Oooh... I know the difference. A gram negative bacteria tests positive on a gram test, and a gram negative bacteria tests negative. Basically, you fix the bacteria to a slide, dye with methyl blue, rinse with iodine, rinse with alcohol, then re-dye with crystal red. Some species of bacteria have a lot of tightly woven peptidoglycan in their cell wall, which will retain the combination of blue dye and iodine when rinsed with alcohol and appear purple under a microscope, while the alcohol will decolor the dyes from the other bacteria and the crystal red stain will show through.
The test basically indicates the presence of that thick layer of peptidoglycan, which is important because the bacteria that show up pink, and therefore have the thinner layer, have a thick capsule or layer of carbohydrates surrounding them (and can therefore get away with much less peptidoglycan.) This thick capsule hides the bacteria from the immune system of the host, as it means there are not a significant amount of proteins on the external surface to be detected. The capsule also, incidentally protects the bacteria from one of the main actions of many antibiotics including penicillin class drugs.
I remember all this (although I might have messed up the names of the blue and pink dyes) but for the life of me can never remember does negative mean the bacteria stains purple and therefore not a really big concern, or does negative mean the bacteria stains pink and is something that has to be treated with higher doses of a more expensive antibiotic that potentially has more side effects?
And before that was a generation of kids who used "sega" interchangably with video games (I remember hearing the sentence "You wanna come over and play some Sega? I just got the new Bond (Goldeneye for the N64.) Before that even parents were referring to the "intendo the kids are playing these days." Before that, it was Atari. And now? It's Xbox that's the generic term.
But then again, I also thought the 360 was going to utterly fail. Realistically, there are ome pretty cool games for it. I really don't think Sony has that killer app yet. We'll see.
Yeah... they haven't been taking my preorder for Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom. In fact, I haven't even seen the cardboard standup in any of my local stores... and we have 3 gamestops in a 2 block radius.
I have experienced Dell's support for machines in a large organization... it is indeed top notch. My experiences with HP? Not perfect, but they usually get the job done. Gateway... ughh.
I have also experienced Dell's support for personally owned computers at home (a friend's, not mine.) it was been simply miserable trying to get them to admit that there could possibly be a hardware defect and that, yes, they will authorize someone to consider coming out to look at the thing at an extremely inconvenient time. I'd think the fact that the computer bluescreening on boot, even with a fresh window's install CD, is a hardware problem and not "Oh, you have too much stuff on the harddrive, a format and reinstall will solve your problem, call me when you've gotten through that. What was that? You can't boot from the install CD to install Windows? Try reformatting and installing."
Yep... Raimi pretty much cut his teeth on Evil Dead... Raimi and Campbell were good friends growing up and pretty much started their careers with that movie. They had done other movies together earlier, but Evil Dead and the sequels are pretty much what gave those guys hollywood level names. I actually doubt that Raimi owns the rights to the word "groovy" said in that manner, but was just trying to give an example that was relatively on topic to illustrate the idea that making ONE hit game can be done on the cheap but there are limitations that can arise afterwards.
On a mildly related note, if you're interested If Chins Could Kill is a must read for any Campbell fan... gives a pretty good feel for the whole mystique, and shows a lot of the trouble that you have to go through in making ANY independant work. And I remember it being a pretty entertaining read.
There's a couple reasons indie-style game developers find it difficult to stick to the same budget. The first and foremost is that your programmers/artists/etc won't be willing to work for free once the first game is released. If you don't give them a salary once you start selling games (and a salary that recognizes that they had worked a long time on little or no money) then they go to another develoer who is able and willing to pay their employees. And once your first game is released, the related costs and labor often are not over... upgrades, bug fixes, etc are often needed in many genres of games (Console games generally don't have as much of these costs involved, while in a game like an MMO the later parts could easilly prove to be more work than the initial implementation.)
