I highly disapprove of AstroTurf. My grandmother had some of that shit. What the hell, you can't plant actual grass on your deck? Lazy.
I meant an Epson scanner, mainly. The ATI video card in my old desktop works like crap with Linux and loses all its video capture capabilities (that won't matter on my new computer, which will definitely not have an ATI card). Also, a Wacom tablet (which MIGHT work with Linux, but installing it looks complicated). I have a cheapo camera that definitely doesn't work with Linux, not that I really care. My printer works OK for basic documents but doesn't have all its features. I need all its features. My MP3 player, a Samsung, only works with Windows, despite rumours that you can fix that by grabbing firmware from another country. I couldn't get my Logitech controller to work. A bunch of mouse buttons don't work. My modem's manufacturer doesn't even exist anymore so good luck finding a driver.
I've heard Photoshop sorta works under WINE but I've never tried it -- I need CMYK. Does Illustrator? I love Inkscape, but it represents CMYK colors in RGBA, which is useless to me. I'm pretty sure Poser and MangaStudio don't - They barely work in XP though that might be a speed thing. Sketchup doesn't have a Linux version yet. The computer I have my eye on has a TV tuner installed, and I don't know if that'll work under Linux, but it's a feature I really want.
I obviously don't know if Vista will work any better with any of this stuff, since I DON'T OWN IT, but since it all works under XP I think it's at least worth a try. If not, fuck it, I'll dual-boot. I need a new computer anyway. This one shuts down if I don't underclock it in the summer.
I can't check if Linux works with the games I already own because my desktop video card is barely compatible with it, and my laptop doesn't have good enough graphics. It doesn't matter, because once I'm done with a game I'm done with it, and I only play games for a few weeks out of a year. I'm interested in next year's games, not last year's.
For the record, I adore Ubuntu on my laptop. Except that it doesn't support the pen screen, which didn't even have the decency to be Wacom. It does run some low-spec Windows games OK -- the laptop itself doesn't have great graphics capabilities. I never managed to get networking running properly, though that's my own inexperience with networks I think.
Basically my options are: - Stick with my old, slow, slightly wonky computer that occasionally forgets it has hard drives. - Buy a new generic and put Linux on it despite the fact that I know it doesn't work with some of my stuff, and will be hard to get working with some of my other stuff, even though it's the cool thing to do. - Buy a nice HP running Vista, hope and pray it works alright, fiddle with it for a while, and put XP or Ubuntu or both or all three on it if it doesn't work.
The HP is faster than the generics available to me for the same price.
Also, foggy glass, man! How can you not love that?
I'll probably get a new computer with Vista. I'm just not a Mac person, Linux doesn't support some software and peripherals I need, and my old desktop is, well, 5 years old at the end of July. I'm cheap but not that cheap.
That doesn't mean I won't install Linux on my old computer and use my old copy of XP on the new one, of course. I'm a real sucker for shiny, transparent, blurry things though. The problem with Mac stuff is that it looks too much like plastic, or fondant, whereas Vista looks more like fogged glass or acrylic. Mac's ferocious pointer-attacking icons worry me. Neither is sparkly enough, frankly.
I really like that program that comes with Macs though. What's it called? "Pages." I want that. I think I'll go for a bike ride.
I've heard mixed opinions about stomach-reduction surgery in the long term. I guess it's effective for a lot of people but it's so drastic that it still worries me.
My observation has been mainly that overweight people tend to eat large portions, not necessarily of unhealthy foods, repeatedly, and that's #1 cause. Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, until their stomachs stretch to accommodate their eyes. I have some overweight/obese friends and relatives who constantly fall into this trap.
- One of my friends eats mainly beans, rice, and vegetables... but he eats easily 4-5x what I would eat. Predictably, he weighs about 400 pounds, almost 3x my weight, despite being fairly active and only 5 inches taller than me. I asked him once why he didn't just cook less food. He blamed lack of "willpower." How much willpower does it really take to dump half a cup less rice in the pot in the first place? Less than it does to get to the gym, I'm sure.
- Another obsesses constantly about health and vitamins, and makes a fair amount of money. But she eats out daily and consumes massive meals. She's very overweight and has bad knees as a result.
- My sister, who shares my genetics (a literally "big-boned" build and a predisposition to put on weight easily), and was built similarly to me when she about 20, eats large meals, junky snacks and sugary sodas. She's 5' tall and weighs probably over 200 pounds.
- My brother in law shares her appetite, but also doesn't exercise at all. He's the kind of guy who goes out of his way to avoid parking more than 10 feet from an entrance. He probably weighs 350-400 pounds and has almost no muscle (in contrast to friend #1).
