If the explosion or impact did actually release energy greater than 1000 Hiroshima bombs, then how could anyone tell whether the resulting mess might have been part of an alien ship. Any matter that is exposed to that amount of energy is going end up looking rather strange. And matter is matter everywhere, metal is metal, alloy is alloy. Any alien life form that came in a star ship from 50 or so light years away is going to be using a design for a star ship that is not all that much different from our designs (such as on Star Trek). And none of those designs are going to be able to survive a 1000x Hiroshima blast. So where does this fool get off saying that there might have been a 'alien star ship' in the wreakage? What he probably saw was the remains of a steam locomotive that went through an enormous blast. Of course, in the Soviet era, blaming unexplained results from any unusual event on space aliens was probably the best thing to do. And yes, I do know that the blast occurred before the Soviet era.
To my middle-aged ears, 192K BPS MP3 sounds fine. It doesn't have the phase-shifter effect found on 128K bps MP3s. If you are younger in your teens or twenties, use 320K bps to get all the high frequencies that may be present in CD recordings. High frequency hearing diminishes with age.
CDs are heavily filtered above 16KHz-18KHz to avoid digital aliasing and this affects the sound. It's why musicians say that vinyl sounds better. Plus musicians get full audio range very loudly and clearly from their stage amps. Johnny Winter says that CDs sound like shit. He has been standing 10 feet away from an amp playing the sounds that come from his guitar for 40 years. Compared to that, well yes, everything else pales in comparison. You probably won't hear any difference.
What the top-flight music producers are really saying is "look, we get $50,000 - $100,000 plus percentage from every no-talent fuck band that walks in our studio off the top. Whether they sell ten or ten million albums, we still get ours. And this MP3 shit is causing people to not buy albums like they used to because instead of five friends buying the same 100 albums, now five friends buy one album each and make near-perfect copies for each other. So the record companies aren't signing as many no-talent one-hit wonder bands than they did ten years ago and this is beginning to affect our bottom-line as producers. And, as producers our greatest concern is to bring great music to the album-record-CD buying public, and we have to issue a statement saying that MP3 sucks. So there it is."
The real question here is why do the record companies demand that the bands that they sign use a top-flight $100,000 (plus percentage of sales) producer? Because it's the only way that they can be assured that they will get the same crisp homogenized Clear-Channel sound that will most-likely get profitable record sales from each of the no-experience bands that they have signed.
Of course the band pays the $100,000 to the producer up front out of their advance and they have no choice over who the producer is or what he (always a he) does to their sound.
The big issue here is the centralization of musical recording distributorship. This is a 20th century phenomenon. The best musicians and bands sign to one of a half dozen or so companies. The company then records the band, makes the recording sound good, embeds the recording into the medium (vinyl, tape, or CD disk) and distributes it around the world. This worked for 100 years. But it's failing now due to both technological change (home recording studios and MP3 distribution) and overwhelming levels of greed and corruption on the part of the record companies. All well documented on Slashdot over the years.
My mistake, the title of the great Roman Polanski movie referred to in the message above is not August Moon, Bitter Moon. From the early 1990s. It is one of those movies that makes you leave the theater in deep 'cinema shock', a dream-like twilight state induced by a powerful movie experience.
It is the last of the great type of movies that can only be called anti-date flicks. These are films that are so anti-romantic, but without being specifically 'dick-flicks' like action movies, that they drive you and your date apart after watching the movie like two like poles of a magnet.
These movies were prevalent in the early and mid-1970s and many are on the lists of what critics call their best films. From a modern perspective, it is hard to believe anyone would actually go on a date or even a casual quasi-romantic outing to one of these showings. These movies are carefully crafted to destroy any possibility of romantic mood. If you are actually going out on a date to one of these titles, like an old movie revival festival or retrospective, be sure to get your date's phone number and e-mail address before the movie because you certainly won't afterwards.
Some of the movies don't age well and many lose their venom when seen on the small screen from VHS or DVD. Not all are violent or bloody or creepy (but it helps). Here's my list, please add your own titles if you know of any movies in this particularly strange genre.
