If you're talking HD movies, they're recorded at only 24 frames/sec. For broadcast in NTSC-standard interlaced video (and for its HD equivalent) at 60 fields/sec, every 5th field is duplicated. Thus, 1080i broadcast HD movies usually take more bandwidth than the original 1080p signal (which can be reconstructed with no loss in quality).
From what I know, majors typically pass on between eight and sixteen cents per track to the artists, and that number hasn't changed much since the ITMS launch.
Most artists are lucky to get 15% of gross take, so given 65c going to the labels, that's less than 10c. Then, the labels deduct the standard 26% for free goods, packaging, restocking and breakages (all obviously still quite relevant for digital downloads), and my personal favourite, the 50% "new technology" deduction (which previously applied to CDs, even though labels made far more per CD than they did for vinyl). After all that, the artist is usually entitled to around 4c for the song.
Of course, this is not to say he/she actually receives that. First there's all the recording and promoting expenses to pay off as well, even though the artist does not get to keep the copyrights to their own songs. Then there's no easy way to be sure the label actually pays you what you're entitled to under your contract anyway, and the barriers to successfully auditing this are set as high as possible. Finally, even if you do manage to scrape up enough money to mount a successful audit, the label will offer to settle (typically for around a third of what you're owed), or to drive your legal expenses up a lot higher still.
It's a very rare actor that can demand millions up-front. Most have to settle for a percentage of the profits. However, due to accounting practices "considered odd by any normal business standards", 95% of movies, even box-office hits, somehow fail to make a profit - as defined by the studio, anyway. This article lists many of the ways in which this is managed, including spreading of gross receipts amongst poorer-performing pictures, "distribution fees" far in excess of reality, a 10% "overhead" fee to be applied to all marketing expenses, tax breaks that are kept by the studios & not counted for the picture, and many others.
Stan Lee got nothing from the Spider-Man movie, because the studio claimed it did not make a profit, at least as defined by his contract. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was produced cheaply and was a huge success, yet somehow "lost $20 million". Even Babylon 5, which took in $500 million in DVD sales alone, is apparently "$80 million in debt". As the creator, J Michael Straczynski said, "Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Steve Vai says very similar things about the record labels' own standard contracts, not least their various bogus deductions for digital download sales. As the saying goes, the really creative people are the accountants.
It's not just Weird Al who signed a bad contract. Nearly all artists get stuck with the same ridiculous clauses. All the major labels give you a simple choice: Sign the standard contract, or be a nobody selling your CDs at pub gigs.
Take a look at this letter from Steve Vai - it lists some of the many ways that the labels burden the artist with every expense, fair and unfair, but retain all ownership of the songs. They short-change them even the few royalties that are due, require large upfront costs for any auditing to check this, disallow auditing of crucial figures like actual manufacturing numbers, then typically "settle" with the artist for around a third of what the artist is actually due anyway.
Regarding iTunes, he says even a well-established and popular artist who is entitled to 15% royalties, would typically see only 4-5c per iTunes track, due to such creative deductions like 15% for "free goods" (there are none, for digital downloads) and the 50% "new technologies" deduction. After, of course, the label has deducted all production and marketing expenses for the songs they now own. Read the linked article, it's hair-raising.
Remember, this isn't some naive and ignorant wannabe speaking, he's been playing for 20-odd years, including many years with Frank Zappa before he went solo - he's been around. He still had no choice. The labels control the radio playlist (via illegal payola) and the shop shelfspace, so if you want to succeed, you have to do a deal with them, and they will only offer the same "standard", artist-raping contract.
I have a 24" CRT on my desk in front of me that will do 1080p and beyond. In fact, it'll do 2304 x 1440 at 85 Hz. Even the cheapo 17" CRT I used to have could do 1920 x 1200 quite legibly. CRTs are certainly capable of decent resolutions.
OTOH, I also have a 15.4" laptop that does 1920 x 1200. I've never seen a colour CRT with that sort of pixel density. And the IMB T221 leaves that for dead. LCDs are capable of more than CRTs, especially at larger sizes.
You're referring to televisions only, and large-screen televisions at that, but that's hardly representative of what CRTs *can* do.
