the absence of the Higgs boson discovery at that time was not considered so important
Then your prof needs a good thwack with a cluestick. Theory without evidence is math, not science.
I suppose if you mean he just assumed it was a fore-gone conclusion that the Higgs would be found as predicted and taught as if it already had been well.. that's still a little off-base, but not nearly as bad as thinking that finding it doesn't matter.
It would have no effect on density. Density is primarily limited by EM forces on various scales, which aren't really affected by the Higgs mechanism.
You can overcome that to some degree (consider things like neutron stars) by upping the mass to such a degree that gravity can overcome the EM forces.
But to get to that point, your armor would have to be so incredibly massive that it wouldn't be practical, regardless of how you achieved such mass. And it would probably suck up the entire earth black-hole style. Which wouldn't be good for anybody.
Sounds like it melted due to bubbles of air (ie: definitely not "empty") left over from the production process. An unexpected effect, but perfectly explainable with "normal" chemical processes once they'd had time to diagnose it.
Usually when we talk about "empty" space in the scientific sense, we tend to refer to things like the inter-galactic voids -- space that's actually "empty" (or as empty as it can get) of known observable particles.
Not that this is entirely possible in reality -- even the voids are filled with photons and gravitons and there will be traces of hydrogen and helium to boot. But we can still consider a perfect void using our mathematical models and come up with testable predictions. We just also have to come up with expected error rates to compensate for the fact that reality is too complex to be modeled perfectly.
Err am I missing something here? I thought it was pretty well-established that the vacuum is unstable. Real energy (/matter) is created constantly. And then annihilated again almost immediately.
IIRC this is a large part of what constitutes Hawking radiation (vacuum pair production right at the event horizon of a black hole -- one half gets absorbed by the black hole's gravity while the other escapes into free space becoming a "real" particle.)
Or does this "light" Higgs somehow interfere with the annihilation process under SM? Certainly not going to claim I've heard every theory relating to the Higgs so maybe I just missed this one!
If the difference is between $4 and $5/gal, then yeah -- milk wouldn't be part of the national defense strategy.
When the price difference is between $4 and $50,000/gal.. then it might be time to think about making it a priority.
Breaking a leg, unplanned pregnancies, contracting a disease or other bouts of bad luck should not bankrupt a person for the rest of their lives. But hey that's just my opinion. Its just too bad that the people rich enough to afford private health care are the same people deciding that universal health care isn't worthwhile.
We should make everyone in that so-called 1% spend a year getting by on $2000/mo allowance so that they get some idea of who they're fucking over (not that most of them would care, but I'm sure there's at least a few who are good at heart and just plain don't understand the "other side.")
Hm. Doubtful. The world is turning to tablets whether MS likes it or not (or in fact, whether I like it or not.) Power users (which includes many if not most/. readers) may not be turning to tablets, but everyone else is.
Can't say I know why. Its all the power and lockdown of a smartphone combined with the encumbering size of a laptop (though luckily not the weight generally.)
But yet they sell. A lot.
Its true Microsoft is taking a big gamble here -- they're attempting to sledgehammer their tablets into the market by leveraging (and in many ways, compromising) their Windows platform. I suspect they're smart enough well-braced for another Vista debacle on the PC end of things, but at the same time they're growing mind share (if not market share immediately) for Metro.
Remember, they've been trying to break into the mobile market for years and have met with constant failure. They've not really been terribly late to market over the past couple of mobile generations, they've just done such a piss-poor job of it that nobody really noticed their attempts. Well people will certainly notice this time!
I would be unsurprised if MS backpedals a bit on the UI side for Windows 9 if they manage to claim a decent portion of the mobile market (and providing the PC market is still worth talking about in 2-3 years, which it probably will be). I doubt their own developers are sitting there typing up the Office source code on a touch screen, never mind all of the R&D, usability tests, etc that they do. They'll be well aware the major benefits and downsides of Metro as a PC UI.
And hell you never know, there's always the slim chance that they're right. I hated the new Win7 task bar when I first started using it -- now I'd have trouble living without things like pinned programs. Perhaps Metro will turn out to be equally great after spending a few weeks/months getting used to it.
I don't have much faith in that, but hey.. MS has put in more R&D dollars than I ever will, so at the moment I'm crossing my fingers that those dollars were well-spent and this isn't completely a marketing-driven sham (especially since I'll almost certainly be forced to use Win8 for work purposes regardless of my personal opinion!)
So it's pretty ballsy to extrapolate the entire universe's radio habits from a sample of one.
Perhaps the narrow band of spectrum we call "radio" specifically, but its not such a bold move to assume EM usage in general. Its the only easily producible long-range force/signal that seems to exist. The weak and strong forces are extremely distance-constrained.
Gravity waves are very difficulty to detect, and even harder to produce in a controlled manner, but I suppose its technically a possibility. Maybe once we've figured out how to detect gravity waves with any significant precision we can start looking there as well, but until such time, EM is the only really useful and interesting place to look.
Of course, there's always the possibility of some force we've managed to overlook throughout the history of science. Such a thing, while unlikely, isn't terribly unfathomable when you consider all the stories of ghosts, magic and other such supernatural goings on mentioned in stories throughout the ages and around the world. Who knows.. maybe there's a grain of truth amidst the fancies and it just happens to be a force that we can't easily perceive directly.
- FTL is even possible. This one's still a pretty wild theory in general. Everything we know about physics says that its impossible. So if its going to happen, it would require something so fundamentally outside of our known physics that we've not yet even glimpsed it.
