So what is pornography? What's prurient interest vs. legitimate sexual health information? What about erotic literature as an art form? What about psychological discussions of human sexuality?
And, most importantly, how the hell do you teach a computer to sort all this out?
Well, not outright, but require clear and consistent labeling of software which may hijack web browsers and display additional, unwanted content. Also, a universal opt-out system for adware and unauthorized browser redirections might be useful.
I've come to this conclusion as a library employee. Mandatory censorware is largely inneffective, as we've seen time and time again in the over and under-blocking of basically every commercial censorship "solution". Parental supervision is a hell of a lot more effective (not to mention constitutional) in preventing access to objectional content, anyway. The problem is when the parent simply can't control what is displayed on the screen in the blink of an eye. I've had to deal with some pretty irate patrons (thankfully no little kids yet) who demand to know why unwanted porn suddenly appears on their monitors. I've taken to running ad-aware checks on all the patron computers frequently. Our security setup also prevents unauthorized software installations (unless they install via ActiveX in IE. Thanks Microsoft Security!). Even so, that's not enough to prevent javascripts (many times contained in otherwise innocuous spam email) from popping up anything they want. And before someone suggests it, I HAVE installed Mozilla on several of the workstations and enabled pop-up blocking, but most users who come to the library to surf have no idea what's going on and simply revert to Internet Explorer because they think it IS the Internet.
I just brought up the text of the bill. I'll give my obligatory IANAL here, but in order to be prosecuted under the bill, it looks like you must:
Traffic copies ammounting to over $1000 in retail value within a 180 day period.
Engage in electronic reproduction for financial gain
So, if you aren't selling the right to download your MP3s, or burning and selling (at a profit) CD s of material you download, or even if you do these things on a very small scale, it looks like you can't be prosecuted. This law does not affect the average P2P user, it just affects people who bootleg as a business and happen to use P2P networks to accomplish their goals.
During the initial hype regarding the release of the Segway, I had a discussion with some friends about the real significance of the invention.
First of all, the Segway will not change the world. In terms of speed, range, carrying capacity, etc., it is similar to the moped. The gyroscopic stabilization system is ingenious, but it does not, by itself, make for a revolution in personal transportation.
Now, the key observation I made was this: if the Segway is successful, it will concievably replace walking as a means of conveyance for many individuals, if only because its 12 MPH top speed exceeds even a brisk gait. This will reduce the amount of excercise that Segway users engage in.
Think about this for a moment. The Segway makes people faster and fatter (if ever there were a more all-American invention, I haven't heard of it). IT was obviously designed as a conspiracy to increase the net momentum of the average American. San Francisco has particular reason to be concerned with this, since its proximity to siesmic fault lines places the city at risk for potentially disasterous consequences of a large aggregate transfer of momentum among its citizens. The city of San Francisco is doing the responsible thing by trying to prevent rush-hour earthquakes!
Actually, the nobels are delayed significantly, too. The reason is so important scientific discoveries can be repeated and verified with a high degree of certainty. The extended time period also allows the awards committees to more appropriately gague the significance and impact of a piece of research.
My earliest memory was from when I was one year old. My father was carrying me down the stairs, and tripped. He managed to cradle and protect me, although he sustained a broken tailbone in the fall. I distinctly remember the arrival of the paramedics, the color of the room (brown), even the fact that the stretcher had 3 straps.
Incidentally, my second memory is of my father's return from the hospital, whereupon he immediately went to our kitchen and got some pretzels. I have no other memories of that house (we moved out less than a month later, though).
Anyway, I'm not a medical sort, but on the oxygen issue: I suffucated during my mother's labor due to complications in the birth, and was dead for a couple of minutes before I was ressuscitated. I have no idea whether that had any affect on my brain development, but I don't have cerebral paulsy (the most likely outcome of those circumstances), so who knows?
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2), and yet her earliest memory is of preschool at age 4.
You do, of course, have a point. Women are entirely capable of making their own decisions about their sexuality, and if they choose to engage in certain sexual acts for money, then it's entirely their choice what they do with their bodies.
