...unless they are just plain stupid, people won't upload or host illegal material without encryption... Please don't infer that I'm supporting this move as a good idea, but that's a pretty big "unless". A great deal of the people who are busted doing illegal stuff online (or offline even) are caught because they did something stupid.
Almost every museum exhibit I've seen says that it was donated or leased from a private collector. And this translates into every private collector doing such a similar thing, how? It doesn't. But, if you accept the premise that most museum exhibits are on loan from private collections, it does imply that museums would be much less impressively populated if it was not for support from private collections. I only see a few realistic options:
1) Let wealthy people buy these relics and show them to me at their discretion. Part of the current model. Sad if things get buried or hidden away, but it's what we've got.
2) Allow museums to buy artifacts when possible using their funding acquired through entrance fees, donations, and public support (taxes, bond measures, ear-marks, etc.) Also part of the current model. As long as we don't go overboard with entrance fees and taxes, I don't mind funding some select purchases for display. But not everything that comes up for auction. If the collectors want it worse than the museum wants to display it, let 'em have it. (Please don't infer support for ear-marks, but it seemed wrong not to include them as a source of museum funding.)
3) Jack up taxes to compete at auction and buy all of these things for public display. Some of these things are impossibly cool, but most are not remotely necessary to the public good. In fact, I suspect that many wouldn't be on display even if a museum had them. So, I'll voluntarily pay $$ to support a museum that shows them off, but I don't want my tax dollars to buy them all just to make sure that a private collector doesn't horde them away. Just my opinion.
4) Seize historic objects for display and compensate the owners some set amount that we, the public, determine rather than allowing them to submit their property to auction. No.
5) Force private collectors to make their collections available for display. You can have my beer bottle collection when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Personally, I vote that we stick with #1 for most cases. Go with #2 when possible without hurting attendance through excessive entrance fees. And avoid #4 & #5 at all costs. What model are you hoping to see if you object so strongly to #1?
Hey now, cocaine has given us lots of great things... Lindsey Lohan... I'm going to have to stop you right there. I won't go so far as to start bashing cocaine, but please don't include Lindsey Lohan in your list of "great things"!
First was egg. It was produced by chicken's ancestor. Actually, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is a trick question. The rooster's ancestor came first, thus enabling the chicken's ancestor to produce the first chicken egg. Otherwise, the egg would have been barren and appropriate for frying and application to toast.
Of course, other eggs had been around for a while...
don't worry, there is always global warming to be the next big boogie man. Yes but, after we've loaded our troops into their APCs, boats, and planes, where do we send them to fight that?
We had one vendor who refused to accept a signature on a scanned and e-mailed document - They insisted that it be faxed. We even pointed out that we were just going to print out the scanned document and drop it in the fax machine because the physical document had already been handed off to somebody else and we suggested that they just print it themselves. They still wanted the fax, so we printed and faxed the document we'd already delivered and that satisfied them. Bizarre.
Unfortunately, as with the current version of Google Earth, it does not support proxies requiring authentication... Not sure which version this changed in, but older versions work fine.
You can't buy music from Rhapsody, you can only rent it. Rhapsody is more like a jukebox than buying a CD. No dispute here - You're absolutely right. I'm no longer a Rhapsody subscriber, but I do buy mp3s from Amazon and have been completely satisfied with their service. No portability restrictions at all - They're just watermarked so that I can't easily share them via p2p without being identified. No complaints here. I was just correcting GGPs speculation that the ability to listen to as much music as he wanted would cost $50/month.
I get unlimited music for free, and legal. I have this device called a "radio", you might have heard of it? Its only drawback is that all its music is RIAA music. That's not the only drawback - The music is prescribed by the radio stations instead of provided on-demand as with mp3s or CDs. Try driving through the Texas panhandle and you'll see what I mean. You have all of the genres of country represented and a choice of stations where you can listen to Rush Limbaugh or somebody explaining why you're headed to Hell and need to repent, but little more. I consider that a major drawback.