- These "shipping lanes" would be detectable. If for example, FTL comes in the form of some out-of-dimension travel, the only gravity waves we may see would be a small blip when the ship leaves our dimension and another small blip when it arrives again. It would be like poking a pinhead in Tokyo harbor and again in San Francisco and then trying to detect their waves amidst the usual churning of the Pacific.
Not to say realtime monitoring of the CMB would be bad if it could be done -- I'm sure there's all sort of fancy things we could learn about the history of our universe with such a tool.. but in relation to SETI projects, hoping to discover FTL events in the CMB is even more unlikely than discovering EM transmissions.
Now that said, I don't know how wide a spectrum they're actually looking at for EM bands. As they widen the frequency range that they can detect, the chance goes up significantly (which is not to say it will ever become a significant overall chance of course.)
There's probably some limits they can place on their searches based on frequencies they're just not likely to detect even if they're there (for example, frequencies that are absorbed by our own atmosphere would make for a useless search from a ground-based telescope.) But the EM band is damned wide and there's no reason that the same set of wavelengths humans find useful (based on our biology, atmospheric conditions and building materials) would be the same set used by any random alien species. As we widen the spectrum, we widen the possibilities of success.
Nope, the lock is still perfectly in tact on the new copy.
Of course whether a judge will agree with such technicalities is another story, but the lock isn't touched in the slightest by copying a DVD or CD. If you can't play the original, you also can't play the copy.
Future technologies might change that of course, if the media companies can ever convince hardware manufacturers to implement some sort of do-not-copy flag that's respected across the board. If that ever happens, then making the copy would implicitly require breaking the (hardware-based) DRM. And its not entirely implausible. We've seen other DRM technology implemented across the board by all manufacturers (DVD region locking, for example.) But current technology doesn't include such a flag (hm. At least up to DVD. Not entirely sure about Bluray now that I think about it.)
Good luck with that one. This sort of attitude a) does nothing to improve the world, and b) is only useful as long as you aren't targeted.
If you're told to show up for a criminal trial and you just don't bother, the cops WILL come hunting and will forcibly drag you to the judge (and probably to jail) if they have to. So unless you're OK with being on the run for the rest of your life, you might want to rethink your choices.
You're a part of society whether you like or not.
Of course the chance that anyone will put that much effort into a copyright case is pretty slim, but the point still stands.
Don't forget to stop playing non-indie video games or listening to any music that you didn't personally purchase from a local artist. The music and game industries are just as guilty as the movie industry for ramming extreme copyright down our throats. Oh. And don't read anything either. The publishing industry isn't our friend either. I assume you're running an open-source OS as well?
I hope you're extremely good at entertaining yourself, and that you work for a business that uses all open-source software (or do manual labor and not have to use software at all.)
I would assume that if the terms for the BD+ / DVD labels don't already prevent you from doing this, they certainly would for your second movie. Its a non-starter.
I'm also pretty sure that at the very least, you'd only be granted a license to use the encrypting technology and therefore would not be legally justified in granting your users authority to break someone else' (presumably patented) algorithms.
You'd be better off to just release your work unencrypted in the first place and hope to hell you make a decent enough profit that you can say "told you so" to all the nay-sayers.
This is what I don't get about the constant DRM push. It doesn't prevent the people who want to copy things from copying things. The people running the MPAA and RIAA aren't stupid. They know this. So why do they continue pouring money into corrupting the legal system in a way that doesn't really benefit them in the end?
I mean sure they can claim $185zillion in damages from little Suzy and her grandmother.. but that's fictional money anyway -- the best they can get out of Suzy is every penny she ever earns, and for most people that adds up to maybe a couple of million over a lifetime even if you discount every single expense (food, clothing, housing, taxes, etc) that they ever pay. ($50k/yr at 45yr working life = $2.25mill.) Hardly a windfall, no matter what the paperwork says. It probably costs them half that just to prosecute the case in the first place.
So what's the goal here? DRM doesn't significantly benefit them in any direct way. It doesn't significantly reduce piracy. Attacking torrent sites for intentionally contributing to copyright infringement could be done with or without DRM (its not like torrents are usually posted with the DRM in-tact anyway.)
So who's benefiting? I assume somebody has a grand scheme somewhere. Or are all of the politicians and lobbyists just going through the motions because they think its what they're supposed to be doing even though they all know its essentially pointless?
When the existing media houses notice that you're starting to cut into their bottom line significantly
Except that you have an unbelievably small chance of this happening, and its got nothing to do with DRM or any other technical measure. Its got to do with the fact that you almost certainly don't have the money to produce and distribute an industry-quality movie.
You can start a studio, you can avoid DRM. You might even make a profit. But you've got a good few decades of business building before you've got any chance of impacting the big studios in any meaningful manner.
And if they think that's even a possibility, they'll do everything in their power to either run you out of business or convince you to engage in the same industry-wide practices that the rest of them do, long before the possibility is realized.
Of course, there's always the slim chance that you can be amazingly lucky and come out of nowhere with a wide sweep game changer. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
The fact of the matter is that we need the big studios if we want to continue seeing $100mill+ movies being made (or even $1mill+.) The money is just too big to be emulated by small studios or independent film makers. Not to say you can't make a great film for $50k (Clerks, for example) but you can't make the next Avatar (or whatever your favorite special-effects-driven film is) with that kind of budget.
And unless the general public suddenly loses their appetite for big-budget films, trying to fight them on that front is just silly. Hard as it is to mobilize the public, its still much more plausible to organize a successful political protest (ala SOPA) than it would be to try and out-compete the studios at their own game.
