What you say is true. Almost all journals are in english. Everyone knows english.
OTOH, that whooshing sound you hear is the United States born semi-literate engineer being outsourced because he or she does not feel the need to compete. There is such a sense of entitlement that we do not think we have to do anything more than the minimum, and in exchange we should be given a job. Even if there is someone else more qualified.
Sure, at some point in the past that was true. But right now businesses are calling Capital Hill in droves, telling the Republicans that all their funding will dry up if all this anti-immigration BS does not end. More H1-B visas, less enforcement of the boarders, no significant fines for employess that do employ undocumented workers. Wasn't it Mr. Gates who threatened to move to Canada, and did move some MS offices to Canada, because he did not think US Engineers were appropriate?
There has to be something that separates those that do get research positions and those that don't, and it is not just race, or citizenship, or the way you look. I can honestly say that I might have gotten jobs if I spoke french. I certainly would be much more employable if I could speak other languages better.
If our education system worked correctly, every US citizen would at least be familiar with three languages. We would be able to compete in the world, and we would not have to depend on others communicating for us. To the original poster, if you are at any kind of big university, you can see the people you will working with in the future. Are they all native speakers of english? I don't think so. How many professors do you have that are not native english speakers? I will say one thing. If you speak another language, at least a little, you ability to understand accents improves as well as your ability to interpret non standard structure and idioms.In effect, your ability to be a team player improves.
Here are the two things I have heard all my adult life about being an engineer, and the quality that are lacking. The ability to communicate, both verbally and in writing. The ability to work as a team, both as a leader and a follower. I think both of these are improved as we learn to speak more than one language.
For those who seek an primary education, which is all that many people want, I think technology provides a more entertaining method to study basic facts. For instance, the technology of injection molding can produce cheap identical blocks that can be used to explore many concepts, as well as foster some higher level creativity skills. We see this in other technologies where a machine might confirm a correct answer and provide some automated positive feedback. The benefit for the primary classroom is clear, as entertained children require much less force to be placed into compliance. As a result, it is arguable, that more of the student have the opportunity, and in fact may, learn more of the facts.
At the secondary level, it seems to me that the impact in the technology itself. For instance, learning to use a teletype machine did not provide a long time marketable skill, but it did provide an opportunity to learn a novel device, which was cool. It made me learn how to learn. Likewise when one might learn to use a EEPROM programmer, vi, a drill, a saw, or even drive a car. All of these are learning the technology, and motivated students will learn how the technology works, and how it does not work, which is what we want anyway.
This continues to college until technology is mostly used to help us learn more efficiently. An computer index can be more efficient than a printed index. Typing paper in LaTeX can be more efficient that on a typewriter or in lower tech word processing program. The list goes on.
What I think is really important, though, is that kids are allowed to become familiar with technology, and it's use. I see classrooms where there is no play time with machines. I see primary school kids being taught by rote the parts of a computer, which little context of what a computer does. I see teachers telling students to open the internet by clicking IE. In this way technology changes the classroom very little, as we are still teaching facts with little context in reality.
Definitely market copy. Extremely general, not useful information, indiscriminate name dropping, with unintended consequences.
For instance, by dropping the imdb name, it is now my impression that this Erlang thing is best at destroying otherwise useful sites by making them less reliable and more annoying to users. Who in their right mind would want to do that. Oh, marketing people, thats who!
I reflected on this issue recently, wanting to digitize some old books. I was not in the position of having to use my own stock, as worn copies of the books were readily available, but the issue were similar. Here are my thoughts.
First, make sure the magazines are not already available. About half of the books I wanted to digitize were already available in digital form. It might cost money. That might be ok. You are either going to have to destroy the magazines or spend huge amounts of time taking pictures, either with a camera or scanner.
Second, do you need to have every article and every magazine and every page scanned? It could be that the digital camera solution might be best, if you can get the hardware, as there may only be a few pages from each magazine that is relevant.
Third, don't just say the magazines cannot be risked. If you want high quality scans, that are not crooked or folded, you are going to need a very good sheet feed scanner, and the magazines will have to be at least have to be unstapled, assuming they are not perfect bound. This will require much post processing, some rescanning, and some damage. If the magazines can be cut, it would likely make things much easier.
We are not in the ancient world where the burning a book means the literal loss of knowledge. In many ways, the copyright laws that keep books from getting scanned is the modern equivalent of book destruction. But, as we know, knowledge is not free, and novel knowledge is quite expensive. If this were not so, many of us would never have in the prime position that many of us has enjoyed.
That said, given the cost of physical storage, and given that libraries will likely throw these magazines like this out rather than pay for storage, and who knows if anyone will ever take the time to scan these obscure item in, it seems that destroying the old media husks is, at lest, defensible.
if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems
If you are shooting and uploading a wedding video every day, which implies that you probably do that for a living, then I would assume you can afford a professional connection to go along with the professional components of the trade. If you are uploading a wedding video a week, at normal speeds, then there is not issue.
For those us with regular consumer accounts, who are going to upload or download DVD quality video, over speed achievable by mere mortals, we would never notice such a cap.
