I have relatives in the Midwest of the US that apparently don't pay per litre, but in every other country I've ever been, water usage is metered just like electricity or any other utility.
Yea, we call that "having a well."
FYI, having a well is far from free.
The largest city in the Midwest only has metered water for a small percentage of houses. For everyone else you are charged a flat fee. Chicago is trying to convince people to install meters, saying that metered water can result in lower bills if you use less than what you'd be billed for. So what's happening is that people who use very little water are installing meters and people who use a lot don't. This shouldn't be a big deal because we have a truly massive lake right beside the city, but the water level is a problem because they reversed the Chicago River to flow out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. Anyway, as of late September, only 41% of Chicago water accounts were metered.
So, what you're saying is that we return to the era prior to copyright (say, before the 1700's just to have a nice, rounded number), all of the authors will no longer have any motivation to publish just like before that time? No one will bother publishing works like Romeo & Juliet (or any of Shakespeare's books, for that matter), Beowolf (before copy right as a concept even existed) or any other works because of lack of copyright protection?
Well, there was great literature before copyright protection, but there was vastly more after it. Some of this is due to technology, demographics, economics, and so forth. But some of it isn't. The first copyright provision passed in 1710. The explosion of the novel, which is entirely a printed form, came after that date. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Defoe was not only a crusader for copyright protections but also possibly the first person in England to be able to make a living by writing prose. Copyright made the professional writer possible.
Romeo & Juliet is a good example, actually. 16th and 17th century plays were written for the stage and printed as an afterthought, often in pirated (if we can use that term) editions. As a result we've lost a pretty large percentage of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, because why print them if someone can pirate them and kill your profits? Or, even worse, what if the rival theater company across the street puts on your play without having to pay you a shilling for it? We know of at least two Shakespearean plays (Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won) that are lost because they were never printed. If Shakespeare had had copyright protection, would it have been worth his time to publish them?
I think that the way copyright protection has been so abused by US corporate interests can sometimes blind us to the value of it. Our current system of unending copyright is very clearly bad, but a reasonable form of copyright is very clearly good. It frees writers from the requirements of patronage, it increases cultural output, and it provides a monetary incentive for making that production public.
The microSD card is a huge plus to me. Assuming the build quality is similar to the previous generation of Nooks, the big Nook will be the first 9"+ tablet with a microSD card, bluetooth, a solid build quality, an a debut price under $300. You can get an Asus EEE Pad Slider for $299, but it sold at ~$400 before this, and the build of the Archos and Le Pan devices didn't impress me when I played with them at my local MicroCenter.
I think that this is a really big deal -- bluetooth, the expansion slot, and a solid build quality will finally mean that there's a proper netbook replacement in the budget range. The Nook Color sort of worked like this, but the bluetooth required Cyanogenmod and is pretty wonky even then, and it's only a 7" device. The Nexus is nice, but you're stuck with the 7" model and there's no microSD slot. Samsung has a $250 device with most of what I want, but it's only a 7" device and there you're effectively paying a $50 premium over the Nexus just for the microSD. So the large Nook really does feel like a big deal to me. If it takes after the Nook Color more than the Nook Tablet in terms of being easy to root and to mod then I'll buy one the day it gets released. Even if it isn't I might buy one anyway.
If it doesn't freeze in the corn belt again this year, like it didn't last year, it would be a good crop to attempt, as it could easily offset feed costs, and avoid "graining" their cattle on refuse gummybears.
Just for the record, last winter was among the warmest ever, but it definitely did freeze here in the corn belt. Davenport, Iowa (for example) had subfreezing temperatures 4 times in October 2011, its first low in the teens on November 17th, and its first day with a subfreezing high on December 5. Buckwheat is a good cool-weather crop, but it isn't very frost-tolerant. It's too in the year late for it.
This is just a mild corrective to the parent. Buckwheat is an excellent alternative to corn, but for earlier in the season.
A quick search of eBay shows that potions are still for sale. For example, here is a love potion (the listing includes some vaguely NSFW images). They say, "I am happy to bring to you a special cast potion that me and the covens that joined us brought forth on Samhain/ Halloween night! [...] This is a guaranteed powerful mix to get you the results you need." That's pretty clearly a magical potion. With a guarantee!
Browsing the metaphysical section also brings up vast quantities of magic items -- 41,706 items under "Crystal Healing", for example. There's also orgone protection for your cell phone and a dust that attracts money. I'm curious -- has eBay banned the sale of magical services -- curses, etc. -- but not magical items? Or are these listings just slipping through the cracks? If it's just services that have been banned, then the complaint in TFA about holy water being sold is completely specious. And even if some physical items have been banned, the continued presence of lots of orgone accumulators and healing crystals suggests that eBay isn't working from purely pro-Christian motives. (Yes, I know about the category of natural magic that can in theory be squared with Christian belief. I don't think eBay is capable of being that subtle.)
And take heart, magic users -- a search for the word "grimoire" turns up 24 pages of items. Even if they've banned the sale of curses, no reason you can't still roll your own!
I can tell you where the idea comes from. It comes from the idiotic idea that doing a research paper on a topic that has already been researched a million times before is useful in any way shape or form. It comes from the notion that you can teach PROPER research procedures on dummy(fake/psuedo) research projects.
IF you want to fix the problem, fix the process. Make it REAL research, on things that matter to the kids. Yeah that means more work for teachers, but teachers are supposed to be teaching, and not teaching by rote.
You can't do original research until you learn what is already known, which by definition will be something that someone has already done. There is no way around this problem. No teacher can generate large numbers of projects that are both 1.) simple enough for an introductory student, and 2.) examples of original research. The easy stuff has been done in most fields.