Well no, there's a solution -- pass a law with compromises that both sides of the issue can agree on. Its only when you get an all-or-nothing approach that the people with the greater vested interests are able to win by simply wearing down their opponent.
In the case of this law, we (the public) got huge wins out of the deal. In particular, they removed or at least nerfed the worst of the presumed-guilty portions (notice-and-takedown, SOPA-style website DOS'ing, etc.) That's a pretty huge win in anybody's books (except the MPAA's of course.)
We also technically got huge new provisions in terms of fair use. These are less of a win, since they're rendered entirely useless thanks to the digital locks crap. But still, they're there. And if it ever comes to a court case with an influential/rich enough defendant (say a university or a large newspaper), they only have to convince the judge that fair use should trump DRM rather than the other way around. As opposed to having to convince the judge that their use IS fair -- a lot harder prospect.
So no, this isn't a win compared to not having the bill, but its definitely a win compared to what Harper's cronies have been trying to push through for more than half a decade now.
I don't doubt the issue will crop up again, especially if/when our neighbors to the south start ramping up their lobbying efforts again. Or if ACTA/TPP somehow make it through the pipeline (essentially nullifying our own laws.) Or just because the media lobby thinks enough time has passed and the public's focus has shifted elsewhere. But they'll have a much harder time convincing people that its necessary when they JUST got a bill through as opposed to the current situation where our copyright laws hadn't been significantly updated since pre-internet times. Or at least I hope they'll have a harder time of it:P.
You do NOT have to break DRM to time-shift or backup digital media. The 0's and 1's will copy just as well regardless of whether they encode a digital lock or not.
Of course, it limits your ability to do so to same-format / same-media copies. Which essentially only makes it useful for CDs and DVDs (and maybe some day Blurays).. but still, its technically doable in some fashion:P.
Format-shifting and all other uses require breaking the DRM and thus are illegal of course.
Microsoft's done that a bit. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger all hide the menu until you press the Alt key. Which pisses me off to no end (mostly just because I'm used to the old look really.)
Luckily all of those programs have a way to turn the menu back on permanently. On the down side, each one of them hides the option in a different place. MSN Messenger being the worst as there's actually a separate option for turning on the contact list menus vs the chat window menus -- and the way to set them for permanently shown is different for the two windows. Obviously Microsoft didn't think anyone would care enough to bother putting any usability studies into their new menu hiding system!
I loves me my menus though. Screw ribbons. Mac-style single menus are just bloody confusing when they switch around all the time and you never know what menu option belongs to what program and ugh.. freaking nightmare. I can live without that 0.5% screen space.
And worrying about fine motor control? If your users are spending a significant portion of their time navigating the menu bar, then you might have bigger usability issues than their ability to target a 1/4"x1/2" screen area.
I don't see the entertainment cartels thanking us, and perhaps more to the point paying us, for the invention of the camera, microphone, speaker, electric guitar, synthesizer, radio, TV, vinyl record, mylar tape, VCR, CD, DVD, huge hard drives, fast consumer grade computers, sophisticated music composition, scoring, recording, mixing and playback software, digital mastering, pitch correction, and most of all, the Internet.
Err what? I'm fairly sure that they "thank" the producers of all of those things in the form of equipment costs and licensing fees on a regular basis.
Or are you trying to imply that you personally invented digital mastering and should be compensated?
"The internet" is the closest thing to being created by "the people" in the sense that it started out as an army project way back in the day, but its long since been taken over by private interests, both in the equipment and the communications aspects.
I'm not a fan of the RIAA but this "argument" is just silly.
No, they'll choose the one that's cheapest and expect you to fulfill the one that makes the most sense.
Clients are asshats. Well ok not ALL of them, but a lot of them certainly are. I can't count the number of times I've gotten a call asking me to fix something immediately as if all I had to do was flip the "fix this bug" switch and had really just been holding out on them for some unknown reason.
Probably no more than writing the same information in a textbook, having it edited and rewritten, dealing with publishers, etc -- providing the tools are in place to create drill-downs and what-nots.
We're just starting to come to grips with such tools, and you're right that they currently take a fair bit more IT skill than your average non-compsci professor is likely to have (or at least, a different set of IT skills.)
But there's nothing inherently bad about the medium. Interactive learning has huge potential if its done well. But we're still learning how to teach with this new technology and yes, it will take some time to get there. Remember, books have been around thousands of years. Blackboards or some equivalent for at least hundreds. Interactive learning tools: Maybe a decade? Perhaps 2-3 decades at best if you count some of the really really early attempts. Give it some time.
Of course, the one thing that's still missing from that equation is an actual person to go ask when the blackboard or textbook aren't enough. THAT is what's missing from computer-based teaching. The blackboards and books are not the problem. The lack of an actual teacher is the problem. And that can be rectified by you know, setting it up as an actual course material and having an actual teacher. Same as any other teaching technique.
There's a huge difference between learning something and becoming an expert in it. An introductory course to anything isn't going to make you an expert no matter what medium was used to express the information.
People grossly overestimating their own competence in a subject is a different topic all together, but again is pretty irrelevant to the specific medium used to transmit knowledge to them.
I'm only a bit started on the second book, but the first book did require some minimal calculus -- mostly stuff you'd find in an average first year calculus course.
