I am now speculating (any real historian want to back me up?) but I think the entertainment business in the middle ages would have had many of the hallmarks of an industry.
Agents, advertising, brands, celebrities, guilds. I think it all went on.
You seriously underestimate the level of trade and industry that went on in the Middle Ages.
I wouldn't dismiss minstrels, actors and playwrights as you seem to.
English noblemen would 'mail order' steel armour from Vienna. Think how much trade infrastructure that involves. Much more than making a decent barrel of wine.
I can't find an online reference right now, so I'll have to cite the Beringia museum in Whitehorse, BC. It seems to be a reputable establishment.
There is at least one example of a tipping point where the effect of warming affects humans literally overnight.
It's thought that as the Ice Age ended, ice fields in Northern Canada melted into vast lakes, with nothing but ice containing them. When, finally, the containing ice melted, the lake would empty into the sea incredibly quickly, in rivers that would dwarf our largest today. Humans at that time would have witnessed dramatic sea level rises taking only a couple of weeks.
I used to doubt that flood stories such as Noah's Ark, Atlantis, Cantre'r Gwaelod, insert-yours-here, could have originated with the sea rises shown in the fossil record - surely they would have been too gradual for Ice Age man to notice? But this explanation of a sudden catastrophic tipping point changed my mind.
In some ways I can sympathise with having laws about approximating pi - you could state in a legal framework, for example, that when calculating taxes based on the area of a circular plot, use 3 * r^2
I don't care about what the planet can handle, I care about a comfortable environment for humans.
(and I don't think it is clear that anthropogenic contributions are leading us to a world of cataclysm, but given that there are lots of other reasons to reduce human emissions (I like forests, coal power puts more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power, oil is economically and politically unstable, etc.), I don't mind there being a push to at least examine the costs of exchanging those emissions for something else; maybe it will even turn out like sulfur emissions)
At last someone rational. I wish I had mod points.
Let's not beat around the bush and cut straight to the chase: they want the court to rule in favor of either economic well being or environmental well being.
Funnily enough, one GW-denier I've talked to believes that the "GW conspiracy" is a big exercise in profiteering. "Follow the money", he says.
I don't agree with him. However there are businesses who would suffer if GW was demonstrated to be bogus. If you sell "make your business greener" consultancy, build renewable power sources, sell biofuel, differentiate your food product by boasting about low food miles, etc. -- your marketability needs CO2==bad to hold true.
We still can't predict [...] the weather, [...] with accuracy in a given year or a decade, let alone centuries.
I'm often reminded of an article I once read in which a scientist was discussing turbulence. He explained how if he poured some cold milk into a hot cup of coffee, without stirring, the currents and turbulence meant that it would be all but impossible to predict the temperature at a specific point, 30 seconds or a minute from now.
"Of course", he said, "we can very accurately predict its temperature one hour from now".
Not a direct analogy, but while I can't get an accurate prediction of whether it will rain in my garden one month from today, I have a much better chance of predicting the mean temperature of the whole planet, over the whole of 2012.
There's no reason why you couldn't mix and match. I guess the GP is suggesting that Erlang would be a better language for writing a messaging server - or perhaps he's alluding to an existing product.
For example, WebMethods is mostly a Java product, but its message server, sold as a reliable, high performance component, is written in C. (Note: I am not endorsing WebMethods).
So, it might well make sense to write a clustered messaging server in Erlang, accepting client connections from Java and other languages.
The most sensible thing would be digital files, with a maintenance schedule -- migrate to a new medium every so often.
However if the requirement absolutely requires that a physical medium is locked up or buried for 17 years, then I'd go for analogue media with tangible encodings:
For text and images, paper and ink (for longer periods, carve stone or etch metal!)
For audio, get some vinyl pressed
For video, 8mm film
It may not be easy to play the vinyl or the 8mm film in 17 years -- but it will be possible, and decay is less likely to be catastrophic.
I bloody hate litterers, so I'd be happy to see you getting fined every time you did it. You'd soon stop. Me, I don't do it.
Speeding, similarly: we only consider moderate speeding as a grey area, because we're so seldom punished for it. Fix that and people would stop doing it.
