Well, they already strong-arm colleges into letting the Army come recruit.
Let me tell you, those mobile Army recruiting stations they set up are *gigantic*... there was a huge one that just sprang up yesterday outside of the entrance to the football stadium here on the night of a big game, trying to trap the people going to watch.
What a crock. So much for neutral academic dialogue.
The US election system and legislative system are both set up in a way that squelches third parties.
With no coalition-building as happens in a parliamentary system, third parties have no pull in Congress; with the electoral college system, they have no hope of influencing executive elections either.
Music, itself -- the part that involves people getting up on stage and singing/playing/whatever, and maybe selling recordings if they're good enough -- is doing just fine.
People still write songs and play them, and will keep on doing so independent of the success or failure of any particular method by which others profit off of them.
1. I know the speaker has a limited top end, but when the incoming signal is weak, I'd like to be able to boost it so I can hear it. I don't want more volume; I want control over the volume so I can hear weak calls.
2. Maybe figure out how I can fix it? If the problem is "confused by multipath problems", I know I can go to the other side of the building and fix it. If the problem is "I'm trying to use this TMobile tower with crappy signal rather than the Cingular tower with good signal", then I can change that. If the problem is "weak signal, period" I know to go closer to town and get away from hills.
Again, think about iwconfig. Useful, isn't it, even if you can't go jam a crowbar in the router, you still can figure out what the problem is.
3. http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1033 . (Panasonic digital cameras). There are very few "This camera is a piece of shit!" posts, and a lot of "Oh shit, I dropped my camera onto concrete... wait, it still works? Cool!" To date I remember exactly one story of one of the things breaking with no good reason.
I've never found one that's well-designed. They may exist, but I've never had or seen one.
What I want:
1) The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. If I can't hear someone with the volume at max (usually when they're on a landline), the scale needs to go higher. My phone goes up to five; it should go up to eleven. It's a device whose principal function is the capture and transmission of sound, yet it has ONE thing you can control about the sound: inbound sound volume, in a limited range. This is ridiculous. This is stuff that could be included essentially for free, since it's all software that doesn't take much processing power. For instance, it'd be nice to have some sort of intelligent parametric EQ. Sometimes you get someone on the other end with a sucky headset and it'd be nice to be able to fix it yourself or have the phone do it for you.
2) The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. I've been standing on top of a mountain and looking over a canyon at a cell tower (~2 miles distant) and have no signal. Sometimes calls get dropped even though I have four "bars" of signal. Is it a SNR problem? The phone trying to do a tower swap and failing? Who the fuck knows? Give me frickin' iwconfig, please. It's like the Windows boot sequence. Either it works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, who knows what went wrong. But Windows at least has Safe Mode...
3) A phone that doesn't fucking break. My old phone had a keypad that kept going bad. My new phone now thinks that there's a headset plugged into it when there's not. Sometimes it thinks I don't have a SIM card in it.
4) I hesitate to suggest this since they seem incapable of getting even simple things right, but replace SIM cards with SD cards (they're effectively a commodity now, $20 for 2GB). Poof, instant long-play pocket audio recorder!
That machine is still only having to compensate for two degrees of freedom (phi, theta), though. It's frickin' cool, but not something I'd want doing general-purpose surgery where any number of things can happen.
Right, but the idea is that simply recording motions from the doctor and playing them back with a robot won't work.
The player piano only works because a piano is a predictable, static thing. It responds in exactly the same way to the same stimulus, every time. The body is not. Fast-acting feedback mechanisms are important for all sorts of things, from maintaining balance to doing surgery.
If we're using musical metaphors: if you take a choir and teach them a piece, then give them earplugs and ask them to perform it, they'll drift out of tune rather quickly; singers rely on constant aural feedback to stay in tune with each other.
... and I only can because of digital, since I'm poor.
