I did, a long time (several years) ago. It mostly worked the way it was advertised: you need karma; doing good metamoderation gives you a bit of additional karma; being metamoderated will affect your moderation eligibility.
Except... they don't tell you one thing: you are penalized if your metamoderations are considered bad. Bad includes consistently disagreeing with other metamods, metamoderating "Unfair" too often, or metamoderating everything "Fair".
So if you are at your karma "cap" of 50 points, or whatever it is now, does metamoderating get you above this? Because I'm sure I basically sit at 50 points, or very occasionally drop to 49. So if my Karma is capped at 50, metamoderating would only run the risk of lowering my status, from what you have said.
I usually receive mod points the same day when I bother to spend time looking at deeply nested threads. This seems consistent with the idea that moderators should try to mod well-formulated yet obscure posts up, rather than to mod high-profile posts down. I can't otherwise find a correlation of meta-moderation and the likelihood I get mod points.
I wonder if anyone has actually looked in the slashcode to see how moderation works and how mod points are given out?
For those who want to comment on my sig, I put them there some time ago when I was in the middle of a heated controversial debate. However, I found the sig to be ineffective. It is like putting a bumper sticker saying you're a new driver and ask people to be nice. I'm keep it as a public service announcement to remind people they're participating in censorship whenever they decide to mod down a post.
I'd agree with your.sig generally, and in particular with overrated being abused as a metamoderation free (i.e. risk free for the moderator) way of moderating a post down without any comeback. Especially as you are often judging a post by your own standards. Not everyone sees the world the same way we do - but the flip side of any system of free speech is having to listen to things you don't always want to hear. Moderating those opinions down is an abuse of what slashdot seems to be about (in my opinion).
Most likely the reason you keep getting mod points and others don't is that you don't visit the site too often. I never get mod points during the times when I read every Slashdot story. Every once in a while, though, I'll get bored and not read Slashdot for a couple of days, and there's almost always mod points waiting for me when I get back.
I suppose that may be the case. I have posted 500 comments, (this will be #501) which isn't a huge number over the years. Maybe 100/year on average I would guess. There are a number of people with far higher UID's that have many more comments than me.
I try and put some thought into my posts - if you look at my posting history, I get a reasonable number of posts moderated up. Not because I'm whoring, but rather because I tend to post when I have something to add. I read the articles alot more often than I post. On the other hand, you will note that I'm not very good at getting articles submitted - I think that I have had 2 successful submissions in 5 years so I probably don't understand what sort of articles are worth posting:)
As to metamod, Do people really use it that often? I've modded ~30 comments so far, and none of those have been metamodded. That is, of course, assuming that the "Metamoderation Results" setting in the options that sends you a message when you get metamodded actually works.
Cant think when I was metamodded. Although maybe I'm just not checking enough...
Maybe/. reserves the metamodding for your early moderations? If there is a shortage of metamoderators, I'd focus them on new moderators to rapidly weed out those who were clearly off the rails. But maybe its just a general shortage of metamod's in general.
At least it can help weed out the most abusive moderators. I seldom call a mod unfair, but when I do I suspect I'm not alone.
I read people posting and complaining that they never get to moderate. I've often wondered why this is, especially in how slashdot manages people who get negative metamod's, etc.
Personally I think I get to moderate alot - Probably about once a week, sometimes more often. There are times when I let my 3 days slip by, because its too hard to keep up.
But I do take the moderating seriously. I actually rarely moderate people down, but rather try and pick the good posts and push them up. On a personal stand I've pretty much stopped using underrated and overrated moderations - I may as well be judged for my actions too. Then again, I've never posted anonymously (which you will just have to take on faith as I obviously can't prove this).
Anyway, whatever I do, the mod points seem to keep coming back.
Personally I like to think its because the way I moderate is approved by the majority of meta-mods.
So when the key of your Samsung BD-P1000 is revoked, your player will no longer play any new disks that you buy. You will have to go out and buy a new player.
This entire thread is complete bullshit. Keys are not revoked via a network jack. Keys are revoked by the simple act of releasing new discs that don't support them.
So this bit is pretty well established
1. Player gets compromised (keys extracted somehow) 2. All new content no longer has a key for the compromised player.
a. Your player cannot play these new disks
b. The new content cannot be decrypted by hackers either.
c. Anything currently released will still play fine.
Now the interesting bit is how to update the players. The key system on Blu-Ray is very clever, and allows enough keys that they will never run out, at least in practice. It was designed to allow revocation of multiple compromised players, hundreds of times over.
The real issue is that you don't want a legitimate player to stop working. A software player can easily be updated on the internet. But a hardware player cannot assume an internet connection. And consumers are going to get angry if their player stops working because someone somewhere managed to figure out its keys.
However, there is no reason why a firmware update for the hardware player cannot be included on all new titles released. There is plenty of space on a Blu-Ray disk to hold thousands of firmware patches, for every compromised hardware player. So the end users will get updated.
