It's not so much that Bombadil is neutral, just that the affairs of the mortals are so far below his care. It's not that he doesn't care about mortals themselves, he saves the lives of the Hobbits after all, but that they are as children to him with their little squabble over some bauble. Bombadil *could* get involved with the ring issue, but they have a Wizard and some other strong guys, and people can't come running to the gods or the spirits of nature or whatever the heck Bombadil is every time they have a little problem to deal with. They need to deal with this thing themselves. He turns out to right, doesn't he?
What I find extremely interesting is that Robert E. Foster in his compendium A Tolkien Companion describes Tom Bombadil and Goldberry as possibly Maias "gone native." Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty accurate description.
While Tolkien was strongly influenced by the Kalevala, he described the characters in that work as "low-brow and scandalous," especially by his own strict Roman Catholic morals. The Children of Hurin will hopefully be a vastly better work.
In only one instant did he actually compose anything for his father's works, and that was The Fall of Doriath for the published Silmarillion, because Tolkien had actually only written one completed version, and that was way back in about 1920, when the mythos was still in a very early stage of evolution, and did not match the post-Lord of the Rings Silmarillion.
I believe that much of the text for the first published release of The Silmarillion was done with the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay, then a university student in Canada (who moved to England to help edit the work). It was this editing work that got Mr. Kay interested in writing fantasy fiction on his own.
I think Nintendo should publicly admit that Wii demand has far exceeded supply, and should seriously consider opening at least two more production lines--with one dedicated to the USA market ONLY.
I think people forget that marijuana--unlike tobacco--does alter your brain functions quite quickly, and that can impair the operation of a motor vehicle, for starters. I remember Car and Driver in the late 1970's wrote an article that actually had a few of their editors smoke a "joint" before driving a car, and that promptly affected the ability to drive a car through a obstacle course properly.
I can understand your concerns, but the A800-800 was designed specifically to fly long routes between the really large international airports, not fly to secondary airports. That's why airports like New York-JFK, Chicago O'Hare, Miami International, Los Angeles International, San Francisco International, Denver International, and Dallas-Fort Worth are upgrading their facilities to handle the A380, since just about all A380 flights will fly to these American airports I mentioned.
Indeed, San Francisco International is one of the very first airports ready to accommodate the A380, thanks to the gates at the new International Terminal being ready to accommodate the plane and runway/taxiway upgrades that will accommodate the wider stance of the A380.
I think we went through that very concern when the 747 went into service in 1970. Remember the collision between the KLM and Pan Am 747's in Tenerife in 1977 that killed a staggering 582 people?
Let's face it folks. The problem with declining CD sales is due to one reason: the retail price is too high.
With prices going for US$15 or more per album-length CD even at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, the recording industry has priced their product in a cartel-like fashion that actually encourages ways to beat the system, whether it's piracy or buying music at a lower price through legal download sites. Why do you think the iTunes Music Store has done so well? Anyway, the RIAA should seriously consider setting a much lower price for a new album-length CD, probably more like US$12 per album maximum. At these lower prices, there is vastly lower incentive to pirate music, since more people can actually afford the real product.
Two major problems still need to be addressed though:
1) The current state of battery design means you need a big bank of batteries to get the electric car anything close to decent range, with the attendant problem of all that dead weight of the battery packs to lug around.
2) It takes several hours to charge the battery packs.
Fortunately, thanks to MIT research into using carbon nanotubes to build better supercapacitor battery packs, we could eliminate both problems simultaneously. This new high-density supercapacitor technology allows for a drastic reduction in the size of the battery pack for the vehicle to get decent range, and because it's a capacitor, it also means charging up the battery pack takes only a few minutes, not several hours you need with conventional NiMH or Li-On battery packs. It's possible that by 2015, a small B-Segment-sized car with a supercapacitor battery pack about the size of the fuel tank of a current car could go as far as 500 km (310 miles) on a single charge and could be recharged in only 3-4 minutes!:-)
...until the cost of the digital projector comes down drastically this idea won't be popular.
I still think they should distribute the movie on specially-encrypted HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, where the movie is stored in a lossless compression format over 2-3 discs. It's still way cheaper to send out 2-3 discs per movie than six 35-pound reels of 35 mm film stock for a movie about two hours long. More long term, once holographic video disc (HVD) technology reaches production they could store 1 TB on a single disc, more than enough space for a high-quality digital projection version of a two hour movie plus multiple language soundtracks and maybe dozens of language subtitle tracks.