It's a b... I mean, it's actually part of a double-planet system, orbiting around a common point in space (unlike all other moons in our solar system). And Ceres is an asteroid with a name, thank you very much.
In answer to your second question, since August 24, if the vote passes.
I certainly agree with you about the importance of assigning values, but emotions are only one way of doing that, and a fairly abstract way at that (they're a combination of many other values, weighted by the individual's personality).
Other value systems include "threat level" (very popular in the animal kingdom, and important for self-preservation for any entity) - objects like "dynamite" can be assigned a higher threat value, which will focus attention. "Relevant resources" are another; any objects that are considered useful for growth (this can include interaction with other entities). "Cost" is an obvious one, also "uniqueness/replacability". There are many others, some more relevant to humans (such as "aesthetics" and "humour").
An association database like Cyc can then make deductions from an initial set of values. For example, if it is told that "dangerous == high threat", and "explosions are dangerous", it then classes all explosion sources as threatening, and will not be so blasé about dynamite in the future.
I'm sure there's a single 360 owner on the planet without a HD - which you need to play a pretty large library of XBox titles
That would be all of two games, Football Manager 06 and Final Fantasy 11. Or, roughly the same number of games that required an HDD on a PS2. The other games can use an HDD if it's there, but don't require it. Oh, and it's an option - you only have to buy it if you feel a need for it, and when you do, it's identical to the premium model.
Compare this to the Sony approach: "If you want a PS3, you better want Blu-Ray as well, because you'll be paying for it anyway. Even if you don't own any Blu-Ray movies, or don't play any games that actually need the extra disc space." Fine for you, maybe, but a lot of people apparently disagree. I'm a bigger fan of HD video than any of my friends, but I won't be buying into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD for some time yet, so I'd rather save my money for more games.
Your PS3 promotion and Zonk rebuttals have been looking a bit strained lately. Even your spelling is suffering, I've noticed - is it all getting a bit on your nerves?
Let me assure you, the ol' days were not as good as you seem to remember:-)
I remember playing some air traffic controller game on my TRS-80 (in glorious 64x16 monochrome ASCII). Not only did I have to wait about 6 minutes for it to load in from the audio cassette (fiddling with the levels to try & make it work), but then I had to enter the mystic serial number to unlock it each time.
The "serial number" was a challenge/response code, looked up from a grid of numbers and letters. To avoid easy copying, the grid was printed in faded ink on dark red paper - and then glued to a cardboard cylinder.
Of course, the grid wasn't exactly huge, it'd probably take about 20 minutes to copy it out by hand, so the whole thing was merely an exercise in ineffective paranoia. The game wasn't even all that much fun.
You don't know if 60 million others will agree, or if absolutely no-one else will agree
It's true you don't know, but you can make a slightly-educated guess on even one sample. You can already reliably state that not everyone will say no. Your guess just gets more educated with more samples. With 100 samples, the best educated guess you can make is "1 in 100 will say yes". Your margin of error is high, but you're still better off than a pure random guess.
You don't have any way of knowing that what we have here is common, or an utter freak occurance.
I don't know anything other than "life is possible", certainly I can't say if it's common. I meant that, even if it's a freak occurance, a one in a trillion chance; when you have uncounted trillions of chances, that still means I'd be willing to bet there was at least a couple dozen other planets containing life in this universe:-) It is also equally possible at this stage that it's only a one in a hundred chance, so the assumption holds there too, at least until we learn more. We might be wrong, but we're slightly more likely to be right. Statistically, all we can say at this time is that the odds of us being the only life in the universe are one in uncounted trillions against.
I can't prove anything, of course. I certainly can't estimate the odds of there being life around Alpha Centauri, or any specific system - as you say, that would require lots more knowledge than we possess. I can only talk about overall odds, relating to the entire set of samples.
If we are on the only biosphere in the entire universe, with its truly vast numbers and variety of conditions, then "freak occurrence" doesn't begin to describe it. The odds are against us being completely alone, to put it mildly. The odds of us actually finding extra-terrestrial life on the planet next door are another matter entirely.
the PS2 is apparently still outselling the 360 month to month
As the PS1 did to the PS2 for the first year or so. I imagine the PS2 will outsell the PS3 for a while too. It is a lot cheaper after all.