Which doesn't mean that a real hacker couldn't "upgrade" their program too, but its a world of difference between figuring out a single key and emulating the system through an upgrade.
However, the biggest reason for this system is that of forcing a delay.
If you stop keys being released for a few months you capture most of the sales market
Sure, you may lose the long tail of marketing, but if you can just keep the decryption keys out of circulation for a few months plenty enough people will buy the disks anyway.
And they can play this cat and mouse game for a long time to come....
My current music collection is high quality MP3s (192-256Kbit) I've ripped myself which I listen to on Slimboxes connected to quality speakers. I never bought any music from iTunes because: - Apple's DRM protected files were too low quality for me to bother with (I would have to rip to CD then reencode to MP3 which usually meant hearable artifacts.)
You do realise that AAC is a much better format than MP3. To be specific, 128 kb/s AAC is about the same quality as 192 kb/s MP3.
Lots of good reasons to avoid DRM, but saying you wont touch 128 kb/s AAC when you use 192 kb/s MP3 isn't a good one. The quality would be similar.
But the more important issue is... I'm currently interested in Japanese bands and they don't seem to want to sell this to me in Canada. I would literally jump at the chance to buy music, DRM free, at $1.20 per song. Shipping the damn CD's into Canada costs me a mint. Luckily I can bundle it with my manga purchases, but I'm still looking at close to $30 for most CDs (each) to get it here.
How about buying some Japanese iTunes gift cards on eBay?
Certainly I use US iTunes gift cards in Australia...
This is a great first step but I'd still need to convert the music in MP3 before I can do anything with it. The format is still locked to the Ipod, which is entirely the problem! I'll probably buy a song to help move things along but until the format is MP3 it ultimately doesn't change much for me. When next month and which artists? Will this be all ITunes stores or just The States?
Its a substantial list, and its an open format. Its actually much better than MP3, and at 256 kb/s its probably about the same as a 320 kb/s MP3. In other words, very good quality. Apparently you can even play it on the Zune, although I suspect that the zune will DRM it before transfer. Not that this matters, as pretty much nobody actually has bought a Zune.
Hey there chief, you are aware a private pilot's license only requires 40 hours of in-flight time, correct? I myself am training for my private license, have 12 hours of flight time, and have already solo'd (flying minus the instructor). General aviation has an accident rate of about 1 fatality per 100,000 flight hours (much safer then driving) although I agree that the barrier to fly is much higher then driving (which helps the accident rate).
Of course, if everyone was flying around up there, there would be alot more collisions...
I'm pretty sure its more than 40 hours in Australia...
But I'd generally agree with you - flying is safer than driving.
Its the damage to society that cars do that troubles me - I've seen too much road carnage to ignore the down side of driving. Too many people in wheelchairs, or having lost limbs, or had their brains injured. Or worse.
Much less problems with flying, other than how to keep planes in the air as fossil fuels run low...
Yes.. in fact, I think it takes a lot more than 3000 deaths to justify the insanity that we have to go through whenever we want to fly. I think the grand total number of deaths due to flying is woefully inadequate to justify the massive concern for "safety" that the airlines are required to exhibit. I think that flying would be more routine and a hell of a lot cheaper if it was more dangerous and people would willingly pay for such a service if only their governments would butt out.
Well, at least you are consistent.
Call me when a car (or plane) injures you or kills a family member, and explain to me then why you think its ok for your family members to suffer because someone else wanted a cheap air ticket or joy ride.
Personal freedom is fine, until (for example) I want the personal freedom to injure you.
Maybe, just maybe, 3000 dying a day is acceptable because of the massive public good of swift personal transportation. But you're probably one of those people who thinks nothing can justify accidental deaths, let alone willful killing.
Before you make too many assumptions about me, let me reflect this back on you:
Do you think that the mass good of air travel justifies the occasional deaths of 3000 people when a few planes fly into buildings?
If that isn't acceptable, then why should this occuring on a daily basis be ok with cars?
Anyway, before you assume that this means that I hate motor cars:
My wife and I share a car. Its a wagon. I ride a bicycle to work most days. The wagon lets me throw my bicycle into the car easily when it rains or whatever.
I love being able to drive places and the freedom that this brings. However, when you look at the carnage that cars produce, I find it impossible to say that this level of death is justifiable.
Now there are two solutions to this problem, and one of them is to stop driving. The other is to look at the whole system of driving. Just like the aeroplane industry did 20-30 years ago, when planes killed alot more people than they do now. I'm really glad that action was taken back then, it produces the safety that we have today. We have done this to a great degree with cars also, but have not gone anywhere near the safety levels of flight. Much more needs to be done. To oppose this is to say that its ok to have thousands of people die daily because you can't be bothered to fix the problem.
When thousands of people die from other causes, it gets much more interest.