What gave me trouble here and there was the way he wrote calculus stuff right into his prose. Its just not the way I'd ever been taught to deal with calculus (or really, any maths.) Even with a full two years of university-level calculus and no shortage of other mathematics classes, I'd always only seen the equations and problems split off in a very obvious and segmented manner. It was a little eye-opening to see that stuff embedded right into the text and written out in words!
He also tends to skip a few steps (again, probably a reasonable thing to do given the target audience) which can occasionally make following the equations a bit tricky if you don't happen to immediately notice the steps he's skipped.
Of course, if you're willing to fore-go the maths all together and just try to absorb the more general ideas, you'll probably do all right.
And finally, you'll have to keep in mind that these books were published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date (which would be hard to do without changing the nature of the text, given that they're mostly a transcript of his actual lectures.) So there's a little bit of outdated information in there that we've since shown to be.. if not incorrect, at least not entirely accurate. I'm sure I'll see more of that when I finally hit the third book (quantum mechanics), but even in the first book he makes the occasional reference to things that turned out to be not quite as they appeared back in 1964.
If I'm going to sit next to my kids 24/7 to make sure they don't 'do' anything out of order I'm most certainly NOT helping them grow up into healthy individuals!
Monitoring them doesn't have to mean micromanaging them. As long as you're close enough to catch them before they get too far into something they shouldn't be, you're doing your job.
What you are suggesting is that we should remove the child-locks from our cars or heck any type of device that's meant to keep children from doing something
There's a difference -- your car is your private place, Wikipedia is a public place. A more appropriate metaphor would be releasing your kid in a shopping mall and expecting mall security to watch over their every move in order to protect them. If you want to lock your own computer down tight, you've got every right to do so and I'd fully support that. If you want to lock Wikipedia down, I'm going to take issue.
(eg. that annoying cap on the bottle of bleach)...parents should be able to just be there, all the time.
I should damned well hope you keep your kid out of the bleach. And any other cleaning product. That "child-proof" cap is basically useless. A good drop of the bottle will break or at least crack that thing in no time. Never mind any spillage that might be just sitting on the outside of the bottle waiting for a curious tongue.
And no, I don't think its unrealistic to have a parent or other guardian (babysitter, responsible older sibling, etc) keeping an eye on your kid at all times, online or offline.
need at least SOME time on their own and enough freedom in that time to discover their world
Agreed, but there's a place for that. And just like the place for offline freedom isn't a busy shopping mall (at least at 7), the place for online freedom isn't the wild internet. And if you insist on them being on the internet, there are plenty of kid-centric sites around. Wikipedia is by nature just not one of those sites. Not all information in the world was created for 7 year olds.
sometimes make bad decisions regardless of how many times you warned them before
Sure. And hopefully they have a supportive parent nearby to catch them and help them deal with the consequences of their bad decisions before any serious harm is done.
I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible
Ahh here's that tricky part again. I applaud the sentiment, but I still firmly believe that if you want to give your kid a controlled experience, that you should be the one controlling it (at least, until they're old enough to understand and control their own experience.) Relying on some third party to control your kid's experience isn't really the best deal for anybody.
having some backup-systems at hand that help me out when I'm not there surely is a good thing!
It surely is, up until it starts impeding my life. Children would be a lot safer if the speed limit around the world was 5mph too. But much as we all like to think of the children, there comes a point where your desire to let your kid run around the yard unsupervised (risking an unnoticed trip into the street) starts impacting my desire to get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time.
Inconvenient if you don't already have the movie you want to watch at the time.
HBO/Showtime/Cable TV/Pay-per-view
Too unpredictable in terms of content. Fine if they happen to be playing something you want to see when you want to see it, but in general its pretty unlikely and you're stuck with "whatever's on." PPV also has the issue of being disproportionately expensive (at least where I'm from. Just to compensate them in case you happen to have the gall to watch the movie with a friend or family member.)
Netflix/Hulu
The only one in your list that's valid in modern times. But they need to drop region locking if they expect to make any huge inroads on a global scale.
FYE/GameStop
Can't really speak to this one. If they're an online, on-demand service then great. If its just a brick-and-mortar service, then see DVDs above.
Wal-Mart/Target
See DVDs above.
Amazon
See DVDs above. Less hassle, but more delay. Pick your poison.
Consumers want to watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. They don't always want to watch whatever crap you feel like shoveling today, nor do they really want to schedule their lives around your arbitrary showing times. And everyone knows that this is now possible, and there's no turning back from that. If you won't provide the service we want, someone else will.
And no, average consumers don't really give a shit about copyright laws. They're less relevant to most of us than jay walking. And there's not really anything you can do to convince us otherwise -- other than the few unlucky victims of your dragnet lawsuits, your copyrights have zero effect on our lives.
Worse in fact. Your copyrights often have a negative effect on our lives due to shit like 30 seconds of unskippable FBI threats followed by 5 minutes of (often also unskippable) ads, all of which are generally removed by the saner sources (legitimate and infringing alike.)
The genie's out of the bottle, so to speak. And its granted us our wish. All of the bitching and moaning and legal system corrupting in the world won't change that fact. As many other posters have quipped, adapt or die. Any other measure short of killing the internet is just prolonging the inevitable.
And Canada! Though the library they offer us up here is pretty paltry in comparison to our southern neighbors (no idea what the UK gets.)
Still, there's plenty of good stuff if you don't mind watching older movies/shows, and there's loads of obscure and weird titles which is always fun (sometimes in a horrifying way if they're REALLY weird!)
Oddly, we get a lot of Bollywood movies up here. Not sure if those make it to the US or not.