As more games get released for the next-gen systems, more people upgrade to HDTVs that show them off better, and developers get more comfortable with the new hardware, PS2 sales will decline, as the PS1's did. But given the price difference, it's entirely likely that PS2s will continue to sell in small numbers for a few years yet, hence the "10 year lifespan" quotes from Sony.
what does it mean for a hypothesis for a single event to be "testable"?
I use the word "testable" in the strict mathematical sense, not the "can we test it today" sense. In other words, something is testable if there can exist evidence to prove or disprove an assertion. For your three example statements, all are theoretically testable since the evidence is (or was) there if we just knew how to look for it. The existance or non-existance of an omnipotent being is not testable, unless that being chooses to allow the evidence of itself to exist.
With natural phenomenon, scientists work on the assumption (until proven otherwise) that there is enough evidence somewhere to explain everything we see, because if you assume otherwise, you might as well give up. Deductive reasoning is an important tool for that; we have excellent reason to believe that 2 + 2 = 4 and always will, so based on that, we can consider many other conclusions equally valid. Other base assumptions may not be as firm, and are (generally) treated as such. As far as the meteorite goes, new evidence came to light (those compounds can be formed by non-organic processes too), so the earlier hypothesis was revised (we can no longer say with reasonable certainty that the meteorite once contained life). So long as we keep perspective on what is unassailable and what is assumed, I have no problem with this.
Suppose God did do something by contravening the laws of nature... You'd learn nothing about the laws of Nature from studying one of its exceptions, and gain no spiritual benefit from it.
I guess that depends how obvious it was:-) If a huge anthropomorphic being appeared in the clouds and boomed, "Behold, the dead shall rise, gravity shall be 20% stronger, and Lake Superior shall be a rather nice Merlot", then I don't imagine many people would waste much time on looking for a naturalistic explanation. I think that would fit your definition of "good reason to do otherwise". OTOH, the assumption that life was created on this planet only by divine intervention, simply because it all looks bloody complex to us, is in my books unwarranted. Further study is justified; hence, science.
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what the statistics are. If one person in a hundred says yes, chances are a few more in that 6 billion will agree. In a universe this size, with hundreds of billions of galaxies and uncounted quadrillions of planets, if life can exist in one place, it's an excellent bet that it also exists in many many other places. The chances of us being the only biosphere in the entire universe are ridiculously small, to put it mildly.
Finding it next door on Mars is another matter. We can't statistically predict that from one sample, as you say, any more than we could predict the answer of any given individual.
Thing is, "God did it" just isn't a helpful answer, if you're trying to advance your technology.
First off, it's unprovable & untestable (at least without help from Him), and second, what now? It's an explanation, but it doesn't increase your understanding. You can't build on it - you can't use it to increase your engineering ability, or to predict natural events, or to provide more food for the hungry. So scientists start out with the assumption that "everything is understandable", whether God did it or not, and proceed to try and understand it.
Now, "God did it" is more useful as a philosophical answer. It can make you happy with your life, make you feel more secure and confident. It may not directly improve your lot in life, but greater confidence will likely help you make better decisions, leading you to help yourself (and maybe others), with or without help from Him.
That argument might make good sense, if Sony's online service is similar to Microsoft's.
I'm just concerned that "free online gameplay" will be closer to the free XLink Kai for Xbox, than to Xbox Live - i.e. a basic list of player-hosted servers to connect to, then you're on your own.
You're just deliberately misinterpreting the GP. How is the area of land within your country borders any less a collection of inert minerals than the Earth? Does your continent care what you do? Or perhaps you really feel that all your "countrymen" are guaranteed to be more well-disposed towards you than any "foreigner", simply by virtue of them having been born within the same set of lines on a map?
I expect you really mean that one can always feel greater kinship to one's countrymen due to sharing the same culture, and that one is less likely to feel kinship with other cultures to any significant degree. This I would certainly dispute. Many countries contain subcultures with as much or more variation than national cultures - and those subcultures extend beyond national boundaries more and more these days. Global travel, international commerce, and the internet are all steadily eroding traditional aspects of nations as separate groups of people.