Pornography itself is not particularly exploitative (although its consumers, who are overwhelmingly male, tend to sexually objectify the women in the films. This is a broader psychosexual issue, though, and once again, none of my business). You made a note, though, that there are cases of criminal abuse in the pornography industry, and that we need better policing to combat this. This is absolutely the point. The fact that pornography is legal allows us to combat abuse in a realistic and effective manner.
A parallel can be drawn, here, to prostitution. In most of the US, prostitution is illegal, and the average life expectancy for a prostitute, after entering the proffesion, is four years (top causes of death include disease, drug addiction, and murder). 85% of prostitutes in the US have been raped by a customer or pimp. The prostitute-pimp relationship is almost inherently abusive. On the other hand, when prostitution was legalized in the state of Nevada, prostitutes had garaunteed legal protection, were actually paid the money they earned, and benefited from a state-mandated health program. The idea is to actually let women make their own decisions, and to provide the full protection of the law to those who choose to work in the sex industry.
It strikes me as odd, at least from a logical perspective, that Arcacia would try to "enforce" their patents by first going after online porn. It would make infinitely more sense if they went after the actual "infringers": namely, the companies producing streaming audio and video software. Going after Real, Apple (QT), M$ (WMP), and the like would have more legal validity, since webcasters purchase technology from these companies that they assume is legal... If any illegal goings on were happening, it stands to reason that the streaming media software providers would be the target.
Of course, there's a pretty shady reason why Acacia is going after porn first: A lot of people, particularly in the judicial system, have very little sympathy for pornographers. They will, at least subconciously, be much more receptive to the image of pornographers as "criminals", since they already consider them evil.
If they win their suits against the porn distributors, though, they have a legal precedent for hitting all kinds of companies, including the software providers (presumably where the money is), as well as anybody who delivers multimedia over the internet. So, the social conservatives who might hand down a token judgement against porn will be in the awkward position of setting a precedent to sue, say, a church that delivers sermons streaming over the Internet.
As with a lot of civil liberties issues, pornography is the frontier of freedom in this case. Many civil libertarians (myself included, since I'm also a feminist) probably wouldn't mind if porn suddenly disappeared. The problem is, if we legislate or judicate against pornography, then we set a very dangerous precedent for harrassing all kinds of expression (usually based on an arbitrary definition of morality, but in this case, purely economic reasons). Additionally, it's really none of my or the state's business what consenting adults do in front of a video camera. Anyway, even if you find pornography morally repugnant, it's still worth defending, when you consider what happens if we allow freedom of expression to erode at its very edge: the erosion spreads to radical political views, then alternative religious beliefs, and so on, eventually leaving a homogenous orthodoxy of ideas. Or, in this case, you simply have a parasite on the patent system getting in the way of people doing business, expressing themselves, and innovating.
Actually, since I both spin and produce electronic music, I've always wanted to get a couple of copies of some of my tracks pressed up for personal use. The problem has always been that getting an acetate master cut is pretty significantly expensive to start ($150 or so), and then, minimum runs tend to be at least 100 copies on actual vinyl (and trust me, you want actual vinyl. Dubplates wear out after *at most* a couple dozen plays). Needless to say, getting records pressed is pretty much prohibitively expensive for an amateur DJ who also happens to be a full-time student.
When Vestax announced their vinyl cutter, which cuts *directly* onto $7 vinyl blanks (no acetate master needed), I figured that small shops would start to acquire them and sell custom-ordered individual records for a nominal markup ($10-$20, although I'd be willing to pay a little more). So the question is, where are these shops? Does anyone have experience with a place that offers this service?