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the absence of the Higgs boson discovery at that time was not considered so important
Then your prof needs a good thwack with a cluestick. Theory without evidence is math, not science.
I suppose if you mean he just assumed it was a fore-gone conclusion that the Higgs would be found as predicted and taught as if it already had been well.. that's still a little off-base, but not nearly as bad as thinking that finding it doesn't matter.
It would have no effect on density. Density is primarily limited by EM forces on various scales, which aren't really affected by the Higgs mechanism.
You can overcome that to some degree (consider things like neutron stars) by upping the mass to such a degree that gravity can overcome the EM forces.
But to get to that point, your armor would have to be so incredibly massive that it wouldn't be practical, regardless of how you achieved such mass. And it would probably suck up the entire earth black-hole style. Which wouldn't be good for anybody.
Sounds like it melted due to bubbles of air (ie: definitely not "empty") left over from the production process. An unexpected effect, but perfectly explainable with "normal" chemical processes once they'd had time to diagnose it.
Usually when we talk about "empty" space in the scientific sense, we tend to refer to things like the inter-galactic voids -- space that's actually "empty" (or as empty as it can get) of known observable particles.
Not that this is entirely possible in reality -- even the voids are filled with photons and gravitons and there will be traces of hydrogen and helium to boot. But we can still consider a perfect void using our mathematical models and come up with testable predictions. We just also have to come up with expected error rates to compensate for the fact that reality is too complex to be modeled perfectly.
Err am I missing something here? I thought it was pretty well-established that the vacuum is unstable. Real energy (/matter) is created constantly. And then annihilated again almost immediately.
IIRC this is a large part of what constitutes Hawking radiation (vacuum pair production right at the event horizon of a black hole -- one half gets absorbed by the black hole's gravity while the other escapes into free space becoming a "real" particle.)
Or does this "light" Higgs somehow interfere with the annihilation process under SM? Certainly not going to claim I've heard every theory relating to the Higgs so maybe I just missed this one!
If the difference is between $4 and $5/gal, then yeah -- milk wouldn't be part of the national defense strategy.
When the price difference is between $4 and $50,000/gal.. then it might be time to think about making it a priority.
Breaking a leg, unplanned pregnancies, contracting a disease or other bouts of bad luck should not bankrupt a person for the rest of their lives. But hey that's just my opinion. Its just too bad that the people rich enough to afford private health care are the same people deciding that universal health care isn't worthwhile.
We should make everyone in that so-called 1% spend a year getting by on $2000/mo allowance so that they get some idea of who they're fucking over (not that most of them would care, but I'm sure there's at least a few who are good at heart and just plain don't understand the "other side.")
Hm. Doubtful. The world is turning to tablets whether MS likes it or not (or in fact, whether I like it or not.) Power users (which includes many if not most /. readers) may not be turning to tablets, but everyone else is.
Can't say I know why. Its all the power and lockdown of a smartphone combined with the encumbering size of a laptop (though luckily not the weight generally.)
But yet they sell. A lot.
Its true Microsoft is taking a big gamble here -- they're attempting to sledgehammer their tablets into the market by leveraging (and in many ways, compromising) their Windows platform. I suspect they're smart enough well-braced for another Vista debacle on the PC end of things, but at the same time they're growing mind share (if not market share immediately) for Metro.
Remember, they've been trying to break into the mobile market for years and have met with constant failure. They've not really been terribly late to market over the past couple of mobile generations, they've just done such a piss-poor job of it that nobody really noticed their attempts. Well people will certainly notice this time!
I would be unsurprised if MS backpedals a bit on the UI side for Windows 9 if they manage to claim a decent portion of the mobile market (and providing the PC market is still worth talking about in 2-3 years, which it probably will be). I doubt their own developers are sitting there typing up the Office source code on a touch screen, never mind all of the R&D, usability tests, etc that they do. They'll be well aware the major benefits and downsides of Metro as a PC UI.
And hell you never know, there's always the slim chance that they're right. I hated the new Win7 task bar when I first started using it -- now I'd have trouble living without things like pinned programs. Perhaps Metro will turn out to be equally great after spending a few weeks/months getting used to it.
I don't have much faith in that, but hey.. MS has put in more R&D dollars than I ever will, so at the moment I'm crossing my fingers that those dollars were well-spent and this isn't completely a marketing-driven sham (especially since I'll almost certainly be forced to use Win8 for work purposes regardless of my personal opinion!)
So it's pretty ballsy to extrapolate the entire universe's radio habits from a sample of one.
Perhaps the narrow band of spectrum we call "radio" specifically, but its not such a bold move to assume EM usage in general. Its the only easily producible long-range force/signal that seems to exist. The weak and strong forces are extremely distance-constrained.
Gravity waves are very difficulty to detect, and even harder to produce in a controlled manner, but I suppose its technically a possibility. Maybe once we've figured out how to detect gravity waves with any significant precision we can start looking there as well, but until such time, EM is the only really useful and interesting place to look.
Of course, there's always the possibility of some force we've managed to overlook throughout the history of science. Such a thing, while unlikely, isn't terribly unfathomable when you consider all the stories of ghosts, magic and other such supernatural goings on mentioned in stories throughout the ages and around the world. Who knows.. maybe there's a grain of truth amidst the fancies and it just happens to be a force that we can't easily perceive directly.
You're making a few fairly large assumptions:
- FTL is even possible. This one's still a pretty wild theory in general. Everything we know about physics says that its impossible. So if its going to happen, it would require something so fundamentally outside of our known physics that we've not yet even glimpsed it.