What is happening to CompUSA is essentially what happened to booksellers between 1997 and 2001 as competition on one side from online resellers like Amazon and the other side from bookselling "superstores" like Barnes & Noble and Borders wiped out most of the smaller shopping mall bookstores and independent bookstores (remember in the San Francisco Bay Area we used to have Cody's in Berkeley, Books, Inc. in Santa Clara, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books in Cupertino, Printers Ink in several locations, etc? They're all gone now, unable to compete against several Barnes & Noble and Borders stores in the same area and from online resellers).
Two questions need to be asked if we phase out MP3 in favor of Ogg Vorbis format:
1) Who will provide professional quality tools to encode audio into.OGG format?
2) Will makers of portable music players offer firmware upgrades to play.OGG files? If not, it could get VERY expensive quickly because people will have to replace their current portable music players with devices designed specifically to decode.OGG files at a cost of anywhere from US$40 to beyond US$300 per player. (ouch!)
I'll trust politicians talking about the environment when they put adequate bus service out to where I, and 10,000 other people, work. instead of forcing us to weather the cold walking distances/waiting long times for buses, or taking our cars.
The only way that would work is require people to live in cities with compact land areas and lots of high-rise housing like they do in Hong Kong. I'm not sure if people want to live that way.
If you read the article, it should be noted that there will be exceptions made for oven lights, which will likely stay incandescent because they can withstand the high temperatures of oven operation.
LED technology has improved dramatically in the past few years, and with better technology the cost has started to come down. I expect by 2016 people will think that compact flourscents are old fashioned technology.:)
I can understand your concerns, but thanks to nanotechnology, the day of every home being its own power generator could become reality within 15 years. We are starting to see the cost of solar panels to generate electricity drop drastically using nanotechnology, a drop that could soon make it possible to do a solar panel installation costing US$2,500 instead of the US$25,000 current cost. Combine that with recent breakthroughs in high-density electrical power storage and the whole idea of a big centralized electrical generation plant could be rendered obselete by 2030. And that home electric power generator will be how your recharge the battery in your all-electric car by then, too.
While this new technology sounds promising, it will be interesting to see how it compares against the MIT-developed carbon-nanotube supercapacitor announced in early 2006. This supercapacitor could be very viable, since it could make it possible to drastically reduce the size of the battery pack so the interior space of the car compares to a normal vehicle.
Anyway, these new technologies finally begin to overcome these major issues with battery power for an all-electric car, namely 1) the need for a lot of space-wasting battery packs, 2) the long charge time for that battery pack, and 3) the limited range of the vehicle at full charge. (It was these issues that doomed the General Motors EV-1 project.) We could see within a decade an all-electric car with a battery pack essentially the size of the fuel tank of a modern fossil-fuelled car that offer a range around 500 km (310 miles) and a recharge time in under five minutes!:-)
I believe scientists are using special light measurements to compute the temperature on the planet. We do know that the upper atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn have been acting very strangely based on recent photos from ground-based telescopes around the world, something we normally associate with upper atmospheric heating.
The issue of faster polar ice melts on Mars recently has been monitored from the Mars Odyssey 2001 orbiter.
I think most of the global warming crowd conveniently forget that by far the biggest determinant of Earth's climate is this object about 150 million kilometers from us called the Sun.
If you look at our sunspot cycle (which has been recorded since the 1600's), it should be noted that Earth warms up every time we have many sunspots and cools down when we have few sunspots. The famous Maunder minimum that bridged the 17th and 18th Centuries with very little sunspot activity resulted in seriously cold winters at the higher latitudes, as noted by the Thames River through London freezing over in winter regularly during this period.
But getting back on topic, scientists have noted that almost every planet in our Solar System is experiencing a warmup during the last 4-5 years. Note that the Martian ice caps are getting smaller and smaller, the atmospheres on our "gas giant" planets are warming up quite a bit, and even Pluto's surface is experiencing warming. That tells us either the Sun is generating a lot of unusual radiation or our Solar System is going through an area of our Milky Way galaxy with higher than normal cosmic radiation.
I personally think when September 2007 rolls around for the next iPod hardware refresh, we'll see the following models:
1. The iPod Shuffle will now be offered in 2 GB in addition to 1 GB storage capacity.
2. The iPod nano will not change hardware design, but will get 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB models (no more 2 GB model).
3. The regular iPod will be no more, replaced by a new model based off iPhone technology with a 16:10 aspect ratio full-screen display and touchscreen controls. It will be offered with 80 GB and 120 GB hard disk storage capacities.