I, Robot was a collection of 9 short stories, not a novel. So which one, precisely, is getting the movie treatment? It'd also be interesting to know which character Smith will be playing. A robot? (ho hum... Robin Williams did it so-so in another Asimov adaptation) One of Donovan or Powell? (actually, this might be kinda fun. These two never really did get a fair shake living in Susan Calvin's shadow) Susan Calvin herself? (err... maybe not)
I should note that I, Robot was actually adapted into a screenplay by Asimov himself in collaboration with Harlan Ellison (and with all the teasing between these two you thought they'd never work together). Hopefully their script is being used for the film, otherwise I shudder to think how it might turn out.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is truly brilliant, and probably my favorite sci-fi universe (although, telivision-wise, I do have to give much credit to Babylon 5). Actually, to be more accurate, the Foundation "Universe" encapsulates 3 different series of novels, each in a different historical epoch, plus a couple more thrown in in between. I'll list them here, for the benefit of anyone who's interested:
The End of Eternity (The Plot Changes made in Foundation and Earth make this novel's connection to the Foundation universe highly dubious, so you can skip it if you like)
The Robot Short Stories (The Complete Robot has almost all of these, with just a couple of recent stories excluded. Alternately, you'll find all the appropriate stories in Robot Dreams and Robot Visions, mixed in with some other robot stories that aren't particularly relevant)
The Positronic Man (A novelized version of the story The Bicentennial Man. If you read the story, it's reasonable for you to skip the novel)
Nemesis (Only just barely connected to the universe by a single phrase mentioned in passing in Forward the Foundation. Still a good book, though)
The Robot Novels:
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun
The Robots of Dawn
Robots and Empire
The Empire Novels:
The Stars, Like Dust
The Currents of Space
Pebble In The Sky
The Foundation Novels:
Prelude to Foundation
Forward the Foundation
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundation's Edge
Foundation and Earth
In addition to all these, a few other authors have written books in Asimov's universe. Roger MacBride Allen wrote a trilogy of novels set just after the Robot series, taking place on a Spacer world at the very beginning of the Settler expansion. The books are decent, but don't really live up to Asimov's skill. They are listed as follows:
Caliban
Inferno
Utopia
As I was researching, I came across some additional Robot mysteries written by Mark W. Tiedemann. I haven't read these, so I have no recommendation, but here they are:
Mirage
Chimera
Aurora
There was also a "second foundation trilogy" authorized by Asimov's estate and written by some very excellent modern SF writers. These books flesh out some of the details in Asimov's universe, but the authors tend to project their own themes onto the stories with mixed success. All three are great books, though, and take place concurrently with Forward the Foundation:
Foundation's Fear (Gregory Benford)
Foundation and Chaos (Greg Bear)
Foundation's Triumph (David Brin)
As I recall, Asimov himself may have also written a book which takes place during the reign of the Trantorian Empire (between the Empire and the Foundation series) involving contact with an alien species, an element notably absent from all the rest of the novels in this arc. I haven't read it, though, and I forget the title.
Anyway, these books are truly epic, and present a huge historical drama about the human race as a whole. You should read them. Now!
Please forgive my spelling error, that should read unobstructed, above, and they shouldn't put all those vowel keys right next to eachother on QWERTY keyboards.
It's not necessarily true that you need a line of sight with no obstacles in the way for an optical communications device to work. There are parts of the EM (optical) spectrum which pass through ordinary objects. Infrared, for example, can "bleed through" most walls, allowing infrared photography of the sort sometimes used by law enforcement to see behind closed doors. On the other hand, gamma rays and x-rays, which are very high frequency, are stopped by few things besides lead.
Actually, current cellphones are, in a way, optical, since they use RF. Radio waves are a kind of light of much lower frequency than the visible spectrum, and they easily leak through all kinds of solid objects. I would assume that this new research project aims at using *higher frequency* optical communications, possibly using a laser for focused rather than diffused (RF-style) transmission. Only transmitting on a direct line of sight has obvious utility for security, and that line of sight doesn't necessarily have to be onobstructed.
With this news, radioshack has killed my purchasing alter-ego, John Shamus of 200 Arroway Lane. See, I created a whole personality for use in radio shack. Besides a fake name and address, my character John spoke in a funny voice, had an interesting career (limo-bus bathroom attendant), and even had a wife with a kid on the way (which made it easier to justify my purchases of children's toys). He also had about a dozen cuecats.
Screw it, I'm going to keep going in to Radio Shack as John, anyway. It's not like my life was going that great to begin with...
When I was in Kyoto recently, I had a chance to try the arcade version of this game out. It was certainly entertaining and, as other posters pointed out, follows the DDR formula of hitting the right pads in time with the music. While this may seem a bit formulaic, it actually is rather fun once you get into it.