On the Cliff's Notes issue -- I just looked in WorldCat and got over 10,000 hits for Hamlet as a subject. This will include multiple entries for lots of titles (different editions, the German translation, etc.), but you're still looking at 4,000+ books published on the topic, in addition to no one knows how many scholarly journal articles. Do you really think that a high school English teacher is going to be able to come up with an idea for original research on Hamlet that hasn't been covered in one of the previous 20,000 publications on the topic? And then come up with another one for her second and third period classes as well? And then do it all over again next year? Not possible. If she could do that she'd have won a MacArthur Grant and would be running the Renaissance studies program at Harvard. The same problem applies (to a less extreme extent) to every book in and around the Western canon. Now, a good teacher will know what's in Cliff's Notes and whatever it's Web equivalents are, and will assign work on something they don't include. But that's as close to original research as you can get with the average student.
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.
On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.
We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.
Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.
Dude, please. Agribusiness, defense and oil, the biggest welfare leeches in America, are all squarely Republican.
Agribusiness is squarely Midwestern. Its bloc of supporters in Congress are representatives from farm states from both parties. For instance, when (oil state) Senator Tom Coburn proposed legislation to end the ethanol subsidy, a bipartisan group of Midwestern senators came up with legislation that attempted to save a subsidy of some sort. This sort of thing happens all of the time. If you're an elected representative from Indiana or Minnesota or Iowa then you're probably going to support Big Agriculture no matter what part you belong to.
A senator may be very clear on what limits there should be on government spending, and he will also probably believe very strongly that such limits should not apply to his constituents. This is of course both a a feature and a bug of a republican form of government.
You're simply not going to get a definitive record of a celestial event in 8th century Europe. Records are very scanty, often non-existent. This is so marked that it's led to an entertaining conspiracy theory or two claiming that the early Middle Ages didn't actually exist and were faked at some later date. Back in the real world, there's so little evidence for most things about Anglo-Saxon England that the claim that the people of York chose Ethelred, son of Mull to be their king is almost as suspect as the claim about the wonderful serpents.
So the best you can usually hope for in the English 8th century is a monk somewhere recording events in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (or a Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- there were a few of them made at different times and in different places). The Chronicle doesn't really go for detail. They sum up a year in a few declarative sentences, with no description, so you're never going to get a description of a celestial event, you're going to get a simplfied interpretation of it. This interpretation will be in terms that the monk or the eyewitnesses he got his information from understood. They didn't know anything about supernovas, but he knew about miraculous crosses in the sky, like that which appeared to the future Roman Emperor Constantine during his fighting against his rival Maxentius. So whatever it was that someone saw, it got interpreted as a crucifix.
The point isn't that something definitely appeared in the sky in 774. There's a chance that someone made up the red crucifx, or hallucinated it, or the chronicler lied or garbled a story he heard fifth-hand. But if it did happen, there's no reason to think that there will be better written evidence than a vague line in one copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
To me, the big thing that the Nexus has over the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet is bluetooth. A tablet on which you can use a BT keyboard to do some serious typing is a device that can replace most of what I do on my netbook -- web surfing, Netflix, email, and light word processing. There are already $200 tablets with BT, but they are things like the Ideapad A1 that don't approach the Nexus in terms of internals and screen quality. This is a big moment as far as I'm concerned. If the thing had a microSD card slot (an unfortunate omission) then I'd preorder one right now and put the netbook up on eBay.
And I know the Nook Color is a very well-built device that's been around for a while and that has bluetooth that you can use under CyanogenMod's build of Anrdoid. But the BT chip doesn't have an antenna, the internals aren't great (and were less good when it was released in October 2010 than the Nexus 7's are right now), and you're stuck on Gingerbread. The Nook Color is close; the Nexus 7 looks to be even closer.
We seem to be going in circles with music. Own a phonograph, stream from radio, own an 8 track/cassette/CD, stream from TV (MTV or countless other music channels), own mp3's, stream from the Net
This isn't really a good comparison. First of all, you didn't pay for radio, you didn't pay for over-the-air TV. If you chose to forgo buying music and depend on the radio, part of the bargain was that you were giving up local control in exchange for not spending any money. You paid for cable TV, of course, but MTV et al provided you with music *videos*, so for your cable bill (and MTV accounted for a tiny part of your bill) you got the dubious pleasure of not only hearing Phil Collins, but of looking at Phil Collins as well. There's value-added there. Allegedly.
Moreover, none of these really replaced purchasing music so much as they supplemented and in fact promoted it. Record labels wanted their artists on the radio not because of the revenue streams from those places (though that helped) but because that was the best way to get people to buy the LP. And sure, phonograph (and sheet music) sales collapsed about the same time as the coming of radio, but that was because of the Depression. People weren't able to spend as much on music. Sales picked up on their own in the postwar period, without any huge change in technology. Even MTV, though you had to pay for it (as a tiny fraction of your cable bill), was never meant as a replacement for selling physical music to people. The music industry viewed it exactly as they viewed radio. It was promotion for the LP/cassette/whatever.
The current wave of streaming audio services is meant to *replace* actual ownership of music. Rather than paying money for an LP/8-track/CD/FLAC file you are paying a sum to access a certain amount of music for a certain period of time. You aren't expected to do both; this is an effort to get you to move your music acquisition budget to music renting. It's a totally new ballgame.
Re:Not "Windows" in any meaningful sense
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The $45 Windows Laptop
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· Score: 4, Informative
I saw this same (or very similar) model on sale at the local CVS.
I'm pretty sure this is the Sylvania netbook that appeared in 2010 for $99 at CVS. Reviewers were not kind about it, but the novelty of buying a $99 computer at a drug store was sort of fun. It's no surprise that 21 months later it's dropped under $50.