So, yes, I like cars, at least in theory.
In practice they are killing alot of people, and consuming huge amounts of non-renewable resources to keep them running. At least the latter is probably fixable, and I look forward to the day I can buy a true electric car. The former is a really hard problem, but to ignore it is also crazy.
And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.
Considering that 3000 people die per day from car accidents around the world, what we have is a disaster of the proportion of september 11, done daily.
Generally speaking, most countries seek to blame the individual driver. Most airlines seek to fix the system. And when you look at what they have had to do to make planes safe, its pretty clear that few of us really have a right to lift a few tons of metal into the air over any place that people are.
The real question that society needs to ask is how much it can justify letting so many people drive cars right now.
Just some food for thought. Wont really matter too much anyway, the oil will probably get too expensive before many people can afford this sort of technology. We will need what is left to fly the efficient, big planes.
And no, I would be bitterly opposed to people having flying cars, even if the technology made it possible.
To be more accurate - Australia and Canada have 80% of the world's uranium between them.
Australia has a little more than Canada.
Compare that with Saudi Oil, at 30% of world supply.
Australia is the Saudi Arabia of Uranium.
Even if you add in Thorium, which is more widely dispersed (usable with breeder reactors, see below) we are a major player, with > 25% of world Thorium.
As to usage:
0.7 percent of uranium is 235, versus 99.3% is U 238
To use in a conventional reactor you need about >4%, and often higher levels of U235
Therefore, the majority of uranium in the world cannot be used in conventional reactors as it has to be enriched (by extracting the U235) to a higher concentration.
If you were to change the world over to conventional reactors for its energy supply, it would run into serious shortages within 30 years or so. By using breeder reactors this would multiply out to well over 100 years of uranium supply. Add thorium into this equation and you are talking many hundreds of years of energy.
And as the price of electicity from a nuclear reactor is only about 10% Uranium, the rest relating to safety, reprocessing and so on costs, a big rise in uranium price isn't such a big issue. However, we must convert to breeder reactor technology or there will be extreme shortages fairly rapidly.
Did you read even the article summary? It sounds like we have some idea where problems like this might stem from and that this is what makes it newsworthy, the whole content protection thing. It also sounds, from the summary, like there are fixes of sorts. Of course i might well have missed the point.
Could it not also be due to file indexing, similar to spotlight? Done badly that could really chew up the file system, especially if it was trying to "index" non-metadata content?
In other words, do we really know if its:
a. A universal problem in Vista or just some installs b. Due to content protection
When you buy the PC with windows, you get the included software such as Norton AV, or whatever. The inclusion of all this software (which then tries to hit you for upgrades or subscriptions) pretty much covers the cost of OEM windows, to my understanding.
Now, if Microsoft actually refunds you the money for the licence, then Dell is actually ahead here! And it may be legal for them to do this if their deal with Norton et al is based on the number of installs sold, and there is no clause for when the user removes software. Very different from the situation if the machine is sold clean.
You get the M$ money back while Dell get the money for including extra software on your windows install.
Just speculation, someone tell me if this is wrong...
There might be a slight effect like that, but for air circulation and oxygenation you do the mouth-to-mouth part. The compressions are used to manually provide some kind of heart function by compressing and releasing the heart muscle indirectly through chest compressions, thus keeping some basic blood circulation going to oxygenize the brain and other vital organs (one can also compress the heart directly, but this for obvious reasons is normally only used in an OR setting, never try this at home, kids, even if you got Mom's new bread knife handy !).
Its actually quite substantial if the chest compressions are done properly. You can get a blood pressure of 120/80 (measured directly on an arterial pressure line) with CPR (+ adrenaline to vasoconstrict although endogenous adrenaline may well keep the BP up much the same). In the process of restoring a normal blood pressure, you will shift a fair bit of gas. However, I have observed this mainly in people who have an endo-tracheal tube in place, as its hard to measure otherwise. In the absence of this the airway may well obstruct such that no gas exchange may occur. Although if you are doing good CPR the brainstem will probably have some function and the airway may have some patency, depending on the individual.
Anyway, I can see the rationale for leaving out the expired air ventilation, but it would probably only be good for a short resusicitation. As I have posted earlier, they are the ones that you will probably be able to save anyway.
No, it is true even if they have stopped breathing. Basically, it does no good to get more oxygen into the blood if it isn't being circulated, and it takes a lot of chest compressions to get it circulated properly
The reasoning is as follows: 1. You don't need much oxygen to stay alive 2. Chest compressions by themselves may cause some air to flow in and out.
As for how much oxygen you need: At rest you consume about 250 ml/min of oxygen. In a cardiac arrest you probably could keep your heart and brain alive on half that as other organs can tolerate hypoxia for at least 30 minutes.