I've had no problems using VGA on several different HD TVs - you just need to set the resolution to the native resolution of the screen.
And what if such a resolution doesn't show up in your display settings dialog?
I've had no problems getting a picture. But a filling the widescreen display, at full resolution, with no borders, overscan or loss of aspect ratio - I haven't got my Toshiba TV and my Dell laptop to do that.
Sorry, I don't see the benefit at all. Good shoes let you walk it lots more places without having to worry about watching every step for broken glass or other hazards, worrying about it becoming too cold and getting frostbite (which tends to affect the feet first), for those in colder climates (which is lots of people in industrialized countries), worrying about it getting too hot and burning your feet (which is lots of people in hotter climates, such as Arizona where I live and many places near the equator), etc.
I think the difference is what we mean by "good shoes". The best shoe would be one that protected you from the things you describe, while still allowing you to use the nerves and muscles in your feet to do what they're meant to do.
Fine, if it's really cold, I need to keep my toes warm. The rest of the time, I'd really prefer to be in sandals, or barefoot. Hot asphalt can be uncomfortable, but your skin develops resistance (just like a beginner guitarist's fingers).
Good shoes also provide proper support and eliminate back pain.
Running around town without shoes makes about as much sense as walking around in a hot, sunny environment without a hat and sunglasses, or in a cold environment without a coat and gloves. You can do it, but why? So you can inflate your ego because you managed to "go without" while no one else made that sacrifice?
Everything's a compromise between sacrifices. Everyone else was sacrificing their posture, and their awareness of the ground beneath their feet. That's a valid choice of course. But probably in most cases one that wasn't consciously made.
It's quite amazing when you try it, how much variety there is in the ground you walk. I urge you to try it - it makes walking fun again.
"Barefooting" involves choosing footwear that protects you as much as necessary, without cushioning you unnecessarily. Going as close to barefoot as you can, while staying protected from the dangers you've described.
I was trying to avoid namedropping a product, but we're talking about things like Vibram Fivefingers -- although something that's not purpose-built, such as a basic Converse shoe with its very basic sole, do almost as well.
OTOH in temperate climates (e.g. Britain), the asphalt doesn't get too hot for bare feet that are accustomed to it. I spent a few summer weeks as a student, going barefoot around my home city at the time (Birmingham). I only stopped because of social pressure from some of my peers. I never stood on any broken glass or similar, simply by watching where I was going.
The fact is, the human foot is great for lots of situations - and would be good for more if we didn't let it get all soft and vulnerable by wrapping it in cotton wool.
Google for 'barefooting' and find all the people who are finding that wearing minimalist shoes improves their posture, fixes back pain, and makes simply walking/running around fun again.
In fact the whole foot and leg are very well adapted to their purpose.
Hooved creatures need four legs to balance. We can stand upright by doing nothing but twitching tiny muscles in our feet -- if we've not allowed them to atrophy, by wrapping them up in big cushioned shoes for our whole lives.
Yes, I expect the paid sites will have ads as well. Greed is a wonderfully consistent that way.
Sigh.
It has little to do with greed and everything to do with what the market will bear. We're talking about businesses here. They will try to maximise profits.
If having ads behind a paywall deters subscribers, then they won't have ads.
If enough subscribers turn out to be tolerant of ads, then they'll have ads.
It wouldn't surprise me all that much to see tiered subscription offers:
Free: ads and selected content
$5/m: unrestricted access to content, with ads
$10/m: unrestricted access to content, no ads
Assuming I wanted the content enough to pay, I personally would go for the $5 option. I imagine many others would agree. What you'd do, is up to you of course.
It's not really ironic. A small local newspaper is the least likely to have sophisticated online sensibilities. The big boys know that there's a balance to be made between serving lots of ads, and alienating readers. Over time those sensibilities will filter down.
Back in the B&W days of TV, it wasn't unusual to have program sponsorships with product placement embedded in the media. There weren't any commercials as we know them today, the talent would switch to talking about the product, then go back to the script.