(in roughly chronological order) El Topo 1969 Mexico Clockwork Orange 1971 UK Swept Away 1973 Italy the original not the Madonna remake Chinatown 1974 USA Seven Beauties 1976 Italy Wertmuller again, naturally Taxi Driver 1976
About this time (1977), Hollywood changed because of Star Wars, anti-date movies weren't made anymore. In the 1980s the only movie that I recall that was in this category was Fatal Attaction. And even that was a date movie if you assured your girlfriend that you would never, never, ever do such a thing. Then it was romantic. There must have been some anti-date movies after the 70s, but except for Bitter Moon, I don't recall any.
Now, movies are just a bore. It's more fun to talk about them than to actually watch them.
Comic books movies are embarrassing. Comic books are for children and we aren't children. To tell people that we really like comic book movies, such a Superman, Batman, X-Men, Transformers, is to tell people that you are still a child in your cultural development. Not as in 'child-like', but in 'retarded'. This is not a good thing.
Literature, and movies are in that category, is a very advanced and complex field. Comic books in terms of imagery , plot, character development, etc... is at the very bottom of the hierarchy of literature. Admitting to other people from other cultures that you're a great fan of comic books and comic book movies and then attempting to justify them as 'serious art' makes you the equivalent of being the guy at a major programmer's convention who tries to get people to take Turtle LOGO seriously.
Now before you start to flame me or boot me down to -2 Score, just a short word. This is simply a warning to people who usually don't interact in the non-tech world. If you actually are a serious fan of comic books and comic book movies, keep it quiet. Be quite discreet. This same advice goes out to the guy who still thinks that Turtle LOGO is a serious programming language.
Expand your perspective. Start by asking non-tech smart people, assuming that you know any, why they don't like comic book movies, and, more importantly, what they do like. Ask them to make copies for you if the movies are on DVD (show them how to do it); pick up fiction books and CD's from the library (reserve them by computer if you don't see them on the shelves). Even if you just watch a few minutes or only read a few pages, it is an exposure. Eventually something will grab you. Allow me to suggest crime novels by James Lee Burke (and his daughter Alifair), movies like August Moon by Roman Polanski, and CDs by Brian Eno, Paul Simon, and Steve Roach.
Did I actually read something like "800 million to 1 billion dollars invested in geothermal could supply a significant percentage of US energy needs by 2050"? I think that this number is off by a factor of 1000 at least. 800 to a billion dollars is less than what the US spends on the Iraq war in a week and is about what California spends in a month on cosmetics.
Another serious problem that no one is talking about is the actual cost of transforming the economy to sustainable energy resources. By the time that most people realize that it has to be done, Peak Oil will have set in and the resources for conversion might be difficult to find.
People are going to have to make some hard choices: hard by 2007 standards at least. Does your city build a new sports stadium for $100 million and get an NBA team or does it spend the same amount on a municipal geothermal plant that will keep electricity rates at their current levels for the next thirty years while every other place has theirs growing 8% a year? In the US in 2007 you aren't going to find many if any people in authority who will make the rational decisions in such choices.
So what's geothermal anyway? Dig a hole a few thousand feet, put in a pipe to the bottom and pump in water? Sounds like an oil well already. Do you have to put the generator also at thousands of feet below the surface? If not, do you have to thermally insulate the pipe so that the steam doesn't reconvert to water thousands of feet below the generator? It's not easy, dearest Slashdaughters, and you aren't going to get it working on a major scale for 800 million dollars. Because if you could, it would have already have been done. (A conditional subjunctive future perfect verbal phrase, for all you grammar affectionados).
What da 'law' says and what it means are two completely different things. The law was passed to prevent people from copying the entire movie and selling these copies without paying royalities to the film studio that made the movie. What this person did was a make an ad-hoc (look it up) private promotional clip of the movie for someone who would be definitely pay to see the movie after viewing the clip.
Anyone who says that this person deserves to be punished so severely is either an idiot, a narrow-minded bigot who doesn't understand what the law means (many Slashdot responders who say 'the law is law' are in this category), or someone who has a financial interest in the USA private prison network who wants to throw everyone in jail because they make money from it.
If this person is severely punished for this minor mishap, then 100000 people from Slashdot should undertake to train another 100000 people on how to download movies and music from the web. Perversion of justice deserves an appropriate and determined response. I don't recommend that you tell the MPAA that you are doing this in protest to this individual case, just do it and let them figure it out.