These little craptops have always intrigued me, and it's just a matter of time before someone puts out one in the under-$100 range that's not entirely terrible. There's this guy that is available new from lots of ebay sites (I chose this one at random and am not endorsing it). It runs Android 2.2 and sports 256 mb of RAM. I haven't seen any kind words about it and from the specs it's likely still terrible, but you're starting to approach something respectable. It's not that far from being a 7" version of the Efika MX SmartBook, which isn't a world beater by any stretch, but which is light and fanless and runs Linux and sort of harks back to what was fun about early netbook.
Is it just me, or has the quality of the trolls at Slashdot absolutely plummeted in the last several years? I really appreciate quality trolling, but I'm afraid that it's turned into a lost art form around here.
No, there are two theories spoken of here -- the original idea of continental drift a century ago (which showed up without much of an explanation, hence viewed by some as pseudoscience), and the more modern theories about plate tectonics and seafloor spreading, which serve to validate and explain continental drift. The latter were evidently emerging when the prof was in grad school.
The theory of plate tectonics was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, as people worked through the implications of the older idea of continental drift and worked out mechanisms for it, and as things like sonar mapping of the seafloor came into being.
My father is a geographer and was in grad school from 1966 to 1971, and he's talked about the fighting over plate tectonics going on among the geologists and physical geographers at his university. At the end of his time in grad school there were a few older geologists who adamantly refused to buy into the idea. Most people in the profession were convinced very quickly of the reality of plate tectonics, once there were good tests of the theory (like the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis). But the "anti-drifter" stance was only killed off by attrition, as the people opposed to it either retired or else died with their boots on.
It's a pretty interesting example of the emergence of a major new idea that completely reshapes a field of knowledge, and does so very quickly once a good explanatory mechanism is found. There's probably a good book-length study of it, and if there isn't then there should be.
This isn't news. There is already strong evidence indicating that circa 1970's/80's US pollution played a key part - if not the cause of - the 1980's Ethiopian Famine.
The Ethiopian Famine ran from 1983-1985, and was mainly caused by a civil war that ran for 17 years, and by disastrous government food policies in the wake of the "Red Terror" of the late 1970s and the construction of a Marxist state that poured all of its resources into its military. Sort of like a much less extreme version famine-prone North Korea. Wikipedia has a fairly weak article on the famine. It's worth noting that the famine began in 1983, but the major drought started in 1984. With a stable society and a reasonable government there would have been food shortages in 1984, but no more, and there definitely wouldn't have been mass starvation before the crops started failing.
Listen, I'm a bleeding heart environmentalist and sympathetic to the idea that the US has historically shit in its own bed, and continues to do so in certain ways. But citing any old thing as caused by US pollution makes environmentalists look like kooks. It's very bad for the cause.
Seriously how did we survive these things in the past, how did we react the first time an airplane killed someone or when the first time a gas light exploded. Why are we so different now?
I think that the biggest difference from early efforts at airplanes or lighting is one of scale. The guy who died in an early aviation accident was usually the guy who designed, paid for, and built the machine that killed him. Same with gas lighting and many other early mechanical inventions. That's easy for us to accept -- you gave it a go, but you did something wrong and it killed you. Moreover, the fault would've been easier to spot in a simpler mechanism, so a huge investigation after the fact isn't necessarily very helpful. With something like Challenger, the people who died weren't the people who made the mistakes, and the identity of the mistakes was extremely difficult to determine. There were thousands or even millions of parts in a space shuttle, with hundreds of people involved in the design, thousands involved in the manufacture, with a total price tag of a couple of billion dollars.
We haven't gotten cowardly. We've just gotten ourselves into deep waters.
A basement dweller hears Schilling's name and remembers that only 4.9% of the runs that Schilling allowed over his career were unearned, which is the lowest percentage for any pitcher with a long career. We, er, *they* know that this means that ERA undervalues Schilling, because preventing unearned runs is a skill -- you do it by striking out batters, not walking anyone, and getting batters to hit fly balls rather than ground balls.
Yeah, that's way more useful than being able to identify the classes of various starships.
Of course it's not at all useful, which is the great beauty of it. Baseball probably has more nerd fans than any other American sport, in large part because it is an incredible generator of numerical data. Just look at Schilling's page at Baseball Reference. Look at all of those beautiful numbers!
A baseball game is largely a series of discrete events with a relatively limited number of possible outcomes. A typical baseball game has maybe 250-300 pitches thrown in it, each one of which has a measurable outcome that can be described in a relatively small number of ways. Almost every plate appearance results in one of these 27 outcomes. We have box scores recording most or all of this information going back to 1918, and various more basic levels of data back to 1871.
You can probably see where this is leading. Lots of data compiled over many years plus a relatively simple array of outcomes means that baseball is extremely well suited to the statistically inclined. There is a vast well of data to mine, you can create mathematical models of the game relatively easily, and, most importantly, many of these models do a decent job of describing what actually occurs on the field. And so now we have the vast and ever-expanding field of Sabermetrics, full of wonderful things like minor league equivalencies and extensive studies of the effects of a catcher's ability to "frame" a pitch. It's even possible to be a knowledgeable baseball fan and *never* watch a game or listen to one on the radio, but instead just look at the numbers every day. Almost like in The Matrix.
Compare this to other team sports, like football (either kind) or basketball. In them, numerous people are involved in every play and you have no good way of recording this in a way you can put on a spreadsheet. You can watch a soccer game and see that the goal was scored because a player who never touched the ball made a great run that confused the defense. But it's very difficult to record this information in a form that is friendly to data analysis. Or think of American football -- how do you make a good statistical record of the play of an offensive lineman? It's very difficult. In baseball, the fundamental interaction is between the pitcher throwing the ball and the batter trying to hit it. It's almost binary, and everything else on the field is vastly less important. It's a game for numbers, it's a game for nerds.