I recently bought a Panasonic FZ50 camera (super-sharp optically stabilized 35-420mm equivalent lens, f/2.8-3.7, 10MP 1/1.8" sensor, all the interesting bells and whistles) for $400. It's absolutely amazing; my only complaint is that the image processing software does some stupid things at ISO 400 or above related to boneheaded noise reduction, and you can bypass all that by shooting RAW. You can get a smaller model with a smaller sensor and fewer bells and whistles (the FZ8) for $250. In SLR-land (digital or otherwise), $400 gets you one lens, and you need quite a few of them to cover the 35-420 f/2.8-3.7 (or 28-504 f/2.8-4.2, for the Panasonic FZ18) range of the all-in-one superzooms.
The price you pay for this is signal-to-noise ratio, but the high ISO performance of even today's small sensors is better than that of film.
The most impressive thing to me about digital camera development is that serious photography is now within pretty much anyone's budget. It doesn't really make that much possible that wasn't possible before, but now it's all possible for amateurs with a reasonably inexpensive camera and free software.
The "TCO" of Linux laptops, if you have reasonably smart monkeys using them, is virtually zero. Want them to do something they don't do already? Go download it. They're doing something you don't want? Google it.
Aren't there ways to get solar power without futzing with photovoltaics?
What sort of efficiency can we get out of focusing sunlight on water (using cheap Fresnel lenses), making steam, and using it to turn a turbine? Is this cheaper per watt of generating capacity to build?
Seems like if you did this on seawater (on a big barge or similar), you could extract the water once the steam recondensed and getting desalination for free. If desalination becomes necessary to supply freshwater this might be worth it.
Carbon nanotubes are *expensive* to manufacture. If the resources spent outfitting the entire infantry with these were instead spent on preventing unnecessary wars, the military would have a better way of delaying dying. Hell, a better way to save the lives of infantrymen would be to take the money spent on nanotube armor and instead spend it on twice as many troops.
The only people who really benefit from this sort of thing are the contractors who fiddle with it.
If this stuff does become widespread the main impact on the world scene will be an upswing in business for Kalashnikov, as everyone replaces their aging AK's with the new higher-caliber models capable of penetrating American armor.
The people who say "there is no God" are speaking in shorthand, really. A scientist might say "electricity obeys Maxwell's equations", but that really means "There is a vast bulk of evidence to suggest that electricity follows Maxwell's equations, so I'm going to assume that it does, and you should too, until and unless somebody comes up with a good reason otherwise." If we had to include that caveat in everything we said, it'd make doing anything unbearably long. (1. "Evidence suggests F=ma. Therefore...")
Likewise, when a rational empiricist says "there is no God", he's really saying "There is a vast bulk of evidence to suggest that there is no God, and at this point it is irrational to claim that there is a God." Empiricists don't make "faith statements", they only give best guesses -- which are often very, very close to certain -- based on the available evidence. The available evidence very strongly suggests that there is no God.
Agreed. I'm an environmentalist, and wish more people who claim that label would learn a little physics and realize that nuclear power is safe and clean. Nuclear power is only unsafe if you're like the Soviets and don't give a shit about safety.
I mean, come on. Inexpensive, clean energy whose only fault is that it has the same word in its name as those bombs that we dropped on Japan? You could probably make these people cut off their balls by telling them that meiosis is a nuclear process.
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Well, they already strong-arm colleges into letting the Army come recruit.
Let me tell you, those mobile Army recruiting stations they set up are *gigantic*... there was a huge one that just sprang up yesterday outside of the entrance to the football stadium here on the night of a big game, trying to trap the people going to watch.
What a crock. So much for neutral academic dialogue.
If universities are doing content filtering to weed out P2P traffic, then they obviously aren't functioning as a common carrier.
Does this make them liable for anything else illegal done with their network? What about the transmission of viruses?
I don't think they want to go this route.
The US election system and legislative system are both set up in a way that squelches third parties.
With no coalition-building as happens in a parliamentary system, third parties have no pull in Congress; with the electoral college system, they have no hope of influencing executive elections either.
The headline says it all.