Or, perhaps you just object to statements that strike you as too glib.
I think it's sillier to consider yourself particularly a member of an arbitrary group of people in your general area (some of whom may not want you to exist) than it is to consider yourself a member of the group of all humans, or indeed all life.
I doubt that we're in any kind of apocalyptic "endtimes", but you can't deny there have been many occasions in the last few thousand years where society has transformed drastically. Sometimes for civil or military reasons, more recently due to fundamental advances in technology. The last hundred years have been particularly dramatic, and the second half more so than the first.
I think it's pretty much beyond doubt that the pace of technology is increasing. Whether it results in a "singularity" is debatable, but I do think it would be a lot harder for us to "blend in" to society in 50 years time, than it would be for someone from the Sixties to cope with life today.
To "predict" that *eventually* you'd be able to see as well as hear people, after the invention of TV, is most unimpressive.
It's obvious, of course - in hindsight. When exactly was that prediction made?
I doubt the human race will choose to place computers in charge of everything, or re-engineer ourselves beyond recognition, any time in our or our children's lifetimes.
It's already happened, to a fair degree, and will continue to happen more - ever heard of the generation gap? Also, remove all computers, and Western society would collapse overnight. Does total dependance on computers equate to them being "in charge"? I can certainly see both these trends ever-increasing - and in hindsight, the signs will be equally obvious. Post-humans in 2050 will have this same discussion, and will be narrowcasting the equivalent of "well duh" to each other.
The first few really significant breakthroughs, like penicillin, were stupid simple and had a bigger effect than anything that's happened since.
I disagree. Fire & the wheel were pretty fundamental, but so was the advent of the information age. I would argue that computers have changed our society at least as much as penicillin, and that change is only just beginning. It's just harder to see from our perspective in the middle of it, and much easier in hindsight. Hence the job of "futurologist".
The reason Sony is subsidising the PS3 by so much is to sell as many consoles as they can so the install base goes up - bigger market for their developers. If they can't build enough, the market doesn't grow much, and they might as well have not bothered subsidising them.
Oh well. For every console they didn't build, that's ~$300 saved in subsidies, at least.
Admittedly intel mistimed the itanium introduction
Mistimed? Intel had been working fruitlessly on it for 8-10 years when AMD finally realised there was an opportunity to pull a Microsoft on them (i.e. consumers like compatibility more than new tech).
Itanium's big advantage is that it is simply a better ISA.
Debatable. It really depends on the application. Itanium does have a nicely designed, regular ISA that is awesome for serious number-crunching, but the VLIW approach really isn't optimal for general-purpose, non-parallel code. It's wasteful, and hard to optimise for. x86 is clunky, inconsistent, badly lacking in registers and a complete pain to code and decode, but it is at least quite compact (fits into small caches). x86-64 improves on this (a little) by adding more registers. PowerPC code is probably better than either, for most jobs.
I think the long time it is taking to iron out the IA64 technology is proof of foresight rather than an indication of a bungle.
I don't think it's a question of "ironing out" the technology any more. They've been working on improving the compilers for years now, and it performs really well - for certain jobs, like SPEC ratings and HPC apps. But it's not going to get much better than it is for what most of the world wants. It's a niche product, the market knows that, and it ain't moving out of that niche any time soon.
Note that both Australian and Euro prices include sales tax, whereas the US price does not. In Australia, that's 10%, which bring it a lot closer.
Still relatively expensive, but you can put that down to greater costs of doing business and/or size of the market. Plus a little margin to allow for currency fluctuations.
Welcome to the technology market, where there's always something better on the horizon.
Buy what you need, when you need it, and don't worry if it's the absolute latest thing out. If you always wait for the latest & greatest thing you've just heard about, you won't end up with anything.
OTOH, if you really don't need it, save your money. When you eventually do get around to buying, you'll always get more for your buck.
These apparently use a new method of separating out and multiplying the needed stemcells, and so far seem to making good progress - the patient is already experiencing improved quality of life.