You need to get out of your basement once in a while.
Isn't this really the sort of knowledge gained by spending more time in the basement?
Schilling's Bloody Sock is one of the most famous incidents in American sports in the 21st century, and occurred during the most-remembered playoff series in baseball of the last few decades. Lots of people who aren't basement dwellers know all about it.
A basement dweller hears Schilling's name and remembers that only 4.9% of the runs that Schilling allowed over his career were unearned, which is the lowest percentage for any pitcher with a long career. We, er, *they* know that this means that ERA undervalues Schilling, because preventing unearned runs is a skill -- you do it by striking out batters, not walking anyone, and getting batters to hit fly balls rather than ground balls.
Basement dwellers, and a lot of other people, also know that Schilling has been a very outspoken conservative proponent of small government for many years. He'd say that a free-spending government corrupts the market, corrupts individuals, and leads to lots of waste. I guess he just went out and proved himself right!
Now if you'll excuse me, Mom says that lunch is ready. Hope it isn't PB&J again!
Slavery was already on its way out, because slaves have low productivity and trained and motivated workers provided more profits despite wage cost.
This argument gets made a lot, but there really isn't any evidence for it. If you look at census data, the number of slaves went up at every census through 1860. The number of slaves increased by almost 60% from 1840 to 1860. That doesn't look like a dying system. And then sharecropping, which was in many respects an extension of slavery, survived in much of the South until the second half of the 20th century. There's no reason to think that slavery wouldn't have survived a very long time after 1865 had the war not happened.
The argument that slavery would wither on the vine was made a lot in the late 18th century as a way of excusing the Founders' unwillingness to do anything about it. Maybe it even looked correct; slavery certainly withered in the Northern states and disappeared there in large part because it wasn't economically important enough to overcome people's moral qualms. But the South had an export economy based on plantations producing cotton, tobacco, and rice, and those demanded lots of heavy labor, and so slavery never withered. It increased until it was killed.
If you're concerned about the way something is manufactured, don't buy it new. Yes, by buying a used item you're increasing the resale value of it, which makes a tiny difference in how much the company can charge for it new. But otherwise you're not supporting the manufacturer.
This is helpful in all sorts of areas, not just with tech manufacturing. If I find an authors to be loathsome in his politics -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Card -- I'll buy his books used. That way I get to read what I want, but don't have to give money to someone whose ideas I find repulsive. Sure, I have to hunt around to find a copy, and maybe deal with dog-eared pages and someone else's underlining, but if you feel strongly about something you should be willing to live with minor inconveniences.
The key to the whole thing is the following, from the BBC article:
The shift to agency pricing was also seen as a protective measure to head off attempts by Amazon to corner the market in ebooks. It had been aggressively cutting prices to win customers over to its Kindle ebook reader.
The publishers are afraid that Amazon, in an effort to kill off their competitors and corner the ebook market, will set prices extremely low and sell ebooks at no profit or at a loss. I don't blame the publishers for being paranoid about it.
If you look at all the homeopathic remedies available, there's an enormous number of them out there. Obviously, it's total BS, but its practitioners have made a real pseudoscience out of it, with tables of ailments and which corresponding remedy to try (the remedies themselves being some item, perhaps a poisonous substance, diluted so much into water that there's probably none left in the vial of water you're buying).
Homeopathy has been around since the early 19th century, and has been a fairly organized practice for almost the entire time, which has meant that it's been able to iterate and refine itself enough to have developed a very complex and mature (though not effective) set of doctrines.
One thing that's interesting, and surprising at first, is that homeopathy's success in the 19th century was due in large part to the fact that it worked better than many other medical practices, in that patients treated by homeopathic remedies often had better outcomes than patients treated by other methods. This seems to be at odds with the known fact that homeopathy doesn't work, but if you think about it for a bit it makes sense. Remember that ancient practices like bloodletting survived until well into the 19th century, and that scientific medicine was very immature -- the common use of anesthesia dates to the 1850s, and germ theory wasn't generally accepted until fairly late in the century. Both traditional and scientific medical practices were often harmful to the patient -- going to the doctor could kill you.
Now consider what a homeopathic doctor does. He visits you, gives you a checkup, then gives you a prescription for a lot of water with a few molecules of something else in it. Put another way, his treatment is bed rest, plenty of fluids, a nice placebo, and a little TLC. That regimen won't ever harm you, and for a lot of diseases and conditions it'll always be the preferred method of treatment. Compared with the sometimes incompetent, often misguided, and occasionally murderous regimes of other forms of 19th century medicine, it's no surprise that homeopathy was a popular and successful practice.
That says nothing about it's place in the 21st century, of course.
The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport.
The last time I left the US I spent four weeks hiking around in the Dolomites and nearby. Everything I had was in my backpack, I stayed at night in mountain rifugios and hiked around most of every day. I had my passport on my person somewhere at every moment, because what else was I going to do with it? I fell a couple of times, nothing serious, but I did get a few scrapes and bruises, and I'll admit that I was a bit free in tossing my pack (which contained my passport) around.
Now, if the RFID chip can be broken by a child sitting on it, there is an approximately 0% chance that mine would have survived that trip had I had the misfortune of having one in my passport. There would have been no way to avoid it, other than putting the passport in a box filled with bubble wrap and packing peanuts or something else equally absurd. Had I been staying in a hotel and wandering around a town I would have (as per Italian law) left it with the hotel. But this wasn't that sort of trip. There was no way, sort of building some sort of portable armored and padded shrine, that I would have been able to "respect" the passport enough to avoid wrecking the RFID chip, if it really is so easy to break.