In any case, this is clearly aimed at the consumer who does not have incredible amounts of original content to upload, but may want to watch movies over the internet. Not an unreasonable compromise. After all, how many of us want to subsidize the professional wedding photographer.
I really wish the silent film shown more. It really forced the creative team to utilize what is special about film, i.e. the images, rather than make a movie that is radio with images. Nothing wrong with the later, I actually prefer good dialoque to pretty picture, but have great respect for movies that have both good writing and good cinematography. Action does not hurt either.
Metropolis has action, it is what I would consider the original speculative fiction flick. The original action flick would, I think, be Zorro. Both have plots are driven by sequential credibly related events. Character are stylized, but that is what happens in a yarn. This is kind of different from movies that just degenerate into sequences of special effects driven by some arbitrary plot device. This, in my mind, is really p0rn. Again, not bad, but not film. For instance, I saw the preview to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It seemed to be this kind of random movie. Eye candy.
I am glad the found an original cut of Metropolis, and hope they release it on DVD at some point in the near future. Hopefully it will show up for rental. Highly recommended. For those who can't wait, the current release is on DVD.
Every once in while I hear that someone has tried to restore an instrument such as this. In some cases, they try to sand down the instrument so it is perfectly flat, and destroy it. It seems that the violin makers tried to not only get very good wood with proper and uniform density, but also made a fairly good attempt to compensate for non uniform density by varying the thickness.
This is a problem with woodwork. It is difficult to get dense wood. Only 20 years ago it was easy to get good dense wood that could be built and oiled so it would last a very long time. Now all I see is light junk wood.
Reminds me of the line from AbFab, where Eddie is correcting the misconception of her daughter, telling her that PR is about telling people about products they don't yet know that they need.
It also amazing me at the even the lowest of the tech worker lives in a glass tower. Who needed a transistor radio? Who needed a car? Who needs a computer, or a website, or email. How many semiskilled web monkeys would be begging for scraps on the street if the PR people did not create a need for new products? It does not just magically happen you know.
I am not marketing, I just know that as much as we would like to, we can't ship the the annoying 1/3 or our workforce to another planet just because it is not immediately obvious what they do. It is like the roach. They must have some purpose. In any case, if one has the job of developing the sleazy product that requires the sleazy sales person, then there is little basis for moral superiority.
We keep hoping for shows like I Love Lucy, Charlies Angles, and BJ and the Bear. We keep hoping for another powerful women, not child girl, like Erin Grey. Young whipper snappers never saw TV when it was fresh and full of possibilities, after the slate of scripted network time wasting, and before the decline to unscripted networked time wasting. When the ideas were recycled from radio, not cannibalized from itself. It is no wonder that a generation raised on Seinfield and Friends would have no love for the one eyed beast. How could even Buffy engender the mythic loyalty of Bewitched.
TV probably died in the year 2001. It is to be expected that, just like radio, it will hang on with it's one bony hand until it relegated to the backwoods of cheap motel rooms, where internet acess is not available.
First, let me say that many of the products are worth the money for persons who enjoy having this merchandise and have the money to spend on it. OTOH, some of these luxury good companies are predatory as they sometimes target persons who do not have the money to buy the products. Which is neither here nor there, just want to get it out of the way.
Now the specific response. As always, if a person is using a trademark without a license, which is all that is happening in this case, then absolutely go after that person with whatever laws may be at hand. If an outlet is violating trademarks, go after that outlet. What one cannot, in general do, is go down to flea market and bust up the place for selling used goods.
Here is why LVMH is a hypocrite. They are doing this to protect their brands and maintain the perceived value of their brand. Ebay is allegedly allowing fakes to be sold, and is allegedly allowing legitimate products to be sold at a discount, which is bad. Instead of going after the sellers, they are going after ebay, which is evidently their right. But do you who else is encouraging these discounts sales, perhaps even more so? The airlines. The airlines are facilitating this evidently illegal behavior by flying person to the US from europe, for a fee, persons whose sole intent is to purchase luxury goods in the US, transport these goods back to the EU, and sell these luxury goods at a discount. I don't see LVMH suing Air France. Don't believe me that this is going on? Go to any legitimate luxury good website, and you will see 'two item limit'. The value of the dollar is so low that the arbitrage potential on luxury goods are enormous.
Of course the issue is really that LVMH and others has created a huge demand without suppling the goods at a price people want to pay, which leads to situation in which the lawless americans figure out some other way to meet the supply. Even in a country that increasingly moving to socialism, (tax rebate checks, using the military to control unemployment, increasingly high taxes to support an increasing bloated government, vis a vis Homeland Security), capitalism still does it job, and the courts can only do so much to curb the capitalistic desire. Of course the rational agents know a secret. Don't buy stuff that is overpriced and hard to get. It doesn't make you smarter, larger, or prettier, unless perhaps you are really dumb, really small, or really ugly to begin with. In which case go and earn some money to correct these problems. But form most of us, a bag on sale from another designer is just as good as an LVM branded bag. In fact, a bag from target or walmart will likely do the trick.
