Atmospheric CO2 is many times what it's ever been for millions of years-- all put into the air since the industrial revolution. Reducing that is a good start.
If you factor in oil company subsidies, cost to clean up pollution, impact of the oil industry on the areas in which oil is pumped, oil spills, etc... gas probably SHOULD cost $10 a gallon, but we're only charging ourselves 1/3 as much and leaving the rest of the costs to our children in the form of a damaged planet and unstable political world.
That being said, not destroying our planet is starting to matter to a larger number of people who are willing to take on the extra cost. I know I'd pay disproportionately more for an extremely efficient automobile. Combine these batteries with some of the new cheaper solar panels on a roof, and I could drive free indefinitely with only the carbon footprint of the original manufacturing.
Yes, old episodes of Single Female Lawyer may reach Omicron Peresei 8 with enough signal strength to pick out of the background noise. But newer episodes transmitted digitally may not. And my FiOS television signal probably doesn't give off enough EF to read from the moon with the best antennae. If human's technological progress is typical, it seems that an emerging civilization probably has about 50-100 years of "noisy" existence before the technology becomes efficient enough that the radio spectrum quiets down. A century may sound like a long time to be vulnerable, but it's a big sky. I'm not too worried.
Ah, a reasonable person posts to Slashdot just as my mod points expire.
Yes, TSA folks are just... folks. They're fellow Americans, not jailers. They have a job to do-- identify the people likely to blow up your plane and keep them from getting on it. Yes, you now have to show ID to travel by plane. Yes, if you give them a hard time they'll do the same to you. But as for the government's ability to track you... well, they don't need an ID to do that. Every time you turn on a cellphone, acquire an IP address, use your EZ-Pass, connect to wi-fi, visit a web page, or otherwise use virtually any high-tech gadget, some entry gets put in some database somewhere. What's really threatening your "privacy" is that it's not illegal to combine, correlate, introspect, and track you via such digital "footprints". And never was. This has nothing to do with 9/11, it's just law and freedom not keeping up with technology.
Sorry, wrong time scale. Xenu came to Earth 75 million years ago in DC-8s to strap Thetans to volcanos that geologists claim (sacrilege!) didn't exist at the time. Which is, of course, in the same geologic ballpark as the meteor that brought down the dinosaurs, so who knows.
This is probably a small side benefit, but Microsoft's concern is real. I made the same decision on a land records site I helped design in the mid 90's (on which you bought points in bulk, and spent them on the site) for two reasons: 1. At the time transaction fees were even worse than today. It wasn't unusual to have a couple of dollars per transaction fee, which is bad if the transaction is for a couple of dollars. 2. The credit card companies at the time were weird about having people actually purchase "something", not just a service or a download specified by URL, so if there was a dispute the value, refund, and such items were easier to determine. "Points" were easy to tally and refund, while downloading a document was vague.
I wouldn't be surprised if similar issues still existed.
Interestingly, Apple doesn't seem to have the same qualms about $0.99 songs.
Is it happening? Yeah! Is it probably not good? Yeah! Do we even know enough to be crying end of the world? No!
Will we ever know enough before it's too late? Probably not! Can we do some good things now to give us more time to learn what's going on? Not if everyone has your attitude...
If you continue to analyze until you completely understand everything, the time for effective action is probably long past.
I'd agree with you except for the first episode. It's the one place I agree with FOX... the original episode 1 was too heavy-handed, slow and obvious. Episode #2 introduced a lot of the concepts in a more entertaining way, and I think developed the characters much more quickly.
When I introduce Firefly to new folks from Episode 1, I almost feel like I have to apologize for how slow and disjoint the episode seems. Episode 2 is fun and flies along.
MPEG4 with AAC and H.264, which is championed by Apple and supported by almost everything, is also open, standardized, and well-supported by software and hardware. The submitter is obviously extremely biased toward Ogg, but Ogg is just a "container" format, just like MPEG4. The actual codec is vorbis (audio) or theora (video).
