against them. But that doesn't mean that there is no use for some bigger, faster, more powerful weapons.
Honestly, I think China's talk of using force to reunify with Taiwan is just talk. What would they gain if they militarily attacked the island? They'd end up destroying half of the economic resources that the island has, and the ill-will they'd gain from the United States and probably most of the rest of the western world would cause some severe political problems that would mess with their economy in massive ways.
The only reason they'd have to take Taiwan by force would be pride. And I don't think they're foolish enough to take so many steps back in the name of pride.
Yeah, I wonder how long it'll be until "Perl God" becomes an actual job title.
In many countries, being an architect is seen as more respectable as it is in the US. In fact, it's often used as a sort of title along with a name. Like a medical doctor would be Doctor Smith in this country, in Guatemala for example, you would often be referred to as Architecto Smith. (I may have spelled that wrong, I was there a couple years ago, and don't really know spanish).
I recently finished five years of architecture school, got my degree, and now I'd need three years as an architectural intern, then take a long and expensive licensing test before I could legally put "architect" under my signature. I find it mildly annoying that the word gets attached to other professions.
The money is not the biggest reason. I don't think anyone goes into teaching to get rich. A while back, my mom decided to go back into teaching, and she took a job in downtown Baltimore. She was all about changing the world for these kids. She started out all bright-eyed and enthusiastic about helping them learn.
She quit after a few years for a couple of reasons. Number one, the administration of the school was so negative and destructive. The principal would announce over the school intercom that she didn't feel like dealing with any trouble-makers today, so don't bother sending them to the office. One time she had to call down to the facilities people, because that was the only way to get anyone to do anything about the child hanging from the ceiling lights.
Secondly, most of the kids parents just don't give a damn. That led to an unwillingness to learn, as well as severe discipline problems.
Third, any authority she had as a teacher to control these kids has been basically stripped away by mixtures of political correctness, "self-esteem preservation", and crybaby parents refusing to accept that their kid is a problem.
After being assulted twice by her students, and having a knife pulled on her once (she taught in an elementary school), she had had enough. No amount of money imaginable could have kept her there. That place practically killed her spirit.
Rest assured, my mom made it very clear to my teachers that I was to be held responsible for my actions in the classroom, and the quality of my work. I was well behaved anyways, but I feared the repercussions were I to cause problems.
If I start publishing your most personal secrets in a national newspaper, which right is more important? My right to free speech or your right to privacy?
The way it works is that telling people my personal secrets may make you an asshole, but it shouldn't be illegal unless you obtained the information illegally. If I broke into your house and read your diary, I performed an illegal act. The information was gained illegally. If your ex-girlfriend hates you and starts telling everyone that you still wet the bed and that news gets around, it sucks for you, but none of your rights were breeched.
The whole tabloid industry is based around getting as many of the most personal secrets as possible for publishing. The people who work there are probably some of the most perverse, unsavory, and useless human beings around, but as long as their information gathering techniques don't break any laws, it's hard to stop them from publishing stuff.
I don't think most of the iTMS customers are being driven to the store by the RIAA's lawsuits. All along, there have been lots of people saying that they downloaded music from P2P because it was convenient, and they only did it illegally because there was no decent legal alternative.
Apple's business model is to make things even more convenient, allow people to be honest, and offer it at a price that's not much worse than free.
Sure, there are still plenty of people out there just downloading whatever they can find for nothing, just as there are people who shoplift in brick and mortar stores. But that doesn't mean there's no money to be made in selling stuff.
Awwww. OSX has been out long enough that if a piece of software hasn't been moved over, the company that owns it doen't see the value, and it will probably never be ported. There are years of old machines that can run OSX, you can buy one used for pretty cheap. Go spend a little money on something faster, and that performance hit won't even be noticeable. And then you can stop living in the past, talking about the good ol' days, and shaking your fist at all the kids zooming by on their fancy G5's.
I was a complete social recluse during highschool, for a number of reasons, and I spent all my time either being miserable at school, or locked in my room at home, on the computer. A week before I graduated, my mom gave me a pamphlet about a company sort of like outward bound, that did a bunch of backpacking trips. The pictures in it were beautiful, and I ended up choosing the 41 day trip in Alaska, not really having any idea what I was getting myself into. My previous outdoor experience was limited to a couple camping trips in cub scouts when I was like 10, and playing in the small wooded area behind my house during middle school.
Anyways, I ended up going on this trip, entirely underprepared for it. When I first got to the airport, and some of the instructors for the trip picked me up at the gate, we were talking, and my lack of knowledge of anything useful for the trip, as well as my general unsocial-ness led them to tell me that they weren't sure the trip was for me. And I certainly had no idea at the time that I'd spend the next 6 weeks without toilet paper.
Long story short, it ended up being, by far, the greatest experience ever, one of those life changing deals. Damn hard work, but the personal rewards were great, and the scenery up there is beyond belief. I did another 30 day trip up through some of the Yukon a few years later, and that was equally awesome.
Unfortunately, I haven't been on any good backpacking trips since then, mostly because college has required too much time and work. Especially needing those internships to graduate. (Although I did manage to get an internship in the jungles in Belize. That rocked.)
I guess the point is, if you can fit a trip like that into your schedule, budget, it's so worth it. Although working at Pixar would undoubtedly kick ass as well.
I was not implying that details only involve aesthetics. The point that I was trying to get across that an issue like noise reduction has become more than just a detail for Apple. A detail in that sense would be maybe adding little dampening pads where a fan is bolted to the case. But Apple went further and designed the whole system around thermal zones and a large number of computer controlled fans.