Just to add a bit, the problem with mass, as you have shown, is that the standard cannot be reproduced outside the labs tha currently own a kilogram standard. It is not so much that the standard changes over time, which is does, but that there is no real way of allowing labs to verify that are following the standard without going to a duplicate.
My understanding is that this leads to issues of reproducibility. With time and length, labs can have a great deal of confidence that what they call a second and metre is the same as everyone else. With the kilogram it is less so. If there is a way to count the number of atoms for a particular ratio of isotopes, then this might help create a standard without circular references to other physical standards. Even if it is not perfect, it is not useless. The count of silicon atoms is going to be on the order of 10^26. The current standard for mass appears to be worse than 1 part in 1 billion, so as long as the count is at least that good, the standard is no worse than what is currently available, with the advantage of being portable. As far a counting those atoms, there are very precise means that are used to measure flux in surface science, and while I don't know if they can be used for bulk materials, I think it would at least be possible.
More importantly, on the way up they forgot the parking brake, not to mention the crackers. If you have not seen the show, it is a beautiful thing to watch.
It goes a bit beyond this. If one installs non-apple memory in you mac, they will hassle you for warranty repair, so it not as simple as don't buy upgrades from Apple. It is really that if you want a rock bottom price computer, don't buy an Apple, which is what this really all about.
Given the competitive PC market, and the high cost of MS OS, building computers does not seem to be a profitable market. An average PC maker can make money from Games computers, while Apple and Sony makes money for selling all computers at a profit.
In any case, buy this guys argument you should not buy not buy memory upgrades from Dell either as they cost 250% more than what you can get on the street. I feel sorry for all those sucker that are paying Dell $50 for memory that fell off the back of the truck, when they could get the same memory form $20 off google. You know, those fools who spend $500 on a computer when they could build one for $300.
In my opinion is the biggest reason to use shuttle boost technology. There is simply no other technology that has the long term testing and use that the STS has. Real world failure rate is around 1.6 % and hopefully falling.
My understanding is that one issue being considered is the added cost of launching cargo with humans, meaning that cargo is shipped with human safety requirements. IIRC, the solution to this was to pre ship much of the material to the final destination using the best reasonable techology, and then send the people up on a much more robust and reliable vehicle.
I also wonder if the moon missions should be used to test some sort of multi vehicle system. For instance a launch vehicle could be based on the current shuttle technology, without the payload requirements. A space only vehicle could be used to transport persons from the space station to the moon and back, for instance a partially reusable lunar module with a highly simplified CSM, as the CSM would not need to renter atmosphere.It would not fit into the rapid return to the moon, but wold provide technology testing to what we may need long term.
Honesty, I have no problem with people, in particular kids, doing stupid shit. We all did it. In most cases something non critcal/fatal will happen and they will correct the behavior, or they will grow out of it. It is like drunk driving. Many people do it a couple times, usually a few DUIs or near misses will cure the behavior. Sometimes they kill someone, and the sad this about this is that murder charges are not pushed often enough. Sometimes they off themselves, which, sad as it may be, is what happens in the real world. Sometimes, like a famous man everyone in the world knows, they never learn and never have any remorse, and continue to engage in inappropriate activities into their 40's, when any sane or intelligent person would have learned otherwise.
What I do have problem with, is vis a vis the above example, everyone just talks about the good ol' boys/girls, and look the other way.
Which has little to do with persons who think they can rich off the long tail. Sure if you amazon and can stock the items that sell massively and the items that only 100 people in the entire country will buy once a year, then, probably, eventunaly, you will make money. Not as much as Wal Mart, but it is a way to compete with WalMart so you can at least make something. In fact even in this scenario you will liely lose money, as amazon did until 2002, and many book stores do currently.
In my mind the question is how 'long tail' can you? Does the internet allow a business to solely stock the niche items and do well. For example, does Thinkgeek do all that well? Or CafePress? I believe that a legitimate bussiness plan can be created from the long tail, and a motivated retailer can make a modest profit. But is the likes of Amazon really based on the long tail concept? Not really. It is based on the low price high availability concept, which is the opposite of what one sees in the long tail.
I am no free market nazi, but it seems that if the market is free, then there will be little issue. To wit, I am not sure if there is any reason why every DNS has to recognize every top level domain, or has to have all data associated with that domain. For instance, if MS has a domain, would it not be technically feasible to not recognize that domain, or as a less drastic measure pass the request to MS servers that will then pass back the more detailed information?
In any case, this is just a natural progression. First only the fortunate few could get a domain, then only those with cash, now anyone with a tenner can have a domain. I certainly do not believe that most people would consider this a bad thing. Now we are liberalizing the tld. People are saying the sky will fall. People are saying there is not going to work long terms. Well, it is working.
As far as who has the right to what name, this will likely work as it does now, and there is a decade or so worth experience to make it much more reasonable for the initial internet land grab with domain speculators taking up every word in the english language. Then consider that anyone who wants to play this game has to half a million, and it is clear how it will work out. Every major corporation will own a TLD with their name. THis will have due to experiences with not doing so on the initial land grab. Promotors of celebrities will likely try to get a TLD. Then we will likely see a number of entrepreneurs trying to grab a TLD as part of a new business model. Child friendly domains, specific faiths, etc. This will be the source of the one legitimate complaint. The balkanization of the internet. It will be much easier to protect the masses from unfortunate facts if they are limited to a government or faith controlled TLD.