It should be noted that Japanese arcades are currently graced with several other games in this same vein, including Guitar Freaks (which is nothing like playing actual guitar, as it is button and switch based), another drum game featuring a western-style drumset, and my personal favorite, a game which uses several keypads and a mock-up vinyl to "simulate" DJing. Once again, this has little to do with actual DJing (just as guitar freaks has nothing to do with playing the guitar, and DDR doesn't very much resemble dancing). Just the same, one can't help but love simple music-based games. They're a refreshing alternative to the standard arcade fare, and the highly social aspects of competition have the potential to bring in crowds of players and spectators, the likes of which the United States hasn't seen since the height of the Pacman era.
Looks like this is a spoofed address. I live in Michigan, and the zipcodes here all begin with a 4.
Re:How about a real Digital Tuntable?
on
Digital DJ Turntable
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, Final Scratch is Linux-based. The install CD comes with a bare-bones linux distro and partitioning utils to get you started. Alternately, you can just put the final scratch software on any laptop that already has linux installed. Oh, and you still need a good set of direct-drive tables to use it effectively (1200's or something comparable, i.e. Vestax PDX-2000's, Stanton STR8-100's, etc.).
I should also note that the Pioneer CDJ-1000 has beaten this home-brew to the punch. It has pitch-adjust and a substantial jog-wheel that is actually adequate for scratching. DJ Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist have been using CDJ-1000s in their live shows for some time, now.
The CDJ-1000 has the benefit of almost zero latency and no skipping. On the other hand, you can drop-cue in final scratch, and its "record box" categorization system is very convenient (and 3 ms of latency is not too bad). You can also plug your final scratch system into pretty much any club setup. Lugging around CDJ-1000's is not so easy.
The situation is not as bad as you would think. I've used a PDA throughout High School for taking notes, keeping track of assignments, etc. It's true that using Graffiti, for me, is a lot slower than typing and slightly slower than handwriting, however, I am still able to keep up using a tried and true trick for notetaking: shorthand. Alternately, several friends of mine have shelled out the $99 for a Palm keyboard. In any case, having a PDA in your pocket can actually make school a lot more convenient. For example, I have a palm app called TinySheet that I use to enter data from lab experiments. I can do preliminary analysis right away, and I can easily sync the spreadsheets to my computer without having to painstakingly reenter data. Sharing notes and information via infrared beaming is also hugely convenient. Of course, cheating using beaming would be quite convenient as well, except that pulling out a PDA during a test would look incredibly suspicious. Beyond that, the same issues of ethics apply as with pen and paper.
Yes, there is song blocking in groups. For a couple of weeks now, file sends have been filtered for copyright, too. This also ended a hack I punched up that used two user accounts to dupe the system into sending copyrighted tracks.
Opt in, essentially. Everything is blocked unless the record label goes out of its way to allow sharing. Those obscure releases... well, some small labels might actually opt-in. Then again, rare, out-of-print recordings from defunct labels will never be shared again. It's a sad story...
No. Theremins have two electronic sensors that, on two different axes, track position, with one hand controlling pitch and the other controlling volume. The theremin is a a very simple (but very cool) hand-position controlled synthesizer.
This device, on the other hand, is more of a sequencer. If you take a look at the webpage, you'll see that the software plays whatever is currently selected (breaks, basslines, ambient FX, etc.) on loop. When a recognized gesture is made, it switches one of the loops to another sample in memory.
True random data, however, is extremely rare. Even random number generator algorithms used on PCs don't generate truly random numbers, but rather "semirandom numbers" resulting from a number of operations being applied to the current timestamp. If you pull bytes out of/dev/random at specified intervals for a long enough time, you will eventually be able to discern what pattern connect these semirandom numbers to the time.
As far as we can tell, the digits of Pi are random. They are also, however, based on mathematical relationships which can be modeled to find patterns in the digits. There are formulae to calculate any independent digit of Pi in both hexadecimal and decimal number systems, as well as known relations like e^(i*Pi) = -1.
