Sorry to break it to you, but the radius of the harmful effect is supposed to be 6000 light years. I doubt we can disperse the population that much before we see this happen again.
Besides, all this does is strip off the ozone layer, which would mess with the marine food chain for a few years. It's not like it would bake people or anything. I'm sure we'll collectively do more damage to the sea than this sort of thing ever could. How fast will we destroy 60% of the ocean's species? I'm guessing something on the order of decades. If this is something we care about, we should be worrying about ourselves and not about imploding neutron stars.
Actually, I didn't know about the Barnes & Noble series. I did find what I meant to mention earlier: The Modern Scholar series. They have a much smaller library than the Teaching Company and I think their courses are shorter, but some of the titles do look good!
Right now, the best source of the geek-friendly audio books you mention are two: My favorite is my public library. They have the excellent 51-hour reading of the three Lord of the Rings books on CD, and right now I'm in the middle of Dune. These are all things that I've read before from paper, but I get something different, and not substantially worse, from hearing the books read aloud.
Then there are two excellent "audio lectures" companies that basically record college freshman-level lecture courses on CD. (One of them is called the Teaching Company, and the other, I forget.) Most of these are decent, and some are quite excellent. There are lots of titles available, and if you're like me and have an interest for almost everything academic, you won't run out of stuff.
Now, I hate to say this, but it has come to my attention that many of these recordings are available illegaly through newsgroups and some p2p sources like eMule. I leave it to your conscience what to do with this information (keeping in mind just how many immoral acts are legal and illegal acts moral). If you asked me whether I prefered motorists who enrich their minds with bootleg lectures about the Aneid, Roman history, or Feynman's excellent lectures on Relativity to motorists who adhere religiously to federal IP laws, I must say that I'd choose the former. But don't ask me. I teach ethics at a major university.
Look, I agree that some convergence devices just don't make sense. I don't think camera-phones are such a great idea, but, whatever. Phones that play mp3s are a different story. First of all, you don't need any new interface controls. The phone already has a screen and a joystick. Second, the phone already needs some amount of flash memory. This is getting cheaper and smaller all the time. If 512MB does not impress you, remember that this will grow soon. That little memory stick adds very little to the size of the phone, and it adds a lot to the functionality. Since this is Sony-Ericsson, I assume that you will be able manage and transfer music by Bluetooth, which has an awesome range and decent bandwidth. The processor for decoding was already needed for other phone features. Basically, I'm looking at my phone right now and I'm a bit mad that it isn't an mp3 player, because it has almost everything an excellent mp3 player needs.
I really hope this becomes a new standard feature on phones. This is the sort of thing that would make me upgrade.
So what I'm saying is that there is no reason to think that an mp3-phone would perform its duties as a phone, or as a music player, in some less-than-perfect way. Actually, I think this will be the best 512MB mp3 player anywhere because of the Blootooth that I suspect it will have, plus the big color lcd and lots of controls. As a phone, there will be no compromises either. This is a combo that makes sense, especially when you consider the possibility of buying songs from a giant catalogue while you're on a road trip. I don't think it's an accident that Sony-Ericsson support mp3 AND aac, just like the iPod and iTunes. I know they're denying stuff now, but you just wait, this will be huge!
No, see, the whole point is that unless you had your phone on vibrate you would miss their call if you were listening to an ipod. I assume this will do something like turn down the music volume when the phone actually rings, and that the caller will be heard in the headphones. This is one convergence device that makes sense.
Re:Apple better off on there own
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There aren't many brand names that have tuned into generic verbs. "Tivo" is one of them. It already has a lot of clout and a fanatical base. Apple knows how to live on clout and a fanatical base.
Maybe they're holding out until the stock price drops lower before they buy. The answer to your question is that Apple is buying the brand, and for cheap. They also probably have some internet-to-Tivo movie distribution scheme in mind. This could be big.
One more thing: You meant "their" not "there". Please don't ever, ever screw this up again. This is how puppies get kicked.
The only population groups who will continue to reproduce at high rates are the altrusitic - which basically equates to people who expect the world to end dramaticlly and soon but who are more likely to eschew luxury
I have some time, let me count the dumb things in your comment...