At that point, it goes beyond a detail, and is one of the defining elements of the computer's design. And I hope a lot of people appreciate how the goals of thes powermac designers/engineers involve more than just putting the fastest processor available into a box in the cheapest way possible.
I'm mostly disappointed that they still haven't announced new monitors. I don't want a sleek aluminum G5 sitting next to one of those dated looking plastic cinema displays, with a three inch border around the screen. New displays!
That's not attention to detail, that's just a different methodology. Not going the cheapest way possible. For attention to detail, notice the lack of cables all over the place inside the computer, or how the little capacitors and other components on the boards are colored to match the internal design. It may be silly in some ways, but when designers care enough to try and make the inside of a computer beautiful, I find that kind of comforting.
Some places are still like that. My gf works at a library, and you just have to sign up for a block of time, and you can use it for free as long as you live in that parish. When I visit there, half the computers are people without computers either typing out papers, or checking their hotmail accounts. The other half are kids playing numbers games or watching little videos on the disney website.
Yeah, but it'd be faster for me to drive out to compUSA and move some files across firewire than to download a couple gigs over my crappy cable connection. And I can be reasonably confident that I'm not downloading malware pretending to be microsoft office.
Oh, stop being so pessimistic. I'm 24, I just graduated from architecture school. I've got a brain full of ideas, lots of energy, but not much money.
How am I supposed create and share all of my ideas? I guess I could wait 30 years, and hope everything works out well, and I'll find the resources to build some really cool things. Or maybe I could dabble in a virtual world where the costs are lower, things move faster, and there's plenty of interested people to share my work with.
That being said, in second life, land prices are so high that it can be hard to make big things. But it's still a whole lot easier than real life.
Really, what would be perfect for this whole MAME rom issue would be for someone to create the equivlent of the iTunes music store, just geared towards old, obsolete arcade games. Gather all the roms together, make them accessible through a clean, easy, and reliable interface, and charge a reasonable price. Just like in the music world, it wouldn't end all of the illegal copying going on, but it would create a decent alternative.
There are, of course, a lot of practical issues that would make this very difficult to do. There are a whole lot of little game developers, it'd probably be hard to track down who owns many games, and offering newer games along side older ones would complicate a lot of things, least of all the pricing issues.
But yeah, it'd be cool.
I think the most basic problem would be that water is pretty heavy. Lead is heavy too, but it probably takes a significantly larger mass of water to create a barrier similar to a mass of lead. And then you need to create some sort of container, which would have to be pretty heavy duty to protect the water from the extreme temperature changes you tend to find in space. That container would probably end up being almost as heavy as whatever shielding the water replaced.
Yeah, but then how are you going to know what to look at? Just browse through random addresses, hoping to find a useful photograph of a decent building?
Did you watch any of the trailers for The Incredibles? You can download one for free from apple.com. It really doesn't seem to have much in common with any of the other super hero movies that hollywood has been spitting out lately, other than the fact that it has "super heros" as main characters.
Most buildings worth looking at probably already have pictures available online. Professionally taken pictures, interior, and exterior. And probably a lot of other interesting information about the building.
I don't see how this system would be all that much more useful than a google search for your purposes.
And watching some of the making of dealies, I learned that they record the actors doing the voices before any of the animation, and they record video as well as audio. Then the facial expressions and gestures that the actors make are often used a points of references for the artists animating the characters.
I spent some time living on a coffee plantation in Guatemala, and I found it amusing that they worried about impatients. A flower my mom was constantly planting and trying to maintain in the gardens around our house back in the states, on the coffee plantationthey were a hated weed. The guy who owned the plantation told me that they were horrible, because if you cut them up, each piece would just turn into a new plant faster than you can imagine.
My point was that that shouldn't matter. Like in my books on the porch analogy, you might know that those books belonged to somebody else, but when they get left on your property, then the original owners really don't have a valid complaint when you do with them what you wish. Monsanto should be suing the farmer from whom the pollen blew, for distributing protected material.
Now that I think about it, it's a lot like the RIAA and filesharing, but instead of me using kazaa to download files, some sort of malware downloads the mp3's to my computer without me telling it to. Should the RIAA come and sue me for having those files now? No, they should go after whoever distributed them.
The guy wasn't infringing on their patent. He didn't make those seeds. If I pulled my car up in front of your house in the middle of the night, threw an box full of books onto your front porch, and then drove off, could I then drive over to the police station and tell them that you stole my books? What if I waited a week, and in that time you sold those books? Are you a theif then?
I fail to see how this is any different. Except maybe that in the case of crops, cross pollenation not only adds the genetically modified stuff to this farmers field, it also reduces the amount of non-modified seeds, because only so many seeds can be produced in a given amount of space. That hardly seems fair to the farmer.
That's a bit of an overgeneralization, and I hope you don't really feel as strongly about what you said as it sounds. While it's true that some games require a huge time investment (especially rpg's), it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
Games have undoubtedly gotten more complicated. This isn't due to a lack of innovation, it's due to new technologies allowing lots of innovation. The fact that there's a huge amount of money involved in the game industry has spawned many companies that just respin older games hoping to make a quick buck, but that doesn't take anything away from newer games that are innovative and good.
Well designed games have a level of depth that can suck you in for a long time (replay value), but also have a well designed learning curve. It's hard to do, but not impossible. I spent dozens of hours playing Grand Theft Auto 3, to the point where I still have all of liberty city pretty much memorized. But my best memories of the game are from when I first rented it from blockbuster for a few days. I hadn't gotten any of the weapons, only one third of the city was available, and I hardly bothered with the missions. But just driving around the city, running from the cops was really easy to pick up, and hella fun.