I simply can't understand software company logic. They sell a 'product', that is, a cardboard box containing a disk and a book. A few years later they sell more or less the same product (a disk and a book in a cardboard box) with a few changes. But they won't reduce the cost of the previous product. They simply refuse to sell or allow anyone else to sell the previous product at a reduced rate. It makes no sense and no other business (or at least any business that actually makes things) works like this.
Company BozoTron makes Bozo-XKE, a software program that does, well, something. They release version 1.0 and it sells a few at $299 a box. Two years later, they release super-improved Bozo-XKE v2.0 (which does nothing more than muck up the user interface that all their customers took so long to learn, and fix a few bugs). It sells for $379 a box. But you can't buy the old version 1.0 at $100. And the owners of v1.0 can't sell their software for $100 to someone else and have BozoTron continue their support with the new owner. Some software companies might do this, but not BozoTron. You also can't split the v1.0 package and sell one part of it to a company (that will only use that section of the software, and doesn't need the rest of the package) for $50.
So absurd and insane. The only reasonable thing to do is just make copies of XKE and use them however you like. Which drives BozoTron nuts. But that wouldn't be happening if they were a reasonable company with a reasonable marketing plan to begin with. But they aren't, they're a software company, a fantasy business, a virtual corp that only works as long a people agree to continue to give them money.
Now I realize that this goes against everything that the Slashdot community believes in and threatens your livelihood, such that it is, but the only true value in software is what wealth it can create when applied to other economic resources. In itself, software is worthless. Its only value is when it's applied to other techniques, processes, and materials and increases the ability of those other techniques, processes, and materials to make money.
So indeed, if XP is making you money and the cost of going to Vista is going to cost you more money than XP is making for you, then nobody is going to switch to Vista. Microsoft should franchise their old operating systems. Let some other company buy a support license from Microsoft to be the people who adapt and fix the bugs in Windows 98 and continue to support it in its various business environments. They are fools for expecting people to abandon old OS installs and go to unproven alternatives. That used to work for the first twenty-five years of the office PC, but it's beginning to change. People are beginning to realize that their corporate PC needs don't match Microsoft's corporate expansion needs. It used to be that what was good for Microsoft was good for the rest of the corporate community. Now that basic symbionic relationship is splitting. This would be good for the Linux community, but they are too splintered for reliable corporate support. It would be good for Apple, but they took too much LSD and it still shows with their obsession with flashy expensive electronic trinkets instead of rugged flexible low-cost computing systems. Eventually someone else will step up to fill the needs that Microsoft used to be able to do before they lost their way.
No, I didn't bring up the term. Whenever someone corrects a grammar mistake in Slashdot they get called a "grammar nazi". I'm pointing out that this is a wildly inappropriate term to use. Its common usage on Slashdot can lead people into believing that it's a common and and accepted usage to call someone any kind of 'nazi' because of annoying habits.
In the real world, this can lead to incidents of extreme social embarrassment in certain groups. Its usage on Slashdot should stop.
No, by outside the Geek community, I mean the community that would use the term 'nazi' as a general purpose word meaning a person who is obsessed with unimportant details.
In many parts of the world, like Eastern Europe and Israel, the term 'nazi' is a loaded word and one not to be used lightly. It very specifically refers to those who murdered millions in the 1940s.
To use this word casually to mean someone who annoys you with irrelevant details would be to commit a major social gaffe. It's the kind of thing that could cost your company contracts and embarrass your CEO. It's not a term to be tossed around in the manner that geeks often do when they use 'loaded' words almost as verbal weapons, purposelfully to attempt to shock.
As geeks, we're used to this. But using loaded words unsuspectingly in different communities can have major and unwanted consequences.
It's quite possible that many geeks who use the term 'nazi' to simply mean a person with annoying habits are not aware of how loaded this word can be among some groups. I'm just cautioning them to avoid its usage. Not that geeks ever pay attention to people trying to warn them about avoidable social embarrassment.
It's like a guy from Asia who listens to a lot of hip-hop and has come to believe that the term 'nigger' means 'good' or 'high quality'. He comes to America and starts using the word without any realization of how loaded the term is here. Until someone tells him. That's what I'm trying to do. Just tell people that it's not socially proper to just toss off the word 'nazi'.