1. Altruism is correlated with reproduction? WTF? By Darwinian standards, reproduction is the ultimate selfish act - one aimed at getting your genes access to more resources. On a social level, you will find the countries with the highest birth rate are the ones where having more children increases your chance for survival and wealth. In countries with a proper retirement system and health care, the selfish reasons for having children are minimized. Guess what: That's why the Europeans and the Japanese are having so few children.
2. Why do you think that people who expect the world to end will "eschew luxury"? Wouldn't they instead be maxing out their credit cards, screwing in bathhouses and living it up? Anyway, why would people who expect the the world to end be having children? Wait, is it because they're altruistic and like to see their children die? I see.
3.... Oh, forget it, I'm bored with your stupid post. Just one more thing about the atheism comment: I don't think atheists are more selfish than anyone else. They do tend to have fewer children than the average, but not when you adjust for income and education. You see, atheists are on average far more educated and wealthy than others, and all such people, atheists or not, have fewer children. (Again, this is because such people lack the selfish reason to reproduce, since their long-term comfort is assured even without children.)
This makes it sound that a real "live" virus would not be evolved from the ground up. It would have to include lots of pre-made tools, like various cracking scripts, a mail server, a p2p tool for self-updating and gene-swapping, maybe a natural language processor for composing plausible emails, and others.
Then it would need some sort of a custom programming environment that resembles the evolution-friendly language you guys have created. It's in the context of that environment that it would evolve. As much of the organism would be written in this evolution-friendly language as possible, but the interface tools like an FTP cracker might not need to itself be subject to evolution.
Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, and the results could be disasterous (stupid script kiddies can already do a lot of damage, and an evolving, tireless and exponentially replicating script kiddie cyborg could be awful), but I'm fascinated by the idea all the same. The article mentions creationists and their sad efforts to "debunk" this, but a self-evolving virus that could fool experts and engage us in a digital war would wake everyone up to the idea that evolution is real.
Also, if an evolving wild virus really were stay dangerous for a while, swapping by p2p the code sections which lead to successful spreading, it could also be assisted by malicious persons coding new tools which would give the virus new options to spread to new environments. If those tools were effective, they would spread quickly.
It might turn out that if this were done well, the only defense would be an autonomously evolving immune system. Then we would have co-evolution, and things would really get interesting!
Hey, I don't think this is a troll response to my comment. Weird moderating!
The article doesn't say just what functionality gets removed in the reduced edition. Is it the whole DirectShow codec structure? I had the impression that this wasn't the case. Well, even if it is, I'm sure you will be able to download a "codec bundle" to restore only the functionality you need. Yeah, I didn't say this was a huge step forward, but it's better than nothing.
Fair enough. I geuss I meant: "progress towards an MS operating system that is under a user's control." Yes, we can think of a million steps that would count as progress towards that, but still, this is one of them.
The article says that just downloading the WMP from microsoft makes this into a full XP Pro edition. So the effect is the same as being able to uninstall WMP, which is what I've been hoping to do for a long time.
What I'm saying is that this reduced edition really is superior, because it's easy to convert it into the full version, but not vice versa.
Yes, the majority of microsoft's evil annoyances are still there, but this is progress nonetheless.
I totally agree. The mouse function must be done differently somehow. I was thinking that the best idea would be to have an accelerometer to measure the movement of the thing itself. You can rotate it along the three spacial axes, and you can also move it (unrotated) along three axes. Wouldn't it be cool if the thing could detect all those motions and translate them into input? Shooter games would start to feel a lot more like shooting. Best of all, this wouldn't require the use of any fingers at all, so you really could type and mouse with perfect simultenaity.
Exactly. For a very long time, maybe forever, there will be an audience of people who care about songs in context, and these people will buy albums. The rest will revert to a 50's like disjointedness, where they care about songs only. So what? There is more space for alternate distribution models now than there ever has been. It's going to be quite hard to "kill" anything.
I see albums the same way, and this is the natural response to this "albums are doomed" sentiment.
But...