And then there are still other costs involved: customer support, press conferences, staff to manage the sales of the older product, and one that many people don't think about: software liscensing fees. Much of the production software used by an indie company will be pirated. Once you are selling a product, you had better make sure that every piece of software is legal. When that includes the OS, and software like LightWave, 3D Studio, Photoshop, sound recording software, software development tools, and associated plugins for all the software... With a couple people in an office, all those liscenses can add up to the same amount as an employee's salary.
And then after your first release, media companies generally aren't quite as fond of your infringing on their IP, so you'd better be sure that anything that you put in the game isn't infringing on the IP of anyone who wants to sue. You know, like the infamous "groovy" used in Earthworm Jim (as well as Duke Nukem, and probably many other games) might not be appreciated by Sam Raimi now that he's mister bigshot Hollywood director with Spiderman rather than just Army of Darkness...
So yeah, once a company has a first game released (or any product, really) there are a lot of costs that come into play... many of these were hidden costs that were merely postponed untill after initial release, and sometimes there are things that are given as freebies to an Indie publisher that you just can't keep doing once you've actually made money.
And more to the point, it's usually (80% of the time? don't remember the exact number or have a source handy) a family member or trusted friend of the family that is the danger. The whole "Don't tell anyone about this" line carries a lot more force if it's from an authority figure.
Considering a fuel cell to run on the same principles as a gas turbine is extremely oversimplifying things. A fuel cell utilizes an electrochemical reaction to provide power: at some point in the reaction there is an electric potential which drives electrons from one portion of the cell to another, and the path of least resistance is offered through wires and tracings leading to the device to actually be powered.
However a turbine is essentially driven by the heat released through direct combination of oxygen and the fuel... just like burning a log in a fire place. Fluids (generally gasses, although it is possible to use liquids or to convert a liquid into a gas as in a steam engine) heated by the reaction expand and flow past turbine blades (or pushing on a piston in the case of an internal combustion engion) causing rotational energy which can then be applied to a generator which magnetically induces current in a coil of wires. In a heat engine system such as this, the efficiency in which energy can be transferred from the heated gasses to the spinning turbine is related to the difference in temperature between the heated reacion gasses and the ambient outside temperature. Using currently used materials, we can realistically only get the internal combustion temperature hot enough to get a maximum of around 40-50% efficiency.
Although calling a gas turbine or internal compression engine a STRICT heat engine is a little misleading, as in most of the common combustions that I know of there are LESS molecules of gas in the combustion mixture after the reaction, IE in the combustion of hydrogen to make water, 2H2 + 1O2 -> 2H20, or 3 molecules end up as 2 molecule. The volume that gasses take up is theoretically independant on what the molecules are, only on the number of molecules, the temperature and the pressure. This fact would generally introduce further inefficiencies to a combustion engine than pure carnot inefficiencies. It could be possible that the efficiencies can be offset somewhat by the inherant volume increase due to vaporization of atomized liquids (I.E. liquid fuel ending up as a gas) but that would go against all the trends of thermodynamics that I have seen.
As far as riders go, this one is fairly on-topic. While the title of the act may be based on current pro-patriotism attitudes, the majority of the act covers management of international trade and closing loopholes that people use to break existing laws regarding trade. This basically says that it is now against the law to recieve money on an illegal bet. All betting that was previously legal include gambling on indian reservation land (basically the server and the computer making the bet have to be on a reservation,) horseracing, and fantasy sports games with a predetermined prize (I found it interesting that this particular form of betting is allowed, as long as the bet is not on a single game.) This act specifically does not cover intrastate gambling, where the computers involved in the betting are located in the same state (the act even acknowledges that the data can be transmitted accross state lines, but it's only the endpoint computers involved in the betting that matter. Shows a deeper understanding of the internet than I've been giving legislators.)