While the word "proprietary" was probably used inappropriately, it is true that Ogg is not well-supported and isolated to a few devices who place extreme value on FOSS. MPEG4 is a vastly better supported container format. If vorbis and theora are that great codecs, just offer them as options inside MPEG4, don't go switching to Ogg. There's no reason for yet another container. But I suspect even with the marginally better quality of vorbis and theora, compatibility with existing production software, media formats, recording hardware, de/encoding hardware, etc., would make MPEG4/AAC the obvious choice for the non-religiously FOSS geek.
From what I understand, the coverage is very spotty before the mid-20th century. They happened to have some old blood plasma from various projects and/or samples from people who died of undetermined causes. Some of those turned out to be AIDS. I doubt many blood samples from the early 20th century (before refrigeration was as widespread and before government programs made this type of research possible).
While you are technically correct, this chatbot has come close. It, or one very much like it, was detailed in an article in Scientific American Mind last month. A Robert Epstein was fooled for over two months into an online relationship with a chatbot. The interesting thing here is that Robert Epstein is actually an expert himself on this technology, having directed the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. So while it wasn't set up according to turing rules, I'd say fooling someone who has repeatedly administered a turing test for months should get some bonus points. His having been fooled, while a little embarrassing for him, is actually pretty interesting in that the person being fooled knows enough to analyze what happened.
Since HIV-1 was isolated pretty much every blood sample known to have ever been taken in history has been retroactively tested. The earliest confirmed HIV-1 positive blood sample in the world is from 1959 in Congo. The earliest US (St Louis) HIV-1 positive blood sample is from 1969.
There was only 1 episode out of order, and I happen to think The Train Job made a better first episode than episode 1. The "dropped" episodes weren't dropped from the middle of anything... they're the ones that never aired because the show was canceled.
I agree-- buy the DVDs. Best DVD set evar, and great commentary (I love that they brought the costume designer in for a couple of them). But still, don't oversell its presentation of the storyline. It's pretty much the same as you saw on TV (right down to the resolution, since FOX didn't do full HD back then, only widescreen 480p), with a couple extra episodes.
I would be amazed that any ISP would touch this with a 10 foot pole. They fought hard to try to get a sort of "common carrier" status, where they are not legally responsible for illegal material going over their network (child pornography, libel, etc). If they turn around and start monitoring their streams for copyright violations, why shouldn't they be on the hook for everything else as well.
And your argument about MPAA paying 1/2 the "damages" is obviously a straw-man, but it does raise an interesting point. I don't think any of these companies should be allowed to claim "damages" without quantifying that lost revenue on their 10-Q and 10-K reports and to their investors. I suspect most of that figure would instantly evaporate if the CFO's were told the numbers had to be accurate or they would go to jail for fraud.
It should be noted that this is an analyst who had already rated Netflix a "sell" and Blockbuster a "buy", and was trying to continue to justify his ratings when he wrote this. In reality, NetFlix is very postal service friendly (they pick up their deliveries themselves, for instance, saving the postal service $100M a year), and has already redesigned their packaging a dozen times and could easily do it again if need be.
In other words, this is FUD spread by an analyst who wants to see his predictions about Netflix's stock swings come true.
I'm no longer a New York State resident, but Hillary Clinton has done more for New York in the few years she's had than most New York senators do in a lifetime. She can name the top issues for every county in the state and what she's done to try to address them. You can make a lot of arguments against her (I personally want her to stay out of my and my family's videogame-buying experience), but asserting that she hasn't done anything for New York is so untrue as to completely discredit you from and valid political opinion in my mind. My family in New York are all Republicans, but they all voted for her because of her ability to get things done for New Yorkers.
I'd say it depends on whether the "high school multimedia course" is trying to be a VoTech course where you teach the type of skills that would be on a temp worker's "known software" sheet, or whether you're trying to teach multimedia concepts and principles to folks who will be going on to a design or fine arts University program. If the former, then an old version of Photoshop is probably better than a new version of GIMP. If the latter, then I don't know that it matters what software gets used as long as it teaches the principles involved.