I think that the album might be dying anyway, but not because of technology. People's taste in music is simply different, and the music that sells does not come close to your description, where "Each song tells part of a the story that an album represents." Yes, we can all name exceptions, but how much of the market share do these exceptions have? Most of the music buyers these days don't care about albums, because their favorite musicians don't care about albums. If you write songs that need the "context" of an album to achieve their full effect, so much the worse for your chances on radio and Mtv! That's why (almost) no one does it, and concentrates on singles. The vast majority of albums consist of singles and then filler songs that the artist was hoping would turn out to be single-worthy, but it didn't pan out. This does not produce anything like a "conceptual structure." That's why I fully understand the sentiment that says: Just give me the hits and keep the swing-and-misses.
This is a very nice post, and not off topic, if the topic is terraforming. I think our best bet is the CO2-fixing bacteria, maybe we could provide some phosphorus, since it should only be needed in trace amounts and could probably be recycled almost indefinitely once introduced.
Also, the gigantic sun shade might not be so crazy, and so long as it's only a few atoms thick, it might not even need to be so massive - more like a round piece of spinning foil at the Venus/Sun liberation point. I wonder how long it would be able to survive all that solar wind... maybe it would need some holes... still, it would help a lot! Also, if we could cover sections of it with solar cells, or some other way of generating power from sunlight, it could actually be useful!
I like this idea of gradually getting over KDE's dependence on X11. I saw some screenshots of KDE running on OSX without X11, and it's beautiful.
It was probably right of devs to reject the patches becuase of the minor problems, but I see no reason why these problems couldn't be ironed out (and many reasons why they should be). A fully working KDE framework on OSX, complete with an intuitive installer, would be incredibly cool.
Apple and Sony are working on something rather major. Cringley thinks so, and I think it makes sense. He thinks it's something to do with HDTV. I think it involves Macs potentially playing PS3 games. That, or an iPod/phone (remember that Ericsson is now Sony Ericsson) with a buy-songs-over-the-air interface to Apple's iTunes store.
Anyway, there is a lot of space for collaboration, and little downside for either company. Sony is big enough to make Apple look more legitemate, and Apple is cool enough to keep Sony looking relevant, especially in the US.
Just because your a Have Not doesn't automatically make it okay for you to use a pirated copy of software.
Actually, I thought about this, and I realized that I disagree. My view is pretty much that if you are a "have not" you are not doing anything wrong if you use a pirated copy of software. Of course it's illegal, but it seems pretty clear to me that this is one of those banned activities which is not wrong. There is no problem in my view with software companies being supported by licenses sold to other companies, and people who voluntarily choose to pay for the box and support. One reason why I think this is that there is already enough of a gap in this world between the have's and have-not's, and if some adolescent notion that it's always wrong to break the law serves to perpetuate that gap, while serving no positive purpose, we should get over it.
Yeah, using this for graphics cards seems like an obvious and good idea. It makes me wonder why they didn't do this with RDRAM. It's so much easier to get a place on a graphics card: no issues about adding memory sticks, no reason to establish an industry standard before soldering on some chips... Yes, it seems like their new ideas have a much better chance of working. (But we still hate them...)
What I'm impressed with is that they actually kept some engineers through their whole lawsuit period, and apparently competent ones too.
Sorry, I don't see anything like good acting in BSG (okay Olmos is good, but watch everyone else!), but maybe that's because of the terrible dialogue writing. I just watched the finalle last night and my eyes still hurt from rolling!
The show that made BSG look like a retard's weekend project in all the aspects you mention is Firefly. A MUCH better job in representing physics, a much more interesting political scenario, miles better in acting, more believable and developed characters, no comparison in episode writing... I could go on.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, all this does is strip off the ozone layer, which would mess with the marine food chain for a few years. It's not like it would bake people or anything. I'm sure we'll collectively do more damage to the sea than this sort of thing ever could. How fast will we destroy 60% of the ocean's species? I'm guessing something on the order of decades. If this is something we care about, we should be worrying about ourselves and not about imploding neutron stars.
Actually, I didn't know about the Barnes & Noble series. I did find what I meant to mention earlier: The Modern Scholar series. They have a much smaller library than the Teaching Company and I think their courses are shorter, but some of the titles do look good!