You have about 2.2 litres of air in your lungs if you breathe out passively. Of this 21% is oxygen, which means you have around 400 ml of oxygen in there. Even if you aren't moving 500 ml of air a minute in an out whilst jostling the person around doing chest compressions, you are probably moving enough to keep the person going for 10 minutes or so.
Of course, if you want to keep someone alive for a longer period of time then you really need to do full CPR. But your chance of survival goes down dramatically after about 10 minutes of CPR anyway.
At the end of the day, there are no technologies for keeping someone alive without a functioning heart (that can be done quickly enough to matter) to make CPR anything more than a stop gap.
Survival is dependent on fixing the underlying problem. The most common fixable problem is a heart attack where the person tries to die not from a large loss of heart muscle, but rather a smaller heart attack complicated by the sudden onset of a heart rhythm that is too fast or slow for the remaining muscle to work properly. This is essentially an electrical problem and the solutions that will fix it are electrical - Defibrillation or Pacing. CPR simply buys you time till this happens.
A lossy MP3 compression of a CD at 320Kbps is about 1/10 size ~ 100MB while a lossless compression is around 300MB. Not all of the "MP3" players supports lossless CODEC, so ripping a CD to MP3 still make lots of sense. Also MP3 decoding tends to be a bit less processor intensive and the reduce data size (vs lossless) also reduce HD/FLASH access leading to longer play time.
Depends on the file: I just ripped 3 CD's and the lossless rate varied from 467 to 932 Kbps.
All of them obviously bigger than a 320 Kbps rip. But not that much bigger, probably averaging 2-2.5 times the size.
I do have some music at 320 Kbps MP3's but I do wonder how much benefit there is in reducing the file size that little.
Like you say, other factors, such as how well your MP3 player can handle the codecs, are probably more important.
But if you own a license to the song, then what is wrong with obtaining a 1:1 quality of the song?
I think it all comes down to choice with regard to quality.
You will never get 1:1 quality with a CD. Its a sample of the sound, and has a degree of loss. Not much of a loss as it samples at 44 KHz, but still a loss.
Most people will say that the loss on a CD is less than the threshold of hearing. I'd agree with that in general. There is more loss on a MP3 or AAC file, but if its less than the threshold of hearing for you, does it matter? Probably not. If you are a real purist, you'll probably play off vinyl to avoid sampling/compression errors. Not that most music systems could do justice to this level of sound quality, and vinyl does scratch....
Now I personally think that apple should sell music without DRM free and high quality. Possibly apple feels the same about this also, as they are in this game to sell ipods, not music.
If you are buying 128 Kb/s AAC (equivalent to 192 Kb/s MP3 roughly), burning it to a cd and re-ripping in high quality, perhaps you should consider one of two options:
1. Rip into a loseless format. If you are doing very high quality MP3's (around 320 kb/s) you might as well use a lossless code as the size difference isn't that much anyway, and you will have no degredation from the original on playback.
2. If disk space is an issue, use AAC, not MP3, as it should generally lose much the same information on the second pass encoding. MP3 drops different types of sounds to save space, so it makes more sense to use a similar codec on the second pass.
It says that it reflects virtually no light. I wonder if that includes the frequencies that are used for radar. If it doesn't reflect any radar signals, that could radically change military aircraft. Currently, military aircraft use shape as well as radar absorbing materials to achieve their stealthy-ness. Imagine if you can coat an F-16 with this stuff, and bam, you have a pretty cheap stealth fighter.
To detect this on radar you use two radars in two different positions and look for discrepancies in areas that don't return a signal.
Not that hard to do if you have a network of radar towers and some computing power. Its a little harder to spot, sort of like trying to see the queue in at the toll gates that has the least cars in it, when normally your eyes tend to see where the most cars are. But actually still quite easy to spot nothingness, especially when you have it moving and are looking from a few positions simultaneously.
How about an OS that actually has a userbase? eComStation sucks.
Well, if you are going to change OS, how about a mac mini...
Finally all those criticisms about using laptop parts dont seem so sensible.
Sure it has lower performance than if it used desktop components. You know what? I don't miss the performance and I have been smiling a long time about having a low power server tucked away on a kitchen bench.
(Added bonus - long lifespan of apple hardware means less landfill).
If you are going to change OS on environmental grounds, get a mini.
Slashdot Mirror
I did, a long time (several years) ago. It mostly worked the way it was advertised: you need karma; doing good metamoderation gives you a bit of additional karma; being metamoderated will affect your moderation eligibility.
Except... they don't tell you one thing: you are penalized if your metamoderations are considered bad. Bad includes consistently disagreeing with other metamods, metamoderating "Unfair" too often, or metamoderating everything "Fair".
So if you are at your karma "cap" of 50 points, or whatever it is now, does metamoderating get you above this? Because I'm sure I basically sit at 50 points, or very occasionally drop to 49. So if my Karma is capped at 50, metamoderating would only run the risk of lowering my status, from what you have said.