I think it is called the preponderance of evidence, the truth will set you free, or whatever else you want to call it. If the facts are that Clinton smoked pot in britain where it was legal, Bush drove drunk in America where it is not legal and tantamount to attempted manslaughter, Rush likely broke that law to feed his drug addiction, and McCain sells beer, selling that requires constant government intervention as the ads are often aimed at small children, then those are the facts. Yes, on the internet it is much more difficult to censor those fact. So, yes, if your leaders are hypocrites, then persons who have access to the facts are going to be more likely to more likely to move to another choice. For instance, if one candidate wants to provide access to government health care, and the other claims that government health care is not good enough even though he has sent his entire life on government benefits, that might be a fact that gets out into the open and makes people question his credibility.
The problem is the entitlements to the Energy industry and how we are going to deal with the waste. If the nuclear plants can be built without government subsidies beyond perhaps land grants, then that would be great. I do not see why we should support bussinesses that aren'r profitable witout entitlements.
The second issue is that we have to get a nuclear depository up and running. Every year the treasury is paying huge amounts of taxpayer money to the nuclear power plants for storage of waste. Who knows how many of those of payments are fraudulent. Until we get a national nuclear waste dump up and running, nuclear power is going to a magnet for corruption of the public purse.
Re:Those old white dudes had it right
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Understanding Privacy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This was the jist of Bruce Schneier's essay on this very topic. One big issue in privacy is the imbalance of power. One example he used was that the police routinely video tape a traffic stop, and there is nothing wrong with that, but that while they have the freedom to use it was they wish, you have no formal method of gaining a copy. It appears that while the public has no right to privacy, the cops have something to hide. A more recent example in the news is the Bush administrations lack of email archives. While the private emails are supposed to be open for inspection, public emails, paid fo by tax payers dollars, remain hidden. Then there was the reluctance of the McCain family to release tax returns, something done by all presidential hopefuls to prove they have nothing to hide.
The founding fathers certainly knew the dangers of such asymmetries. It is sad that their heirs care only about exploiting such asymmetries to satisfy some personal greed.
There is a point to this. There is one thing you need to manufacture any kind of sophisticated weapon: sophisticated manufacturing capability. There are plenty of people who have ideas, blueprints, even process diagrams, but turning these into working product is quite another thing. For instance, why was the first widely used programmable device the Jacquard loom and not the babbage engine? Because the latter was beyond the manufacturing capability of the time. In the US space program, one of the major innovations, if not the major innovation, was manufacturing technology.
We see this in Iraq. Biological weapons are difficult to produce and sometimes ineffective. Nuclear weapons are difficult to produce and the fissionable material is well controlled, although available. So, what do they use? The IED. Simple to build. Effective. Scary.
Technology is the systematic recording of who to do things.
If I use technology to build a missile, and then use technology to build a laser to shoot it down, is one technology and one anti-technology? No, both are simply the application of the techniques learned and taught.
Furthermore it would be difficult to know which is the technology and which is the anti technology. If I can't go about my work because kids are downloading pron 24/7 and clogging the pipe, even though the attempt is made to balance the traffic, then is technology to unclog the pipe a good or bad thing? The technology used to unscramble the picture and catch the guy that was abusing little kids, was that good or bad?
There is a sense of entitlement that is pervasive is our culture, a sense that we somehow have an inherent right to any technology. Not only a right to the technology, but a right to have someone produce at the price we want to pay, in the form that we want, and as soon as we want it. If this isn't possible, the government should subsidize it. We see this with gas. If we don't get waht we want, we whine.
The problem with this is that not all technology is good. We see this with medical supplies. We see this with cars and SUVs. A bit more time, a bit less greed, a reduction in the sense of entitlement, we might have technology that is helpful and not just cool.
Google will and is becoming a force that will, soon enough, begin to block innovation and cause some grief to persons who depend on them, just like MS. However, they are still a reasonable company, mostly because they have to fight against Yahoo. MS is a non issue except that it has cash it can use to cause problems.
I think that Google did one thing that no one else did. Quietly controlled cost, invested heavily in R&D, and pretty much created the profitable ad based service model. Yahoo did not sit around and do nothing. Yahoo was an incumbent that had a reasonable enough business model. The problem is the model did not scale as it required massive human input. One must, however give them credit for two things. First, they saw and effectively filled a demand. Second, in a field littered with ineffective firms, they exist. They are not on the top. They do not generate the massive short term gains that some investors want, but they do appear to here to stay.
The deal with MS was purely designed to destabilize the market and allow MS to give the appearance that it was doing something. Such a deal, in the long term, likely would have only split Yahoos market share between Google and MS. This would have been fine for MS as it has the assets to pay huge amounts of money for market share, but would have hurt the market because Google would not have to work so hard to grow market share, revenue, and stock price.
As it is, Google has to fight, Yahoo has a niche, and MS will continue to shovel money into the sector, guaranteeing future growth.