Yes, riders are a royal PITA, and really only serve for someone to push their own special interests through, but this one is relatively benign and on topic. More interesting topics in the act include "IP-Enabled Voice Communications and Public Safety Act of 2006" which basically means the federal government is going to now be responsible for providing accurate information to IP phone companies so 911 calls can be appropriately routed. They are also going to publish the list so that if people somehow don't get through properly (whether through routing error or an overload of calls to existing 911 call centers) people can call alternate public safety call centers (emergency and non-emergency alike) directly. A very reasonable piece of legislation, but in actuality less on topic with the rest of the overall act than internet gambling is. (Although it is on topic with its own subsection, as it appears that a seperate emergency responsiveness act had previously been attached to the port security act... however port security and emergency responsiveness are indeed related topics.)
Since they came out, prices of iPods have dropped before the pre-holiday shopping season if there was not a major advance for the time being. Apple's pricing scheme indeed fits right in with their history of pricing. Zune, however, will be sold for a loss. This articlehas Scott Ericson, the senior marketing director for Zune flat out saying they don't plan to make money this year. It looks like they are using the good old Xbox strategy of... lose money on every unit. Except by the time manufacturing costs come down enough fot the $249 price point to be profitable, Apple will have already reduced the price again (while still making a profit) or come out with an upgraded version of the iPod at around the same price point.
People might wonder why Microsoft is getting into the businesses, but to me it seems they are really pulling a reverse monopoly tactic. Yez, they are leveraging the profits they make in one market to enter another. But they are not entering the other market in order to make a profit, they are more likely entering the other markets in order to increase tie in on their primary market (Windows.)
What PR campaign? I haven't seen a single Ad for Zune... granted I don't sit in front of the TV all day, but I do watch a couple shows and whatnot. When I do a Google search for "zune" I get a "did you mean zone" message followed by a few reviews on tech sites. Nothing like the all out assault of the dancing silhouettes with the white iPods. Even a google search for silhouettes has as it's fourth entry the wikipedia entry on the iPod commercial. I don't think I'll see anybody dressing up as the Zune mascot this halloween, but I have seen a number of people dressed in all black with black facepaint and an iPod in previous years. The commercials for iPods generally represent a large number of underground artists who are poised to break it big, or classic artists that are poised for a comeback (there are exceptions, but...?) The commercials for Zune that I just found had extremely blah nonedescript music and animations that, while they could be considered cute, are simply not memorable or easilly identifiable with the brand (And the fact that I had to actively search for the commercials really means the ad campaign has virtually no penetration.)
This is going to be like all of the other iPod killers out there... remember, if someone hears what your product does and instantly compares itself to another product, that product has and will mantain market dominance for the foreseeable future, probably untill they make a severe PR or technical blunder.
The USSR sattelite jamming was, IIRC, microwave or otherwise EM based to cut off the line of communication with the sattelite. This is news because the dance is with... LAZERS!!@!
Usually, it's not so much that some get big and some get small, it's more that animals on a smallish island tend to converge on the same side... so normally large animals (elephants, horses, deer etc) become smaller while naturally small animals (rodents, birds, lizards...) become larger, untill they are all about the same size. And for the record... people also get smaller under the same circumstances.
Comedy may not be the best medium for the news, it is a great way to present opinions/editorials. It allows you to present an opinion on a political topic without looking like a raving lunatic. Stewart and Limbaugh both fit into this category in my mind. For one to form an opinion on the topics it IS better to have researched through more traditional news channels, but for many people there simply isn't time to read about every topic. Stewart et al. allow people to be both entertained AND informed, if a topic raised by these pundits is particularilly interesting or important, then people can go out and find more information as needed. The issues they raise will in general be the most interesting to their audience, and a large subset of "interesting" is importance and relevance to society (although not all interesting news is important or relevant, and a lot of important/relevant news is interesting.)
While comedic or entertainment based Op/Ed is not the best format for a sole source of news, it can serve a purpose in getting people interested and involved with the topics of the time. With modern media and the glut of information available, it would be overly cumbersome for every individual to research each and every news source on all the topics available.