Not sure why SlashDot folks love to demonize Apple and Jobs lately, when the iTunes Music Store is pretty much the only thing keeping mainstream digital music cheap. I think Apple just wants to see what it would take to make "ripping" DVDs as easy as it is for CDs from a business perspective. From a technology perspective it's no longer rocket science, but to make a business out of it you have to negotiate the rights. So throw out an offer and see what people say.
What does a format being standardized have to do with the applications that read and write them? Perhaps I'm not as sensitive to this, since it's really easy to generate PDFs from all applications on MacOS X, but I don't see why Adobe should release their software for free any more than I think Dreamweaver should be free in order for HTML to be a standard.
It's funny this article came up today. I've been thinking about how "exclusive" Wikipedia's editing and leadership ever since yesterday, when a page I contributed to (and therefore was watching), got an edit with the following comment: "(RV: per WP:V and WP:RS)". Now, if you're trying to create a system in which people are "free" to edit and feel comfortable doing so, this sort of nonsense has to stop. It doesn't take THAT long to type in English in the comments of the English Wikipedia.
It seems like Wikipedia editors are creating their own little cabal of procedures, language, and rules that if you don't spend all day tracking you can't hope to decode. Unless they do something to make people feel more welcome and understand what's going on a little better, they might as well close Wikipedia editing up and go to a Brittanica paradigm.
I have no problem with broadness or everyone being able to edit (not just "experts".) My biggest problem with wikipedia is actually the opposite-- experts are pretty much forbidden from contributing to most of the articles that they know the most about. Wikipedia discourages people from editing or creating articles relating to something they're directly involved with, meaning almost all the information on it is hearsay and non-expert contributions.
If you disagree with the intent GPLv3 then you disagree with the intent of v2 as well, although you may coincidentally disagree with the implementation of v2.
That's revisionist history. GPLv2 has always, and continues to protect the four freedoms completely with regards to the code. As I mentioned, even TiVo is forced to allow everyone to use, study, redistribute and modify all the source code.
The GPLv3 is more like DRM, though. It sets requirements on how other people are forced to run your code in binary form after it's been modified, distributed and installed. Should the hardware that TiVo makes be forced to be able to run your code? You can go build your own hardware and use, study, redistribute, and modify all the source code involved, so the four freedoms are still maintained without any of the new restrictions.
Basically, the FSF and their supporters are attempting to spin GPLv3 as a "refinement" of something that retroactively fulfills what they were "thinking all along". It's not that. GPLv3 is a re-thinking of the definition of FSF and applying it to new areas. It adds new restrictions and makes it more difficult to work with, causing a huge amount of harm to the free and open source communities.
You, of course, will disagree with me, but that's my point. Agree or disagree, all the unfortunate folks who added "or later" are along for the ride involuntarily. If you add "or later", you're saying that you will agree to be bound by whatever FSF decides to change in the future forever, and give up all your own rights. Not recommended.
I'd personally hate it if they gave up the beautiful elegance that is ObjC and forced Apple developers to move to Java or.NET.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: Objective C is exactly at the sweet spot for a computer language
I have to admit to not appreciating beautiful elegance, and prefer the buglessness, productivity, and tools of Java. Every time I start up XCode it's painful compared to even the free Java IDEs, let alone something like IntelliJ IDEA. And it also doesn't compare to Microsoft's tools.
As for Objective-C itself as a language, its syntax is unnecessarily complex and its few benefits over Java are pretty meaningless in practice. In performance, the two are fairly comparable.
In summary, Interface Builder, Project Builder/XCode, and Objective-C were state-of-the-art in the mid to late 80's when they came around. The industry has far surpassed them in this day and age. Every time I start up XCode on my Mac I feel like I've been transported to a dark age of development compared to my IntelliJ IDEA tools for work... and it's not just that Apple is lazy about its IDE. Objective-C is fundamentally not as amenable to the analysis, refactoring, and syntax help that Java is.
Slashdot Mirror
considering we don't know enough to take action.