Michael
I usually receive mod points the same day when I bother to spend time looking at deeply nested threads. This seems consistent with the idea that moderators should try to mod well-formulated yet obscure posts up, rather than to mod high-profile posts down. I can't otherwise find a correlation of meta-moderation and the likelihood I get mod points.
.sig generally, and in particular with overrated being abused as a metamoderation free (i.e. risk free for the moderator) way of moderating a post down without any comeback. Especially as you are often judging a post by your own standards. Not everyone sees the world the same way we do - but the flip side of any system of free speech is having to listen to things you don't always want to hear. Moderating those opinions down is an abuse of what slashdot seems to be about (in my opinion).
I wonder if anyone has actually looked in the slashcode to see how moderation works and how mod points are given out?
For those who want to comment on my sig, I put them there some time ago when I was in the middle of a heated controversial debate. However, I found the sig to be ineffective. It is like putting a bumper sticker saying you're a new driver and ask people to be nice. I'm keep it as a public service announcement to remind people they're participating in censorship whenever they decide to mod down a post.
I'd agree with your
Michael
Most likely the reason you keep getting mod points and others don't is that you don't visit the site too often. I never get mod points during the times when I read every Slashdot story. Every once in a while, though, I'll get bored and not read Slashdot for a couple of days, and there's almost always mod points waiting for me when I get back.
:)
/. reserves the metamodding for your early moderations? If there is a shortage of metamoderators, I'd focus them on new moderators to rapidly weed out those who were clearly off the rails. But maybe its just a general shortage of metamod's in general.
I suppose that may be the case. I have posted 500 comments, (this will be #501) which isn't a huge number over the years. Maybe 100/year on average I would guess. There are a number of people with far higher UID's that have many more comments than me.
I try and put some thought into my posts - if you look at my posting history, I get a reasonable number of posts moderated up. Not because I'm whoring, but rather because I tend to post when I have something to add. I read the articles alot more often than I post. On the other hand, you will note that I'm not very good at getting articles submitted - I think that I have had 2 successful submissions in 5 years so I probably don't understand what sort of articles are worth posting
As to metamod, Do people really use it that often? I've modded ~30 comments so far, and none of those have been metamodded. That is, of course, assuming that the "Metamoderation Results" setting in the options that sends you a message when you get metamodded actually works.
Cant think when I was metamodded. Although maybe I'm just not checking enough...
Maybe
Michael
At least it can help weed out the most abusive moderators. I seldom call a mod unfair, but when I do I suspect I'm not alone.
I read people posting and complaining that they never get to moderate. I've often wondered why this is, especially in how slashdot manages people who get negative metamod's, etc.
Personally I think I get to moderate alot - Probably about once a week, sometimes more often. There are times when I let my 3 days slip by, because its too hard to keep up.
But I do take the moderating seriously. I actually rarely moderate people down, but rather try and pick the good posts and push them up. On a personal stand I've pretty much stopped using underrated and overrated moderations - I may as well be judged for my actions too. Then again, I've never posted anonymously (which you will just have to take on faith as I obviously can't prove this).
Anyway, whatever I do, the mod points seem to keep coming back.
Personally I like to think its because the way I moderate is approved by the majority of meta-mods.
Michael
I don't know if the Universe can withstand that.
Definitely a sign of the upcoming apocalypse..
Michael
One wavelength hardly invisibility makes, but as the blurb suggests, it renders the target invisible to laser designators.
Invisible to laser speed checks would have some non military applications.
Michael
So when the key of your Samsung BD-P1000 is revoked, your player will no longer play any new disks that you buy. You will have to go out and buy a new player.
This entire thread is complete bullshit. Keys are not revoked via a network jack. Keys are revoked by the simple act of releasing new discs that don't support them.
So this bit is pretty well established
1. Player gets compromised (keys extracted somehow)
2. All new content no longer has a key for the compromised player.
a. Your player cannot play these new disks
b. The new content cannot be decrypted by hackers either.
c. Anything currently released will still play fine.
Now the interesting bit is how to update the players. The key system on Blu-Ray is very clever, and allows enough keys that they will never run out, at least in practice. It was designed to allow revocation of multiple compromised players, hundreds of times over.
The real issue is that you don't want a legitimate player to stop working. A software player can easily be updated on the internet. But a hardware player cannot assume an internet connection. And consumers are going to get angry if their player stops working because someone somewhere managed to figure out its keys.
However, there is no reason why a firmware update for the hardware player cannot be included on all new titles released. There is plenty of space on a Blu-Ray disk to hold thousands of firmware patches, for every compromised hardware player. So the end users will get updated.
Which doesn't mean that a real hacker couldn't "upgrade" their program too, but its a world of difference between figuring out a single key and emulating the system through an upgrade.
However, the biggest reason for this system is that of forcing a delay.