- These "shipping lanes" would be detectable. If for example, FTL comes in the form of some out-of-dimension travel, the only gravity waves we may see would be a small blip when the ship leaves our dimension and another small blip when it arrives again. It would be like poking a pinhead in Tokyo harbor and again in San Francisco and then trying to detect their waves amidst the usual churning of the Pacific.
Not to say realtime monitoring of the CMB would be bad if it could be done -- I'm sure there's all sort of fancy things we could learn about the history of our universe with such a tool.. but in relation to SETI projects, hoping to discover FTL events in the CMB is even more unlikely than discovering EM transmissions.
Now that said, I don't know how wide a spectrum they're actually looking at for EM bands. As they widen the frequency range that they can detect, the chance goes up significantly (which is not to say it will ever become a significant overall chance of course.)
There's probably some limits they can place on their searches based on frequencies they're just not likely to detect even if they're there (for example, frequencies that are absorbed by our own atmosphere would make for a useless search from a ground-based telescope.) But the EM band is damned wide and there's no reason that the same set of wavelengths humans find useful (based on our biology, atmospheric conditions and building materials) would be the same set used by any random alien species. As we widen the spectrum, we widen the possibilities of success.
Nope, the lock is still perfectly in tact on the new copy.
Of course whether a judge will agree with such technicalities is another story, but the lock isn't touched in the slightest by copying a DVD or CD. If you can't play the original, you also can't play the copy.
Future technologies might change that of course, if the media companies can ever convince hardware manufacturers to implement some sort of do-not-copy flag that's respected across the board. If that ever happens, then making the copy would implicitly require breaking the (hardware-based) DRM. And its not entirely implausible. We've seen other DRM technology implemented across the board by all manufacturers (DVD region locking, for example.) But current technology doesn't include such a flag (hm. At least up to DVD. Not entirely sure about Bluray now that I think about it.)
Good luck with that one. This sort of attitude a) does nothing to improve the world, and b) is only useful as long as you aren't targeted.
If you're told to show up for a criminal trial and you just don't bother, the cops WILL come hunting and will forcibly drag you to the judge (and probably to jail) if they have to. So unless you're OK with being on the run for the rest of your life, you might want to rethink your choices.
You're a part of society whether you like or not.
Of course the chance that anyone will put that much effort into a copyright case is pretty slim, but the point still stands.
Don't forget to stop playing non-indie video games or listening to any music that you didn't personally purchase from a local artist. The music and game industries are just as guilty as the movie industry for ramming extreme copyright down our throats. Oh. And don't read anything either. The publishing industry isn't our friend either. I assume you're running an open-source OS as well?
I hope you're extremely good at entertaining yourself, and that you work for a business that uses all open-source software (or do manual labor and not have to use software at all.)
I would assume that if the terms for the BD+ / DVD labels don't already prevent you from doing this, they certainly would for your second movie. Its a non-starter.
I'm also pretty sure that at the very least, you'd only be granted a license to use the encrypting technology and therefore would not be legally justified in granting your users authority to break someone else' (presumably patented) algorithms.
You'd be better off to just release your work unencrypted in the first place and hope to hell you make a decent enough profit that you can say "told you so" to all the nay-sayers.
This is what I don't get about the constant DRM push. It doesn't prevent the people who want to copy things from copying things. The people running the MPAA and RIAA aren't stupid. They know this. So why do they continue pouring money into corrupting the legal system in a way that doesn't really benefit them in the end?
I mean sure they can claim $185zillion in damages from little Suzy and her grandmother.. but that's fictional money anyway -- the best they can get out of Suzy is every penny she ever earns, and for most people that adds up to maybe a couple of million over a lifetime even if you discount every single expense (food, clothing, housing, taxes, etc) that they ever pay. ($50k/yr at 45yr working life = $2.25mill.) Hardly a windfall, no matter what the paperwork says. It probably costs them half that just to prosecute the case in the first place.
So what's the goal here? DRM doesn't significantly benefit them in any direct way. It doesn't significantly reduce piracy. Attacking torrent sites for intentionally contributing to copyright infringement could be done with or without DRM (its not like torrents are usually posted with the DRM in-tact anyway.)
So who's benefiting? I assume somebody has a grand scheme somewhere. Or are all of the politicians and lobbyists just going through the motions because they think its what they're supposed to be doing even though they all know its essentially pointless?
When the existing media houses notice that you're starting to cut into their bottom line significantly
Except that you have an unbelievably small chance of this happening, and its got nothing to do with DRM or any other technical measure. Its got to do with the fact that you almost certainly don't have the money to produce and distribute an industry-quality movie.
You can start a studio, you can avoid DRM. You might even make a profit. But you've got a good few decades of business building before you've got any chance of impacting the big studios in any meaningful manner.
And if they think that's even a possibility, they'll do everything in their power to either run you out of business or convince you to engage in the same industry-wide practices that the rest of them do, long before the possibility is realized.
Of course, there's always the slim chance that you can be amazingly lucky and come out of nowhere with a wide sweep game changer. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
The fact of the matter is that we need the big studios if we want to continue seeing $100mill+ movies being made (or even $1mill+.) The money is just too big to be emulated by small studios or independent film makers. Not to say you can't make a great film for $50k (Clerks, for example) but you can't make the next Avatar (or whatever your favorite special-effects-driven film is) with that kind of budget.
And unless the general public suddenly loses their appetite for big-budget films, trying to fight them on that front is just silly. Hard as it is to mobilize the public, its still much more plausible to organize a successful political protest (ala SOPA) than it would be to try and out-compete the studios at their own game.