Atmospheric CO2 is many times what it's ever been for millions of years-- all put into the air since the industrial revolution. Reducing that is a good start.
Because I happen to like the species.
If you factor in oil company subsidies, cost to clean up pollution, impact of the oil industry on the areas in which oil is pumped, oil spills, etc... gas probably SHOULD cost $10 a gallon, but we're only charging ourselves 1/3 as much and leaving the rest of the costs to our children in the form of a damaged planet and unstable political world.
That being said, not destroying our planet is starting to matter to a larger number of people who are willing to take on the extra cost. I know I'd pay disproportionately more for an extremely efficient automobile. Combine these batteries with some of the new cheaper solar panels on a roof, and I could drive free indefinitely with only the carbon footprint of the original manufacturing.
Yes, old episodes of Single Female Lawyer may reach Omicron Peresei 8 with enough signal strength to pick out of the background noise. But newer episodes transmitted digitally may not. And my FiOS television signal probably doesn't give off enough EF to read from the moon with the best antennae. If human's technological progress is typical, it seems that an emerging civilization probably has about 50-100 years of "noisy" existence before the technology becomes efficient enough that the radio spectrum quiets down. A century may sound like a long time to be vulnerable, but it's a big sky. I'm not too worried.
Ah, a reasonable person posts to Slashdot just as my mod points expire.
Yes, TSA folks are just... folks. They're fellow Americans, not jailers. They have a job to do-- identify the people likely to blow up your plane and keep them from getting on it. Yes, you now have to show ID to travel by plane. Yes, if you give them a hard time they'll do the same to you. But as for the government's ability to track you... well, they don't need an ID to do that. Every time you turn on a cellphone, acquire an IP address, use your EZ-Pass, connect to wi-fi, visit a web page, or otherwise use virtually any high-tech gadget, some entry gets put in some database somewhere. What's really threatening your "privacy" is that it's not illegal to combine, correlate, introspect, and track you via such digital "footprints". And never was. This has nothing to do with 9/11, it's just law and freedom not keeping up with technology.
Sorry, wrong time scale. Xenu came to Earth 75 million years ago in DC-8s to strap Thetans to volcanos that geologists claim (sacrilege!) didn't exist at the time. Which is, of course, in the same geologic ballpark as the meteor that brought down the dinosaurs, so who knows.
This is probably a small side benefit, but Microsoft's concern is real. I made the same decision on a land records site I helped design in the mid 90's (on which you bought points in bulk, and spent them on the site) for two reasons: 1. At the time transaction fees were even worse than today. It wasn't unusual to have a couple of dollars per transaction fee, which is bad if the transaction is for a couple of dollars. 2. The credit card companies at the time were weird about having people actually purchase "something", not just a service or a download specified by URL, so if there was a dispute the value, refund, and such items were easier to determine. "Points" were easy to tally and refund, while downloading a document was vague.
I wouldn't be surprised if similar issues still existed.
Interestingly, Apple doesn't seem to have the same qualms about $0.99 songs.
Is it happening? Yeah! Is it probably not good? Yeah! Do we even know enough to be crying end of the world? No!
Will we ever know enough before it's too late? Probably not! Can we do some good things now to give us more time to learn what's going on? Not if everyone has your attitude...
If you continue to analyze until you completely understand everything, the time for effective action is probably long past.
I'd agree with you except for the first episode. It's the one place I agree with FOX... the original episode 1 was too heavy-handed, slow and obvious. Episode #2 introduced a lot of the concepts in a more entertaining way, and I think developed the characters much more quickly.
When I introduce Firefly to new folks from Episode 1, I almost feel like I have to apologize for how slow and disjoint the episode seems. Episode 2 is fun and flies along.
MPEG4 with AAC and H.264, which is championed by Apple and supported by almost everything, is also open, standardized, and well-supported by software and hardware. The submitter is obviously extremely biased toward Ogg, but Ogg is just a "container" format, just like MPEG4. The actual codec is vorbis (audio) or theora (video).