Microsoft released the "golden master" back in middle November 2006. Apple should have gotten their hands on that code back then and went to work to revise iTunes so it works properly with Vista on the day of release (January 30, 2007).
As such, Apple will hurt itself until they release a new version of iTunes 7.x that does work correctly with Vista.
The reason is simple: the final Windows Vista code was released to manufacturing way back in middle November 2006, and Apple should have gotten a hand on the final code back then to test and revise the iTunes software so they could have released on January 30, 2007 a new version of iTunes 7.0 that does work correctly with Vista.
Flame me all you want, but I personally think too many people who responded to this message thread have a "it won't happen here" attitude in regards to terrorist threats. Are we going to forget the lessons of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 9/11 attacks until a couple of hundred to thousands are killed in a single attack again? We MUST take any terrorist threat from any extreme political persuasion seriously.
I'd rather have our law enforcement authorities find out this is just a hoax instead of having to explain to the next of kin why a many persons got killed by a terrorist attack.
I'm not going to flame you, but in fact I applaud you for saying the correct comment.
Does anyone remember what happened in Afghanistan during the 1980's, when the Soviet military air-dropped dolls and other toys near villages that were booby traps with explosives in them? Many Afghani children were seriously injured or killed by small explosives put inside these small "toys."
Not likely digital downloads will replace discs until we see near-univeral adoption of broadband Internet well above the 50 megabits per second download speed (e.g., wide adoption of fiber-optic lines on the "last mile" connection into the home).
Let's face it folks: most of the world's broadband users are stuck in the 1.5 to 8 megabit per second download speed range, definitely not fast enough to download a high-quality 720p or 1080p HD movie that could be as big as 8-12 GB in size without tying up the connection for many hours.
...The dramatic reduction in the size of digital still cameras and MiniDV camcorders will still change the world anyway. The ability to download still images and video to a desktop or laptop computer, process the data, and upload it to the Internet has turned citizens into de facto journalists. In fact, many pundits now say if we had modern digital cameras and digital camcorders back in 1963, instead of having only one clear film of the assassination of President Kennedy we would end up with video and still images of that unfortunate tragedy from multiple viewpoints.
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It's not so much that Bombadil is neutral, just that the affairs of the mortals are so far below his care. It's not that he doesn't care about mortals themselves, he saves the lives of the Hobbits after all, but that they are as children to him with their little squabble over some bauble. Bombadil *could* get involved with the ring issue, but they have a Wizard and some other strong guys, and people can't come running to the gods or the spirits of nature or whatever the heck Bombadil is every time they have a little problem to deal with. They need to deal with this thing themselves. He turns out to right, doesn't he?
What I find extremely interesting is that Robert E. Foster in his compendium A Tolkien Companion describes Tom Bombadil and Goldberry as possibly Maias "gone native." Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty accurate description.
While Tolkien was strongly influenced by the Kalevala, he described the characters in that work as "low-brow and scandalous," especially by his own strict Roman Catholic morals. The Children of Hurin will hopefully be a vastly better work.
In only one instant did he actually compose anything for his father's works, and that was The Fall of Doriath for the published Silmarillion, because Tolkien had actually only written one completed version, and that was way back in about 1920, when the mythos was still in a very early stage of evolution, and did not match the post-Lord of the Rings Silmarillion.
I believe that much of the text for the first published release of The Silmarillion was done with the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay, then a university student in Canada (who moved to England to help edit the work). It was this editing work that got Mr. Kay interested in writing fantasy fiction on his own.
I think Nintendo should publicly admit that Wii demand has far exceeded supply, and should seriously consider opening at least two more production lines--with one dedicated to the USA market ONLY.
I think people forget that marijuana--unlike tobacco--does alter your brain functions quite quickly, and that can impair the operation of a motor vehicle, for starters. I remember Car and Driver in the late 1970's wrote an article that actually had a few of their editors smoke a "joint" before driving a car, and that promptly affected the ability to drive a car through a obstacle course properly.
I can understand your concerns, but the A800-800 was designed specifically to fly long routes between the really large international airports, not fly to secondary airports. That's why airports like New York-JFK, Chicago O'Hare, Miami International, Los Angeles International, San Francisco International, Denver International, and Dallas-Fort Worth are upgrading their facilities to handle the A380, since just about all A380 flights will fly to these American airports I mentioned.