If you stop keys being released for a few months you capture most of the sales market
Sure, you may lose the long tail of marketing, but if you can just keep the decryption keys out of circulation for a few months plenty enough people will buy the disks anyway.
And they can play this cat and mouse game for a long time to come....
My 2c worth,
Michael
You misunderstood/I wasn't clear enough.
I suspect I was the one missing your point.
My bad.
Michael
My current music collection is high quality MP3s (192-256Kbit) I've ripped myself which I listen to on Slimboxes connected to quality speakers.
I never bought any music from iTunes because:
- Apple's DRM protected files were too low quality for me to bother with (I would have to rip to CD then reencode to MP3 which usually meant hearable artifacts.)
You do realise that AAC is a much better format than MP3. To be specific, 128 kb/s AAC is about the same quality as 192 kb/s MP3.
Lots of good reasons to avoid DRM, but saying you wont touch 128 kb/s AAC when you use 192 kb/s MP3 isn't a good one. The quality would be similar.
Michael
But the more important issue is... I'm currently interested in Japanese bands and they don't seem to want to sell this to me in Canada. I would literally jump at the chance to buy music, DRM free, at $1.20 per song. Shipping the damn CD's into Canada costs me a mint. Luckily I can bundle it with my manga purchases, but I'm still looking at close to $30 for most CDs (each) to get it here.
How about buying some Japanese iTunes gift cards on eBay?
Certainly I use US iTunes gift cards in Australia...
Michael
This is a great first step but I'd still need to convert the music in MP3 before I can do anything with it. The format is still locked to the Ipod, which is entirely the problem! I'll probably buy a song to help move things along but until the format is MP3 it ultimately doesn't change much for me. When next month and which artists? Will this be all ITunes stores or just The States?
No, its not just the iPod.
A list of players is available on wikipedia
Its a substantial list, and its an open format. Its actually much better than MP3, and at 256 kb/s its probably about the same as a 320 kb/s MP3. In other words, very good quality. Apparently you can even play it on the Zune, although I suspect that the zune will DRM it before transfer. Not that this matters, as pretty much nobody actually has bought a Zune.
Michael
Hey there chief, you are aware a private pilot's license only requires 40 hours of in-flight time, correct? I myself am training for my private license, have 12 hours of flight time, and have already solo'd (flying minus the instructor). General aviation has an accident rate of about 1 fatality per 100,000 flight hours (much safer then driving) although I agree that the barrier to fly is much higher then driving (which helps the accident rate).
Of course, if everyone was flying around up there, there would be alot more collisions...
I'm pretty sure its more than 40 hours in Australia...
But I'd generally agree with you - flying is safer than driving.
Its the damage to society that cars do that troubles me - I've seen too much road carnage to ignore the down side of driving. Too many people in wheelchairs, or having lost limbs, or had their brains injured. Or worse.
Much less problems with flying, other than how to keep planes in the air as fossil fuels run low...
Michael
Yes.. in fact, I think it takes a lot more than 3000 deaths to justify the insanity that we have to go through whenever we want to fly. I think the grand total number of deaths due to flying is woefully inadequate to justify the massive concern for "safety" that the airlines are required to exhibit. I think that flying would be more routine and a hell of a lot cheaper if it was more dangerous and people would willingly pay for such a service if only their governments would butt out.
Well, at least you are consistent.
Call me when a car (or plane) injures you or kills a family member, and explain to me then why you think its ok for your family members to suffer because someone else wanted a cheap air ticket or joy ride.
Personal freedom is fine, until (for example) I want the personal freedom to injure you.
Unless you think that is ok too...
Michael
Probably just feeding the trolls here now.
Maybe, just maybe, 3000 dying a day is acceptable because of the massive public good of swift personal transportation. But you're probably one of those people who thinks nothing can justify accidental deaths, let alone willful killing.
Before you make too many assumptions about me, let me reflect this back on you:
Do you think that the mass good of air travel justifies the occasional deaths of 3000 people when a few planes fly into buildings?
If that isn't acceptable, then why should this occuring on a daily basis be ok with cars?
Anyway, before you assume that this means that I hate motor cars:
My wife and I share a car. Its a wagon. I ride a bicycle to work most days. The wagon lets me throw my bicycle into the car easily when it rains or whatever.
I love being able to drive places and the freedom that this brings. However, when you look at the carnage that cars produce, I find it impossible to say that this level of death is justifiable.
Now there are two solutions to this problem, and one of them is to stop driving. The other is to look at the whole system of driving. Just like the aeroplane industry did 20-30 years ago, when planes killed alot more people than they do now. I'm really glad that action was taken back then, it produces the safety that we have today. We have done this to a great degree with cars also, but have not gone anywhere near the safety levels of flight. Much more needs to be done. To oppose this is to say that its ok to have thousands of people die daily because you can't be bothered to fix the problem.