While the word "proprietary" was probably used inappropriately, it is true that Ogg is not well-supported and isolated to a few devices who place extreme value on FOSS. MPEG4 is a vastly better supported container format. If vorbis and theora are that great codecs, just offer them as options inside MPEG4, don't go switching to Ogg. There's no reason for yet another container. But I suspect even with the marginally better quality of vorbis and theora, compatibility with existing production software, media formats, recording hardware, de/encoding hardware, etc., would make MPEG4/AAC the obvious choice for the non-religiously FOSS geek.
From what I understand, the coverage is very spotty before the mid-20th century. They happened to have some old blood plasma from various projects and/or samples from people who died of undetermined causes. Some of those turned out to be AIDS. I doubt many blood samples from the early 20th century (before refrigeration was as widespread and before government programs made this type of research possible).
While you are technically correct, this chatbot has come close. It, or one very much like it, was detailed in an article in Scientific American Mind last month. A Robert Epstein was fooled for over two months into an online relationship with a chatbot. The interesting thing here is that Robert Epstein is actually an expert himself on this technology, having directed the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. So while it wasn't set up according to turing rules, I'd say fooling someone who has repeatedly administered a turing test for months should get some bonus points. His having been fooled, while a little embarrassing for him, is actually pretty interesting in that the person being fooled knows enough to analyze what happened.
Since HIV-1 was isolated pretty much every blood sample known to have ever been taken in history has been retroactively tested. The earliest confirmed HIV-1 positive blood sample in the world is from 1959 in Congo. The earliest US (St Louis) HIV-1 positive blood sample is from 1969.
There was only 1 episode out of order, and I happen to think The Train Job made a better first episode than episode 1. The "dropped" episodes weren't dropped from the middle of anything... they're the ones that never aired because the show was canceled.
I agree-- buy the DVDs. Best DVD set evar, and great commentary (I love that they brought the costume designer in for a couple of them). But still, don't oversell its presentation of the storyline. It's pretty much the same as you saw on TV (right down to the resolution, since FOX didn't do full HD back then, only widescreen 480p), with a couple extra episodes.
I would be amazed that any ISP would touch this with a 10 foot pole. They fought hard to try to get a sort of "common carrier" status, where they are not legally responsible for illegal material going over their network (child pornography, libel, etc). If they turn around and start monitoring their streams for copyright violations, why shouldn't they be on the hook for everything else as well.
And your argument about MPAA paying 1/2 the "damages" is obviously a straw-man, but it does raise an interesting point. I don't think any of these companies should be allowed to claim "damages" without quantifying that lost revenue on their 10-Q and 10-K reports and to their investors. I suspect most of that figure would instantly evaporate if the CFO's were told the numbers had to be accurate or they would go to jail for fraud.
It should be noted that this is an analyst who had already rated Netflix a "sell" and Blockbuster a "buy", and was trying to continue to justify his ratings when he wrote this. In reality, NetFlix is very postal service friendly (they pick up their deliveries themselves, for instance, saving the postal service $100M a year), and has already redesigned their packaging a dozen times and could easily do it again if need be.
In other words, this is FUD spread by an analyst who wants to see his predictions about Netflix's stock swings come true.
I'm no longer a New York State resident, but Hillary Clinton has done more for New York in the few years she's had than most New York senators do in a lifetime. She can name the top issues for every county in the state and what she's done to try to address them. You can make a lot of arguments against her (I personally want her to stay out of my and my family's videogame-buying experience), but asserting that she hasn't done anything for New York is so untrue as to completely discredit you from and valid political opinion in my mind. My family in New York are all Republicans, but they all voted for her because of her ability to get things done for New Yorkers.
I'd say it depends on whether the "high school multimedia course" is trying to be a VoTech course where you teach the type of skills that would be on a temp worker's "known software" sheet, or whether you're trying to teach multimedia concepts and principles to folks who will be going on to a design or fine arts University program. If the former, then an old version of Photoshop is probably better than a new version of GIMP. If the latter, then I don't know that it matters what software gets used as long as it teaches the principles involved.