I think that while you have an excellent point, when you pay money I think that most people would expect an experience that is superior to not paying money. I agree that most people do expect an experience that is superior when they pay for it. But I'm not convinced that they should. That principle extends beyond mp3 downloading to a lot of other areas:
* Downloading Windows XP Pro provides a better experience than buying Windows XP home * Breaking into a museum after it closes is free and allows you full access to exhibits not officially on display * In a stolen car, you don't have to worry about maintenance or insurance and, when it runs out of gas or crashes, you don't have to refill or repair it
The issue at hand, I believe, is much more legal/illegal rather than free/non-free.
But unlimited songs would probably cost quite much in the industries view, say 50 dollar / month or so Actually, it's about $12.99/month... Some people just like to whine without exploring their legal options first because the criminal options are marginally cheaper and they like to play the part of a martyr whose piracy rights are being violated. If you want copywritten material, buy a copy. Otherwise, live without it (or boycott it if you feel the need to protest.)
Here come the (-1 Troll) mods... Sig embarrassingly related.
Main Entry: trow Pronunciation: \'tro\ [long o improperly copypasta'ed] Function: verb Etymology: Middle English, from Old English trowan; akin to Old English trowe faithful, true Date: before 12th century
Yes they have a large commitment to basic research in the physical sciences but to say that these grants have nothing to do with energy research would be erroneous. If you meant to say that their investments are not all in applied areas of energy research then you'd have an easier time backing up your statement. I did not mean to imply that they spend too much time on physical science and not enough in applied energy research. They should be spending more time/money on applied energy research, but their primary mission is nuclear weapon stockpile maintenance. That's an important goal too, but IMHO it should not consume nearly the portion of resources that it currently does.
But the truth is that they are heavily invested in applied research; you can search through the literature for work by the National Energy Technology Labs, for instance. B.S. Energy research and applied sciences (apart from weapons work) are a side hobby for the DoE. That doesn't mean that they're not looking at those things at all, it just means that they're distantly secondary from their role in weapons maintenance. They play a big part in buttering my bread, so I won't be too harsh, but I think that they're badly unbalanced. Just my $.02.
it's pretty obvious that science has not been a USA priority for quite some time now. Yep. Our administration has decided that making footprints on Mars and digging graves in Iraq outweighs energy research. Sucks.
Even worse? The DoE is almost entirely devoted to missions having nothing to do with energy research.
The Wii controller accelerometer can barely allow for a soft putt on Wii Sports' Golf, and you actually think it's going to be worth a shit for Street Fighter? If you're equating your fighting style to gentle taps for short golf putts, I'd like to challenge you to a boxing match. The Wii controller does pretty decently for large movements, although the boxing in Wii Sports is fairly frustrating. I'd fault the Wii's lack of flexibility for controlled jumps/kicks/running in a Street Fighter-style game much more than inadequate accels.
where the toilet is flushed to tank that is later pumper to sea Actually, in the systems I know of, the waste is stored in large containers and eventually sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I believe the U.S. Navy has environmental programs in place to offset their dumping.
Simply pumping the waste out to sea made it possible to track subs based on the resulting floaters.
feh. It brings up a question which is begging for an answer. It does not beg the question. This seems like a petty peve. It seems obvious enough that by:
this begs the question of how many people actually use a laptop in this fashion. the esteemed "getto man d" meant:
This begets the question, "How many people actually use a laptop in this fashion?" Double feh.
Huh? How does one triangulate in n dimensions without n+1 receivers? Your logic seems solid enough to me. We aren't using the triangulation feature, so I probably remembered incorrectly and posted without thinking through. If I'm picturing things right: 1 transceiver should be able to resolve location to a spherical surface. (Or a circle if you assume it's on the ground.) 2 transceivers should get it down to a circle. (Or two points on the ground.) 3 should give you a choice of 2 possible points. (Or 1 on the ground.) 4 should find the tag in 3-D space. This is all assuming non-coplanar readers reporting non-conflicting data among other things.
Sound about right? I'm a little fuzzy today and may be picturing this wrong.
I don't know what your budget is like, but the readers can be pricey. The ones we use that are able to triangulate (2-D with two readers, 3-D with 3 readers) ran about $4k apiece. But, they would easily cover a standard sized home.
Of course, we had different needs than you, so there are probably considerably cheaper alternatives.
