Yeah! And when they put pictures in newspapers as well that just got in the way of the text.
And this kind of thing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU8PId_6xec (YouTube.com) is a pointless waste of resources. I'd rather read 250 words on the nature of light.
I have been using a service called Dropbox. This has 2GB of space for nothing but the point is that you define a single folder on all your machines as the Dropbox and it syncs everything between each device (and online). This means that I save a file on my laptop and it get sent to The Cloud, but also to my desktop computer. Best of both worlds, and the more computers you add, the more backups you have.
Windows and Mac clients are available at the moment, and a Linux edition (currently Ubuntu/Nautilus) is in testing - I have a copy and it's truly lovely.
One of the real problems is that the kind of journalism that is talked about in TFA is likely to be found in the most popular elements of the press, and these set up some interesting, and sometime devastating, consequences. You might look at the Andrew Wakefield controversy - where essentially one man (with a number of a alleged conflicts of interest) and a couple of UK newspapers managed to convince a large body of the population that there was a link between MMR and autism and that there was a large body of scientific opinion supporting this. In fact, it was pretty much Wakefield versus the establishment (and lots of evidence), but because he had achieved some level of publicity, people stopped having their babies vaccinated and, probably as a result, children have died in the UK from entirely preventable diseases. It's the same process which allows ID into classrooms - if people are discussing it, then it must be worth discussing.
I have the iPlayer thing installed on a virtual WinXP machine and, if it did cost £100 million, I'd be surprised. It's rubbish for the following reasons.
1. If I wanted to rip the content I'd just plug a macbook into my DVR and record it. DRM be damned.
2. If I paid for content with my licence fee, then I paid for it. I didn't pay to borrow it for seven days.
3. The programmes I wanted to watch often weren't available - for example, the first episode of The Tudors (I didn't watch the second, third...) wasn't there. Torrentspy had it though.
4. Some dude has put every episode of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe on Youtube in order and that is watchable in Windows, Linux or OS X. I can live with the image quality.
I've fired up iPlayer twice. It turned my machine to sludge, was unreliable and just didn't work in the way it was supposed to. I love the BBC and would happily pay 2x the licence fee, but the iPlayer is just a waste of resources. I'd much rather see some innovative drama, the return of Cardiac Arrest or another Spooks-based ARG that a media player that is about as half as useful as every other distribution channel.
Bought a Mac Mini from PC World, and when the dvd burner went tits up I took it to an Apple service centre and was told the warranty had expired, even though I'd only had the machine for 10 months. Apparently the store had registered the machine as purchased and then kept it in storage for a couple of months simply to piss me off.
I won't be buying from them again. This just makes me more confident in my own personal boycott.
Well that all seems a bit negative. Science is part of culture, and so an appreciation of it should be part of anyone's cultural learning. Using some texts - maybe on the history of science - is a good idea, as is an introduction to philosophy. My elder daughter read Sophie's World and that gave her a pretty good grounding in the latter and Bill Bryson's science book also has decent short chapters that are well written and thoroughly researched.
It's amazing how many people still regard 'science' and 'arts' as mutually exclusive...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! And when they put pictures in newspapers as well that just got in the way of the text. And this kind of thing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU8PId_6xec (YouTube.com) is a pointless waste of resources. I'd rather read 250 words on the nature of light.
A: I have more hair than I really have.
B: You're all stupid enough to believe I have more hair than I really have.
C: I don't mind looking like a tit - so long as no-one believes I've lost a bit of hair because I'm older than Methusilah.
I have been using a service called Dropbox. This has 2GB of space for nothing but the point is that you define a single folder on all your machines as the Dropbox and it syncs everything between each device (and online). This means that I save a file on my laptop and it get sent to The Cloud, but also to my desktop computer. Best of both worlds, and the more computers you add, the more backups you have. Windows and Mac clients are available at the moment, and a Linux edition (currently Ubuntu/Nautilus) is in testing - I have a copy and it's truly lovely.
One of the real problems is that the kind of journalism that is talked about in TFA is likely to be found in the most popular elements of the press, and these set up some interesting, and sometime devastating, consequences. You might look at the Andrew Wakefield controversy - where essentially one man (with a number of a alleged conflicts of interest) and a couple of UK newspapers managed to convince a large body of the population that there was a link between MMR and autism and that there was a large body of scientific opinion supporting this. In fact, it was pretty much Wakefield versus the establishment (and lots of evidence), but because he had achieved some level of publicity, people stopped having their babies vaccinated and, probably as a result, children have died in the UK from entirely preventable diseases.
It's the same process which allows ID into classrooms - if people are discussing it, then it must be worth discussing.
I have the iPlayer thing installed on a virtual WinXP machine and, if it did cost £100 million, I'd be surprised. It's rubbish for the following reasons. 1. If I wanted to rip the content I'd just plug a macbook into my DVR and record it. DRM be damned. 2. If I paid for content with my licence fee, then I paid for it. I didn't pay to borrow it for seven days. 3. The programmes I wanted to watch often weren't available - for example, the first episode of The Tudors (I didn't watch the second, third...) wasn't there. Torrentspy had it though. 4. Some dude has put every episode of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe on Youtube in order and that is watchable in Windows, Linux or OS X. I can live with the image quality. I've fired up iPlayer twice. It turned my machine to sludge, was unreliable and just didn't work in the way it was supposed to. I love the BBC and would happily pay 2x the licence fee, but the iPlayer is just a waste of resources. I'd much rather see some innovative drama, the return of Cardiac Arrest or another Spooks-based ARG that a media player that is about as half as useful as every other distribution channel.
Bought a Mac Mini from PC World, and when the dvd burner went tits up I took it to an Apple service centre and was told the warranty had expired, even though I'd only had the machine for 10 months. Apparently the store had registered the machine as purchased and then kept it in storage for a couple of months simply to piss me off. I won't be buying from them again. This just makes me more confident in my own personal boycott.
Well that all seems a bit negative. Science is part of culture, and so an appreciation of it should be part of anyone's cultural learning. Using some texts - maybe on the history of science - is a good idea, as is an introduction to philosophy. My elder daughter read Sophie's World and that gave her a pretty good grounding in the latter and Bill Bryson's science book also has decent short chapters that are well written and thoroughly researched. It's amazing how many people still regard 'science' and 'arts' as mutually exclusive...