If the chip is that much less resilient than the paper that the passports are printed on, they need to come up with something better.
Marshmallow Fluff? If you're going to give yourself up to Google like this you need to think big. For $25 you could buy 2500 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints from Poster Revolution via Amazon. Not only do you exchange your measly $25 for $2,500, you also wind up with enough posters to cover 16722 square meters. That's over four acres. You'll never have to buy wallpaper again!
And better yet, those (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints look sort of like real money, so maybe Amazon will accept them as legal tender, and you can exchange your $2500 for 250000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, then exchange those for 25000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 2500000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 250000000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 25000000000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, and suddenly you've got enough (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints to cover the Earth with a layer of (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints almost four (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints deep. Thanks to Google and Amazon/Poster Revolution, all of your mad genius-destroy-the-Earth desires can be realized!
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The largest city in the Midwest only has metered water for a small percentage of houses. For everyone else you are charged a flat fee. Chicago is trying to convince people to install meters, saying that metered water can result in lower bills if you use less than what you'd be billed for. So what's happening is that people who use very little water are installing meters and people who use a lot don't. This shouldn't be a big deal because we have a truly massive lake right beside the city, but the water level is a problem because they reversed the Chicago River to flow out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. Anyway, as of late September, only 41% of Chicago water accounts were metered.
Well, there was great literature before copyright protection, but there was vastly more after it. Some of this is due to technology, demographics, economics, and so forth. But some of it isn't. The first copyright provision passed in 1710. The explosion of the novel, which is entirely a printed form, came after that date. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Defoe was not only a crusader for copyright protections but also possibly the first person in England to be able to make a living by writing prose. Copyright made the professional writer possible.
Romeo & Juliet is a good example, actually. 16th and 17th century plays were written for the stage and printed as an afterthought, often in pirated (if we can use that term) editions. As a result we've lost a pretty large percentage of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, because why print them if someone can pirate them and kill your profits? Or, even worse, what if the rival theater company across the street puts on your play without having to pay you a shilling for it? We know of at least two Shakespearean plays (Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won) that are lost because they were never printed. If Shakespeare had had copyright protection, would it have been worth his time to publish them?
I think that the way copyright protection has been so abused by US corporate interests can sometimes blind us to the value of it. Our current system of unending copyright is very clearly bad, but a reasonable form of copyright is very clearly good. It frees writers from the requirements of patronage, it increases cultural output, and it provides a monetary incentive for making that production public.
The microSD card is a huge plus to me. Assuming the build quality is similar to the previous generation of Nooks, the big Nook will be the first 9"+ tablet with a microSD card, bluetooth, a solid build quality, an a debut price under $300. You can get an Asus EEE Pad Slider for $299, but it sold at ~$400 before this, and the build of the Archos and Le Pan devices didn't impress me when I played with them at my local MicroCenter.
I think that this is a really big deal -- bluetooth, the expansion slot, and a solid build quality will finally mean that there's a proper netbook replacement in the budget range. The Nook Color sort of worked like this, but the bluetooth required Cyanogenmod and is pretty wonky even then, and it's only a 7" device. The Nexus is nice, but you're stuck with the 7" model and there's no microSD slot. Samsung has a $250 device with most of what I want, but it's only a 7" device and there you're effectively paying a $50 premium over the Nexus just for the microSD. So the large Nook really does feel like a big deal to me. If it takes after the Nook Color more than the Nook Tablet in terms of being easy to root and to mod then I'll buy one the day it gets released. Even if it isn't I might buy one anyway.
Just for the record, last winter was among the warmest ever, but it definitely did freeze here in the corn belt. Davenport, Iowa (for example) had subfreezing temperatures 4 times in October 2011, its first low in the teens on November 17th, and its first day with a subfreezing high on December 5. Buckwheat is a good cool-weather crop, but it isn't very frost-tolerant. It's too in the year late for it.
This is just a mild corrective to the parent. Buckwheat is an excellent alternative to corn, but for earlier in the season.
A quick search of eBay shows that potions are still for sale. For example, here is a love potion (the listing includes some vaguely NSFW images). They say, "I am happy to bring to you a special cast potion that me and the covens that joined us brought forth on Samhain/ Halloween night! [...] This is a guaranteed powerful mix to get you the results you need." That's pretty clearly a magical potion. With a guarantee!
Browsing the metaphysical section also brings up vast quantities of magic items -- 41,706 items under "Crystal Healing", for example. There's also orgone protection for your cell phone and a dust that attracts money. I'm curious -- has eBay banned the sale of magical services -- curses, etc. -- but not magical items? Or are these listings just slipping through the cracks? If it's just services that have been banned, then the complaint in TFA about holy water being sold is completely specious. And even if some physical items have been banned, the continued presence of lots of orgone accumulators and healing crystals suggests that eBay isn't working from purely pro-Christian motives. (Yes, I know about the category of natural magic that can in theory be squared with Christian belief. I don't think eBay is capable of being that subtle.)
And take heart, magic users -- a search for the word "grimoire" turns up 24 pages of items. Even if they've banned the sale of curses, no reason you can't still roll your own!
You can't do original research until you learn what is already known, which by definition will be something that someone has already done. There is no way around this problem. No teacher can generate large numbers of projects that are both 1.) simple enough for an introductory student, and 2.) examples of original research. The easy stuff has been done in most fields.