Then there are two excellent "audio lectures" companies that basically record college freshman-level lecture courses on CD. (One of them is called the Teaching Company, and the other, I forget.) Most of these are decent, and some are quite excellent. There are lots of titles available, and if you're like me and have an interest for almost everything academic, you won't run out of stuff.
Now, I hate to say this, but it has come to my attention that many of these recordings are available illegaly through newsgroups and some p2p sources like eMule. I leave it to your conscience what to do with this information (keeping in mind just how many immoral acts are legal and illegal acts moral). If you asked me whether I prefered motorists who enrich their minds with bootleg lectures about the Aneid, Roman history, or Feynman's excellent lectures on Relativity to motorists who adhere religiously to federal IP laws, I must say that I'd choose the former. But don't ask me. I teach ethics at a major university.
Maybe it's like the Gilette idea: Give away the projectors, charge for the bulbs!
Yeah, because nobody will ever figure out a way to watch something you download on your living room TV.
I really hope this becomes a new standard feature on phones. This is the sort of thing that would make me upgrade.
So what I'm saying is that there is no reason to think that an mp3-phone would perform its duties as a phone, or as a music player, in some less-than-perfect way. Actually, I think this will be the best 512MB mp3 player anywhere because of the Blootooth that I suspect it will have, plus the big color lcd and lots of controls. As a phone, there will be no compromises either. This is a combo that makes sense, especially when you consider the possibility of buying songs from a giant catalogue while you're on a road trip. I don't think it's an accident that Sony-Ericsson support mp3 AND aac, just like the iPod and iTunes. I know they're denying stuff now, but you just wait, this will be huge!
No, see, the whole point is that unless you had your phone on vibrate you would miss their call if you were listening to an ipod. I assume this will do something like turn down the music volume when the phone actually rings, and that the caller will be heard in the headphones. This is one convergence device that makes sense.
Maybe they're holding out until the stock price drops lower before they buy. The answer to your question is that Apple is buying the brand, and for cheap. They also probably have some internet-to-Tivo movie distribution scheme in mind. This could be big.
One more thing: You meant "their" not "there". Please don't ever, ever screw this up again. This is how puppies get kicked.
I have some time, let me count the dumb things in your comment...
1. Altruism is correlated with reproduction? WTF? By Darwinian standards, reproduction is the ultimate selfish act - one aimed at getting your genes access to more resources. On a social level, you will find the countries with the highest birth rate are the ones where having more children increases your chance for survival and wealth. In countries with a proper retirement system and health care, the selfish reasons for having children are minimized. Guess what: That's why the Europeans and the Japanese are having so few children.
2. Why do you think that people who expect the world to end will "eschew luxury"? Wouldn't they instead be maxing out their credit cards, screwing in bathhouses and living it up? Anyway, why would people who expect the the world to end be having children? Wait, is it because they're altruistic and like to see their children die? I see.
3. ... Oh, forget it, I'm bored with your stupid post. Just one more thing about the atheism comment: I don't think atheists are more selfish than anyone else. They do tend to have fewer children than the average, but not when you adjust for income and education. You see, atheists are on average far more educated and wealthy than others, and all such people, atheists or not, have fewer children. (Again, this is because such people lack the selfish reason to reproduce, since their long-term comfort is assured even without children.)
Then it would need some sort of a custom programming environment that resembles the evolution-friendly language you guys have created. It's in the context of that environment that it would evolve. As much of the organism would be written in this evolution-friendly language as possible, but the interface tools like an FTP cracker might not need to itself be subject to evolution.
Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, and the results could be disasterous (stupid script kiddies can already do a lot of damage, and an evolving, tireless and exponentially replicating script kiddie cyborg could be awful), but I'm fascinated by the idea all the same. The article mentions creationists and their sad efforts to "debunk" this, but a self-evolving virus that could fool experts and engage us in a digital war would wake everyone up to the idea that evolution is real.
Also, if an evolving wild virus really were stay dangerous for a while, swapping by p2p the code sections which lead to successful spreading, it could also be assisted by malicious persons coding new tools which would give the virus new options to spread to new environments. If those tools were effective, they would spread quickly.
It might turn out that if this were done well, the only defense would be an autonomously evolving immune system. Then we would have co-evolution, and things would really get interesting!