Healthy food is better, yes, but portion control is vital. There are, IIRC, 3 monitors for "fullness" in the body. One monitors glucose in the blood, and takes a while to activate. It mainly signals hunger. The second, I can't remember, but it also signals hunger. The most important, though, is like an elastic around the stomach that, when it stretches, says, "that's enough food, I'm full now." If you eat large meals it takes longer to trigger it -- if it triggers at all before the food runs out.
The best bet to lose weight is to start closely, mindfully monitoring caloric intake and cutting back on portion sizes. Planning is necessary because you can't count on your body's signals -- its sensors are miscalibrated. On the plus side, it only takes a few months for a stomach to shrink on its own. Even cutting back you shouldn't get the "hunger" signals until you're actually low on glucose... but it's hard to avoid eating because you don't get the "full" signal from the stomach-stretch detector either.
That kind of sustained mindfulness is really difficult, though.
Everyone locks their doors in Canada. Most of the time. Although the one person I know who's really paranoid about it got that way after living in Atlanta for a while.
My modem broke a few days ago. I can detect about 10 Wi-Fi signals from my house, and luckily one of them was open and I was able to access it. That let me (read/. &) email my ISP and order a new modem. (I tried calling them once and spent 2 hours on hold before I got to talk to someone. They reply to emails within a couple hours as well -- which isn't really faster but is a lot easier.) I'd be quite happy to leave my Wi-Fi open, except that I really don't know how to secure my own computers completely, and I don't really want to deal with slowdowns because a neighbour is leeching.
My university streams some courses in RealPlayer format, so I tried the Linux version. It didn't work at all on my laptop running Ubuntu. The program would install but it wouldn't start. The Windows version wouldn't work under Wine either. I fiddled for a little while then just booted Windows instead.
My mom has one of those. I plugged it into my MP3 player once and it stopped working, until I reset it. So they're apparently not universal, and I don't recommend trying that.
I said "explain correctly." Freud did provide explanations. They were hypothetical. He didn't test them all. Others did, and disproved them, or found better explanations for them. He was only doing part of the scientific process himself, but he was still taking part in it.
For an example, from Wikipedia: "Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events."
Observation made, explanation given, explanation tested, explanation disproved. All by Freud himself.
If a scientist said "I have observed X about light, therefore I propose that light is composed of particles," whether they are being scientific does not depend if they are right or not.
Freud was more of a theorist than an empiricist. He formulated hypotheses based on observations and case studies. Others tested his theories, and found many of them wrong or a little off. But not all of them: the idea of an unconscious mind (which is vital to current psychological theory), and of stress causing physical symptoms, are basically sound. Of course he didn't understand exactly why -- psychology was still in its infancy.
Psychology generally doesn't work in terms of "universal laws" - it's the science of individual differences. Some discovery might be true in 30% of the population, have some bearing on about 40%, and be completely wrong for the other 30%. That doesn't mean it isn't true in 30%.
Some people like the smell of tar and some hate it. There cannot be a universal law that says "tar smells bad." And just because an observation can't be explained correctly with the current state of knowledge doesn't mean it isn't science.
I don't really like Freud either, and I think he was mostly a bad philosopher, but to say he didn't contribute anything to the modern understanding of the mind is just wrong.
Assuming the information is stored on hard drives, and a hard drive weighs 700 grams, and the truck in question is a Ford Super Duty, which has a capacity of 6,120 lbs, and the hard drives have a nominal capacity of 500 decimal gigabytes, I estimate the amount of information per truckload to be approximately 1.76 petabytes.
If they were using an 18-wheeler I'd really be impressed.
Your son is very lucky. When I was a kid, no one would let me touch our sewing table. I should have told them it was good exercise, but these were the days before NES so I doubt they would have cared.
I think lack of sales, if that was an issue, are probably a supply problem rather than demand. Anyway.
There are tons of shortcomings with the Kindle that prevented it from being as popular as the iPod. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Amazon really looked for input before launch. Frankly, I heard about it less than a week before it was launched. The lack of hype probably didn't help, but there are problems with the device itself.
1) Books are less popular or "cool" than music. Books are not "status symbols" unless you're trying to look well-read... and then it'd be better to have a bookshelf of leather-bound tomes. iPods play music (which can be passively consumed for a long period of time and thus has more apparent value)
2) A good portion of the books that people want to read will never be available on the Kindle.
3) It's difficult to put the books you already own onto the Kindle. Music CDs (and other formats, with some effort) can easily be transferred to an iPod. iTunes made a large library of music available.
4) The Kindle is not cool looking. It has too many buttons, it looks a bit cheap, the screen can't be appreciated from photos. The iPod is clean, distinctive, and simple-looking.