On the Cliff's Notes issue -- I just looked in WorldCat and got over 10,000 hits for Hamlet as a subject. This will include multiple entries for lots of titles (different editions, the German translation, etc.), but you're still looking at 4,000+ books published on the topic, in addition to no one knows how many scholarly journal articles. Do you really think that a high school English teacher is going to be able to come up with an idea for original research on Hamlet that hasn't been covered in one of the previous 20,000 publications on the topic? And then come up with another one for her second and third period classes as well? And then do it all over again next year? Not possible. If she could do that she'd have won a MacArthur Grant and would be running the Renaissance studies program at Harvard. The same problem applies (to a less extreme extent) to every book in and around the Western canon. Now, a good teacher will know what's in Cliff's Notes and whatever it's Web equivalents are, and will assign work on something they don't include. But that's as close to original research as you can get with the average student.
On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.
We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.
Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.
Agribusiness is squarely Midwestern. Its bloc of supporters in Congress are representatives from farm states from both parties. For instance, when (oil state) Senator Tom Coburn proposed legislation to end the ethanol subsidy, a bipartisan group of Midwestern senators came up with legislation that attempted to save a subsidy of some sort. This sort of thing happens all of the time. If you're an elected representative from Indiana or Minnesota or Iowa then you're probably going to support Big Agriculture no matter what part you belong to.
A senator may be very clear on what limits there should be on government spending, and he will also probably believe very strongly that such limits should not apply to his constituents. This is of course both a a feature and a bug of a republican form of government.
You're simply not going to get a definitive record of a celestial event in 8th century Europe. Records are very scanty, often non-existent. This is so marked that it's led to an entertaining conspiracy theory or two claiming that the early Middle Ages didn't actually exist and were faked at some later date. Back in the real world, there's so little evidence for most things about Anglo-Saxon England that the claim that the people of York chose Ethelred, son of Mull to be their king is almost as suspect as the claim about the wonderful serpents.
So the best you can usually hope for in the English 8th century is a monk somewhere recording events in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (or a Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- there were a few of them made at different times and in different places). The Chronicle doesn't really go for detail. They sum up a year in a few declarative sentences, with no description, so you're never going to get a description of a celestial event, you're going to get a simplfied interpretation of it. This interpretation will be in terms that the monk or the eyewitnesses he got his information from understood. They didn't know anything about supernovas, but he knew about miraculous crosses in the sky, like that which appeared to the future Roman Emperor Constantine during his fighting against his rival Maxentius. So whatever it was that someone saw, it got interpreted as a crucifix.
The point isn't that something definitely appeared in the sky in 774. There's a chance that someone made up the red crucifx, or hallucinated it, or the chronicler lied or garbled a story he heard fifth-hand. But if it did happen, there's no reason to think that there will be better written evidence than a vague line in one copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
To me, the big thing that the Nexus has over the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet is bluetooth. A tablet on which you can use a BT keyboard to do some serious typing is a device that can replace most of what I do on my netbook -- web surfing, Netflix, email, and light word processing. There are already $200 tablets with BT, but they are things like the Ideapad A1 that don't approach the Nexus in terms of internals and screen quality. This is a big moment as far as I'm concerned. If the thing had a microSD card slot (an unfortunate omission) then I'd preorder one right now and put the netbook up on eBay.
And I know the Nook Color is a very well-built device that's been around for a while and that has bluetooth that you can use under CyanogenMod's build of Anrdoid. But the BT chip doesn't have an antenna, the internals aren't great (and were less good when it was released in October 2010 than the Nexus 7's are right now), and you're stuck on Gingerbread. The Nook Color is close; the Nexus 7 looks to be even closer.
This isn't really a good comparison. First of all, you didn't pay for radio, you didn't pay for over-the-air TV. If you chose to forgo buying music and depend on the radio, part of the bargain was that you were giving up local control in exchange for not spending any money. You paid for cable TV, of course, but MTV et al provided you with music *videos*, so for your cable bill (and MTV accounted for a tiny part of your bill) you got the dubious pleasure of not only hearing Phil Collins, but of looking at Phil Collins as well. There's value-added there. Allegedly.
Moreover, none of these really replaced purchasing music so much as they supplemented and in fact promoted it. Record labels wanted their artists on the radio not because of the revenue streams from those places (though that helped) but because that was the best way to get people to buy the LP. And sure, phonograph (and sheet music) sales collapsed about the same time as the coming of radio, but that was because of the Depression. People weren't able to spend as much on music. Sales picked up on their own in the postwar period, without any huge change in technology. Even MTV, though you had to pay for it (as a tiny fraction of your cable bill), was never meant as a replacement for selling physical music to people. The music industry viewed it exactly as they viewed radio. It was promotion for the LP/cassette/whatever.
The current wave of streaming audio services is meant to *replace* actual ownership of music. Rather than paying money for an LP/8-track/CD/FLAC file you are paying a sum to access a certain amount of music for a certain period of time. You aren't expected to do both; this is an effort to get you to move your music acquisition budget to music renting. It's a totally new ballgame.
I'm pretty sure this is the Sylvania netbook that appeared in 2010 for $99 at CVS. Reviewers were not kind about it, but the novelty of buying a $99 computer at a drug store was sort of fun. It's no surprise that 21 months later it's dropped under $50.
These little craptops have always intrigued me, and it's just a matter of time before someone puts out one in the under-$100 range that's not entirely terrible. There's this guy that is available new from lots of ebay sites (I chose this one at random and am not endorsing it). It runs Android 2.2 and sports 256 mb of RAM. I haven't seen any kind words about it and from the specs it's likely still terrible, but you're starting to approach something respectable. It's not that far from being a 7" version of the Efika MX SmartBook, which isn't a world beater by any stretch, but which is light and fanless and runs Linux and sort of harks back to what was fun about early netbook.