I doubt Apple will sell lossless copies, or even significantly higher bitrate copies anytime in the near future. Yes, an audiophile will be able to hear the difference. The vast majority of people, however, can't tell the difference, or at the very least are not appreciably annoyed by it. In fact, most audiophiles would probably have a difficult time being able to tell the difference between 128 AAC and a lossless high bitrate compression algorithm if they were listening through the standard iPod ear buds, the cheap standalone computer speakers or even (God/FSM/etc) forbid a laptop's built in speakers that the vast majority or people will listen to their iTunes music through. Apple selling a format that satisfies the audiophile's needs would be like McDonald's selling porterhouse steak. The increased price would more than offset the percieved gain in quality in the eyes of the majority of consumers. To go back to the McDonald's analogy, fast food restaraunts make much higher profits than serving haute cuisine. Most gourmet restaurants wouldn't stay in business if it wasn't for the bar (yes, the food does generally make a small profit for the owner, but at an ROI that would be better served investing the money elsewhere.)
The related technology will improve which could allow for higher quality audio, but to the great majority of customers the sound quality is more than adequate. Customers would be more pleased if the technological advances developed are for faster download speeds and iPods which are cheaper, smaller, lighter, hold more songs and have a longer battery life. Oh yeah, and customers will absolutely demand above all else that the unit is trendy and looks slick.
The problem doesn't really come from Europeans not purchasing the rice (It's designed to be processed into a medicine, not eaten.) The problem comes in when farmers are trying to grow organic and non-GM, but their crops are cross-fertilized by the GM crops, destroying the market for their product. And then Bayer turns around and sues the victim of the cross polinization for IP theft.
I didn't say the products give "false hapiness" but that people are driven to purchase them because they have a false belief that the product will make them happy.
But if you want a difference between thinking you are happy and true happiness, I can give an example of addictive drugs which give a temporary mood elevation when used, but in the long run you have a lower level of happiness due to having used the drug. Or something as apparantly benign as chapstick, which provides temporary relief from dry lips by pulling moisture from lower dermal layers but in the long run reduce your the natural ability of your lips to moisten the outer layers meaning you end up with dryer lips for having used it. The reduction in discomfort of dry lips can be equated with happiness, but in the long run by using this "cure" you can end up with even more discomfort.
Some of that "unintelligable spam" isn't actually spam, but messages sent to essentially confuse spam filters. To catch the real spam as well as these, you would have to tighten your filters a bit, but that could create falso positives. So they are basically cannon fodder sent to retrain your filters.
You will be thrown in with the general group of people that don't have tv sounds etc identified. This will include people without a TV in another room, people without a TV, or people who simply do not have a computer and TV on at the same time. Which one you are can likely be determined by other information garnered from your computer use. Not that Google will actually determine which one it is, more that people with attributes "X, Y, Alice, Bob, Foo, and Blargh" click through on a given google ad. The closer your attributes match those of someone else, the more an ad they actually clicked on will be pushed to you, and ads you click on will be pushed more to them. They could even work with the companies advertising and determine of those click throughs, which results in a purchase and use that to weigh the n-dimensional cloud even further.
At least I assume that's how it will work. Computers really aren't good at determining context yet, but they can sort large amounts of data in a way to match up large numbers of attributes and keywords, then pull some statistical analysis to determine which ads will most likely pull YOU in.
Now I don't really know how it will decide to push the classic "mindshare" type ads which aren't designed to get you to immediately purchase something, but rather create brand awareness which hopefully (in the advertiser's mind) makes it more likely that you purchase their particular brand if you are in the marketplace. That would probably require methods that are a lot more intrusive.
Then again, regarding the technology involved, filtering out other sounds and then determining a hash of the remaining audio sounds way to error prone to me. I would think it would be easier to just convince tv execs to encode some information about what is being watched directly into the audio stream of a movie or TV show, presumably out of the range of normal human hearing. Sort of an ultrasonic bar code.
Slashdot Mirror
The question was if the BENEFIT was in the unmanned parts, not the costs.
And Feingold... cause, you know, he was the only one to actually vote against the patriot act.