Mythbusters have been doing this recently. Before/after an ad break, the three younger ones would switch to talking about some brand of car.
If it had worked, I'd probably remember which brand.
The whole concept of "unwritten contract" is a ploy by the powerful, who honor no such "contracts",
"The rest of the world has no morals, therefore why should I?" ?
I think there are pragmatic reasons to honour that unwritten contract. Let's take the example of a small site, some blogger perhaps, who uses their annual Google Ads cheque to pay for hosting.
If that cheque doesn't come, perhaps that blogger decides it's not worth carrying on, and his readers miss out.
That principle scales. If, say, Eurogamer (which I value), doesn't make enough ad revenue, they'll wind up their operations.
What would cause that to be true? No wait, before I can even make sense of your statement and ask a better question, WTF does "reputable" mean?
Really, I just meant mainstream, popular, and not porn or warez. If your ads irritate too many people, they'll stop coming to your site, and you'll lose money.
Because if it just means "has a reputation for not showing obnoxious ads" then I guess your tautology is true.;-) If it means anything else, though, then you're probably wrong. Is Slashdot a "reputable site?"
Yes. Slashdot's ads are sufficiently unobtrusive, that for I while I didn't even bother suppressing ads when I was offered the chance.
Slashdot itself has a "disable advertising" button I can press to turn off ads...how hard are you guys trying to go out of business by pandering to these types?
I like the/. approach. That "disable advertising" button only appears if you've earned a high karma. If you're comments are of a high quality, you're paying for Slashdot by contributing good comments. If your karma is lower, you're paying by eyeballing ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I am now speculating (any real historian want to back me up?) but I think the entertainment business in the middle ages would have had many of the hallmarks of an industry.
Agents, advertising, brands, celebrities, guilds. I think it all went on.
[citation needed]
(/. says: "This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original..." -- and I suppose /. has a point)
You seriously underestimate the level of trade and industry that went on in the Middle Ages.
I wouldn't dismiss minstrels, actors and playwrights as you seem to.
English noblemen would 'mail order' steel armour from Vienna. Think how much trade infrastructure that involves. Much more than making a decent barrel of wine.
I can't find an online reference right now, so I'll have to cite the Beringia museum in Whitehorse, BC. It seems to be a reputable establishment.
There is at least one example of a tipping point where the effect of warming affects humans literally overnight.
It's thought that as the Ice Age ended, ice fields in Northern Canada melted into vast lakes, with nothing but ice containing them. When, finally, the containing ice melted, the lake would empty into the sea incredibly quickly, in rivers that would dwarf our largest today. Humans at that time would have witnessed dramatic sea level rises taking only a couple of weeks.
I used to doubt that flood stories such as Noah's Ark, Atlantis, Cantre'r Gwaelod, insert-yours-here, could have originated with the sea rises shown in the fossil record - surely they would have been too gradual for Ice Age man to notice? But this explanation of a sudden catastrophic tipping point changed my mind.
In 1897 someone in Indiana attempted to legally define pi as 4 (not 3!) (among other values).
In some ways I can sympathise with having laws about approximating pi - you could state in a legal framework, for example, that when calculating taxes based on the area of a circular plot, use 3 * r^2
I don't care about what the planet can handle, I care about a comfortable environment for humans.
(and I don't think it is clear that anthropogenic contributions are leading us to a world of cataclysm, but given that there are lots of other reasons to reduce human emissions (I like forests, coal power puts more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power, oil is economically and politically unstable, etc.), I don't mind there being a push to at least examine the costs of exchanging those emissions for something else; maybe it will even turn out like sulfur emissions)
At last someone rational. I wish I had mod points.
Let's not beat around the bush and cut straight to the chase: they want the court to rule in favor of either economic well being or environmental well being.
Funnily enough, one GW-denier I've talked to believes that the "GW conspiracy" is a big exercise in profiteering. "Follow the money", he says.
I don't agree with him. However there are businesses who would suffer if GW was demonstrated to be bogus. If you sell "make your business greener" consultancy, build renewable power sources, sell biofuel, differentiate your food product by boasting about low food miles, etc. -- your marketability needs CO2==bad to hold true.