Is it just me, or has the quality of the trolls at Slashdot absolutely plummeted in the last several years? I really appreciate quality trolling, but I'm afraid that it's turned into a lost art form around here.
Similar studies have even been on Slashdot before, in 2002 and in 2009.
The theory of plate tectonics was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, as people worked through the implications of the older idea of continental drift and worked out mechanisms for it, and as things like sonar mapping of the seafloor came into being.
My father is a geographer and was in grad school from 1966 to 1971, and he's talked about the fighting over plate tectonics going on among the geologists and physical geographers at his university. At the end of his time in grad school there were a few older geologists who adamantly refused to buy into the idea. Most people in the profession were convinced very quickly of the reality of plate tectonics, once there were good tests of the theory (like the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis). But the "anti-drifter" stance was only killed off by attrition, as the people opposed to it either retired or else died with their boots on.
It's a pretty interesting example of the emergence of a major new idea that completely reshapes a field of knowledge, and does so very quickly once a good explanatory mechanism is found. There's probably a good book-length study of it, and if there isn't then there should be.
The Ethiopian Famine ran from 1983-1985, and was mainly caused by a civil war that ran for 17 years, and by disastrous government food policies in the wake of the "Red Terror" of the late 1970s and the construction of a Marxist state that poured all of its resources into its military. Sort of like a much less extreme version famine-prone North Korea. Wikipedia has a fairly weak article on the famine. It's worth noting that the famine began in 1983, but the major drought started in 1984. With a stable society and a reasonable government there would have been food shortages in 1984, but no more, and there definitely wouldn't have been mass starvation before the crops started failing.
Listen, I'm a bleeding heart environmentalist and sympathetic to the idea that the US has historically shit in its own bed, and continues to do so in certain ways. But citing any old thing as caused by US pollution makes environmentalists look like kooks. It's very bad for the cause.
I think that the biggest difference from early efforts at airplanes or lighting is one of scale. The guy who died in an early aviation accident was usually the guy who designed, paid for, and built the machine that killed him. Same with gas lighting and many other early mechanical inventions. That's easy for us to accept -- you gave it a go, but you did something wrong and it killed you. Moreover, the fault would've been easier to spot in a simpler mechanism, so a huge investigation after the fact isn't necessarily very helpful. With something like Challenger, the people who died weren't the people who made the mistakes, and the identity of the mistakes was extremely difficult to determine. There were thousands or even millions of parts in a space shuttle, with hundreds of people involved in the design, thousands involved in the manufacture, with a total price tag of a couple of billion dollars.
We haven't gotten cowardly. We've just gotten ourselves into deep waters.
A basement dweller hears Schilling's name and remembers that only 4.9% of the runs that Schilling allowed over his career were unearned, which is the lowest percentage for any pitcher with a long career. We, er, *they* know that this means that ERA undervalues Schilling, because preventing unearned runs is a skill -- you do it by striking out batters, not walking anyone, and getting batters to hit fly balls rather than ground balls.
Yeah, that's way more useful than being able to identify the classes of various starships.
Of course it's not at all useful, which is the great beauty of it. Baseball probably has more nerd fans than any other American sport, in large part because it is an incredible generator of numerical data. Just look at Schilling's page at Baseball Reference. Look at all of those beautiful numbers!
A baseball game is largely a series of discrete events with a relatively limited number of possible outcomes. A typical baseball game has maybe 250-300 pitches thrown in it, each one of which has a measurable outcome that can be described in a relatively small number of ways. Almost every plate appearance results in one of these 27 outcomes. We have box scores recording most or all of this information going back to 1918, and various more basic levels of data back to 1871.
You can probably see where this is leading. Lots of data compiled over many years plus a relatively simple array of outcomes means that baseball is extremely well suited to the statistically inclined. There is a vast well of data to mine, you can create mathematical models of the game relatively easily, and, most importantly, many of these models do a decent job of describing what actually occurs on the field. And so now we have the vast and ever-expanding field of Sabermetrics, full of wonderful things like minor league equivalencies and extensive studies of the effects of a catcher's ability to "frame" a pitch. It's even possible to be a knowledgeable baseball fan and *never* watch a game or listen to one on the radio, but instead just look at the numbers every day. Almost like in The Matrix.
Compare this to other team sports, like football (either kind) or basketball. In them, numerous people are involved in every play and you have no good way of recording this in a way you can put on a spreadsheet. You can watch a soccer game and see that the goal was scored because a player who never touched the ball made a great run that confused the defense. But it's very difficult to record this information in a form that is friendly to data analysis. Or think of American football -- how do you make a good statistical record of the play of an offensive lineman? It's very difficult. In baseball, the fundamental interaction is between the pitcher throwing the ball and the batter trying to hit it. It's almost binary, and everything else on the field is vastly less important. It's a game for numbers, it's a game for nerds.
You need to get out of your basement once in a while.
Isn't this really the sort of knowledge gained by spending more time in the basement?
Schilling's Bloody Sock is one of the most famous incidents in American sports in the 21st century, and occurred during the most-remembered playoff series in baseball of the last few decades. Lots of people who aren't basement dwellers know all about it.
A basement dweller hears Schilling's name and remembers that only 4.9% of the runs that Schilling allowed over his career were unearned, which is the lowest percentage for any pitcher with a long career. We, er, *they* know that this means that ERA undervalues Schilling, because preventing unearned runs is a skill -- you do it by striking out batters, not walking anyone, and getting batters to hit fly balls rather than ground balls.