Oooh... I know the difference. A gram negative bacteria tests positive on a gram test, and a gram negative bacteria tests negative. Basically, you fix the bacteria to a slide, dye with methyl blue, rinse with iodine, rinse with alcohol, then re-dye with crystal red. Some species of bacteria have a lot of tightly woven peptidoglycan in their cell wall, which will retain the combination of blue dye and iodine when rinsed with alcohol and appear purple under a microscope, while the alcohol will decolor the dyes from the other bacteria and the crystal red stain will show through.
The test basically indicates the presence of that thick layer of peptidoglycan, which is important because the bacteria that show up pink, and therefore have the thinner layer, have a thick capsule or layer of carbohydrates surrounding them (and can therefore get away with much less peptidoglycan.) This thick capsule hides the bacteria from the immune system of the host, as it means there are not a significant amount of proteins on the external surface to be detected. The capsule also, incidentally protects the bacteria from one of the main actions of many antibiotics including penicillin class drugs.
I remember all this (although I might have messed up the names of the blue and pink dyes) but for the life of me can never remember does negative mean the bacteria stains purple and therefore not a really big concern, or does negative mean the bacteria stains pink and is something that has to be treated with higher doses of a more expensive antibiotic that potentially has more side effects?
And before that was a generation of kids who used "sega" interchangably with video games (I remember hearing the sentence "You wanna come over and play some Sega? I just got the new Bond (Goldeneye for the N64.) Before that even parents were referring to the "intendo the kids are playing these days." Before that, it was Atari. And now? It's Xbox that's the generic term.
But then again, I also thought the 360 was going to utterly fail. Realistically, there are ome pretty cool games for it. I really don't think Sony has that killer app yet. We'll see.
Yeah... they haven't been taking my preorder for Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom. In fact, I haven't even seen the cardboard standup in any of my local stores... and we have 3 gamestops in a 2 block radius.
I have experienced Dell's support for machines in a large organization... it is indeed top notch. My experiences with HP? Not perfect, but they usually get the job done. Gateway... ughh.
I have also experienced Dell's support for personally owned computers at home (a friend's, not mine.) it was been simply miserable trying to get them to admit that there could possibly be a hardware defect and that, yes, they will authorize someone to consider coming out to look at the thing at an extremely inconvenient time. I'd think the fact that the computer bluescreening on boot, even with a fresh window's install CD, is a hardware problem and not "Oh, you have too much stuff on the harddrive, a format and reinstall will solve your problem, call me when you've gotten through that. What was that? You can't boot from the install CD to install Windows? Try reformatting and installing."
More Prior Art is available elsewhere.
Yep... Raimi pretty much cut his teeth on Evil Dead... Raimi and Campbell were good friends growing up and pretty much started their careers with that movie. They had done other movies together earlier, but Evil Dead and the sequels are pretty much what gave those guys hollywood level names. I actually doubt that Raimi owns the rights to the word "groovy" said in that manner, but was just trying to give an example that was relatively on topic to illustrate the idea that making ONE hit game can be done on the cheap but there are limitations that can arise afterwards.
On a mildly related note, if you're interested If Chins Could Kill is a must read for any Campbell fan... gives a pretty good feel for the whole mystique, and shows a lot of the trouble that you have to go through in making ANY independant work. And I remember it being a pretty entertaining read.
There's a couple reasons indie-style game developers find it difficult to stick to the same budget. The first and foremost is that your programmers/artists/etc won't be willing to work for free once the first game is released. If you don't give them a salary once you start selling games (and a salary that recognizes that they had worked a long time on little or no money) then they go to another develoer who is able and willing to pay their employees. And once your first game is released, the related costs and labor often are not over... upgrades, bug fixes, etc are often needed in many genres of games (Console games generally don't have as much of these costs involved, while in a game like an MMO the later parts could easilly prove to be more work than the initial implementation.)