Indeed, San Francisco International is one of the very first airports ready to accommodate the A380, thanks to the gates at the new International Terminal being ready to accommodate the plane and runway/taxiway upgrades that will accommodate the wider stance of the A380.
I think we went through that very concern when the 747 went into service in 1970. Remember the collision between the KLM and Pan Am 747's in Tenerife in 1977 that killed a staggering 582 people?
Let's face it folks. The problem with declining CD sales is due to one reason: the retail price is too high.
With prices going for US$15 or more per album-length CD even at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, the recording industry has priced their product in a cartel-like fashion that actually encourages ways to beat the system, whether it's piracy or buying music at a lower price through legal download sites. Why do you think the iTunes Music Store has done so well? Anyway, the RIAA should seriously consider setting a much lower price for a new album-length CD, probably more like US$12 per album maximum. At these lower prices, there is vastly lower incentive to pirate music, since more people can actually afford the real product.
Two major problems still need to be addressed though:
:-)
1) The current state of battery design means you need a big bank of batteries to get the electric car anything close to decent range, with the attendant problem of all that dead weight of the battery packs to lug around.
2) It takes several hours to charge the battery packs.
Fortunately, thanks to MIT research into using carbon nanotubes to build better supercapacitor battery packs, we could eliminate both problems simultaneously. This new high-density supercapacitor technology allows for a drastic reduction in the size of the battery pack for the vehicle to get decent range, and because it's a capacitor, it also means charging up the battery pack takes only a few minutes, not several hours you need with conventional NiMH or Li-On battery packs. It's possible that by 2015, a small B-Segment-sized car with a supercapacitor battery pack about the size of the fuel tank of a current car could go as far as 500 km (310 miles) on a single charge and could be recharged in only 3-4 minutes!
...until the cost of the digital projector comes down drastically this idea won't be popular.
I still think they should distribute the movie on specially-encrypted HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, where the movie is stored in a lossless compression format over 2-3 discs. It's still way cheaper to send out 2-3 discs per movie than six 35-pound reels of 35 mm film stock for a movie about two hours long. More long term, once holographic video disc (HVD) technology reaches production they could store 1 TB on a single disc, more than enough space for a high-quality digital projection version of a two hour movie plus multiple language soundtracks and maybe dozens of language subtitle tracks.
What is happening to CompUSA is essentially what happened to booksellers between 1997 and 2001 as competition on one side from online resellers like Amazon and the other side from bookselling "superstores" like Barnes & Noble and Borders wiped out most of the smaller shopping mall bookstores and independent bookstores (remember in the San Francisco Bay Area we used to have Cody's in Berkeley, Books, Inc. in Santa Clara, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books in Cupertino, Printers Ink in several locations, etc? They're all gone now, unable to compete against several Barnes & Noble and Borders stores in the same area and from online resellers).
Two questions need to be asked if we phase out MP3 in favor of Ogg Vorbis format:
.OGG format?
.OGG files? If not, it could get VERY expensive quickly because people will have to replace their current portable music players with devices designed specifically to decode .OGG files at a cost of anywhere from US$40 to beyond US$300 per player. (ouch!)
1) Who will provide professional quality tools to encode audio into
2) Will makers of portable music players offer firmware upgrades to play
I'll trust politicians talking about the environment when they put adequate bus service out to where I, and 10,000 other people, work. instead of forcing us to weather the cold walking distances/waiting long times for buses, or taking our cars.
The only way that would work is require people to live in cities with compact land areas and lots of high-rise housing like they do in Hong Kong. I'm not sure if people want to live that way.
If you read the article, it should be noted that there will be exceptions made for oven lights, which will likely stay incandescent because they can withstand the high temperatures of oven operation.
:)
LED technology has improved dramatically in the past few years, and with better technology the cost has started to come down. I expect by 2016 people will think that compact flourscents are old fashioned technology.
I can understand your concerns, but thanks to nanotechnology, the day of every home being its own power generator could become reality within 15 years. We are starting to see the cost of solar panels to generate electricity drop drastically using nanotechnology, a drop that could soon make it possible to do a solar panel installation costing US$2,500 instead of the US$25,000 current cost. Combine that with recent breakthroughs in high-density electrical power storage and the whole idea of a big centralized electrical generation plant could be rendered obselete by 2030. And that home electric power generator will be how your recharge the battery in your all-electric car by then, too.
While this new technology sounds promising, it will be interesting to see how it compares against the MIT-developed carbon-nanotube supercapacitor announced in early 2006. This supercapacitor could be very viable, since it could make it possible to drastically reduce the size of the battery pack so the interior space of the car compares to a normal vehicle.