Anyway, the press release says that the algorithm is effective for practically random data. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I would guess that it applies to data that is in some way human-generated. Text files might contain, say, many instances of the text strings "and" and "the", no matter what their overall content. Even media files have loads of patterns, both in their structure (16 bit chunks of audio, or VGA-sized frames) and in their content (the same background from image to image in a video, for example). Even in something as complex as a high resolution video (which we'll take to be "practically random"), there are many patterns which can be exploited for compression.
Slashdot Mirror
So what is pornography? What's prurient interest vs. legitimate sexual health information? What about erotic literature as an art form? What about psychological discussions of human sexuality?
And, most importantly, how the hell do you teach a computer to sort all this out?
Outlaw adware!
Well, not outright, but require clear and consistent labeling of software which may hijack web browsers and display additional, unwanted content. Also, a universal opt-out system for adware and unauthorized browser redirections might be useful.
I've come to this conclusion as a library employee. Mandatory censorware is largely inneffective, as we've seen time and time again in the over and under-blocking of basically every commercial censorship "solution". Parental supervision is a hell of a lot more effective (not to mention constitutional) in preventing access to objectional content, anyway. The problem is when the parent simply can't control what is displayed on the screen in the blink of an eye. I've had to deal with some pretty irate patrons (thankfully no little kids yet) who demand to know why unwanted porn suddenly appears on their monitors. I've taken to running ad-aware checks on all the patron computers frequently. Our security setup also prevents unauthorized software installations (unless they install via ActiveX in IE. Thanks Microsoft Security!). Even so, that's not enough to prevent javascripts (many times contained in otherwise innocuous spam email) from popping up anything they want. And before someone suggests it, I HAVE installed Mozilla on several of the workstations and enabled pop-up blocking, but most users who come to the library to surf have no idea what's going on and simply revert to Internet Explorer because they think it IS the Internet.
I see... even so, who uses ratio FTP servers anymore?
I just brought up the text of the bill. I'll give my obligatory IANAL here, but in order to be prosecuted under the bill, it looks like you must:
Traffic copies ammounting to over $1000 in retail value within a 180 day period.
Engage in electronic reproduction for financial gain
So, if you aren't selling the right to download your MP3s, or burning and selling (at a profit) CD s of material you download, or even if you do these things on a very small scale, it looks like you can't be prosecuted. This law does not affect the average P2P user, it just affects people who bootleg as a business and happen to use P2P networks to accomplish their goals.
During the initial hype regarding the release of the Segway, I had a discussion with some friends about the real significance of the invention.
First of all, the Segway will not change the world. In terms of speed, range, carrying capacity, etc., it is similar to the moped. The gyroscopic stabilization system is ingenious, but it does not, by itself, make for a revolution in personal transportation.
Now, the key observation I made was this: if the Segway is successful, it will concievably replace walking as a means of conveyance for many individuals, if only because its 12 MPH top speed exceeds even a brisk gait. This will reduce the amount of excercise that Segway users engage in.
Think about this for a moment. The Segway makes people faster and fatter (if ever there were a more all-American invention, I haven't heard of it). IT was obviously designed as a conspiracy to increase the net momentum of the average American. San Francisco has particular reason to be concerned with this, since its proximity to siesmic fault lines places the city at risk for potentially disasterous consequences of a large aggregate transfer of momentum among its citizens. The city of San Francisco is doing the responsible thing by trying to prevent rush-hour earthquakes!
Actually, the nobels are delayed significantly, too. The reason is so important scientific discoveries can be repeated and verified with a high degree of certainty. The extended time period also allows the awards committees to more appropriately gague the significance and impact of a piece of research.
My earliest memory was from when I was one year old. My father was carrying me down the stairs, and tripped. He managed to cradle and protect me, although he sustained a broken tailbone in the fall. I distinctly remember the arrival of the paramedics, the color of the room (brown), even the fact that the stretcher had 3 straps.
Incidentally, my second memory is of my father's return from the hospital, whereupon he immediately went to our kitchen and got some pretzels. I have no other memories of that house (we moved out less than a month later, though).