And then there are still other costs involved: customer support, press conferences, staff to manage the sales of the older product, and one that many people don't think about: software liscensing fees. Much of the production software used by an indie company will be pirated. Once you are selling a product, you had better make sure that every piece of software is legal. When that includes the OS, and software like LightWave, 3D Studio, Photoshop, sound recording software, software development tools, and associated plugins for all the software... With a couple people in an office, all those liscenses can add up to the same amount as an employee's salary.
And then after your first release, media companies generally aren't quite as fond of your infringing on their IP, so you'd better be sure that anything that you put in the game isn't infringing on the IP of anyone who wants to sue. You know, like the infamous "groovy" used in Earthworm Jim (as well as Duke Nukem, and probably many other games) might not be appreciated by Sam Raimi now that he's mister bigshot Hollywood director with Spiderman rather than just Army of Darkness...
So yeah, once a company has a first game released (or any product, really) there are a lot of costs that come into play... many of these were hidden costs that were merely postponed untill after initial release, and sometimes there are things that are given as freebies to an Indie publisher that you just can't keep doing once you've actually made money.
Strangers aren't the only dangers
And more to the point, it's usually (80% of the time? don't remember the exact number or have a source handy) a family member or trusted friend of the family that is the danger. The whole "Don't tell anyone about this" line carries a lot more force if it's from an authority figure.
Considering a fuel cell to run on the same principles as a gas turbine is extremely oversimplifying things. A fuel cell utilizes an electrochemical reaction to provide power: at some point in the reaction there is an electric potential which drives electrons from one portion of the cell to another, and the path of least resistance is offered through wires and tracings leading to the device to actually be powered.
However a turbine is essentially driven by the heat released through direct combination of oxygen and the fuel... just like burning a log in a fire place. Fluids (generally gasses, although it is possible to use liquids or to convert a liquid into a gas as in a steam engine) heated by the reaction expand and flow past turbine blades (or pushing on a piston in the case of an internal combustion engion) causing rotational energy which can then be applied to a generator which magnetically induces current in a coil of wires. In a heat engine system such as this, the efficiency in which energy can be transferred from the heated gasses to the spinning turbine is related to the difference in temperature between the heated reacion gasses and the ambient outside temperature. Using currently used materials, we can realistically only get the internal combustion temperature hot enough to get a maximum of around 40-50% efficiency.
Although calling a gas turbine or internal compression engine a STRICT heat engine is a little misleading, as in most of the common combustions that I know of there are LESS molecules of gas in the combustion mixture after the reaction, IE in the combustion of hydrogen to make water, 2H2 + 1O2 -> 2H20, or 3 molecules end up as 2 molecule. The volume that gasses take up is theoretically independant on what the molecules are, only on the number of molecules, the temperature and the pressure. This fact would generally introduce further inefficiencies to a combustion engine than pure carnot inefficiencies. It could be possible that the efficiencies can be offset somewhat by the inherant volume increase due to vaporization of atomized liquids (I.E. liquid fuel ending up as a gas) but that would go against all the trends of thermodynamics that I have seen.
As far as riders go, this one is fairly on-topic. While the title of the act may be based on current pro-patriotism attitudes, the majority of the act covers management of international trade and closing loopholes that people use to break existing laws regarding trade. This basically says that it is now against the law to recieve money on an illegal bet. All betting that was previously legal include gambling on indian reservation land (basically the server and the computer making the bet have to be on a reservation,) horseracing, and fantasy sports games with a predetermined prize (I found it interesting that this particular form of betting is allowed, as long as the bet is not on a single game.) This act specifically does not cover intrastate gambling, where the computers involved in the betting are located in the same state (the act even acknowledges that the data can be transmitted accross state lines, but it's only the endpoint computers involved in the betting that matter. Shows a deeper understanding of the internet than I've been giving legislators.)