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If you're talking HD movies, they're recorded at only 24 frames/sec. For broadcast in NTSC-standard interlaced video (and for its HD equivalent) at 60 fields/sec, every 5th field is duplicated. Thus, 1080i broadcast HD movies usually take more bandwidth than the original 1080p signal (which can be reconstructed with no loss in quality).
From what I know, majors typically pass on between eight and sixteen cents per track to the artists, and that number hasn't changed much since the ITMS launch.
Most artists are lucky to get 15% of gross take, so given 65c going to the labels, that's less than 10c. Then, the labels deduct the standard 26% for free goods, packaging, restocking and breakages (all obviously still quite relevant for digital downloads), and my personal favourite, the 50% "new technology" deduction (which previously applied to CDs, even though labels made far more per CD than they did for vinyl). After all that, the artist is usually entitled to around 4c for the song.
Of course, this is not to say he/she actually receives that. First there's all the recording and promoting expenses to pay off as well, even though the artist does not get to keep the copyrights to their own songs. Then there's no easy way to be sure the label actually pays you what you're entitled to under your contract anyway, and the barriers to successfully auditing this are set as high as possible. Finally, even if you do manage to scrape up enough money to mount a successful audit, the label will offer to settle (typically for around a third of what you're owed), or to drive your legal expenses up a lot higher still.
It's a very rare actor that can demand millions up-front. Most have to settle for a percentage of the profits. However, due to accounting practices "considered odd by any normal business standards", 95% of movies, even box-office hits, somehow fail to make a profit - as defined by the studio, anyway. This article lists many of the ways in which this is managed, including spreading of gross receipts amongst poorer-performing pictures, "distribution fees" far in excess of reality, a 10% "overhead" fee to be applied to all marketing expenses, tax breaks that are kept by the studios & not counted for the picture, and many others.
Stan Lee got nothing from the Spider-Man movie, because the studio claimed it did not make a profit, at least as defined by his contract. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was produced cheaply and was a huge success, yet somehow "lost $20 million". Even Babylon 5, which took in $500 million in DVD sales alone, is apparently "$80 million in debt". As the creator, J Michael Straczynski said, "Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Steve Vai says very similar things about the record labels' own standard contracts, not least their various bogus deductions for digital download sales. As the saying goes, the really creative people are the accountants.
It's not just Weird Al who signed a bad contract. Nearly all artists get stuck with the same ridiculous clauses. All the major labels give you a simple choice: Sign the standard contract, or be a nobody selling your CDs at pub gigs.
Take a look at this letter from Steve Vai - it lists some of the many ways that the labels burden the artist with every expense, fair and unfair, but retain all ownership of the songs. They short-change them even the few royalties that are due, require large upfront costs for any auditing to check this, disallow auditing of crucial figures like actual manufacturing numbers, then typically "settle" with the artist for around a third of what the artist is actually due anyway.
Regarding iTunes, he says even a well-established and popular artist who is entitled to 15% royalties, would typically see only 4-5c per iTunes track, due to such creative deductions like 15% for "free goods" (there are none, for digital downloads) and the 50% "new technologies" deduction. After, of course, the label has deducted all production and marketing expenses for the songs they now own. Read the linked article, it's hair-raising.
Remember, this isn't some naive and ignorant wannabe speaking, he's been playing for 20-odd years, including many years with Frank Zappa before he went solo - he's been around. He still had no choice. The labels control the radio playlist (via illegal payola) and the shop shelfspace, so if you want to succeed, you have to do a deal with them, and they will only offer the same "standard", artist-raping contract.
I have a 24" CRT on my desk in front of me that will do 1080p and beyond. In fact, it'll do 2304 x 1440 at 85 Hz. Even the cheapo 17" CRT I used to have could do 1920 x 1200 quite legibly. CRTs are certainly capable of decent resolutions.
OTOH, I also have a 15.4" laptop that does 1920 x 1200. I've never seen a colour CRT with that sort of pixel density. And the IMB T221 leaves that for dead. LCDs are capable of more than CRTs, especially at larger sizes.
You're referring to televisions only, and large-screen televisions at that, but that's hardly representative of what CRTs *can* do.
It's a b... I mean, it's actually part of a double-planet system, orbiting around a common point in space (unlike all other moons in our solar system). And Ceres is an asteroid with a name, thank you very much.