This is funny, but often the case. I have for the first time tried to teach kids to use the internet, and while most will spend the time playing around to learn what they need to know, there are always a few that will just sit there, and then claim that the assignment is too hard, even if they did not even try. The public will often focus on that one or two kids that refused to work, and then use the evidence to claim the entire process is not valid. In this case the idea of the computers are probably valid, but some are always going to try to peturb the process to minimize the personal effort they must make.
This is related to the mockery of constructivist learning that is also in the article. While such learning styles are not suitable for everyone, or for all tasks, it certainly is valid for many people on computers. For instance, how many people do we know that can learn how to use a computer just by reading a manual? Constructivist learning is expensive, and sometimes the expense may not be worth it, but in computers it is. I believe that access to such technology at a young age is critical for future success. For instance, a colleague of mine, of similar age, is not able to use any of the computer applications we are to use, except for the internet. He, unlike me, was not exposed to computer from a very early age. He probably sat in classes where he learned keystrokes and menu choices to complete certain tasks, but never has the opportunity to construct a model that related the tasks and movements.
So what we are seeing here is more of the same. Complaints about teaching using expensive gadgets, no matter how those gadgets are related to the future, and complaints about making those things too complex, even though complexity helps educate people, especially if the complexity can be somewhat hidden from less advanced students. The saddest thing I see is the project moving to windows. Though this may help students who are not so excited to learn, it really harms those that might have gone into the OOS and fiddled with it. For this student, no 'useful' work might have gotten done, but real learning would have occurred. It is the difference between building something out of Make or Circuit Celler Dr. Dobbs, and building something from a kit you bought at walmart.
The Intel Macs have only been out for a couple years. There are many powerbooks out there that are only 2-3 years and are still in use.
If we assume that the final beta of Snow Leopard is to be released at the 2009 WWDC or before, I would hope it would support the PPC, at least in the basics. Certainly we are going to support for the PPC drop, as it already has for parts of iLife, and for an older machine that is probably ok. One of the positive aspects of Apple is the willingness to create new products that are not hindered by old hardware.
It is really my hope that Apple keeps the PPC capability until they rethinks the OS, in the same was that they rethought the OS when they moved for the post 7.5 era to the X era, in the context of current computer use multicore chips and the custom gear they got from PA Semi. This is the precedent. The original system, up to 7.5, was what I consider the original OS,supported the 10 years of the 68K mac. OS 7.5 to OS 9 were transitory from 68K to PPC. BY 9.2, I think, four year later, the 68K was completely gone. At this point, however, OS X was on the horizon and OS 9 was simply there as a compatibility layer.
I think if Apple has a 5 year transition to a modern OS, one that makes use of parallel processing, uses intelligent graphics, and is seamless with online resources, they will once again lose the market. Hopefully Snow Leopard will be the transitory OS that works on PPC and Intel macs, and then the next big thing will be an OS that works in the emerging computer model. Jobs sees this coming. It is good to know he is planning for it. He was able to make the NeXT creation work. I think he bought PA Semi to do the same thing. He knows that programming 4 cores is where we are going, and this is how he plans to get there. It may be OS X, say 10.7, but for marketing they will think of something else.
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OTOH, that whooshing sound you hear is the United States born semi-literate engineer being outsourced because he or she does not feel the need to compete. There is such a sense of entitlement that we do not think we have to do anything more than the minimum, and in exchange we should be given a job. Even if there is someone else more qualified.
Sure, at some point in the past that was true. But right now businesses are calling Capital Hill in droves, telling the Republicans that all their funding will dry up if all this anti-immigration BS does not end. More H1-B visas, less enforcement of the boarders, no significant fines for employess that do employ undocumented workers. Wasn't it Mr. Gates who threatened to move to Canada, and did move some MS offices to Canada, because he did not think US Engineers were appropriate?
There has to be something that separates those that do get research positions and those that don't, and it is not just race, or citizenship, or the way you look. I can honestly say that I might have gotten jobs if I spoke french. I certainly would be much more employable if I could speak other languages better.
If our education system worked correctly, every US citizen would at least be familiar with three languages. We would be able to compete in the world, and we would not have to depend on others communicating for us. To the original poster, if you are at any kind of big university, you can see the people you will working with in the future. Are they all native speakers of english? I don't think so. How many professors do you have that are not native english speakers? I will say one thing. If you speak another language, at least a little, you ability to understand accents improves as well as your ability to interpret non standard structure and idioms.In effect, your ability to be a team player improves.
Here are the two things I have heard all my adult life about being an engineer, and the quality that are lacking. The ability to communicate, both verbally and in writing. The ability to work as a team, both as a leader and a follower. I think both of these are improved as we learn to speak more than one language.
At the secondary level, it seems to me that the impact in the technology itself. For instance, learning to use a teletype machine did not provide a long time marketable skill, but it did provide an opportunity to learn a novel device, which was cool. It made me learn how to learn. Likewise when one might learn to use a EEPROM programmer, vi, a drill, a saw, or even drive a car. All of these are learning the technology, and motivated students will learn how the technology works, and how it does not work, which is what we want anyway.