Game consoles are in the news? Nintendo just released a new $80 piece of hardware for the Wii that's making headlines? Game consoles aren't green enough! Hybrids are in the news? Not green enough - Their batteries kill the planet! The Westminster dog show is on? Dogs aren't green enough! Their pee kills grass!
The input (in my set-up) is via composite from the back of my receiver if I'm recording from satellite or via coax on the rare occasion that I need to digitize a VHS tape for somebody. So, yes, I am digitizing an analog signal and storing it as a high-quality mpeg (if I keep a show over-night, it's compressed to a more efficient format). In my case, I would be converting to analog anyway between the receiver and TV and the digitizer is very good, so I don't notice any degradation in quality. In others set-ups, YMMV.
Because it's more expensive? I don't have an old PC that doesn't suck up enormous amounts of power; doesn't have a remote control; probably lots of other parts needed (video in?) If you don't have the hardware handy, then it would be an expense. I gutted a few PCs I had laying around, each with different problems, and pieced together the box I'm using. The only purchase I had to make was the video input board bundled with the BeyondTV software, RF remote, and IR blinker (about $100 IIRC). I believe that the newer cards cost marginally more, but support HD.
I don't want a loud whiny box sitting next to my TV spewing out heat I found that getting creative in minimizing the sound while mitigating the heat was an interesting part of the project, but my end result is still louder than a standard Tivo...
so far I don't know of any system or software that can decode DirecTV satellite. I have DirectTV and it works fine. Basically, if you have cable, you plug it straight into your video input card. If you have a receiver, you tell the software what kind it is and hook an IR blinker between the PC and the receiver. You navigate/program/flip channels using a RF remote that interfaces with the PC. The PC then uses the IR blinker to tune the receiver. Unless you've got something exotic that uses neither standard cable nor a receiver that can be tuned with an IR remote, you're golden.
My Tivo and satellite is a great product. There's nothing wrong with it. Cheaper than cable, better quality than cable, better customer support than cable. Why shouldn't I use it? Sounds like you should. But, if you've got spare hardware, adapting a PC will be cheaper and give you a lot of additional features. And, I consider parts of the implementation fun. But, different strokes I guess.
I'm not running Myth because my time is valuable, and I'd MUCH rather have the appliance experience than the geek cred of running Myth at home. It's true that if you compare what you consider your time to be worth (unless it's worth very little to you) and the time it takes to build a BeyondTV/MythTV box, Tivo is a no-brainer winner. And I have no interest in geek cred - If I did, I've have gone with MythTV instead of putting a Windows box on display in my living room.
But, at least for me, building my media center computer was recreation. It was a ~2 week process done a little bit at a time while the kids were in bed. Overall, it was a nice change of pace and a nice one-shot project. And it yielded a result that I don't think any out-of-the-box solution can match (although my experience is limited on the out-of-the-box perks.) Huge amount of storage, very wide range of media compatibility (mp3s, mpgs, wmvs, avis with any Windows-supported codec, etc.), commercial skipping, no worries about compatibility with broadcaster demands, etc.
I think using something like MythTv or Tivo is a massive waste of time because you still have to deal with the commercials. I use BeyondTV at home. The commercials are still recorded, but they're detected pretty robustly ~5-10 minutes after the program finishes recording. They show up in a different color in the progress bar when it's displayed and it's a single button press to skip each set.
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...unless they are just plain stupid, people won't upload or host illegal material without encryption... Please don't infer that I'm supporting this move as a good idea, but that's a pretty big "unless". A great deal of the people who are busted doing illegal stuff online (or offline even) are caught because they did something stupid.1) Let wealthy people buy these relics and show them to me at their discretion.
Part of the current model. Sad if things get buried or hidden away, but it's what we've got.
2) Allow museums to buy artifacts when possible using their funding acquired through entrance fees, donations, and public support (taxes, bond measures, ear-marks, etc.)
Also part of the current model. As long as we don't go overboard with entrance fees and taxes, I don't mind funding some select purchases for display. But not everything that comes up for auction. If the collectors want it worse than the museum wants to display it, let 'em have it. (Please don't infer support for ear-marks, but it seemed wrong not to include them as a source of museum funding.)
3) Jack up taxes to compete at auction and buy all of these things for public display.