"Music *industry* woes".
Music, itself -- the part that involves people getting up on stage and singing/playing/whatever, and maybe selling recordings if they're good enough -- is doing just fine.
People still write songs and play them, and will keep on doing so independent of the success or failure of any particular method by which others profit off of them.
1. I know the speaker has a limited top end, but when the incoming signal is weak, I'd like to be able to boost it so I can hear it. I don't want more volume; I want control over the volume so I can hear weak calls.
2. Maybe figure out how I can fix it? If the problem is "confused by multipath problems", I know I can go to the other side of the building and fix it. If the problem is "I'm trying to use this TMobile tower with crappy signal rather than the Cingular tower with good signal", then I can change that. If the problem is "weak signal, period" I know to go closer to town and get away from hills.
Again, think about iwconfig. Useful, isn't it, even if you can't go jam a crowbar in the router, you still can figure out what the problem is.
3. http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1033 . (Panasonic digital cameras). There are very few "This camera is a piece of shit!" posts, and a lot of "Oh shit, I dropped my camera onto concrete... wait, it still works? Cool!" To date I remember exactly one story of one of the things breaking with no good reason.
I've never found one that's well-designed. They may exist, but I've never had or seen one.
What I want:
1) The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. If I can't hear someone with the volume at max (usually when they're on a landline), the scale needs to go higher. My phone goes up to five; it should go up to eleven. It's a device whose principal function is the capture and transmission of sound, yet it has ONE thing you can control about the sound: inbound sound volume, in a limited range. This is ridiculous. This is stuff that could be included essentially for free, since it's all software that doesn't take much processing power. For instance, it'd be nice to have some sort of intelligent parametric EQ. Sometimes you get someone on the other end with a sucky headset and it'd be nice to be able to fix it yourself or have the phone do it for you.
2) The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. I've been standing on top of a mountain and looking over a canyon at a cell tower (~2 miles distant) and have no signal. Sometimes calls get dropped even though I have four "bars" of signal. Is it a SNR problem? The phone trying to do a tower swap and failing? Who the fuck knows? Give me frickin' iwconfig, please. It's like the Windows boot sequence. Either it works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, who knows what went wrong. But Windows at least has Safe Mode...
3) A phone that doesn't fucking break. My old phone had a keypad that kept going bad. My new phone now thinks that there's a headset plugged into it when there's not. Sometimes it thinks I don't have a SIM card in it.
4) I hesitate to suggest this since they seem incapable of getting even simple things right, but replace SIM cards with SD cards (they're effectively a commodity now, $20 for 2GB). Poof, instant long-play pocket audio recorder!
That machine is still only having to compensate for two degrees of freedom (phi, theta), though. It's frickin' cool, but not something I'd want doing general-purpose surgery where any number of things can happen.
Right, but the idea is that simply recording motions from the doctor and playing them back with a robot won't work.
The player piano only works because a piano is a predictable, static thing. It responds in exactly the same way to the same stimulus, every time. The body is not. Fast-acting feedback mechanisms are important for all sorts of things, from maintaining balance to doing surgery.
If we're using musical metaphors: if you take a choir and teach them a piece, then give them earplugs and ask them to perform it, they'll drift out of tune rather quickly; singers rely on constant aural feedback to stay in tune with each other.
Don't a lot of cell phone batteries only have one cell?
okay, what if you're in $PUBLIC_PLACE, and your mother calls telling you that your father had a heart attack?
In my long-running game we had two married couples, an engaged couple (six players), and the DM had a girlfriend.
... and I only can because of digital, since I'm poor.
I recently bought a Panasonic FZ50 camera (super-sharp optically stabilized 35-420mm equivalent lens, f/2.8-3.7, 10MP 1/1.8" sensor, all the interesting bells and whistles) for $400. It's absolutely amazing; my only complaint is that the image processing software does some stupid things at ISO 400 or above related to boneheaded noise reduction, and you can bypass all that by shooting RAW. You can get a smaller model with a smaller sensor and fewer bells and whistles (the FZ8) for $250. In SLR-land (digital or otherwise), $400 gets you one lens, and you need quite a few of them to cover the 35-420 f/2.8-3.7 (or 28-504 f/2.8-4.2, for the Panasonic FZ18) range of the all-in-one superzooms.