Anyway, I'm not a medical sort, but on the oxygen issue: I suffucated during my mother's labor due to complications in the birth, and was dead for a couple of minutes before I was ressuscitated. I have no idea whether that had any affect on my brain development, but I don't have cerebral paulsy (the most likely outcome of those circumstances), so who knows?
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2), and yet her earliest memory is of preschool at age 4.
You do, of course, have a point. Women are entirely capable of making their own decisions about their sexuality, and if they choose to engage in certain sexual acts for money, then it's entirely their choice what they do with their bodies.
Pornography itself is not particularly exploitative (although its consumers, who are overwhelmingly male, tend to sexually objectify the women in the films. This is a broader psychosexual issue, though, and once again, none of my business). You made a note, though, that there are cases of criminal abuse in the pornography industry, and that we need better policing to combat this. This is absolutely the point. The fact that pornography is legal allows us to combat abuse in a realistic and effective manner.
A parallel can be drawn, here, to prostitution. In most of the US, prostitution is illegal, and the average life expectancy for a prostitute, after entering the proffesion, is four years (top causes of death include disease, drug addiction, and murder). 85% of prostitutes in the US have been raped by a customer or pimp. The prostitute-pimp relationship is almost inherently abusive. On the other hand, when prostitution was legalized in the state of Nevada, prostitutes had garaunteed legal protection, were actually paid the money they earned, and benefited from a state-mandated health program. The idea is to actually let women make their own decisions, and to provide the full protection of the law to those who choose to work in the sex industry.
It strikes me as odd, at least from a logical perspective, that Arcacia would try to "enforce" their patents by first going after online porn. It would make infinitely more sense if they went after the actual "infringers": namely, the companies producing streaming audio and video software. Going after Real, Apple (QT), M$ (WMP), and the like would have more legal validity, since webcasters purchase technology from these companies that they assume is legal... If any illegal goings on were happening, it stands to reason that the streaming media software providers would be the target.
Of course, there's a pretty shady reason why Acacia is going after porn first: A lot of people, particularly in the judicial system, have very little sympathy for pornographers. They will, at least subconciously, be much more receptive to the image of pornographers as "criminals", since they already consider them evil.
If they win their suits against the porn distributors, though, they have a legal precedent for hitting all kinds of companies, including the software providers (presumably where the money is), as well as anybody who delivers multimedia over the internet. So, the social conservatives who might hand down a token judgement against porn will be in the awkward position of setting a precedent to sue, say, a church that delivers sermons streaming over the Internet.
As with a lot of civil liberties issues, pornography is the frontier of freedom in this case. Many civil libertarians (myself included, since I'm also a feminist) probably wouldn't mind if porn suddenly disappeared. The problem is, if we legislate or judicate against pornography, then we set a very dangerous precedent for harrassing all kinds of expression (usually based on an arbitrary definition of morality, but in this case, purely economic reasons). Additionally, it's really none of my or the state's business what consenting adults do in front of a video camera. Anyway, even if you find pornography morally repugnant, it's still worth defending, when you consider what happens if we allow freedom of expression to erode at its very edge: the erosion spreads to radical political views, then alternative religious beliefs, and so on, eventually leaving a homogenous orthodoxy of ideas. Or, in this case, you simply have a parasite on the patent system getting in the way of people doing business, expressing themselves, and innovating.
Actually, since I both spin and produce electronic music, I've always wanted to get a couple of copies of some of my tracks pressed up for personal use. The problem has always been that getting an acetate master cut is pretty significantly expensive to start ($150 or so), and then, minimum runs tend to be at least 100 copies on actual vinyl (and trust me, you want actual vinyl. Dubplates wear out after *at most* a couple dozen plays). Needless to say, getting records pressed is pretty much prohibitively expensive for an amateur DJ who also happens to be a full-time student.
When Vestax announced their vinyl cutter, which cuts *directly* onto $7 vinyl blanks (no acetate master needed), I figured that small shops would start to acquire them and sell custom-ordered individual records for a nominal markup ($10-$20, although I'd be willing to pay a little more). So the question is, where are these shops? Does anyone have experience with a place that offers this service?