There probably isn't much difference between these two constructions. My mistake.
But my point is that you won't just throw symbols around in precision code and not expect it to make a difference. You don't tolerate sloppy C language structure because it would destroy the functionality of your work. Same is true with English language structure. And English is a lot easier than C to express a complex and subtle meaning or thought.
Slashdaughters, please stop using the term 'grammar Nazis'. The Nazis (a shortened version of the German words for national socialism) were a group of very evil and dangerous men who started a war that left 70,000,000 people dead and half of the civilized world in ruins in the 1940s. They systematically murdered nearly every Jewish person in areas under their occupation.
The term 'nazi' is not a acceptable metaphor for those of us who request precision in language structure. It insults the memory of the good people who were slaughtered by this criminals. Perhaps 'grammar martinet' after:
martinet \mar-t'n-ET\, noun: 1. A strict disciplinarian. 2. One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods.
And there is no reason to criticize precision grammar anyway. This shit is important. We can't make functional language translation software if people don't use precision grammar. The difference between (its and it's) is just as important as the difference between [ *(function_name) and * function_name].
But seriously, stop using the term 'grammar nazi' or anything 'nazi'. It is assured to cause you social embarrassment outside of the geek community.
Let's all take a minute and try to read between the lines here. Why is anyone seriously thinking about doing this when it is so much easier and cheaper just to pump the oil out of the North Sea and use that oil to generate electricity? The off-shore oil rigs are already there and paid for. Land-based oil-fired power plants can be made just as clean and green as off-shore wind plants. And you don't have to worry about anyone cutting the power cable or other mischief. If you have the oil, then the cost of generating power from that oil is greatly cheaper than getting the same amount of power from wind regardless of how you play with the spreadsheet numbers.
Maybe the unspoken truth here is that there isn't any more North Sea oil. Maybe it's mostly already been pumped out and played. Why else would anyone want or need to put big expensive and fragile wind mills on top of proven productive oil fields in the absolute worse place on earth for wind-mills to be? In the middle of the North Sea? Not even Europeans are dumb enough to be doing this if they didn't absolutely have to. And they are doing it so there is a reasonable possibility that the North Sea oil is nearly gone.
It seems that no one is addressing what seems to me to be a major concern about putting anything valuable far out in the ocean. It is very difficult to protect it from intentional destruction.
Defense of power generation facilities is a low priority on land because your country's armed forces protect it and everything else that is within the borders. Outside of the country's landmass, it becomes difficult to protect major power installations. If your region's power requirements are substantially provided by far off-shore generators, then any bozo with a big boat and a big gun on his big boat can shut down your region's power grid for months. In fact all it takes is one Allahhead with a Cessna loaded with TNT to shut down the grid, if he knows which ocean tower is the central command-and-control unit of the power cluster.
Granted the vast amount of ocean is going to mitigate the mischief, but it isn't going to stop submarine torpedos from psycho rogue governments or even agent-provocateurs from your 'friendly' neighbors. No, you have to get out there and patrol, patrol, patrol. Which costs a lot of money. And whose expense is never entered into the cost-benefit estimate reports before these types of projects are built.
So yeah, it's one thing to build this project in the middle of the God-forsaken North Sea and another to build it fifty miles off the West Coast of the USA.
Either way it sucks for them, and history will not be kind to us for forcing them into having to choose between really bad options while we, for the most part, live well.
But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I can't believe that they don't see anything unusual about having ten children and a sub-minimum wage job as an illegal immigrant 2000 miles away from their family.
But in the end, I get by and they either starve or depend on the kindness of strangers. Regardless of how hard that they work. Because the work that they do can't support ten kids in another country. And people will call me cruel and heartless because I allow this starvation to happen.
If we were dealing with millions of feral cats and dogs, then my very liberal friends would have no problem taking active steps to control their reproduction patterns. But we're dealing with humans, and the situation is different. It's a subject that no one will talk about. But if and when a 'die-off' occurs, the best that the good people will say if they say anything at all about the subject, is that it was the result of a 'disfunctional culture'. Followed by an embarrassed silence, and a quick change of subject to the new wine at Trader Joe's.