5) The Kindle is only available online from Amazon. That is, when it's not sold out -- which it was for months after launch. The iPod was hard to find for a while, but it was available from many retailers right away.
6) The Kindle doesn't support Wi-Fi; instead it works off some cellular network that few people really understand, which is only available in the US anyway. The iPod just plugged into a computer using a cable or dock. Maybe technically inferior, but easier to understand.
7) Kindle is only available in the US. I'd totally buy one if they were available in Canada, but they aren't. EBooks have the greatest appeal where paper books have the least availability. The iPod was available everywhere. I think it only supported Macs at first, but that was soon rectified.
8) The Kindle is limited somewhat in file format support. Notably, they don't support PDFs natively. For music, MP3 is the only format that really matters. Apple did co-promote their lossless format, and that probably helped them.
9) Buying a Kindle to read books is not economical for light readers. The device itself costs $400, and if a Kindle book costs $10, and an "average" real book costs $20, you'd have to buy 40 books just to break even. Except that some books will not be available for the Kindle anyway, and you'll have to buy them as paper. (The majority of books I buy, for instance, have photos, diagrams, or illustrations, or are textbooks that are not available in digital formats.) When the Kindle breaks or becomes obsolescent, the books become useless. (Of course, it's still not a bad deal if you read a lot of novels, or want to download newspapers. Music needs a player anyway, and an iPod is smaller than a portable CD player or a stereo.
10) The Kindle lacks storage space. It's expandable, but what does it have again? 128MB? How much does a 1GB stick of flash memory cost again? $10? (Of course, text-format books don't take much space -- but pictures, comics, or podcasts do.) The iPod had 5GB of memory, enough for many albums and even a modest music collection.
11) The Kindle is too large to fit in a pocket and too small to display letter or A4 sized documents. Even if it did support PDFs. It's about the size of a paperback. That's not horrible if you're reading novels, but it's not optimally portable, nor optimally useful. Even the original iPod fit nicely in a pocket.
12) Kindles weren't hyped much and lacked branding. Amazon isn't known as a tech company at all -- they're known as a bookstore. iPods had the force of the Apple community behind them. Apple is known as a superior tech company.
I'm positive that availability was the biggest obstacle, though. How many people would have bought them if it was as simple as going to Best Buy?
It'll be interesting to see what will happen with the first e-paper reader that gets into stores.
Natural diamonds are much more abundant than they'd have you believe. There's an artificial scarcity. Large, high quality diamonds are pretty rare, but there are plenty of small ones (enough to make tools out of them, and enough that diamond jewelery has next to no resale value.) The markup on new diamonds is huge and the supply chain is narrow.
Anyhow, isn't this whole thing the plot of the First Wave episode "The Apostles"? Except possibly without aliens? And probably fewer biker gangs?
I'd like to use a Microsoft system that does not require graphical support. Where's a rich commandline for those that need no graphics (samba server, calendar/mail server..)?
I disagree on that one. The nice thing about Windows, for me, is that when you break something, it still defaults to a GUI (Safe mode). I suppose it doesn't matter for an expert, but for Linux, you basically have to know how to work two systems: the GUI and the terminal/command line. There are plenty of command-line programs for Windows. That they aren't all built into Windows itself isn't necessarily a failing. Even in Linux most of the special stuff comes from some package or another, not the kernel. And what kind of overhead does a simple GUI really cause, as long as you're not using Vista?
I'm really, really not a Linux expert, (I've used Ubuntu for around a year, and that's it) but even doing regular things, I've managed to break X or Gnome or KDE six or seven times. At least if I really screw up Windows I can fall back on my DOS skills.:p
I agree on the updating. Even if there was some sort of auto-update background service thing, that software manufacturers could opt into. MS Update only catches a handful of 3rd-party drivers that usually aren't needed anyway. Repositories are awesome, and a big advantage Linux has over Windows.
The main relationship between 1984 and V for Vendetta that I saw was the similarity between the Voice of Fate (a radio program, much more prominent in the book IIRC) and "Body politic" (the Eye = surveillance, the Fingermen = police) and Big Brother. There were tons of other influences of course, stronger ones for sure, but that one kind of stuck in my mind.
I don't know about QBasic, since it's a little old-fashioned at this point. The current crop of undergrads has probably not seen much DOS. I learned it in junior high, then in high school learned some Visual Basic, Perl, and C++. They never taught us how to do much with files, though. I really wish they had, since that was probably all the formal programming training I'm ever going to get.
I forgot Perl within a month. C++ stuck with me a little longer, though I think I've lost it now. I can still write a bit in Visual Basic though, enough to make very small programs for very specific purposes. The nice thing about it is you're making a visual interface, so you immediately feel like you're making a "real" program, even if it does nothing but pop up on the screen and display some buttons that do nothing. It's very encouraging to a beginner.