We still can't predict [...] the weather, [...] with accuracy in a given year or a decade, let alone centuries.
I'm often reminded of an article I once read in which a scientist was discussing turbulence. He explained how if he poured some cold milk into a hot cup of coffee, without stirring, the currents and turbulence meant that it would be all but impossible to predict the temperature at a specific point, 30 seconds or a minute from now.
"Of course", he said, "we can very accurately predict its temperature one hour from now".
Not a direct analogy, but while I can't get an accurate prediction of whether it will rain in my garden one month from today, I have a much better chance of predicting the mean temperature of the whole planet, over the whole of 2012.
It's not very clever to talk about "the green movement" as if it's homogenous.
Some "greens" are focussed on global warming, and campaign for wind farms.
Some "greens" are focussed on nice bucolic scenery, and strongly oppose wind farms.
There's no reason why you couldn't mix and match. I guess the GP is suggesting that Erlang would be a better language for writing a messaging server - or perhaps he's alluding to an existing product.
For example, WebMethods is mostly a Java product, but its message server, sold as a reliable, high performance component, is written in C. (Note: I am not endorsing WebMethods).
So, it might well make sense to write a clustered messaging server in Erlang, accepting client connections from Java and other languages.
The most sensible thing would be digital files, with a maintenance schedule -- migrate to a new medium every so often.
However if the requirement absolutely requires that a physical medium is locked up or buried for 17 years, then I'd go for analogue media with tangible encodings:
It may not be easy to play the vinyl or the 8mm film in 17 years -- but it will be possible, and decay is less likely to be catastrophic.
I still have music CDs that I purchased in the 1970's that are still usable :)
1982 at the earliest.
But there is a difference between a pressed CD - which can last for a very long time - and a CDR which decays surprisingly quickly.
I bloody hate litterers, so I'd be happy to see you getting fined every time you did it. You'd soon stop. Me, I don't do it.
Speeding, similarly: we only consider moderate speeding as a grey area, because we're so seldom punished for it. Fix that and people would stop doing it.
I've had no problems using VGA on several different HD TVs - you just need to set the resolution to the native resolution of the screen.
And what if such a resolution doesn't show up in your display settings dialog?
I've had no problems getting a picture. But a filling the widescreen display, at full resolution, with no borders, overscan or loss of aspect ratio - I haven't got my Toshiba TV and my Dell laptop to do that.
In my experience, it's a real nightmare finding a VGA mode that the TV likes. Possibly, HDMI fixes that.
Sorry, I don't see the benefit at all. Good shoes let you walk it lots more places without having to worry about watching every step for broken glass or other hazards, worrying about it becoming too cold and getting frostbite (which tends to affect the feet first), for those in colder climates (which is lots of people in industrialized countries), worrying about it getting too hot and burning your feet (which is lots of people in hotter climates, such as Arizona where I live and many places near the equator), etc.
I think the difference is what we mean by "good shoes". The best shoe would be one that protected you from the things you describe, while still allowing you to use the nerves and muscles in your feet to do what they're meant to do.
Fine, if it's really cold, I need to keep my toes warm. The rest of the time, I'd really prefer to be in sandals, or barefoot. Hot asphalt can be uncomfortable, but your skin develops resistance (just like a beginner guitarist's fingers).
Good shoes also provide proper support and eliminate back pain.
This is the important bit. Evidence is mounting that all that support and padding do more harm than good.
http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/
Running around town without shoes makes about as much sense as walking around in a hot, sunny environment without a hat and sunglasses, or in a cold environment without a coat and gloves. You can do it, but why? So you can inflate your ego because you managed to "go without" while no one else made that sacrifice?
Everything's a compromise between sacrifices. Everyone else was sacrificing their posture, and their awareness of the ground beneath their feet. That's a valid choice of course. But probably in most cases one that wasn't consciously made.
It's quite amazing when you try it, how much variety there is in the ground you walk. I urge you to try it - it makes walking fun again.
You didn't Google did you.
"Barefooting" involves choosing footwear that protects you as much as necessary, without cushioning you unnecessarily. Going as close to barefoot as you can, while staying protected from the dangers you've described.