When thousands of people die from other causes, it gets much more interest.
So, yes, I like cars, at least in theory.
In practice they are killing alot of people, and consuming huge amounts of non-renewable resources to keep them running. At least the latter is probably fixable, and I look forward to the day I can buy a true electric car. The former is a really hard problem, but to ignore it is also crazy.
Does that put my position in perspective?
Michael
And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.
Considering that 3000 people die per day from car accidents around the world, what we have is a disaster of the proportion of september 11, done daily.
Generally speaking, most countries seek to blame the individual driver. Most airlines seek to fix the system. And when you look at what they have had to do to make planes safe, its pretty clear that few of us really have a right to lift a few tons of metal into the air over any place that people are.
The real question that society needs to ask is how much it can justify letting so many people drive cars right now.
Just some food for thought. Wont really matter too much anyway, the oil will probably get too expensive before many people can afford this sort of technology. We will need what is left to fly the efficient, big planes.
And no, I would be bitterly opposed to people having flying cars, even if the technology made it possible.
My 2c
Michael
1/ Find a country with lots of uranium.
Canada and Australia
To be more accurate - Australia and Canada have 80% of the world's uranium between them.
Australia has a little more than Canada.
Compare that with Saudi Oil, at 30% of world supply.
Australia is the Saudi Arabia of Uranium.
Even if you add in Thorium, which is more widely dispersed (usable with breeder reactors, see below) we are a major player, with > 25% of world Thorium.
As to usage:
0.7 percent of uranium is 235, versus 99.3% is U 238
To use in a conventional reactor you need about >4%, and often higher levels of U235
Therefore, the majority of uranium in the world cannot be used in conventional reactors as it has to be enriched (by extracting the U235) to a higher concentration.
If you were to change the world over to conventional reactors for its energy supply, it would run into serious shortages within 30 years or so. By using breeder reactors this would multiply out to well over 100 years of uranium supply. Add thorium into this equation and you are talking many hundreds of years of energy.
And as the price of electicity from a nuclear reactor is only about 10% Uranium, the rest relating to safety, reprocessing and so on costs, a big rise in uranium price isn't such a big issue. However, we must convert to breeder reactor technology or there will be extreme shortages fairly rapidly.
Just FYI,
Michael
Did you read even the article summary? It sounds like we have some idea where problems like this might stem from and that this is what makes it newsworthy, the whole content protection thing. It also sounds, from the summary, like there are fixes of sorts. Of course i might well have missed the point.
Could it not also be due to file indexing, similar to spotlight? Done badly that could really chew up the file system, especially if it was trying to "index" non-metadata content?
In other words, do we really know if its:
a. A universal problem in Vista or just some installs
b. Due to content protection
Michael
When you buy the PC with windows, you get the included software such as Norton AV, or whatever.
The inclusion of all this software (which then tries to hit you for upgrades or subscriptions) pretty much covers the cost of OEM windows, to my understanding.
Now, if Microsoft actually refunds you the money for the licence, then Dell is actually ahead here! And it may be legal for them to do this if their deal with Norton et al is based on the number of installs sold, and there is no clause for when the user removes software. Very different from the situation if the machine is sold clean.
You get the M$ money back while Dell get the money for including extra software on your windows install.
Just speculation, someone tell me if this is wrong...
Michael
Also, oxygen-starved combustion have a tendency to react almost explosively to a sudden oxygen-feed.
Like, say, someone opening the server-room door.
That won't cause a sudden oxygen feed. The pressures in the two rooms would be the same, just a different oxygen percentage.
There would be a slow diffusion oxygen in.
Michael
There might be a slight effect like that, but for air circulation and oxygenation you do the mouth-to-mouth part. The compressions are used to manually provide some kind of heart function by compressing and releasing the heart muscle indirectly through chest compressions, thus keeping some basic blood circulation going to oxygenize the brain and other vital organs (one can also compress the heart directly, but this for obvious reasons is normally only used in an OR setting, never try this at home, kids, even if you got Mom's new bread knife handy !).
Its actually quite substantial if the chest compressions are done properly. You can get a blood pressure of 120/80 (measured directly on an arterial pressure line) with CPR (+ adrenaline to vasoconstrict although endogenous adrenaline may well keep the BP up much the same). In the process of restoring a normal blood pressure, you will shift a fair bit of gas. However, I have observed this mainly in people who have an endo-tracheal tube in place, as its hard to measure otherwise. In the absence of this the airway may well obstruct such that no gas exchange may occur. Although if you are doing good CPR the brainstem will probably have some function and the airway may have some patency, depending on the individual.
Anyway, I can see the rationale for leaving out the expired air ventilation, but it would probably only be good for a short resusicitation. As I have posted earlier, they are the ones that you will probably be able to save anyway.