Well no, there's a solution -- pass a law with compromises that both sides of the issue can agree on. Its only when you get an all-or-nothing approach that the people with the greater vested interests are able to win by simply wearing down their opponent.
In the case of this law, we (the public) got huge wins out of the deal. In particular, they removed or at least nerfed the worst of the presumed-guilty portions (notice-and-takedown, SOPA-style website DOS'ing, etc.) That's a pretty huge win in anybody's books (except the MPAA's of course.)
We also technically got huge new provisions in terms of fair use. These are less of a win, since they're rendered entirely useless thanks to the digital locks crap. But still, they're there. And if it ever comes to a court case with an influential/rich enough defendant (say a university or a large newspaper), they only have to convince the judge that fair use should trump DRM rather than the other way around. As opposed to having to convince the judge that their use IS fair -- a lot harder prospect.
So no, this isn't a win compared to not having the bill, but its definitely a win compared to what Harper's cronies have been trying to push through for more than half a decade now.
I don't doubt the issue will crop up again, especially if/when our neighbors to the south start ramping up their lobbying efforts again. Or if ACTA/TPP somehow make it through the pipeline (essentially nullifying our own laws.) Or just because the media lobby thinks enough time has passed and the public's focus has shifted elsewhere. But they'll have a much harder time convincing people that its necessary when they JUST got a bill through as opposed to the current situation where our copyright laws hadn't been significantly updated since pre-internet times. Or at least I hope they'll have a harder time of it :P.
You do NOT have to break DRM to time-shift or backup digital media. The 0's and 1's will copy just as well regardless of whether they encode a digital lock or not.
Of course, it limits your ability to do so to same-format / same-media copies. Which essentially only makes it useful for CDs and DVDs (and maybe some day Blurays).. but still, its technically doable in some fashion :P.
Format-shifting and all other uses require breaking the DRM and thus are illegal of course.
Microsoft's done that a bit. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger all hide the menu until you press the Alt key. Which pisses me off to no end (mostly just because I'm used to the old look really.)
Luckily all of those programs have a way to turn the menu back on permanently. On the down side, each one of them hides the option in a different place. MSN Messenger being the worst as there's actually a separate option for turning on the contact list menus vs the chat window menus -- and the way to set them for permanently shown is different for the two windows. Obviously Microsoft didn't think anyone would care enough to bother putting any usability studies into their new menu hiding system!
I loves me my menus though. Screw ribbons. Mac-style single menus are just bloody confusing when they switch around all the time and you never know what menu option belongs to what program and ugh.. freaking nightmare. I can live without that 0.5% screen space.
And worrying about fine motor control? If your users are spending a significant portion of their time navigating the menu bar, then you might have bigger usability issues than their ability to target a 1/4"x1/2" screen area.
I don't see the entertainment cartels thanking us, and perhaps more to the point paying us, for the invention of the camera, microphone, speaker, electric guitar, synthesizer, radio, TV, vinyl record, mylar tape, VCR, CD, DVD, huge hard drives, fast consumer grade computers, sophisticated music composition, scoring, recording, mixing and playback software, digital mastering, pitch correction, and most of all, the Internet.
Err what? I'm fairly sure that they "thank" the producers of all of those things in the form of equipment costs and licensing fees on a regular basis.
Or are you trying to imply that you personally invented digital mastering and should be compensated?
"The internet" is the closest thing to being created by "the people" in the sense that it started out as an army project way back in the day, but its long since been taken over by private interests, both in the equipment and the communications aspects.
I'm not a fan of the RIAA but this "argument" is just silly.
No, they'll choose the one that's cheapest and expect you to fulfill the one that makes the most sense.
Clients are asshats. Well ok not ALL of them, but a lot of them certainly are. I can't count the number of times I've gotten a call asking me to fix something immediately as if all I had to do was flip the "fix this bug" switch and had really just been holding out on them for some unknown reason.
Probably no more than writing the same information in a textbook, having it edited and rewritten, dealing with publishers, etc -- providing the tools are in place to create drill-downs and what-nots.
We're just starting to come to grips with such tools, and you're right that they currently take a fair bit more IT skill than your average non-compsci professor is likely to have (or at least, a different set of IT skills.)
But there's nothing inherently bad about the medium. Interactive learning has huge potential if its done well. But we're still learning how to teach with this new technology and yes, it will take some time to get there. Remember, books have been around thousands of years. Blackboards or some equivalent for at least hundreds. Interactive learning tools: Maybe a decade? Perhaps 2-3 decades at best if you count some of the really really early attempts. Give it some time.
Of course, the one thing that's still missing from that equation is an actual person to go ask when the blackboard or textbook aren't enough. THAT is what's missing from computer-based teaching. The blackboards and books are not the problem. The lack of an actual teacher is the problem. And that can be rectified by you know, setting it up as an actual course material and having an actual teacher. Same as any other teaching technique.
There's a huge difference between learning something and becoming an expert in it. An introductory course to anything isn't going to make you an expert no matter what medium was used to express the information.
People grossly overestimating their own competence in a subject is a different topic all together, but again is pretty irrelevant to the specific medium used to transmit knowledge to them.
I'm only a bit started on the second book, but the first book did require some minimal calculus -- mostly stuff you'd find in an average first year calculus course.