Simple programming is a handy skill, even if you don't use it much... like house-painting.
I thought V for Vendetta was a very good movie. It wasn't much like the original, but it was a good movie. It needed to change to suit the times, and it did. And it looked good. And it discarded some bullshit that didn't make sense.
The Justice League Unlimited episode based on his Superman story "For the Man Who Has Everything," was also excellent, partly because it excised a sort of pointless subplot.
Alan Moore is a good writer, but he also uses other people's characters and ideas, and tosses anything that doesn't suit what he's trying to tell. He's as guilty as anyone of screwing with originals to adapt them to his own taste.
Watchmen was based on old Charlton characters (Blue Beetle = Nite-Owl, the Question = Rorschach, etc.); V for Vendetta was strongly influenced by 1984; Supreme was based on Superman -- and he tossed the character's history to make his own version); Tom Strong is based on various pulp heroes; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was based on various literary characters, and is not the first such pastiche by far (and it was an awful book); and Lost Girls was a pervy take on fairy tales. Even Top 10, probably my favourite thing he's done, makes innumerable references to other works, and I'm not sure how much it was influenced by Astro City.
Moore really is good, and Watchmen is his most important work, so I hope it's adapted well. (It really came along at the right moment; the world was ready in the 1980s for a serious deconstruction of superheroes.) I've only seen stills so far but they really seem to capture the right mood and look. But his work is not flawless, and it's practically as derivative as the movies it inspired.
I'm speaking mainly from a personal experience perspective with a bit of biology knowledge, but here goes.
Diet soda has 1-2 calories (Aspartame & acesulfame potassium or sucralose). A bottle or large cup of non-diet soda has about 300 calories (sucrose/glucose-fructose or HFCS). All else being equal, if you're drinking sugary soda all the time, you're going to be worse off than if you drink diet soda. It's simple in-and-out calorie counting.
On the other hand, drinking diet soda is like playing tricks on your body. It messes up your insulin production. You drink it, your body says, "Sweet! That means sugar, so make insulin!" Then it doesn't get the calorie hit it's expecting, so it makes more insulin. Eventually it builds up an insulin resistance, and it's a slippery slope to diabetes.
However, if you're consuming diet soda with food, you're getting calories (albeit less than with sugar soda), so you don't get the insulin resistance. (I think, IANAD.)
If you're still eating a 1700 Calorie meal, that won't do you much good and you'll still get fat. But at least it's not a 2000 Calorie meal. A lot of people are tricked into thinking "diet" means a lot more than it does. You're shaving calories off from your drinks but you need to watch the rest of your intake, too. I know a few people who are desperate to lose weight, but never do, because while they're trying every other trick in the book, they just refuse to cut down on their portion sizes.
Switching from sugar-based to diet sodas helped me lose about 20 lbs (from 160 to 140), especially with the first 10 lbs. It only helped, though. I had to resume exercising and watch what I was eating, too.
We've been on the verge of getting one, and hooking it up to a small (19" or so) LCD TV, for about 3 years. We were sort of waiting for a small, cheap computer that ran Linux... like this, for instance.
I thought of 3 probable configurations for it. 1) A laptop with a TV tuner. Convenient all-in-one. Can be grabbed and taken away. Downside: TV would take time to turn on, and 90% of the time we'd just want it as a pure TV. Also, cables and adaptors everywhere. Good laptops are expensive, bad laptops don't have good sound or screens.
2) A computer with TV tuner, and a monitor. Cheapest option. Downside: TV would take time to turn on. Cables everywhere. Would need external speakers. Hard to find a compact PC that can handle a TV tuner. If it didn't have to be compact I could just stick my old mid-tower down there...
3) A TV and a computer. A compact enough computer can be hidden. TV has built-in speakers and is instant-on. Downside: would have to switch video source to use computer.
I don't know if we'll ever do it though. We don't have a big kitchen and getting the cable to come out the right place would be a pain. (Now it's above the fridge... which is not an ideal spot for a computer, but is a better spot for a TV than the counter.) There's still the matter of a digital cable box.
Right now I just take my laptop downstairs. Not that I don't have enough cookbooks.
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Dare I ask if it will be available or usable in Canada?
$399 sounds entirely reasonable. A no-contract Treo or Blackberry costs about $600.
I highly disapprove of AstroTurf. My grandmother had some of that shit. What the hell, you can't plant actual grass on your deck? Lazy.