This continues to college until technology is mostly used to help us learn more efficiently. An computer index can be more efficient than a printed index. Typing paper in LaTeX can be more efficient that on a typewriter or in lower tech word processing program. The list goes on.
What I think is really important, though, is that kids are allowed to become familiar with technology, and it's use. I see classrooms where there is no play time with machines. I see primary school kids being taught by rote the parts of a computer, which little context of what a computer does. I see teachers telling students to open the internet by clicking IE. In this way technology changes the classroom very little, as we are still teaching facts with little context in reality.
For instance, by dropping the imdb name, it is now my impression that this Erlang thing is best at destroying otherwise useful sites by making them less reliable and more annoying to users. Who in their right mind would want to do that. Oh, marketing people, thats who!
First, make sure the magazines are not already available. About half of the books I wanted to digitize were already available in digital form. It might cost money. That might be ok. You are either going to have to destroy the magazines or spend huge amounts of time taking pictures, either with a camera or scanner.
Second, do you need to have every article and every magazine and every page scanned? It could be that the digital camera solution might be best, if you can get the hardware, as there may only be a few pages from each magazine that is relevant.
Third, don't just say the magazines cannot be risked. If you want high quality scans, that are not crooked or folded, you are going to need a very good sheet feed scanner, and the magazines will have to be at least have to be unstapled, assuming they are not perfect bound. This will require much post processing, some rescanning, and some damage. If the magazines can be cut, it would likely make things much easier.
We are not in the ancient world where the burning a book means the literal loss of knowledge. In many ways, the copyright laws that keep books from getting scanned is the modern equivalent of book destruction. But, as we know, knowledge is not free, and novel knowledge is quite expensive. If this were not so, many of us would never have in the prime position that many of us has enjoyed.
That said, given the cost of physical storage, and given that libraries will likely throw these magazines like this out rather than pay for storage, and who knows if anyone will ever take the time to scan these obscure item in, it seems that destroying the old media husks is, at lest, defensible.
If you are shooting and uploading a wedding video every day, which implies that you probably do that for a living, then I would assume you can afford a professional connection to go along with the professional components of the trade. If you are uploading a wedding video a week, at normal speeds, then there is not issue.
For those us with regular consumer accounts, who are going to upload or download DVD quality video, over speed achievable by mere mortals, we would never notice such a cap.
In any case, this is clearly aimed at the consumer who does not have incredible amounts of original content to upload, but may want to watch movies over the internet. Not an unreasonable compromise. After all, how many of us want to subsidize the professional wedding photographer.
Metropolis has action, it is what I would consider the original speculative fiction flick. The original action flick would, I think, be Zorro. Both have plots are driven by sequential credibly related events. Character are stylized, but that is what happens in a yarn. This is kind of different from movies that just degenerate into sequences of special effects driven by some arbitrary plot device. This, in my mind, is really p0rn. Again, not bad, but not film. For instance, I saw the preview to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It seemed to be this kind of random movie. Eye candy.
I am glad the found an original cut of Metropolis, and hope they release it on DVD at some point in the near future. Hopefully it will show up for rental. Highly recommended. For those who can't wait, the current release is on DVD.
This is a problem with woodwork. It is difficult to get dense wood. Only 20 years ago it was easy to get good dense wood that could be built and oiled so it would last a very long time. Now all I see is light junk wood.
It also amazing me at the even the lowest of the tech worker lives in a glass tower. Who needed a transistor radio? Who needed a car? Who needs a computer, or a website, or email. How many semiskilled web monkeys would be begging for scraps on the street if the PR people did not create a need for new products? It does not just magically happen you know.
I am not marketing, I just know that as much as we would like to, we can't ship the the annoying 1/3 or our workforce to another planet just because it is not immediately obvious what they do. It is like the roach. They must have some purpose. In any case, if one has the job of developing the sleazy product that requires the sleazy sales person, then there is little basis for moral superiority.
TV probably died in the year 2001. It is to be expected that, just like radio, it will hang on with it's one bony hand until it relegated to the backwoods of cheap motel rooms, where internet acess is not available.
Now the specific response. As always, if a person is using a trademark without a license, which is all that is happening in this case, then absolutely go after that person with whatever laws may be at hand. If an outlet is violating trademarks, go after that outlet. What one cannot, in general do, is go down to flea market and bust up the place for selling used goods.
Here is why LVMH is a hypocrite. They are doing this to protect their brands and maintain the perceived value of their brand. Ebay is allegedly allowing fakes to be sold, and is allegedly allowing legitimate products to be sold at a discount, which is bad. Instead of going after the sellers, they are going after ebay, which is evidently their right. But do you who else is encouraging these discounts sales, perhaps even more so? The airlines. The airlines are facilitating this evidently illegal behavior by flying person to the US from europe, for a fee, persons whose sole intent is to purchase luxury goods in the US, transport these goods back to the EU, and sell these luxury goods at a discount. I don't see LVMH suing Air France. Don't believe me that this is going on? Go to any legitimate luxury good website, and you will see 'two item limit'. The value of the dollar is so low that the arbitrage potential on luxury goods are enormous.