In answer to your second question, since August 24, if the vote passes.
I certainly agree with you about the importance of assigning values, but emotions are only one way of doing that, and a fairly abstract way at that (they're a combination of many other values, weighted by the individual's personality).
Other value systems include "threat level" (very popular in the animal kingdom, and important for self-preservation for any entity) - objects like "dynamite" can be assigned a higher threat value, which will focus attention. "Relevant resources" are another; any objects that are considered useful for growth (this can include interaction with other entities). "Cost" is an obvious one, also "uniqueness/replacability". There are many others, some more relevant to humans (such as "aesthetics" and "humour").
An association database like Cyc can then make deductions from an initial set of values. For example, if it is told that "dangerous == high threat", and "explosions are dangerous", it then classes all explosion sources as threatening, and will not be so blasé about dynamite in the future.
I'm sure there's a single 360 owner on the planet without a HD - which you need to play a pretty large library of XBox titles
That would be all of two games, Football Manager 06 and Final Fantasy 11. Or, roughly the same number of games that required an HDD on a PS2. The other games can use an HDD if it's there, but don't require it. Oh, and it's an option - you only have to buy it if you feel a need for it, and when you do, it's identical to the premium model.
Compare this to the Sony approach: "If you want a PS3, you better want Blu-Ray as well, because you'll be paying for it anyway. Even if you don't own any Blu-Ray movies, or don't play any games that actually need the extra disc space." Fine for you, maybe, but a lot of people apparently disagree. I'm a bigger fan of HD video than any of my friends, but I won't be buying into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD for some time yet, so I'd rather save my money for more games.
Your PS3 promotion and Zonk rebuttals have been looking a bit strained lately. Even your spelling is suffering, I've noticed - is it all getting a bit on your nerves?
no entering mystic serial numbers
Let me assure you, the ol' days were not as good as you seem to remember :-)
I remember playing some air traffic controller game on my TRS-80 (in glorious 64x16 monochrome ASCII). Not only did I have to wait about 6 minutes for it to load in from the audio cassette (fiddling with the levels to try & make it work), but then I had to enter the mystic serial number to unlock it each time.
The "serial number" was a challenge/response code, looked up from a grid of numbers and letters. To avoid easy copying, the grid was printed in faded ink on dark red paper - and then glued to a cardboard cylinder.
Of course, the grid wasn't exactly huge, it'd probably take about 20 minutes to copy it out by hand, so the whole thing was merely an exercise in ineffective paranoia. The game wasn't even all that much fun.
"Understand that [Blu-Ray] is the last physical format there will ever be." - Bill Gates, Oct 2005
You don't know if 60 million others will agree, or if absolutely no-one else will agree
It's true you don't know, but you can make a slightly-educated guess on even one sample. You can already reliably state that not everyone will say no. Your guess just gets more educated with more samples. With 100 samples, the best educated guess you can make is "1 in 100 will say yes". Your margin of error is high, but you're still better off than a pure random guess.
You don't have any way of knowing that what we have here is common, or an utter freak occurance.
I don't know anything other than "life is possible", certainly I can't say if it's common. I meant that, even if it's a freak occurance, a one in a trillion chance; when you have uncounted trillions of chances, that still means I'd be willing to bet there was at least a couple dozen other planets containing life in this universe :-) It is also equally possible at this stage that it's only a one in a hundred chance, so the assumption holds there too, at least until we learn more. We might be wrong, but we're slightly more likely to be right. Statistically, all we can say at this time is that the odds of us being the only life in the universe are one in uncounted trillions against.
I can't prove anything, of course. I certainly can't estimate the odds of there being life around Alpha Centauri, or any specific system - as you say, that would require lots more knowledge than we possess. I can only talk about overall odds, relating to the entire set of samples.
If we are on the only biosphere in the entire universe, with its truly vast numbers and variety of conditions, then "freak occurrence" doesn't begin to describe it. The odds are against us being completely alone, to put it mildly. The odds of us actually finding extra-terrestrial life on the planet next door are another matter entirely.
the PS2 is apparently still outselling the 360 month to month
As the PS1 did to the PS2 for the first year or so. I imagine the PS2 will outsell the PS3 for a while too. It is a lot cheaper after all.