I meant an Epson scanner, mainly. The ATI video card in my old desktop works like crap with Linux and loses all its video capture capabilities (that won't matter on my new computer, which will definitely not have an ATI card). Also, a Wacom tablet (which MIGHT work with Linux, but installing it looks complicated). I have a cheapo camera that definitely doesn't work with Linux, not that I really care. My printer works OK for basic documents but doesn't have all its features. I need all its features. My MP3 player, a Samsung, only works with Windows, despite rumours that you can fix that by grabbing firmware from another country. I couldn't get my Logitech controller to work. A bunch of mouse buttons don't work. My modem's manufacturer doesn't even exist anymore so good luck finding a driver.
I've heard Photoshop sorta works under WINE but I've never tried it -- I need CMYK. Does Illustrator? I love Inkscape, but it represents CMYK colors in RGBA, which is useless to me. I'm pretty sure Poser and MangaStudio don't - They barely work in XP though that might be a speed thing. Sketchup doesn't have a Linux version yet. The computer I have my eye on has a TV tuner installed, and I don't know if that'll work under Linux, but it's a feature I really want.
I obviously don't know if Vista will work any better with any of this stuff, since I DON'T OWN IT, but since it all works under XP I think it's at least worth a try. If not, fuck it, I'll dual-boot. I need a new computer anyway. This one shuts down if I don't underclock it in the summer.
I can't check if Linux works with the games I already own because my desktop video card is barely compatible with it, and my laptop doesn't have good enough graphics. It doesn't matter, because once I'm done with a game I'm done with it, and I only play games for a few weeks out of a year. I'm interested in next year's games, not last year's.
For the record, I adore Ubuntu on my laptop. Except that it doesn't support the pen screen, which didn't even have the decency to be Wacom. It does run some low-spec Windows games OK -- the laptop itself doesn't have great graphics capabilities. I never managed to get networking running properly, though that's my own inexperience with networks I think.
Basically my options are:
- Stick with my old, slow, slightly wonky computer that occasionally forgets it has hard drives.
- Buy a new generic and put Linux on it despite the fact that I know it doesn't work with some of my stuff, and will be hard to get working with some of my other stuff, even though it's the cool thing to do.
- Buy a nice HP running Vista, hope and pray it works alright, fiddle with it for a while, and put XP or Ubuntu or both or all three on it if it doesn't work.
The HP is faster than the generics available to me for the same price.
Also, foggy glass, man! How can you not love that?
I'll probably get a new computer with Vista. I'm just not a Mac person, Linux doesn't support some software and peripherals I need, and my old desktop is, well, 5 years old at the end of July. I'm cheap but not that cheap.
That doesn't mean I won't install Linux on my old computer and use my old copy of XP on the new one, of course. I'm a real sucker for shiny, transparent, blurry things though. The problem with Mac stuff is that it looks too much like plastic, or fondant, whereas Vista looks more like fogged glass or acrylic. Mac's ferocious pointer-attacking icons worry me. Neither is sparkly enough, frankly.
I really like that program that comes with Macs though. What's it called? "Pages." I want that. I think I'll go for a bike ride.
I've heard mixed opinions about stomach-reduction surgery in the long term. I guess it's effective for a lot of people but it's so drastic that it still worries me.
My observation has been mainly that overweight people tend to eat large portions, not necessarily of unhealthy foods, repeatedly, and that's #1 cause. Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, until their stomachs stretch to accommodate their eyes. I have some overweight/obese friends and relatives who constantly fall into this trap.
- One of my friends eats mainly beans, rice, and vegetables... but he eats easily 4-5x what I would eat. Predictably, he weighs about 400 pounds, almost 3x my weight, despite being fairly active and only 5 inches taller than me. I asked him once why he didn't just cook less food. He blamed lack of "willpower." How much willpower does it really take to dump half a cup less rice in the pot in the first place? Less than it does to get to the gym, I'm sure.
- Another obsesses constantly about health and vitamins, and makes a fair amount of money. But she eats out daily and consumes massive meals. She's very overweight and has bad knees as a result.
- My sister, who shares my genetics (a literally "big-boned" build and a predisposition to put on weight easily), and was built similarly to me when she about 20, eats large meals, junky snacks and sugary sodas. She's 5' tall and weighs probably over 200 pounds.
- My brother in law shares her appetite, but also doesn't exercise at all. He's the kind of guy who goes out of his way to avoid parking more than 10 feet from an entrance. He probably weighs 350-400 pounds and has almost no muscle (in contrast to friend #1).
Healthy food is better, yes, but portion control is vital. There are, IIRC, 3 monitors for "fullness" in the body. One monitors glucose in the blood, and takes a while to activate. It mainly signals hunger. The second, I can't remember, but it also signals hunger. The most important, though, is like an elastic around the stomach that, when it stretches, says, "that's enough food, I'm full now." If you eat large meals it takes longer to trigger it -- if it triggers at all before the food runs out.