What gave me trouble here and there was the way he wrote calculus stuff right into his prose. Its just not the way I'd ever been taught to deal with calculus (or really, any maths.) Even with a full two years of university-level calculus and no shortage of other mathematics classes, I'd always only seen the equations and problems split off in a very obvious and segmented manner. It was a little eye-opening to see that stuff embedded right into the text and written out in words!
He also tends to skip a few steps (again, probably a reasonable thing to do given the target audience) which can occasionally make following the equations a bit tricky if you don't happen to immediately notice the steps he's skipped.
Of course, if you're willing to fore-go the maths all together and just try to absorb the more general ideas, you'll probably do all right.
And finally, you'll have to keep in mind that these books were published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date (which would be hard to do without changing the nature of the text, given that they're mostly a transcript of his actual lectures.) So there's a little bit of outdated information in there that we've since shown to be.. if not incorrect, at least not entirely accurate. I'm sure I'll see more of that when I finally hit the third book (quantum mechanics), but even in the first book he makes the occasional reference to things that turned out to be not quite as they appeared back in 1964.
If I'm going to sit next to my kids 24/7 to make sure they don't 'do' anything out of order I'm most certainly NOT helping them grow up into healthy individuals!
Monitoring them doesn't have to mean micromanaging them. As long as you're close enough to catch them before they get too far into something they shouldn't be, you're doing your job.
What you are suggesting is that we should remove the child-locks from our cars or heck any type of device that's meant to keep children from doing something
There's a difference -- your car is your private place, Wikipedia is a public place. A more appropriate metaphor would be releasing your kid in a shopping mall and expecting mall security to watch over their every move in order to protect them. If you want to lock your own computer down tight, you've got every right to do so and I'd fully support that. If you want to lock Wikipedia down, I'm going to take issue.
(eg. that annoying cap on the bottle of bleach)...parents should be able to just be there, all the time.
I should damned well hope you keep your kid out of the bleach. And any other cleaning product. That "child-proof" cap is basically useless. A good drop of the bottle will break or at least crack that thing in no time. Never mind any spillage that might be just sitting on the outside of the bottle waiting for a curious tongue.
And no, I don't think its unrealistic to have a parent or other guardian (babysitter, responsible older sibling, etc) keeping an eye on your kid at all times, online or offline.
need at least SOME time on their own and enough freedom in that time to discover their world
Agreed, but there's a place for that. And just like the place for offline freedom isn't a busy shopping mall (at least at 7), the place for online freedom isn't the wild internet. And if you insist on them being on the internet, there are plenty of kid-centric sites around. Wikipedia is by nature just not one of those sites. Not all information in the world was created for 7 year olds.
sometimes make bad decisions regardless of how many times you warned them before
Sure. And hopefully they have a supportive parent nearby to catch them and help them deal with the consequences of their bad decisions before any serious harm is done.
I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible
Ahh here's that tricky part again. I applaud the sentiment, but I still firmly believe that if you want to give your kid a controlled experience, that you should be the one controlling it (at least, until they're old enough to understand and control their own experience.) Relying on some third party to control your kid's experience isn't really the best deal for anybody.
having some backup-systems at hand that help me out when I'm not there surely is a good thing!
It surely is, up until it starts impeding my life. Children would be a lot safer if the speed limit around the world was 5mph too. But much as we all like to think of the children, there comes a point where your desire to let your kid run around the yard unsupervised (risking an unnoticed trip into the street) starts impacting my desire to get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time.
DVD/Blu-Ray
Inconvenient if you don't already have the movie you want to watch at the time.
HBO/Showtime/Cable TV/Pay-per-view
Too unpredictable in terms of content. Fine if they happen to be playing something you want to see when you want to see it, but in general its pretty unlikely and you're stuck with "whatever's on." PPV also has the issue of being disproportionately expensive (at least where I'm from. Just to compensate them in case you happen to have the gall to watch the movie with a friend or family member.)
Netflix/Hulu
The only one in your list that's valid in modern times. But they need to drop region locking if they expect to make any huge inroads on a global scale.
FYE/GameStop
Can't really speak to this one. If they're an online, on-demand service then great. If its just a brick-and-mortar service, then see DVDs above.
Wal-Mart/Target
See DVDs above.
Amazon
See DVDs above. Less hassle, but more delay. Pick your poison.
Consumers want to watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. They don't always want to watch whatever crap you feel like shoveling today, nor do they really want to schedule their lives around your arbitrary showing times. And everyone knows that this is now possible, and there's no turning back from that. If you won't provide the service we want, someone else will.
And no, average consumers don't really give a shit about copyright laws. They're less relevant to most of us than jay walking. And there's not really anything you can do to convince us otherwise -- other than the few unlucky victims of your dragnet lawsuits, your copyrights have zero effect on our lives.
Worse in fact. Your copyrights often have a negative effect on our lives due to shit like 30 seconds of unskippable FBI threats followed by 5 minutes of (often also unskippable) ads, all of which are generally removed by the saner sources (legitimate and infringing alike.)
The genie's out of the bottle, so to speak. And its granted us our wish. All of the bitching and moaning and legal system corrupting in the world won't change that fact. As many other posters have quipped, adapt or die. Any other measure short of killing the internet is just prolonging the inevitable.
And Canada! Though the library they offer us up here is pretty paltry in comparison to our southern neighbors (no idea what the UK gets.)
Still, there's plenty of good stuff if you don't mind watching older movies/shows, and there's loads of obscure and weird titles which is always fun (sometimes in a horrifying way if they're REALLY weird!)
Oddly, we get a lot of Bollywood movies up here. Not sure if those make it to the US or not.