Damn, that IS expensive, but pretty neat. The mouse technology seems like a perfect match for this in-air keyboard.
The article doesn't say just what functionality gets removed in the reduced edition. Is it the whole DirectShow codec structure? I had the impression that this wasn't the case. Well, even if it is, I'm sure you will be able to download a "codec bundle" to restore only the functionality you need. Yeah, I didn't say this was a huge step forward, but it's better than nothing.
Fair enough. I geuss I meant: "progress towards an MS operating system that is under a user's control." Yes, we can think of a million steps that would count as progress towards that, but still, this is one of them.
What I'm saying is that this reduced edition really is superior, because it's easy to convert it into the full version, but not vice versa.
Yes, the majority of microsoft's evil annoyances are still there, but this is progress nonetheless.
I totally agree. The mouse function must be done differently somehow. I was thinking that the best idea would be to have an accelerometer to measure the movement of the thing itself. You can rotate it along the three spacial axes, and you can also move it (unrotated) along three axes. Wouldn't it be cool if the thing could detect all those motions and translate them into input? Shooter games would start to feel a lot more like shooting. Best of all, this wouldn't require the use of any fingers at all, so you really could type and mouse with perfect simultenaity.
Exactly. For a very long time, maybe forever, there will be an audience of people who care about songs in context, and these people will buy albums. The rest will revert to a 50's like disjointedness, where they care about songs only. So what? There is more space for alternate distribution models now than there ever has been. It's going to be quite hard to "kill" anything.
But...
I think that the album might be dying anyway, but not because of technology. People's taste in music is simply different, and the music that sells does not come close to your description, where "Each song tells part of a the story that an album represents." Yes, we can all name exceptions, but how much of the market share do these exceptions have? Most of the music buyers these days don't care about albums, because their favorite musicians don't care about albums. If you write songs that need the "context" of an album to achieve their full effect, so much the worse for your chances on radio and Mtv! That's why (almost) no one does it, and concentrates on singles. The vast majority of albums consist of singles and then filler songs that the artist was hoping would turn out to be single-worthy, but it didn't pan out. This does not produce anything like a "conceptual structure." That's why I fully understand the sentiment that says: Just give me the hits and keep the swing-and-misses.
Also, the gigantic sun shade might not be so crazy, and so long as it's only a few atoms thick, it might not even need to be so massive - more like a round piece of spinning foil at the Venus/Sun liberation point. I wonder how long it would be able to survive all that solar wind... maybe it would need some holes... still, it would help a lot! Also, if we could cover sections of it with solar cells, or some other way of generating power from sunlight, it could actually be useful!
It was probably right of devs to reject the patches becuase of the minor problems, but I see no reason why these problems couldn't be ironed out (and many reasons why they should be). A fully working KDE framework on OSX, complete with an intuitive installer, would be incredibly cool.
Anyway, there is a lot of space for collaboration, and little downside for either company. Sony is big enough to make Apple look more legitemate, and Apple is cool enough to keep Sony looking relevant, especially in the US.
Actually, I thought about this, and I realized that I disagree. My view is pretty much that if you are a "have not" you are not doing anything wrong if you use a pirated copy of software. Of course it's illegal, but it seems pretty clear to me that this is one of those banned activities which is not wrong. There is no problem in my view with software companies being supported by licenses sold to other companies, and people who voluntarily choose to pay for the box and support. One reason why I think this is that there is already enough of a gap in this world between the have's and have-not's, and if some adolescent notion that it's always wrong to break the law serves to perpetuate that gap, while serving no positive purpose, we should get over it.
What I'm impressed with is that they actually kept some engineers through their whole lawsuit period, and apparently competent ones too.
That's why he has to appear with Troi - so he appears less bad in comparison. I bet it's in his contract.
Yes, this is the only TNG throwback plot that would ever get me to watch another Enterprise episode. Good idea, and btw., cool handle!
The show that made BSG look like a retard's weekend project in all the aspects you mention is Firefly. A MUCH better job in representing physics, a much more interesting political scenario, miles better in acting, more believable and developed characters, no comparison in episode writing... I could go on.