Thanks for the reply. I also did farm labor for several summers, picking shade tobacco in Western Massachusetts. I also picked up the spoiled crop of orange overripe cucumbers. You're right, it sucks. It's hard to put that in delicate language in a public forum as diverse as Slashdot since you never know who your audience will be and you don't have a lot of space to convince people that you're not a bigot( or if you are, you're not a stupid bigot).
I have to agree, technology is the way out of lose:lose situations. I think that is why we are all so into it, almost to point of being an alternative religion.
Hello, I posted my long-winded comment after twenty or so joke comments that had nothing to do with the actual subject.
I don't think that robots are going to harvest because at the present it is still too expensive to do so. Migrant labor is still much cheaper.
If the robots suddenly became very cheap, and that is always a possibility, then putting tens of thousands of migrant workers out of jobs would have consequences. One is that many of them would stave, and two is that many would turn to crime to get money. They are not going to become middle-class.
I don't know the ratio of illegal to legal migrant workers (harvest food pickers). I do know that a significant number of them are Anglo-American and have been doing migrant food picking for generations. The Grapes of Wraft descendants.
It's a touchy subject. Because an introduction of high-tech such as robots into serf labor occupations means someone is going to lose and lose big. And these are people that have little or nothing to lose. When you take things from the very poor, like their livelihoods, they can be expected to react violently.
To introduce changes that can be reasonably expected to induce starvation and violence among the people at the bottom of the economic ladder is not progress, or advancement. Some thought should be given to alternatives before simply just doing it. That was my point. It's a subject that can fill many books. It should be handled with care in a little Slashdot message.
"The labor problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws," Jim Schwass said.
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
In order to avoid audio artifacts caused by aliasing of the digital signal, the audio must be filtered so that no frequencies approach the sample rate. The filters needed to do this by their very nature distort the audio signal. Because the CD sample rate's Nyquist frequency (1/2 the sample rate) is so close to upper range of human hearing, the filters actually do change the upper audio frequencies. There are phase shifts and decibel bumps all over the post 15KHz high frequency range. This is what causes the perception that CD audio is inferior to vinyl. Because it's true. It's true even though in theory the sample rate covers all audible frequencies.
If CDs audio were sampled at a 96KHz rate and reproduced at that rate also, then yes, they would sound the same as vinyl records. Because the upper audio components of the signal that give the brain clues to nature of the audio signal would be unchanged.
The only real data that we have on CD sales comes from the entities that have the most to gain by claiming that CD sales are rapidly falling. By claiming that CD sales are lower each year, the three or four multinational media entertainment companies that believe they own most of the world's recorded music can use that claim to push for laws that will make it impossible to copy a CD with a computer drive. Sure there will be a hundred people on Slashdot who can break the encryption, but there will also be a billion people who won't be able to do so.
Let's look at this from another perspective: CDs are bought primarily by young people, and the world's percentage of young people is booming like never before. CDs are a middle class good and the world's middle class is expanding like never before. CDs are a low-cost item and are marketed as a self-contained impulse status purchase: the world's new exploding set of middle-class young people are eager to buy low-cost status items.
Therefore, it is impossible for CD sales to be falling. Sow could they be? Generally in economics, when it is impossible for something to happen, then it doesn't happen. In all probability, the media companies are lying, and CD sales are actually strong. It's like Enron telling everyone that business is booming and then going bankrupt in a flash. It's a huge lie repeatedly told by the people who have the most to gain from this lie. It won't be the first time that something like this has happened.
So take this claim of decreased CD sales with skepticism. There is no reason for it to be true.
Summer 1977 Probably you weren't born yet or were an infant.
In any event your parents were sneaking a few tokes on a joint in the parking lot of the theater (and a few gulps of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill) that was showing Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Marathon Man ('is it safe?'), or Black Sunday (' Zere ahr no accidents!' Martha Keller and Ahhnold - jeez what a team!)
Honda is losing all their credibilty on a piece-of-shit CVCC engine. Mazda is blowing their wad on a Wankel. Toyota is toying around with the uglyest cars ever made. GM gives us the Vega, Ford the Pinto, and AMC brings up the rear with the Pacer. And the only pants that we could buy a bell-bottoms. No wonder we needed to get stoned and right now if not sooner.