As more games get released for the next-gen systems, more people upgrade to HDTVs that show them off better, and developers get more comfortable with the new hardware, PS2 sales will decline, as the PS1's did. But given the price difference, it's entirely likely that PS2s will continue to sell in small numbers for a few years yet, hence the "10 year lifespan" quotes from Sony.
Now that's a real answer :-)
what does it mean for a hypothesis for a single event to be "testable"?
I use the word "testable" in the strict mathematical sense, not the "can we test it today" sense. In other words, something is testable if there can exist evidence to prove or disprove an assertion. For your three example statements, all are theoretically testable since the evidence is (or was) there if we just knew how to look for it. The existance or non-existance of an omnipotent being is not testable, unless that being chooses to allow the evidence of itself to exist.
With natural phenomenon, scientists work on the assumption (until proven otherwise) that there is enough evidence somewhere to explain everything we see, because if you assume otherwise, you might as well give up. Deductive reasoning is an important tool for that; we have excellent reason to believe that 2 + 2 = 4 and always will, so based on that, we can consider many other conclusions equally valid. Other base assumptions may not be as firm, and are (generally) treated as such. As far as the meteorite goes, new evidence came to light (those compounds can be formed by non-organic processes too), so the earlier hypothesis was revised (we can no longer say with reasonable certainty that the meteorite once contained life). So long as we keep perspective on what is unassailable and what is assumed, I have no problem with this.
Suppose God did do something by contravening the laws of nature... You'd learn nothing about the laws of Nature from studying one of its exceptions, and gain no spiritual benefit from it.
I guess that depends how obvious it was :-) If a huge anthropomorphic being appeared in the clouds and boomed, "Behold, the dead shall rise, gravity shall be 20% stronger, and Lake Superior shall be a rather nice Merlot", then I don't imagine many people would waste much time on looking for a naturalistic explanation. I think that would fit your definition of "good reason to do otherwise". OTOH, the assumption that life was created on this planet only by divine intervention, simply because it all looks bloody complex to us, is in my books unwarranted. Further study is justified; hence, science.
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what the statistics are. If one person in a hundred says yes, chances are a few more in that 6 billion will agree. In a universe this size, with hundreds of billions of galaxies and uncounted quadrillions of planets, if life can exist in one place, it's an excellent bet that it also exists in many many other places. The chances of us being the only biosphere in the entire universe are ridiculously small, to put it mildly.
Finding it next door on Mars is another matter. We can't statistically predict that from one sample, as you say, any more than we could predict the answer of any given individual.
Thing is, "God did it" just isn't a helpful answer, if you're trying to advance your technology.
First off, it's unprovable & untestable (at least without help from Him), and second, what now? It's an explanation, but it doesn't increase your understanding. You can't build on it - you can't use it to increase your engineering ability, or to predict natural events, or to provide more food for the hungry. So scientists start out with the assumption that "everything is understandable", whether God did it or not, and proceed to try and understand it.
Now, "God did it" is more useful as a philosophical answer. It can make you happy with your life, make you feel more secure and confident. It may not directly improve your lot in life, but greater confidence will likely help you make better decisions, leading you to help yourself (and maybe others), with or without help from Him.
That argument might make good sense, if Sony's online service is similar to Microsoft's.
I'm just concerned that "free online gameplay" will be closer to the free XLink Kai for Xbox, than to Xbox Live - i.e. a basic list of player-hosted servers to connect to, then you're on your own.
It's thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end.
I have another theory, you know...
You're just deliberately misinterpreting the GP. How is the area of land within your country borders any less a collection of inert minerals than the Earth? Does your continent care what you do? Or perhaps you really feel that all your "countrymen" are guaranteed to be more well-disposed towards you than any "foreigner", simply by virtue of them having been born within the same set of lines on a map?
I expect you really mean that one can always feel greater kinship to one's countrymen due to sharing the same culture, and that one is less likely to feel kinship with other cultures to any significant degree. This I would certainly dispute. Many countries contain subcultures with as much or more variation than national cultures - and those subcultures extend beyond national boundaries more and more these days. Global travel, international commerce, and the internet are all steadily eroding traditional aspects of nations as separate groups of people.