Yes, riders are a royal PITA, and really only serve for someone to push their own special interests through, but this one is relatively benign and on topic. More interesting topics in the act include "IP-Enabled Voice Communications and Public Safety Act of 2006" which basically means the federal government is going to now be responsible for providing accurate information to IP phone companies so 911 calls can be appropriately routed. They are also going to publish the list so that if people somehow don't get through properly (whether through routing error or an overload of calls to existing 911 call centers) people can call alternate public safety call centers (emergency and non-emergency alike) directly. A very reasonable piece of legislation, but in actuality less on topic with the rest of the overall act than internet gambling is. (Although it is on topic with its own subsection, as it appears that a seperate emergency responsiveness act had previously been attached to the port security act... however port security and emergency responsiveness are indeed related topics.)
Indeed, the stock market and even insurance are viewed by some people as gambling and thus considered to be morally ambiguous or even an outright sin.
Probably just keyword sensitive advertising. Since the word Apple comes up a lot, the advertising aggregrator weighs products with that tag higher.
Since they came out, prices of iPods have dropped before the pre-holiday shopping season if there was not a major advance for the time being. Apple's pricing scheme indeed fits right in with their history of pricing. Zune, however, will be sold for a loss. This articlehas Scott Ericson, the senior marketing director for Zune flat out saying they don't plan to make money this year. It looks like they are using the good old Xbox strategy of... lose money on every unit. Except by the time manufacturing costs come down enough fot the $249 price point to be profitable, Apple will have already reduced the price again (while still making a profit) or come out with an upgraded version of the iPod at around the same price point.
People might wonder why Microsoft is getting into the businesses, but to me it seems they are really pulling a reverse monopoly tactic. Yez, they are leveraging the profits they make in one market to enter another. But they are not entering the other market in order to make a profit, they are more likely entering the other markets in order to increase tie in on their primary market (Windows.)
What PR campaign? I haven't seen a single Ad for Zune... granted I don't sit in front of the TV all day, but I do watch a couple shows and whatnot. When I do a Google search for "zune" I get a "did you mean zone" message followed by a few reviews on tech sites. Nothing like the all out assault of the dancing silhouettes with the white iPods. Even a google search for silhouettes has as it's fourth entry the wikipedia entry on the iPod commercial. I don't think I'll see anybody dressing up as the Zune mascot this halloween, but I have seen a number of people dressed in all black with black facepaint and an iPod in previous years. The commercials for iPods generally represent a large number of underground artists who are poised to break it big, or classic artists that are poised for a comeback (there are exceptions, but...?) The commercials for Zune that I just found had extremely blah nonedescript music and animations that, while they could be considered cute, are simply not memorable or easilly identifiable with the brand (And the fact that I had to actively search for the commercials really means the ad campaign has virtually no penetration.)
This is going to be like all of the other iPod killers out there... remember, if someone hears what your product does and instantly compares itself to another product, that product has and will mantain market dominance for the foreseeable future, probably untill they make a severe PR or technical blunder.
More like in North Korea only old spy satellites are blinded by lasers.
The USSR sattelite jamming was, IIRC, microwave or otherwise EM based to cut off the line of communication with the sattelite. This is news because the dance is with... LAZERS!!@!
Usually, it's not so much that some get big and some get small, it's more that animals on a smallish island tend to converge on the same side... so normally large animals (elephants, horses, deer etc) become smaller while naturally small animals (rodents, birds, lizards...) become larger, untill they are all about the same size. And for the record... people also get smaller under the same circumstances.
Comedy may not be the best medium for the news, it is a great way to present opinions/editorials. It allows you to present an opinion on a political topic without looking like a raving lunatic. Stewart and Limbaugh both fit into this category in my mind. For one to form an opinion on the topics it IS better to have researched through more traditional news channels, but for many people there simply isn't time to read about every topic. Stewart et al. allow people to be both entertained AND informed, if a topic raised by these pundits is particularilly interesting or important, then people can go out and find more information as needed. The issues they raise will in general be the most interesting to their audience, and a large subset of "interesting" is importance and relevance to society (although not all interesting news is important or relevant, and a lot of important/relevant news is interesting.)
While comedic or entertainment based Op/Ed is not the best format for a sole source of news, it can serve a purpose in getting people interested and involved with the topics of the time. With modern media and the glut of information available, it would be overly cumbersome for every individual to research each and every news source on all the topics available.