I, Robot was a collection of 9 short stories, not a novel. So which one, precisely, is getting the movie treatment? It'd also be interesting to know which character Smith will be playing. A robot? (ho hum... Robin Williams did it so-so in another Asimov adaptation) One of Donovan or Powell? (actually, this might be kinda fun. These two never really did get a fair shake living in Susan Calvin's shadow) Susan Calvin herself? (err... maybe not)
I should note that I, Robot was actually adapted into a screenplay by Asimov himself in collaboration with Harlan Ellison (and with all the teasing between these two you thought they'd never work together). Hopefully their script is being used for the film, otherwise I shudder to think how it might turn out.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is truly brilliant, and probably my favorite sci-fi universe (although, telivision-wise, I do have to give much credit to Babylon 5). Actually, to be more accurate, the Foundation "Universe" encapsulates 3 different series of novels, each in a different historical epoch, plus a couple more thrown in in between. I'll list them here, for the benefit of anyone who's interested:
The Robot Novels:
The Empire Novels:
The Foundation Novels:
In addition to all these, a few other authors have written books in Asimov's universe. Roger MacBride Allen wrote a trilogy of novels set just after the Robot series, taking place on a Spacer world at the very beginning of the Settler expansion. The books are decent, but don't really live up to Asimov's skill. They are listed as follows:
As I was researching, I came across some additional Robot mysteries written by Mark W. Tiedemann. I haven't read these, so I have no recommendation, but here they are:
There was also a "second foundation trilogy" authorized by Asimov's estate and written by some very excellent modern SF writers. These books flesh out some of the details in Asimov's universe, but the authors tend to project their own themes onto the stories with mixed success. All three are great books, though, and take place concurrently with Forward the Foundation:
As I recall, Asimov himself may have also written a book which takes place during the reign of the Trantorian Empire (between the Empire and the Foundation series) involving contact with an alien species, an element notably absent from all the rest of the novels in this arc. I haven't read it, though, and I forget the title.
Anyway, these books are truly epic, and present a huge historical drama about the human race as a whole. You should read them. Now!
Please forgive my spelling error, that should read unobstructed, above, and they shouldn't put all those vowel keys right next to eachother on QWERTY keyboards.
It's not necessarily true that you need a line of sight with no obstacles in the way for an optical communications device to work. There are parts of the EM (optical) spectrum which pass through ordinary objects. Infrared, for example, can "bleed through" most walls, allowing infrared photography of the sort sometimes used by law enforcement to see behind closed doors. On the other hand, gamma rays and x-rays, which are very high frequency, are stopped by few things besides lead.
Actually, current cellphones are, in a way, optical, since they use RF. Radio waves are a kind of light of much lower frequency than the visible spectrum, and they easily leak through all kinds of solid objects. I would assume that this new research project aims at using *higher frequency* optical communications, possibly using a laser for focused rather than diffused (RF-style) transmission. Only transmitting on a direct line of sight has obvious utility for security, and that line of sight doesn't necessarily have to be onobstructed.
With this news, radioshack has killed my purchasing alter-ego, John Shamus of 200 Arroway Lane. See, I created a whole personality for use in radio shack. Besides a fake name and address, my character John spoke in a funny voice, had an interesting career (limo-bus bathroom attendant), and even had a wife with a kid on the way (which made it easier to justify my purchases of children's toys). He also had about a dozen cuecats.
Screw it, I'm going to keep going in to Radio Shack as John, anyway. It's not like my life was going that great to begin with...
When I was in Kyoto recently, I had a chance to try the arcade version of this game out. It was certainly entertaining and, as other posters pointed out, follows the DDR formula of hitting the right pads in time with the music. While this may seem a bit formulaic, it actually is rather fun once you get into it.
It should be noted that Japanese arcades are currently graced with several other games in this same vein, including Guitar Freaks (which is nothing like playing actual guitar, as it is button and switch based), another drum game featuring a western-style drumset, and my personal favorite, a game which uses several keypads and a mock-up vinyl to "simulate" DJing. Once again, this has little to do with actual DJing (just as guitar freaks has nothing to do with playing the guitar, and DDR doesn't very much resemble dancing). Just the same, one can't help but love simple music-based games. They're a refreshing alternative to the standard arcade fare, and the highly social aspects of competition have the potential to bring in crowds of players and spectators, the likes of which the United States hasn't seen since the height of the Pacman era.