Or, perhaps you just object to statements that strike you as too glib.
I think it's sillier to consider yourself particularly a member of an arbitrary group of people in your general area (some of whom may not want you to exist) than it is to consider yourself a member of the group of all humans, or indeed all life.
I doubt that we're in any kind of apocalyptic "endtimes", but you can't deny there have been many occasions in the last few thousand years where society has transformed drastically. Sometimes for civil or military reasons, more recently due to fundamental advances in technology. The last hundred years have been particularly dramatic, and the second half more so than the first.
I think it's pretty much beyond doubt that the pace of technology is increasing. Whether it results in a "singularity" is debatable, but I do think it would be a lot harder for us to "blend in" to society in 50 years time, than it would be for someone from the Sixties to cope with life today.
To "predict" that *eventually* you'd be able to see as well as hear people, after the invention of TV, is most unimpressive.
It's obvious, of course - in hindsight. When exactly was that prediction made?
I doubt the human race will choose to place computers in charge of everything, or re-engineer ourselves beyond recognition, any time in our or our children's lifetimes.
It's already happened, to a fair degree, and will continue to happen more - ever heard of the generation gap? Also, remove all computers, and Western society would collapse overnight. Does total dependance on computers equate to them being "in charge"? I can certainly see both these trends ever-increasing - and in hindsight, the signs will be equally obvious. Post-humans in 2050 will have this same discussion, and will be narrowcasting the equivalent of "well duh" to each other.
The first few really significant breakthroughs, like penicillin, were stupid simple and had a bigger effect than anything that's happened since.
I disagree. Fire & the wheel were pretty fundamental, but so was the advent of the information age. I would argue that computers have changed our society at least as much as penicillin, and that change is only just beginning. It's just harder to see from our perspective in the middle of it, and much easier in hindsight. Hence the job of "futurologist".
The reason Sony is subsidising the PS3 by so much is to sell as many consoles as they can so the install base goes up - bigger market for their developers. If they can't build enough, the market doesn't grow much, and they might as well have not bothered subsidising them.
Oh well. For every console they didn't build, that's ~$300 saved in subsidies, at least.
Admittedly intel mistimed the itanium introduction
Mistimed? Intel had been working fruitlessly on it for 8-10 years when AMD finally realised there was an opportunity to pull a Microsoft on them (i.e. consumers like compatibility more than new tech).
Itanium's big advantage is that it is simply a better ISA.
Debatable. It really depends on the application. Itanium does have a nicely designed, regular ISA that is awesome for serious number-crunching, but the VLIW approach really isn't optimal for general-purpose, non-parallel code. It's wasteful, and hard to optimise for. x86 is clunky, inconsistent, badly lacking in registers and a complete pain to code and decode, but it is at least quite compact (fits into small caches). x86-64 improves on this (a little) by adding more registers. PowerPC code is probably better than either, for most jobs.
I think the long time it is taking to iron out the IA64 technology is proof of foresight rather than an indication of a bungle.
I don't think it's a question of "ironing out" the technology any more. They've been working on improving the compilers for years now, and it performs really well - for certain jobs, like SPEC ratings and HPC apps. But it's not going to get much better than it is for what most of the world wants. It's a niche product, the market knows that, and it ain't moving out of that niche any time soon.
Note that both Australian and Euro prices include sales tax, whereas the US price does not. In Australia, that's 10%, which bring it a lot closer.
Still relatively expensive, but you can put that down to greater costs of doing business and/or size of the market. Plus a little margin to allow for currency fluctuations.
Welcome to the technology market, where there's always something better on the horizon.
Buy what you need, when you need it, and don't worry if it's the absolute latest thing out. If you always wait for the latest & greatest thing you've just heard about, you won't end up with anything.
OTOH, if you really don't need it, save your money. When you eventually do get around to buying, you'll always get more for your buck.
More here.
These apparently use a new method of separating out and multiplying the needed stemcells, and so far seem to making good progress - the patient is already experiencing improved quality of life.