The price you pay for this is signal-to-noise ratio, but the high ISO performance of even today's small sensors is better than that of film.
The most impressive thing to me about digital camera development is that serious photography is now within pretty much anyone's budget. It doesn't really make that much possible that wasn't possible before, but now it's all possible for amateurs with a reasonably inexpensive camera and free software.
That's never happened to me.
The worst I've gotten is "We know it doesn't work, but there's nothing we can do since ATi's drivers suck. *explanation of ATi/Linux wankery".
Seriously, there's such a wide variety of shit available for Linux that pretty much everything an inexperienced user would need already exists.
And I'd probably need to teach them how to use new software for printing photos.
Why?
My mom uses GIMP or Picasa on Windows to print photos. How's this all that different from using GIMP or Picasa on Linux to print photos?
... because there are probably fifty people who access bbc.co.uk using Linux from my *department* at the University of Arizona?
All the computers run Linux, and people are always reading the news from them.
The "TCO" of Linux laptops, if you have reasonably smart monkeys using them, is virtually zero. Want them to do something they don't do already? Go download it. They're doing something you don't want? Google it.
Oppenheimer et al. wouldn't have worked out how to make a nuke if they didn't have pens.
Aren't there ways to get solar power without futzing with photovoltaics?
What sort of efficiency can we get out of focusing sunlight on water (using cheap Fresnel lenses), making steam, and using it to turn a turbine? Is this cheaper per watt of generating capacity to build?
Seems like if you did this on seawater (on a big barge or similar), you could extract the water once the steam recondensed and getting desalination for free. If desalination becomes necessary to supply freshwater this might be worth it.
Sure they do.
Carbon nanotubes are *expensive* to manufacture. If the resources spent outfitting the entire infantry with these were instead spent on preventing unnecessary wars, the military would have a better way of delaying dying. Hell, a better way to save the lives of infantrymen would be to take the money spent on nanotube armor and instead spend it on twice as many troops.
The only people who really benefit from this sort of thing are the contractors who fiddle with it.
If this stuff does become widespread the main impact on the world scene will be an upswing in business for Kalashnikov, as everyone replaces their aging AK's with the new higher-caliber models capable of penetrating American armor.
The majority of Americans are in agreement about this one, and the overwhelming majority of the most educated Americans are in agreement.
No, I'd find some way to get rid of them that didn't involve small-arms fire.
Think the army is actually going to make 200k suits of this stuff?
A better way to stop people from getting shot in wartime is to not be in stupid wars.
The people who say "there is no God" are speaking in shorthand, really. A scientist might say "electricity obeys Maxwell's equations", but that really means "There is a vast bulk of evidence to suggest that electricity follows Maxwell's equations, so I'm going to assume that it does, and you should too, until and unless somebody comes up with a good reason otherwise." If we had to include that caveat in everything we said, it'd make doing anything unbearably long. (1. "Evidence suggests F=ma. Therefore...")
Likewise, when a rational empiricist says "there is no God", he's really saying "There is a vast bulk of evidence to suggest that there is no God, and at this point it is irrational to claim that there is a God." Empiricists don't make "faith statements", they only give best guesses -- which are often very, very close to certain -- based on the available evidence. The available evidence very strongly suggests that there is no God.
Agreed. I'm an environmentalist, and wish more people who claim that label would learn a little physics and realize that nuclear power is safe and clean. Nuclear power is only unsafe if you're like the Soviets and don't give a shit about safety.
I mean, come on. Inexpensive, clean energy whose only fault is that it has the same word in its name as those bombs that we dropped on Japan? You could probably make these people cut off their balls by telling them that meiosis is a nuclear process.