Of course the issue is really that LVMH and others has created a huge demand without suppling the goods at a price people want to pay, which leads to situation in which the lawless americans figure out some other way to meet the supply. Even in a country that increasingly moving to socialism, (tax rebate checks, using the military to control unemployment, increasingly high taxes to support an increasing bloated government, vis a vis Homeland Security), capitalism still does it job, and the courts can only do so much to curb the capitalistic desire. Of course the rational agents know a secret. Don't buy stuff that is overpriced and hard to get. It doesn't make you smarter, larger, or prettier, unless perhaps you are really dumb, really small, or really ugly to begin with. In which case go and earn some money to correct these problems. But form most of us, a bag on sale from another designer is just as good as an LVM branded bag. In fact, a bag from target or walmart will likely do the trick.
My understanding is that this leads to issues of reproducibility. With time and length, labs can have a great deal of confidence that what they call a second and metre is the same as everyone else. With the kilogram it is less so. If there is a way to count the number of atoms for a particular ratio of isotopes, then this might help create a standard without circular references to other physical standards. Even if it is not perfect, it is not useless. The count of silicon atoms is going to be on the order of 10^26. The current standard for mass appears to be worse than 1 part in 1 billion, so as long as the count is at least that good, the standard is no worse than what is currently available, with the advantage of being portable. As far a counting those atoms, there are very precise means that are used to measure flux in surface science, and while I don't know if they can be used for bulk materials, I think it would at least be possible.
More importantly, on the way up they forgot the parking brake, not to mention the crackers. If you have not seen the show, it is a beautiful thing to watch.
Given the competitive PC market, and the high cost of MS OS, building computers does not seem to be a profitable market. An average PC maker can make money from Games computers, while Apple and Sony makes money for selling all computers at a profit.
In any case, buy this guys argument you should not buy not buy memory upgrades from Dell either as they cost 250% more than what you can get on the street. I feel sorry for all those sucker that are paying Dell $50 for memory that fell off the back of the truck, when they could get the same memory form $20 off google. You know, those fools who spend $500 on a computer when they could build one for $300.
My understanding is that one issue being considered is the added cost of launching cargo with humans, meaning that cargo is shipped with human safety requirements. IIRC, the solution to this was to pre ship much of the material to the final destination using the best reasonable techology, and then send the people up on a much more robust and reliable vehicle.
I also wonder if the moon missions should be used to test some sort of multi vehicle system. For instance a launch vehicle could be based on the current shuttle technology, without the payload requirements. A space only vehicle could be used to transport persons from the space station to the moon and back, for instance a partially reusable lunar module with a highly simplified CSM, as the CSM would not need to renter atmosphere.It would not fit into the rapid return to the moon, but wold provide technology testing to what we may need long term.
What I do have problem with, is vis a vis the above example, everyone just talks about the good ol' boys/girls, and look the other way.
In my mind the question is how 'long tail' can you? Does the internet allow a business to solely stock the niche items and do well. For example, does Thinkgeek do all that well? Or CafePress? I believe that a legitimate bussiness plan can be created from the long tail, and a motivated retailer can make a modest profit. But is the likes of Amazon really based on the long tail concept? Not really. It is based on the low price high availability concept, which is the opposite of what one sees in the long tail.
In any case, this is just a natural progression. First only the fortunate few could get a domain, then only those with cash, now anyone with a tenner can have a domain. I certainly do not believe that most people would consider this a bad thing. Now we are liberalizing the tld. People are saying the sky will fall. People are saying there is not going to work long terms. Well, it is working.
As far as who has the right to what name, this will likely work as it does now, and there is a decade or so worth experience to make it much more reasonable for the initial internet land grab with domain speculators taking up every word in the english language. Then consider that anyone who wants to play this game has to half a million, and it is clear how it will work out. Every major corporation will own a TLD with their name. THis will have due to experiences with not doing so on the initial land grab. Promotors of celebrities will likely try to get a TLD. Then we will likely see a number of entrepreneurs trying to grab a TLD as part of a new business model. Child friendly domains, specific faiths, etc. This will be the source of the one legitimate complaint. The balkanization of the internet. It will be much easier to protect the masses from unfortunate facts if they are limited to a government or faith controlled TLD.
I think it is called the preponderance of evidence, the truth will set you free, or whatever else you want to call it. If the facts are that Clinton smoked pot in britain where it was legal, Bush drove drunk in America where it is not legal and tantamount to attempted manslaughter, Rush likely broke that law to feed his drug addiction, and McCain sells beer, selling that requires constant government intervention as the ads are often aimed at small children, then those are the facts. Yes, on the internet it is much more difficult to censor those fact. So, yes, if your leaders are hypocrites, then persons who have access to the facts are going to be more likely to more likely to move to another choice. For instance, if one candidate wants to provide access to government health care, and the other claims that government health care is not good enough even though he has sent his entire life on government benefits, that might be a fact that gets out into the open and makes people question his credibility.