Michael
No, it is true even if they have stopped breathing. Basically, it does no good to get more oxygen into the blood if it isn't being circulated, and it takes a lot of chest compressions to get it circulated properly
The reasoning is as follows:
1. You don't need much oxygen to stay alive
2. Chest compressions by themselves may cause some air to flow in and out.
As for how much oxygen you need:
At rest you consume about 250 ml/min of oxygen. In a cardiac arrest you probably could keep your heart and brain alive on half that as other organs can tolerate hypoxia for at least 30 minutes.
You have about 2.2 litres of air in your lungs if you breathe out passively. Of this 21% is oxygen, which means you have around 400 ml of oxygen in there. Even if you aren't moving 500 ml of air a minute in an out whilst jostling the person around doing chest compressions, you are probably moving enough to keep the person going for 10 minutes or so.
Of course, if you want to keep someone alive for a longer period of time then you really need to do full CPR. But your chance of survival goes down dramatically after about 10 minutes of CPR anyway.
At the end of the day, there are no technologies for keeping someone alive without a functioning heart (that can be done quickly enough to matter) to make CPR anything more than a stop gap.
Survival is dependent on fixing the underlying problem. The most common fixable problem is a heart attack where the person tries to die not from a large loss of heart muscle, but rather a smaller heart attack complicated by the sudden onset of a heart rhythm that is too fast or slow for the remaining muscle to work properly. This is essentially an electrical problem and the solutions that will fix it are electrical - Defibrillation or Pacing. CPR simply buys you time till this happens.
Michael
A lossy MP3 compression of a CD at 320Kbps is about 1/10 size ~ 100MB while a lossless compression is around 300MB. Not all of the "MP3" players supports lossless CODEC, so ripping a CD to MP3 still make lots of sense. Also MP3 decoding tends to be a bit less processor intensive and the reduce data size (vs lossless) also reduce HD/FLASH access leading to longer play time.
Depends on the file: I just ripped 3 CD's and the lossless rate varied from 467 to 932 Kbps.
All of them obviously bigger than a 320 Kbps rip. But not that much bigger, probably averaging 2-2.5 times the size.
I do have some music at 320 Kbps MP3's but I do wonder how much benefit there is in reducing the file size that little.
Like you say, other factors, such as how well your MP3 player can handle the codecs, are probably more important.
Michael
But if you own a license to the song, then what is wrong with obtaining a 1:1 quality of the song?
....
I think it all comes down to choice with regard to quality.
You will never get 1:1 quality with a CD. Its a sample of the sound, and has a degree of loss. Not much of a loss as it samples at 44 KHz, but still a loss.
Most people will say that the loss on a CD is less than the threshold of hearing. I'd agree with that in general. There is more loss on a MP3 or AAC file, but if its less than the threshold of hearing for you, does it matter? Probably not. If you are a real purist, you'll probably play off vinyl to avoid sampling/compression errors. Not that most music systems could do justice to this level of sound quality, and vinyl does scratch
Now I personally think that apple should sell music without DRM free and high quality. Possibly apple feels the same about this also, as they are in this game to sell ipods, not music.
If you are buying 128 Kb/s AAC (equivalent to 192 Kb/s MP3 roughly), burning it to a cd and re-ripping in high quality, perhaps you should consider one of two options:
1. Rip into a loseless format. If you are doing very high quality MP3's (around 320 kb/s) you might as well use a lossless code as the size difference isn't that much anyway, and you will have no degredation from the original on playback.
2. If disk space is an issue, use AAC, not MP3, as it should generally lose much the same information on the second pass encoding. MP3 drops different types of sounds to save space, so it makes more sense to use a similar codec on the second pass.
Or, where possible, use a music provider that doesn't encrypt your music.
Anyway, just my 2c worth,
Michael
It says that it reflects virtually no light. I wonder if that includes the frequencies that are used for radar. If it doesn't reflect any radar signals, that could radically change military aircraft. Currently, military aircraft use shape as well as radar absorbing materials to achieve their stealthy-ness. Imagine if you can coat an F-16 with this stuff, and bam, you have a pretty cheap stealth fighter.
To detect this on radar you use two radars in two different positions and look for discrepancies in areas that don't return a signal.
Not that hard to do if you have a network of radar towers and some computing power. Its a little harder to spot, sort of like trying to see the queue in at the toll gates that has the least cars in it, when normally your eyes tend to see where the most cars are. But actually still quite easy to spot nothingness, especially when you have it moving and are looking from a few positions simultaneously.
Michael
How about an OS that actually has a userbase? eComStation sucks.
Well, if you are going to change OS, how about a mac mini...
Finally all those criticisms about using laptop parts dont seem so sensible.
Sure it has lower performance than if it used desktop components. You know what? I don't miss the performance and I have been smiling a long time about having a low power server tucked away on a kitchen bench.
(Added bonus - long lifespan of apple hardware means less landfill).
If you are going to change OS on environmental grounds, get a mini.
Michael