I was trying to avoid namedropping a product, but we're talking about things like Vibram Fivefingers -- although something that's not purpose-built, such as a basic Converse shoe with its very basic sole, do almost as well.
OTOH in temperate climates (e.g. Britain), the asphalt doesn't get too hot for bare feet that are accustomed to it. I spent a few summer weeks as a student, going barefoot around my home city at the time (Birmingham). I only stopped because of social pressure from some of my peers. I never stood on any broken glass or similar, simply by watching where I was going.
The fact is, the human foot is great for lots of situations - and would be good for more if we didn't let it get all soft and vulnerable by wrapping it in cotton wool.
Don't dis feet.
Google for 'barefooting' and find all the people who are finding that wearing minimalist shoes improves their posture, fixes back pain, and makes simply walking/running around fun again.
In fact the whole foot and leg are very well adapted to their purpose.
Hooved creatures need four legs to balance. We can stand upright by doing nothing but twitching tiny muscles in our feet -- if we've not allowed them to atrophy, by wrapping them up in big cushioned shoes for our whole lives.
Yes, I expect the paid sites will have ads as well. Greed is a wonderfully consistent that way.
Sigh.
It has little to do with greed and everything to do with what the market will bear. We're talking about businesses here. They will try to maximise profits.
If having ads behind a paywall deters subscribers, then they won't have ads.
If enough subscribers turn out to be tolerant of ads, then they'll have ads.
It wouldn't surprise me all that much to see tiered subscription offers:
Assuming I wanted the content enough to pay, I personally would go for the $5 option. I imagine many others would agree. What you'd do, is up to you of course.
It's not really ironic. A small local newspaper is the least likely to have sophisticated online sensibilities. The big boys know that there's a balance to be made between serving lots of ads, and alienating readers. Over time those sensibilities will filter down.
Back in the B&W days of TV, it wasn't unusual to have program sponsorships with product placement embedded in the media. There weren't any commercials as we know them today, the talent would switch to talking about the product, then go back to the script.
Mythbusters have been doing this recently. Before/after an ad break, the three younger ones would switch to talking about some brand of car.
If it had worked, I'd probably remember which brand.
You keep tolerating the ads. I have no moral qualms about ignoring, avoiding or dodging them, so I'll just keep doing that. Everybody wins.
How is this different from:
You keep tolerating paying electricity bills. I have no moral qualms about hacking my meter, so I'll keep doing that. Everybody wins.
?
The adblock mentality is, "I'm going to enjoy free(*) content, while the fools who don't install adblock pay(*) for it"
(* free of ads, pay by seeing ads)
The whole concept of "unwritten contract" is a ploy by the powerful, who honor no such "contracts",
"The rest of the world has no morals, therefore why should I?" ?
I think there are pragmatic reasons to honour that unwritten contract. Let's take the example of a small site, some blogger perhaps, who uses their annual Google Ads cheque to pay for hosting.
If that cheque doesn't come, perhaps that blogger decides it's not worth carrying on, and his readers miss out.
That principle scales. If, say, Eurogamer (which I value), doesn't make enough ad revenue, they'll wind up their operations.
What would cause that to be true? No wait, before I can even make sense of your statement and ask a better question, WTF does "reputable" mean?
Really, I just meant mainstream, popular, and not porn or warez. If your ads irritate too many people, they'll stop coming to your site, and you'll lose money.
Because if it just means "has a reputation for not showing obnoxious ads" then I guess your tautology is true. ;-) If it means anything else, though, then you're probably wrong. Is Slashdot a "reputable site?"
Yes. Slashdot's ads are sufficiently unobtrusive, that for I while I didn't even bother suppressing ads when I was offered the chance.
Slashdot itself has a "disable advertising" button I can press to turn off ads...how hard are you guys trying to go out of business by pandering to these types?
I like the /. approach. That "disable advertising" button only appears if you've earned a high karma. If you're comments are of a high quality, you're paying for Slashdot by contributing good comments. If your karma is lower, you're paying by eyeballing ads.