Basement dwellers, and a lot of other people, also know that Schilling has been a very outspoken conservative proponent of small government for many years. He'd say that a free-spending government corrupts the market, corrupts individuals, and leads to lots of waste. I guess he just went out and proved himself right!
Now if you'll excuse me, Mom says that lunch is ready. Hope it isn't PB&J again!
Slavery was already on its way out, because slaves have low productivity and trained and motivated workers provided more profits despite wage cost.
This argument gets made a lot, but there really isn't any evidence for it. If you look at census data, the number of slaves went up at every census through 1860. The number of slaves increased by almost 60% from 1840 to 1860. That doesn't look like a dying system. And then sharecropping, which was in many respects an extension of slavery, survived in much of the South until the second half of the 20th century. There's no reason to think that slavery wouldn't have survived a very long time after 1865 had the war not happened.
The argument that slavery would wither on the vine was made a lot in the late 18th century as a way of excusing the Founders' unwillingness to do anything about it. Maybe it even looked correct; slavery certainly withered in the Northern states and disappeared there in large part because it wasn't economically important enough to overcome people's moral qualms. But the South had an export economy based on plantations producing cotton, tobacco, and rice, and those demanded lots of heavy labor, and so slavery never withered. It increased until it was killed.
If you're concerned about the way something is manufactured, don't buy it new. Yes, by buying a used item you're increasing the resale value of it, which makes a tiny difference in how much the company can charge for it new. But otherwise you're not supporting the manufacturer.
This is helpful in all sorts of areas, not just with tech manufacturing. If I find an authors to be loathsome in his politics -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Card -- I'll buy his books used. That way I get to read what I want, but don't have to give money to someone whose ideas I find repulsive. Sure, I have to hunt around to find a copy, and maybe deal with dog-eared pages and someone else's underlining, but if you feel strongly about something you should be willing to live with minor inconveniences.
The shift to agency pricing was also seen as a protective measure to head off attempts by Amazon to corner the market in ebooks. It had been aggressively cutting prices to win customers over to its Kindle ebook reader.
The publishers are afraid that Amazon, in an effort to kill off their competitors and corner the ebook market, will set prices extremely low and sell ebooks at no profit or at a loss. I don't blame the publishers for being paranoid about it.
If you look at all the homeopathic remedies available, there's an enormous number of them out there. Obviously, it's total BS, but its practitioners have made a real pseudoscience out of it, with tables of ailments and which corresponding remedy to try (the remedies themselves being some item, perhaps a poisonous substance, diluted so much into water that there's probably none left in the vial of water you're buying).
Homeopathy has been around since the early 19th century, and has been a fairly organized practice for almost the entire time, which has meant that it's been able to iterate and refine itself enough to have developed a very complex and mature (though not effective) set of doctrines.
One thing that's interesting, and surprising at first, is that homeopathy's success in the 19th century was due in large part to the fact that it worked better than many other medical practices, in that patients treated by homeopathic remedies often had better outcomes than patients treated by other methods. This seems to be at odds with the known fact that homeopathy doesn't work, but if you think about it for a bit it makes sense. Remember that ancient practices like bloodletting survived until well into the 19th century, and that scientific medicine was very immature -- the common use of anesthesia dates to the 1850s, and germ theory wasn't generally accepted until fairly late in the century. Both traditional and scientific medical practices were often harmful to the patient -- going to the doctor could kill you.
Now consider what a homeopathic doctor does. He visits you, gives you a checkup, then gives you a prescription for a lot of water with a few molecules of something else in it. Put another way, his treatment is bed rest, plenty of fluids, a nice placebo, and a little TLC. That regimen won't ever harm you, and for a lot of diseases and conditions it'll always be the preferred method of treatment. Compared with the sometimes incompetent, often misguided, and occasionally murderous regimes of other forms of 19th century medicine, it's no surprise that homeopathy was a popular and successful practice.
That says nothing about it's place in the 21st century, of course.
The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport.
The last time I left the US I spent four weeks hiking around in the Dolomites and nearby. Everything I had was in my backpack, I stayed at night in mountain rifugios and hiked around most of every day. I had my passport on my person somewhere at every moment, because what else was I going to do with it? I fell a couple of times, nothing serious, but I did get a few scrapes and bruises, and I'll admit that I was a bit free in tossing my pack (which contained my passport) around.
Now, if the RFID chip can be broken by a child sitting on it, there is an approximately 0% chance that mine would have survived that trip had I had the misfortune of having one in my passport. There would have been no way to avoid it, other than putting the passport in a box filled with bubble wrap and packing peanuts or something else equally absurd. Had I been staying in a hotel and wandering around a town I would have (as per Italian law) left it with the hotel. But this wasn't that sort of trip. There was no way, sort of building some sort of portable armored and padded shrine, that I would have been able to "respect" the passport enough to avoid wrecking the RFID chip, if it really is so easy to break.
If the chip is that much less resilient than the paper that the passports are printed on, they need to come up with something better.
Marshmallow Fluff? If you're going to give yourself up to Google like this you need to think big. For $25 you could buy 2500 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints from Poster Revolution via Amazon. Not only do you exchange your measly $25 for $2,500, you also wind up with enough posters to cover 16722 square meters. That's over four acres. You'll never have to buy wallpaper again!
And better yet, those (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints look sort of like real money, so maybe Amazon will accept them as legal tender, and you can exchange your $2500 for 250000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, then exchange those for 25000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 2500000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 250000000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, exchange those for 25000000000000 (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints, and suddenly you've got enough (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints to cover the Earth with a layer of (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints almost four (24x36) The Godfather Movie (Dollar Bill) Poster Prints deep. Thanks to Google and Amazon/Poster Revolution, all of your mad genius-destroy-the-Earth desires can be realized!