The best bet to lose weight is to start closely, mindfully monitoring caloric intake and cutting back on portion sizes. Planning is necessary because you can't count on your body's signals -- its sensors are miscalibrated. On the plus side, it only takes a few months for a stomach to shrink on its own. Even cutting back you shouldn't get the "hunger" signals until you're actually low on glucose... but it's hard to avoid eating because you don't get the "full" signal from the stomach-stretch detector either.
That kind of sustained mindfulness is really difficult, though.
In Soviet Russia, Linux runs Android (SDK)!
Possibly. Frankly, I don't know what they're doing in Russia. You know, I'm ashamed of my self for even getting into this. Never mind.
Everyone locks their doors in Canada. Most of the time. Although the one person I know who's really paranoid about it got that way after living in Atlanta for a while.
/. &) email my ISP and order a new modem. (I tried calling them once and spent 2 hours on hold before I got to talk to someone. They reply to emails within a couple hours as well -- which isn't really faster but is a lot easier.) I'd be quite happy to leave my Wi-Fi open, except that I really don't know how to secure my own computers completely, and I don't really want to deal with slowdowns because a neighbour is leeching.
My modem broke a few days ago. I can detect about 10 Wi-Fi signals from my house, and luckily one of them was open and I was able to access it. That let me (read
My university streams some courses in RealPlayer format, so I tried the Linux version. It didn't work at all on my laptop running Ubuntu. The program would install but it wouldn't start. The Windows version wouldn't work under Wine either. I fiddled for a little while then just booted Windows instead.
My mom has one of those. I plugged it into my MP3 player once and it stopped working, until I reset it. So they're apparently not universal, and I don't recommend trying that.
Not until I get a super solenoid engine powered by chi that sheds feathers and sparkles as I drive my car which transforms into a fighting robot. ~_~
I said "explain correctly." Freud did provide explanations. They were hypothetical. He didn't test them all. Others did, and disproved them, or found better explanations for them. He was only doing part of the scientific process himself, but he was still taking part in it.
For an example, from Wikipedia:
"Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events."
Observation made, explanation given, explanation tested, explanation disproved. All by Freud himself.
If a scientist said "I have observed X about light, therefore I propose that light is composed of particles," whether they are being scientific does not depend if they are right or not.
Freud was more of a theorist than an empiricist. He formulated hypotheses based on observations and case studies. Others tested his theories, and found many of them wrong or a little off. But not all of them: the idea of an unconscious mind (which is vital to current psychological theory), and of stress causing physical symptoms, are basically sound. Of course he didn't understand exactly why -- psychology was still in its infancy.
Psychology generally doesn't work in terms of "universal laws" - it's the science of individual differences. Some discovery might be true in 30% of the population, have some bearing on about 40%, and be completely wrong for the other 30%. That doesn't mean it isn't true in 30%.
Some people like the smell of tar and some hate it. There cannot be a universal law that says "tar smells bad." And just because an observation can't be explained correctly with the current state of knowledge doesn't mean it isn't science.
I don't really like Freud either, and I think he was mostly a bad philosopher, but to say he didn't contribute anything to the modern understanding of the mind is just wrong.
Assuming the information is stored on hard drives, and a hard drive weighs 700 grams, and the truck in question is a Ford Super Duty, which has a capacity of 6,120 lbs, and the hard drives have a nominal capacity of 500 decimal gigabytes, I estimate the amount of information per truckload to be approximately 1.76 petabytes.
If they were using an 18-wheeler I'd really be impressed.
Last I checked liquid water is called water, and is a noun and a verb. Ice would be solid water.
Not that that sentence makes any more sense.
Death ray?
Save that for Mimas.
In other news: Information still wants to be free.
Yes, yours too.
Your son is very lucky. When I was a kid, no one would let me touch our sewing table. I should have told them it was good exercise, but these were the days before NES so I doubt they would have cared.
I think lack of sales, if that was an issue, are probably a supply problem rather than demand. Anyway.
There are tons of shortcomings with the Kindle that prevented it from being as popular as the iPod. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Amazon really looked for input before launch. Frankly, I heard about it less than a week before it was launched. The lack of hype probably didn't help, but there are problems with the device itself.
1) Books are less popular or "cool" than music. Books are not "status symbols" unless you're trying to look well-read... and then it'd be better to have a bookshelf of leather-bound tomes.
iPods play music (which can be passively consumed for a long period of time and thus has more apparent value)
2) A good portion of the books that people want to read will never be available on the Kindle.
3) It's difficult to put the books you already own onto the Kindle.