I doubt Apple will sell lossless copies, or even significantly higher bitrate copies anytime in the near future. Yes, an audiophile will be able to hear the difference. The vast majority of people, however, can't tell the difference, or at the very least are not appreciably annoyed by it. In fact, most audiophiles would probably have a difficult time being able to tell the difference between 128 AAC and a lossless high bitrate compression algorithm if they were listening through the standard iPod ear buds, the cheap standalone computer speakers or even (God/FSM/etc) forbid a laptop's built in speakers that the vast majority or people will listen to their iTunes music through. Apple selling a format that satisfies the audiophile's needs would be like McDonald's selling porterhouse steak. The increased price would more than offset the percieved gain in quality in the eyes of the majority of consumers. To go back to the McDonald's analogy, fast food restaraunts make much higher profits than serving haute cuisine. Most gourmet restaurants wouldn't stay in business if it wasn't for the bar (yes, the food does generally make a small profit for the owner, but at an ROI that would be better served investing the money elsewhere.)
The related technology will improve which could allow for higher quality audio, but to the great majority of customers the sound quality is more than adequate. Customers would be more pleased if the technological advances developed are for faster download speeds and iPods which are cheaper, smaller, lighter, hold more songs and have a longer battery life. Oh yeah, and customers will absolutely demand above all else that the unit is trendy and looks slick.
The problem doesn't really come from Europeans not purchasing the rice (It's designed to be processed into a medicine, not eaten.) The problem comes in when farmers are trying to grow organic and non-GM, but their crops are cross-fertilized by the GM crops, destroying the market for their product. And then Bayer turns around and sues the victim of the cross polinization for IP theft.
I didn't say the products give "false hapiness" but that people are driven to purchase them because they have a false belief that the product will make them happy.
But if you want a difference between thinking you are happy and true happiness, I can give an example of addictive drugs which give a temporary mood elevation when used, but in the long run you have a lower level of happiness due to having used the drug. Or something as apparantly benign as chapstick, which provides temporary relief from dry lips by pulling moisture from lower dermal layers but in the long run reduce your the natural ability of your lips to moisten the outer layers meaning you end up with dryer lips for having used it. The reduction in discomfort of dry lips can be equated with happiness, but in the long run by using this "cure" you can end up with even more discomfort.
Some of that "unintelligable spam" isn't actually spam, but messages sent to essentially confuse spam filters. To catch the real spam as well as these, you would have to tighten your filters a bit, but that could create falso positives. So they are basically cannon fodder sent to retrain your filters.
You will be thrown in with the general group of people that don't have tv sounds etc identified. This will include people without a TV in another room, people without a TV, or people who simply do not have a computer and TV on at the same time. Which one you are can likely be determined by other information garnered from your computer use. Not that Google will actually determine which one it is, more that people with attributes "X, Y, Alice, Bob, Foo, and Blargh" click through on a given google ad. The closer your attributes match those of someone else, the more an ad they actually clicked on will be pushed to you, and ads you click on will be pushed more to them. They could even work with the companies advertising and determine of those click throughs, which results in a purchase and use that to weigh the n-dimensional cloud even further.
At least I assume that's how it will work. Computers really aren't good at determining context yet, but they can sort large amounts of data in a way to match up large numbers of attributes and keywords, then pull some statistical analysis to determine which ads will most likely pull YOU in.
Now I don't really know how it will decide to push the classic "mindshare" type ads which aren't designed to get you to immediately purchase something, but rather create brand awareness which hopefully (in the advertiser's mind) makes it more likely that you purchase their particular brand if you are in the marketplace. That would probably require methods that are a lot more intrusive.
Then again, regarding the technology involved, filtering out other sounds and then determining a hash of the remaining audio sounds way to error prone to me. I would think it would be easier to just convince tv execs to encode some information about what is being watched directly into the audio stream of a movie or TV show, presumably out of the range of normal human hearing. Sort of an ultrasonic bar code.