Some of these things are impossibly cool, but most are not remotely necessary to the public good. In fact, I suspect that many wouldn't be on display even if a museum had them. So, I'll voluntarily pay $$ to support a museum that shows them off, but I don't want my tax dollars to buy them all just to make sure that a private collector doesn't horde them away. Just my opinion.
4) Seize historic objects for display and compensate the owners some set amount that we, the public, determine rather than allowing them to submit their property to auction.
No.
5) Force private collectors to make their collections available for display.
You can have my beer bottle collection when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Personally, I vote that we stick with #1 for most cases. Go with #2 when possible without hurting attendance through excessive entrance fees. And avoid #4 & #5 at all costs. What model are you hoping to see if you object so strongly to #1?
It was produced by chicken's ancestor. Actually, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is a trick question. The rooster's ancestor came first, thus enabling the chicken's ancestor to produce the first chicken egg. Otherwise, the egg would have been barren and appropriate for frying and application to toast.
Of course, other eggs had been around for a while...
We had one vendor who refused to accept a signature on a scanned and e-mailed document - They insisted that it be faxed. We even pointed out that we were just going to print out the scanned document and drop it in the fax machine because the physical document had already been handed off to somebody else and we suggested that they just print it themselves. They still wanted the fax, so we printed and faxed the document we'd already delivered and that satisfied them. Bizarre.
Unfortunately, as with the current version of Google Earth, it does not support proxies requiring authentication... Not sure which version this changed in, but older versions work fine.
* Downloading Windows XP Pro provides a better experience than buying Windows XP home
* Breaking into a museum after it closes is free and allows you full access to exhibits not officially on display
* In a stolen car, you don't have to worry about maintenance or insurance and, when it runs out of gas or crashes, you don't have to refill or repair it
The issue at hand, I believe, is much more legal/illegal rather than free/non-free.
Here come the (-1 Troll) mods... Sig embarrassingly related.
Main Entry: trow
Pronunciation: \'tro\ [long o improperly copypasta'ed]
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English trowan; akin to Old English trowe faithful, true
Date: before 12th century
1) obsolete: believe
2) archaic: think
Even worse? The DoE is almost entirely devoted to missions having nothing to do with energy research.
Too depressing...
Simply pumping the waste out to sea made it possible to track subs based on the resulting floaters.
You read the whole title? I got as far as "IBM Patents..." and came in here to start complaining.
1 transceiver should be able to resolve location to a spherical surface. (Or a circle if you assume it's on the ground.)
2 transceivers should get it down to a circle. (Or two points on the ground.)
3 should give you a choice of 2 possible points. (Or 1 on the ground.)
4 should find the tag in 3-D space.
This is all assuming non-coplanar readers reporting non-conflicting data among other things.
Sound about right? I'm a little fuzzy today and may be picturing this wrong.
I don't know what your budget is like, but the readers can be pricey. The ones we use that are able to triangulate (2-D with two readers, 3-D with 3 readers) ran about $4k apiece. But, they would easily cover a standard sized home.
Of course, we had different needs than you, so there are probably considerably cheaper alternatives.
Game consoles are in the news? Nintendo just released a new $80 piece of hardware for the Wii that's making headlines? Game consoles aren't green enough!
Hybrids are in the news? Not green enough - Their batteries kill the planet!
The Westminster dog show is on? Dogs aren't green enough! Their pee kills grass!
The input (in my set-up) is via composite from the back of my receiver if I'm recording from satellite or via coax on the rare occasion that I need to digitize a VHS tape for somebody. So, yes, I am digitizing an analog signal and storing it as a high-quality mpeg (if I keep a show over-night, it's compressed to a more efficient format). In my case, I would be converting to analog anyway between the receiver and TV and the digitizer is very good, so I don't notice any degradation in quality. In others set-ups, YMMV.
But, at least for me, building my media center computer was recreation. It was a ~2 week process done a little bit at a time while the kids were in bed. Overall, it was a nice change of pace and a nice one-shot project. And it yielded a result that I don't think any out-of-the-box solution can match (although my experience is limited on the out-of-the-box perks.) Huge amount of storage, very wide range of media compatibility (mp3s, mpgs, wmvs, avis with any Windows-supported codec, etc.), commercial skipping, no worries about compatibility with broadcaster demands, etc.
Just my experience.