Music CDs (and other formats, with some effort) can easily be transferred to an iPod. iTunes made a large library of music available.
4) The Kindle is not cool looking. It has too many buttons, it looks a bit cheap, the screen can't be appreciated from photos.
The iPod is clean, distinctive, and simple-looking.
5) The Kindle is only available online from Amazon. That is, when it's not sold out -- which it was for months after launch.
The iPod was hard to find for a while, but it was available from many retailers right away.
6) The Kindle doesn't support Wi-Fi; instead it works off some cellular network that few people really understand, which is only available in the US anyway.
The iPod just plugged into a computer using a cable or dock. Maybe technically inferior, but easier to understand.
7) Kindle is only available in the US. I'd totally buy one if they were available in Canada, but they aren't. EBooks have the greatest appeal where paper books have the least availability.
The iPod was available everywhere. I think it only supported Macs at first, but that was soon rectified.
8) The Kindle is limited somewhat in file format support. Notably, they don't support PDFs natively.
For music, MP3 is the only format that really matters. Apple did co-promote their lossless format, and that probably helped them.
9) Buying a Kindle to read books is not economical for light readers. The device itself costs $400, and if a Kindle book costs $10, and an "average" real book costs $20, you'd have to buy 40 books just to break even. Except that some books will not be available for the Kindle anyway, and you'll have to buy them as paper. (The majority of books I buy, for instance, have photos, diagrams, or illustrations, or are textbooks that are not available in digital formats.) When the Kindle breaks or becomes obsolescent, the books become useless. (Of course, it's still not a bad deal if you read a lot of novels, or want to download newspapers.
Music needs a player anyway, and an iPod is smaller than a portable CD player or a stereo.
10) The Kindle lacks storage space. It's expandable, but what does it have again? 128MB? How much does a 1GB stick of flash memory cost again? $10? (Of course, text-format books don't take much space -- but pictures, comics, or podcasts do.)
The iPod had 5GB of memory, enough for many albums and even a modest music collection.
11) The Kindle is too large to fit in a pocket and too small to display letter or A4 sized documents. Even if it did support PDFs. It's about the size of a paperback. That's not horrible if you're reading novels, but it's not optimally portable, nor optimally useful.
Even the original iPod fit nicely in a pocket.
12) Kindles weren't hyped much and lacked branding. Amazon isn't known as a tech company at all -- they're known as a bookstore.
iPods had the force of the Apple community behind them. Apple is known as a superior tech company.
I'm positive that availability was the biggest obstacle, though. How many people would have bought them if it was as simple as going to Best Buy?
It'll be interesting to see what will happen with the first e-paper reader that gets into stores.
Natural diamonds are much more abundant than they'd have you believe. There's an artificial scarcity. Large, high quality diamonds are pretty rare, but there are plenty of small ones (enough to make tools out of them, and enough that diamond jewelery has next to no resale value.) The markup on new diamonds is huge and the supply chain is narrow.
Anyhow, isn't this whole thing the plot of the First Wave episode "The Apostles"? Except possibly without aliens? And probably fewer biker gangs?
I'd like to use a Microsoft system that does not require graphical support. Where's a rich commandline for those that need no graphics (samba server, calendar/mail server..)?
:p
I disagree on that one. The nice thing about Windows, for me, is that when you break something, it still defaults to a GUI (Safe mode). I suppose it doesn't matter for an expert, but for Linux, you basically have to know how to work two systems: the GUI and the terminal/command line. There are plenty of command-line programs for Windows. That they aren't all built into Windows itself isn't necessarily a failing. Even in Linux most of the special stuff comes from some package or another, not the kernel. And what kind of overhead does a simple GUI really cause, as long as you're not using Vista?
I'm really, really not a Linux expert, (I've used Ubuntu for around a year, and that's it) but even doing regular things, I've managed to break X or Gnome or KDE six or seven times. At least if I really screw up Windows I can fall back on my DOS skills.
I agree on the updating. Even if there was some sort of auto-update background service thing, that software manufacturers could opt into. MS Update only catches a handful of 3rd-party drivers that usually aren't needed anyway. Repositories are awesome, and a big advantage Linux has over Windows.
Can you just buy a second battery for a discounted price? That would be a not-terribly-crazy alternative.
The main relationship between 1984 and V for Vendetta that I saw was the similarity between the Voice of Fate (a radio program, much more prominent in the book IIRC) and "Body politic" (the Eye = surveillance, the Fingermen = police) and Big Brother. There were tons of other influences of course, stronger ones for sure, but that one kind of stuck in my mind.