:-)
Anyway, these new technologies finally begin to overcome these major issues with battery power for an all-electric car, namely 1) the need for a lot of space-wasting battery packs, 2) the long charge time for that battery pack, and 3) the limited range of the vehicle at full charge. (It was these issues that doomed the General Motors EV-1 project.) We could see within a decade an all-electric car with a battery pack essentially the size of the fuel tank of a modern fossil-fuelled car that offer a range around 500 km (310 miles) and a recharge time in under five minutes!
I believe scientists are using special light measurements to compute the temperature on the planet. We do know that the upper atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn have been acting very strangely based on recent photos from ground-based telescopes around the world, something we normally associate with upper atmospheric heating.
The issue of faster polar ice melts on Mars recently has been monitored from the Mars Odyssey 2001 orbiter.
I think most of the global warming crowd conveniently forget that by far the biggest determinant of Earth's climate is this object about 150 million kilometers from us called the Sun.
If you look at our sunspot cycle (which has been recorded since the 1600's), it should be noted that Earth warms up every time we have many sunspots and cools down when we have few sunspots. The famous Maunder minimum that bridged the 17th and 18th Centuries with very little sunspot activity resulted in seriously cold winters at the higher latitudes, as noted by the Thames River through London freezing over in winter regularly during this period.
But getting back on topic, scientists have noted that almost every planet in our Solar System is experiencing a warmup during the last 4-5 years. Note that the Martian ice caps are getting smaller and smaller, the atmospheres on our "gas giant" planets are warming up quite a bit, and even Pluto's surface is experiencing warming. That tells us either the Sun is generating a lot of unusual radiation or our Solar System is going through an area of our Milky Way galaxy with higher than normal cosmic radiation.
I personally think when September 2007 rolls around for the next iPod hardware refresh, we'll see the following models:
1. The iPod Shuffle will now be offered in 2 GB in addition to 1 GB storage capacity.
2. The iPod nano will not change hardware design, but will get 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB models (no more 2 GB model).
3. The regular iPod will be no more, replaced by a new model based off iPhone technology with a 16:10 aspect ratio full-screen display and touchscreen controls. It will be offered with 80 GB and 120 GB hard disk storage capacities.
Microsoft released the "golden master" back in middle November 2006. Apple should have gotten their hands on that code back then and went to work to revise iTunes so it works properly with Vista on the day of release (January 30, 2007).
As such, Apple will hurt itself until they release a new version of iTunes 7.x that does work correctly with Vista.
I blame the mess on Apple.
The reason is simple: the final Windows Vista code was released to manufacturing way back in middle November 2006, and Apple should have gotten a hand on the final code back then to test and revise the iTunes software so they could have released on January 30, 2007 a new version of iTunes 7.0 that does work correctly with Vista.
Flame me all you want, but I personally think too many people who responded to this message thread have a "it won't happen here" attitude in regards to terrorist threats. Are we going to forget the lessons of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 9/11 attacks until a couple of hundred to thousands are killed in a single attack again? We MUST take any terrorist threat from any extreme political persuasion seriously.
I'd rather have our law enforcement authorities find out this is just a hoax instead of having to explain to the next of kin why a many persons got killed by a terrorist attack.
I'm not going to flame you, but in fact I applaud you for saying the correct comment.
Does anyone remember what happened in Afghanistan during the 1980's, when the Soviet military air-dropped dolls and other toys near villages that were booby traps with explosives in them? Many Afghani children were seriously injured or killed by small explosives put inside these small "toys."
Not likely digital downloads will replace discs until we see near-univeral adoption of broadband Internet well above the 50 megabits per second download speed (e.g., wide adoption of fiber-optic lines on the "last mile" connection into the home).
Let's face it folks: most of the world's broadband users are stuck in the 1.5 to 8 megabit per second download speed range, definitely not fast enough to download a high-quality 720p or 1080p HD movie that could be as big as 8-12 GB in size without tying up the connection for many hours.
...The dramatic reduction in the size of digital still cameras and MiniDV camcorders will still change the world anyway. The ability to download still images and video to a desktop or laptop computer, process the data, and upload it to the Internet has turned citizens into de facto journalists. In fact, many pundits now say if we had modern digital cameras and digital camcorders back in 1963, instead of having only one clear film of the assassination of President Kennedy we would end up with video and still images of that unfortunate tragedy from multiple viewpoints.