Looks like this is a spoofed address. I live in Michigan, and the zipcodes here all begin with a 4.
Actually, Final Scratch is Linux-based. The install CD comes with a bare-bones linux distro and partitioning utils to get you started. Alternately, you can just put the final scratch software on any laptop that already has linux installed. Oh, and you still need a good set of direct-drive tables to use it effectively (1200's or something comparable, i.e. Vestax PDX-2000's, Stanton STR8-100's, etc.).
I should also note that the Pioneer CDJ-1000 has beaten this home-brew to the punch. It has pitch-adjust and a substantial jog-wheel that is actually adequate for scratching. DJ Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist have been using CDJ-1000s in their live shows for some time, now.
The CDJ-1000 has the benefit of almost zero latency and no skipping. On the other hand, you can drop-cue in final scratch, and its "record box" categorization system is very convenient (and 3 ms of latency is not too bad). You can also plug your final scratch system into pretty much any club setup. Lugging around CDJ-1000's is not so easy.
The situation is not as bad as you would think. I've used a PDA throughout High School for taking notes, keeping track of assignments, etc. It's true that using Graffiti, for me, is a lot slower than typing and slightly slower than handwriting, however, I am still able to keep up using a tried and true trick for notetaking: shorthand. Alternately, several friends of mine have shelled out the $99 for a Palm keyboard. In any case, having a PDA in your pocket can actually make school a lot more convenient. For example, I have a palm app called TinySheet that I use to enter data from lab experiments. I can do preliminary analysis right away, and I can easily sync the spreadsheets to my computer without having to painstakingly reenter data. Sharing notes and information via infrared beaming is also hugely convenient. Of course, cheating using beaming would be quite convenient as well, except that pulling out a PDA during a test would look incredibly suspicious. Beyond that, the same issues of ethics apply as with pen and paper.
Yes, there is song blocking in groups. For a couple of weeks now, file sends have been filtered for copyright, too. This also ended a hack I punched up that used two user accounts to dupe the system into sending copyrighted tracks.
Opt in, essentially. Everything is blocked unless the record label goes out of its way to allow sharing. Those obscure releases... well, some small labels might actually opt-in. Then again, rare, out-of-print recordings from defunct labels will never be shared again. It's a sad story...
No. Theremins have two electronic sensors that, on two different axes, track position, with one hand controlling pitch and the other controlling volume. The theremin is a a very simple (but very cool) hand-position controlled synthesizer.
This device, on the other hand, is more of a sequencer. If you take a look at the webpage, you'll see that the software plays whatever is currently selected (breaks, basslines, ambient FX, etc.) on loop. When a recognized gesture is made, it switches one of the loops to another sample in memory.
In other words, it's a cute, cuddly MMT-8.
Look out, according to the robotics section of the timeline, these automatons will have 40% of the jobs worldwide in 2010!
Egads, I hope not! It's my favorite synthetic rubber!
True random data, however, is extremely rare. Even random number generator algorithms used on PCs don't generate truly random numbers, but rather "semirandom numbers" resulting from a number of operations being applied to the current timestamp. If you pull bytes out of /dev/random at specified intervals for a long enough time, you will eventually be able to discern what pattern connect these semirandom numbers to the time.
As far as we can tell, the digits of Pi are random. They are also, however, based on mathematical relationships which can be modeled to find patterns in the digits. There are formulae to calculate any independent digit of Pi in both hexadecimal and decimal number systems, as well as known relations like e^(i*Pi) = -1.
Anyway, the press release says that the algorithm is effective for practically random data. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I would guess that it applies to data that is in some way human-generated. Text files might contain, say, many instances of the text strings "and" and "the", no matter what their overall content. Even media files have loads of patterns, both in their structure (16 bit chunks of audio, or VGA-sized frames) and in their content (the same background from image to image in a video, for example). Even in something as complex as a high resolution video (which we'll take to be "practically random"), there are many patterns which can be exploited for compression.