I don't know about QBasic, since it's a little old-fashioned at this point. The current crop of undergrads has probably not seen much DOS. I learned it in junior high, then in high school learned some Visual Basic, Perl, and C++. They never taught us how to do much with files, though. I really wish they had, since that was probably all the formal programming training I'm ever going to get.
I forgot Perl within a month. C++ stuck with me a little longer, though I think I've lost it now. I can still write a bit in Visual Basic though, enough to make very small programs for very specific purposes. The nice thing about it is you're making a visual interface, so you immediately feel like you're making a "real" program, even if it does nothing but pop up on the screen and display some buttons that do nothing. It's very encouraging to a beginner.
Simple programming is a handy skill, even if you don't use it much... like house-painting.
I thought V for Vendetta was a very good movie. It wasn't much like the original, but it was a good movie. It needed to change to suit the times, and it did. And it looked good. And it discarded some bullshit that didn't make sense.
The Justice League Unlimited episode based on his Superman story "For the Man Who Has Everything," was also excellent, partly because it excised a sort of pointless subplot.
Alan Moore is a good writer, but he also uses other people's characters and ideas, and tosses anything that doesn't suit what he's trying to tell. He's as guilty as anyone of screwing with originals to adapt them to his own taste.
Watchmen was based on old Charlton characters (Blue Beetle = Nite-Owl, the Question = Rorschach, etc.); V for Vendetta was strongly influenced by 1984; Supreme was based on Superman -- and he tossed the character's history to make his own version); Tom Strong is based on various pulp heroes; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was based on various literary characters, and is not the first such pastiche by far (and it was an awful book); and Lost Girls was a pervy take on fairy tales. Even Top 10, probably my favourite thing he's done, makes innumerable references to other works, and I'm not sure how much it was influenced by Astro City.
Moore really is good, and Watchmen is his most important work, so I hope it's adapted well. (It really came along at the right moment; the world was ready in the 1980s for a serious deconstruction of superheroes.) I've only seen stills so far but they really seem to capture the right mood and look. But his work is not flawless, and it's practically as derivative as the movies it inspired.
I'm speaking mainly from a personal experience perspective with a bit of biology knowledge, but here goes.
Diet soda has 1-2 calories (Aspartame & acesulfame potassium or sucralose). A bottle or large cup of non-diet soda has about 300 calories (sucrose/glucose-fructose or HFCS). All else being equal, if you're drinking sugary soda all the time, you're going to be worse off than if you drink diet soda. It's simple in-and-out calorie counting.
On the other hand, drinking diet soda is like playing tricks on your body. It messes up your insulin production. You drink it, your body says, "Sweet! That means sugar, so make insulin!" Then it doesn't get the calorie hit it's expecting, so it makes more insulin. Eventually it builds up an insulin resistance, and it's a slippery slope to diabetes.
However, if you're consuming diet soda with food, you're getting calories (albeit less than with sugar soda), so you don't get the insulin resistance. (I think, IANAD.)
If you're still eating a 1700 Calorie meal, that won't do you much good and you'll still get fat. But at least it's not a 2000 Calorie meal. A lot of people are tricked into thinking "diet" means a lot more than it does. You're shaving calories off from your drinks but you need to watch the rest of your intake, too. I know a few people who are desperate to lose weight, but never do, because while they're trying every other trick in the book, they just refuse to cut down on their portion sizes.
Switching from sugar-based to diet sodas helped me lose about 20 lbs (from 160 to 140), especially with the first 10 lbs. It only helped, though. I had to resume exercising and watch what I was eating, too.
We've been on the verge of getting one, and hooking it up to a small (19" or so) LCD TV, for about 3 years. We were sort of waiting for a small, cheap computer that ran Linux... like this, for instance.
I thought of 3 probable configurations for it.
1) A laptop with a TV tuner. Convenient all-in-one. Can be grabbed and taken away. Downside: TV would take time to turn on, and 90% of the time we'd just want it as a pure TV. Also, cables and adaptors everywhere. Good laptops are expensive, bad laptops don't have good sound or screens.
2) A computer with TV tuner, and a monitor. Cheapest option. Downside: TV would take time to turn on. Cables everywhere. Would need external speakers. Hard to find a compact PC that can handle a TV tuner. If it didn't have to be compact I could just stick my old mid-tower down there...
3) A TV and a computer. A compact enough computer can be hidden. TV has built-in speakers and is instant-on. Downside: would have to switch video source to use computer.
I don't know if we'll ever do it though. We don't have a big kitchen and getting the cable to come out the right place would be a pain. (Now it's above the fridge... which is not an ideal spot for a computer, but is a better spot for a TV than the counter.) There's still the matter of a digital cable box.
Right now I just take my laptop downstairs. Not that I don't have enough cookbooks.