Not sure why SlashDot folks love to demonize Apple and Jobs lately, when the iTunes Music Store is pretty much the only thing keeping mainstream digital music cheap. I think Apple just wants to see what it would take to make "ripping" DVDs as easy as it is for CDs from a business perspective. From a technology perspective it's no longer rocket science, but to make a business out of it you have to negotiate the rights. So throw out an offer and see what people say.
No one's dictating anything yet, so settle down.
What does a format being standardized have to do with the applications that read and write them? Perhaps I'm not as sensitive to this, since it's really easy to generate PDFs from all applications on MacOS X, but I don't see why Adobe should release their software for free any more than I think Dreamweaver should be free in order for HTML to be a standard.
It's funny this article came up today. I've been thinking about how "exclusive" Wikipedia's editing and leadership ever since yesterday, when a page I contributed to (and therefore was watching), got an edit with the following comment: "(RV: per WP:V and WP:RS)". Now, if you're trying to create a system in which people are "free" to edit and feel comfortable doing so, this sort of nonsense has to stop. It doesn't take THAT long to type in English in the comments of the English Wikipedia.
It seems like Wikipedia editors are creating their own little cabal of procedures, language, and rules that if you don't spend all day tracking you can't hope to decode. Unless they do something to make people feel more welcome and understand what's going on a little better, they might as well close Wikipedia editing up and go to a Brittanica paradigm.
I have no problem with broadness or everyone being able to edit (not just "experts".) My biggest problem with wikipedia is actually the opposite-- experts are pretty much forbidden from contributing to most of the articles that they know the most about. Wikipedia discourages people from editing or creating articles relating to something they're directly involved with, meaning almost all the information on it is hearsay and non-expert contributions.
If you disagree with the intent GPLv3 then you disagree with the intent of v2 as well, although you may coincidentally disagree with the implementation of v2.
That's revisionist history. GPLv2 has always, and continues to protect the four freedoms completely with regards to the code. As I mentioned, even TiVo is forced to allow everyone to use, study, redistribute and modify all the source code.
The GPLv3 is more like DRM, though. It sets requirements on how other people are forced to run your code in binary form after it's been modified, distributed and installed. Should the hardware that TiVo makes be forced to be able to run your code? You can go build your own hardware and use, study, redistribute, and modify all the source code involved, so the four freedoms are still maintained without any of the new restrictions.
Basically, the FSF and their supporters are attempting to spin GPLv3 as a "refinement" of something that retroactively fulfills what they were "thinking all along". It's not that. GPLv3 is a re-thinking of the definition of FSF and applying it to new areas. It adds new restrictions and makes it more difficult to work with, causing a huge amount of harm to the free and open source communities.
You, of course, will disagree with me, but that's my point. Agree or disagree, all the unfortunate folks who added "or later" are along for the ride involuntarily. If you add "or later", you're saying that you will agree to be bound by whatever FSF decides to change in the future forever, and give up all your own rights. Not recommended.
Still, I'd hate to see another great cross-platform game developer consumed by the Microsoft mediocrity as happened with Bungie.
I'd personally hate it if they gave up the beautiful elegance that is ObjC and forced Apple developers to move to Java or .NET.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: Objective C is exactly at the sweet spot for a computer language
I have to admit to not appreciating beautiful elegance, and prefer the buglessness, productivity, and tools of Java. Every time I start up XCode it's painful compared to even the free Java IDEs, let alone something like IntelliJ IDEA. And it also doesn't compare to Microsoft's tools.
As for Objective-C itself as a language, its syntax is unnecessarily complex and its few benefits over Java are pretty meaningless in practice. In performance, the two are fairly comparable.
In summary, Interface Builder, Project Builder/XCode, and Objective-C were state-of-the-art in the mid to late 80's when they came around. The industry has far surpassed them in this day and age. Every time I start up XCode on my Mac I feel like I've been transported to a dark age of development compared to my IntelliJ IDEA tools for work... and it's not just that Apple is lazy about its IDE. Objective-C is fundamentally not as amenable to the analysis, refactoring, and syntax help that Java is.