The second issue is that we have to get a nuclear depository up and running. Every year the treasury is paying huge amounts of taxpayer money to the nuclear power plants for storage of waste. Who knows how many of those of payments are fraudulent. Until we get a national nuclear waste dump up and running, nuclear power is going to a magnet for corruption of the public purse.
The founding fathers certainly knew the dangers of such asymmetries. It is sad that their heirs care only about exploiting such asymmetries to satisfy some personal greed.
We see this in Iraq. Biological weapons are difficult to produce and sometimes ineffective. Nuclear weapons are difficult to produce and the fissionable material is well controlled, although available. So, what do they use? The IED. Simple to build. Effective. Scary.
If I use technology to build a missile, and then use technology to build a laser to shoot it down, is one technology and one anti-technology? No, both are simply the application of the techniques learned and taught.
Furthermore it would be difficult to know which is the technology and which is the anti technology. If I can't go about my work because kids are downloading pron 24/7 and clogging the pipe, even though the attempt is made to balance the traffic, then is technology to unclog the pipe a good or bad thing? The technology used to unscramble the picture and catch the guy that was abusing little kids, was that good or bad?
There is a sense of entitlement that is pervasive is our culture, a sense that we somehow have an inherent right to any technology. Not only a right to the technology, but a right to have someone produce at the price we want to pay, in the form that we want, and as soon as we want it. If this isn't possible, the government should subsidize it. We see this with gas. If we don't get waht we want, we whine.
The problem with this is that not all technology is good. We see this with medical supplies. We see this with cars and SUVs. A bit more time, a bit less greed, a reduction in the sense of entitlement, we might have technology that is helpful and not just cool.
I think that Google did one thing that no one else did. Quietly controlled cost, invested heavily in R&D, and pretty much created the profitable ad based service model. Yahoo did not sit around and do nothing. Yahoo was an incumbent that had a reasonable enough business model. The problem is the model did not scale as it required massive human input. One must, however give them credit for two things. First, they saw and effectively filled a demand. Second, in a field littered with ineffective firms, they exist. They are not on the top. They do not generate the massive short term gains that some investors want, but they do appear to here to stay.
The deal with MS was purely designed to destabilize the market and allow MS to give the appearance that it was doing something. Such a deal, in the long term, likely would have only split Yahoos market share between Google and MS. This would have been fine for MS as it has the assets to pay huge amounts of money for market share, but would have hurt the market because Google would not have to work so hard to grow market share, revenue, and stock price.
As it is, Google has to fight, Yahoo has a niche, and MS will continue to shovel money into the sector, guaranteeing future growth.
This is related to the mockery of constructivist learning that is also in the article. While such learning styles are not suitable for everyone, or for all tasks, it certainly is valid for many people on computers. For instance, how many people do we know that can learn how to use a computer just by reading a manual? Constructivist learning is expensive, and sometimes the expense may not be worth it, but in computers it is. I believe that access to such technology at a young age is critical for future success. For instance, a colleague of mine, of similar age, is not able to use any of the computer applications we are to use, except for the internet. He, unlike me, was not exposed to computer from a very early age. He probably sat in classes where he learned keystrokes and menu choices to complete certain tasks, but never has the opportunity to construct a model that related the tasks and movements.
So what we are seeing here is more of the same. Complaints about teaching using expensive gadgets, no matter how those gadgets are related to the future, and complaints about making those things too complex, even though complexity helps educate people, especially if the complexity can be somewhat hidden from less advanced students. The saddest thing I see is the project moving to windows. Though this may help students who are not so excited to learn, it really harms those that might have gone into the OOS and fiddled with it. For this student, no 'useful' work might have gotten done, but real learning would have occurred. It is the difference between building something out of Make or Circuit Celler Dr. Dobbs, and building something from a kit you bought at walmart.
If we assume that the final beta of Snow Leopard is to be released at the 2009 WWDC or before, I would hope it would support the PPC, at least in the basics. Certainly we are going to support for the PPC drop, as it already has for parts of iLife, and for an older machine that is probably ok. One of the positive aspects of Apple is the willingness to create new products that are not hindered by old hardware.
It is really my hope that Apple keeps the PPC capability until they rethinks the OS, in the same was that they rethought the OS when they moved for the post 7.5 era to the X era, in the context of current computer use multicore chips and the custom gear they got from PA Semi. This is the precedent. The original system, up to 7.5, was what I consider the original OS,supported the 10 years of the 68K mac. OS 7.5 to OS 9 were transitory from 68K to PPC. BY 9.2, I think, four year later, the 68K was completely gone. At this point, however, OS X was on the horizon and OS 9 was simply there as a compatibility layer.
I think if Apple has a 5 year transition to a modern OS, one that makes use of parallel processing, uses intelligent graphics, and is seamless with online resources, they will once again lose the market. Hopefully Snow Leopard will be the transitory OS that works on PPC and Intel macs, and then the next big thing will be an OS that works in the emerging computer model. Jobs sees this coming. It is good to know he is planning for it. He was able to make the NeXT creation work. I think he bought PA Semi to do the same thing. He knows that programming 4 cores is where we are going, and this is how he plans to get there. It may be OS X, say 10.7, but for marketing they will think of something else.