If you could predict a car for 30 years in the future that you would want to buy you could have done worse than a Hyundai Accent with a ten year warranty or a Prius. Hell you could have just kept your BFAC (Big F*ucking American Car, with the emphasis on Big), your Monte Carlo or Riviera.
So the car that I want 30 years from now. Small, for good mileage. Cheap. everyone's going to be poor with the coming Peak Oil and Global Warming situations manifesting. Big Tires for driving on really bad roads. Safe, with serious air bags. Durable; something that will last a long time. Bulletproof safe, because the Peak Oil and Global Warming situations are going knock a lot people out of the middle class and they're going to looking to fuck with someone just like me for no other reason than I have a car and have the ability to make enough money to not have to live with people like them. Vandal-proof,with special coating on the exterior so that spraypainted gang symbols just wash off. Theft-proof, with a tracking device so if the shitpeople actually do manage tosteal it then I can get it back quickly.
Are you looking for a career with a real future? Make cars like the one described above. I'll buy it and so will millions of other people.
Police, in America less so than elsewhere, are basically fascists. There are good guys which always include them, and bad guys, (more often than not, you).
According to this worldview, everything they do is legal and everything you do is illegal. They have the power to use lethal violence against anyone that they feel is illegal. Which is everyone, including you.
But their resources are limited and there is a lot of paperwork to fill out for every illegal (you, baby) that they process. So they have to be selective. Anything outside the local norm gets selected. (You are outside someone's local norm).
When you understand this mentality, you understand the police everywhere in the world. There are only two other things that you need to know. 1: Having a lot of money changes you from being illegal to being legal, especially if you give some of this money to the police. 2: In most legal systems, the police don't determine whether a person or activity is guilty of anything. The courts do and the courts are a completely different branch of government from the police.
In America, the court's determination of your guilt is directly dependent upon the amount of money that you spend on lawyers. This isn't opinion or bias or fantasy, it's a basic fact that is simply never discussed publicly.
The question of whether it is illegal to video the police is irrelevant, the real question is whether the person arrested is willing and able to spend what is necessary to affirm his innocence in a court of law in the US.
The police everywhere are always going to arrest you for videotaping them. Whether or not they kill you, beat you half to death while you're in their custody, or simply detain you for a period of time depends on the traditions of the local jurisdiction.
One thing is for sure. If you do video tape the police in action, make sure that the image is being broadcast to another recording machine that they don't know about. This way you will have something to bargain with in court and you won't have to spend as money proving your innocence than if the police just take the tape from your machine.
This is not fantasy, this is the way that the world works once you get away from your PC.
This argument is absurd. In the real world, one can use gestures and rephrasing of the sentence to get the intended meaning across. We need a cheap and reasonably reliable communication device for real-world real-time situations, not something that can translate literature or pass academic worse-case situations.
People who say we need an AI supercomputer to handle basic language translation needs have probably never been in a situation where they have been completely isolated from everyone by the lack of speaking even one word of the local language. This happens all the time in the real world. Especially now when a week's pay and a 24-hour journey will get you to a million places where nobody speaks English or any other language that you took one class in while at college.
And a week's pay or NGO grant gets anyone who comes from a place where no one speaks or studies English to right to your neighborhood as well.
There is an overwhelming need for small powerful flexible cheap language translators. And telling people that it can't be done with or without an AI supercomputer doesn't help the situation any.
Thank you.
Before we get all excited about the possibility of a hole in the ground, I would like to take this opportunity to remind Slashdaughters that Mars is basically for a realistic purposes just a bright star in the night sky, nothing more.
There is nothing gained by spending hundreds of billions of dollars going there.
But,......We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid war, so why shouldn't we spend the same on a science project that holds out the possibility of uniting all mankind.
- There is a real limit to the number of projects that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on before we run out of money and have nothing but dreams and rocks to show for our money. Also the money spent on the insane war hasn't been earned yet. It's been financed out of future obligations that our grandchildren must pay or suffer Argentinian-style economic collapse.
- Mankind doesn't give a shit about rockets unless they are carrying hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines being delivered to people who are different from themselves. One of the arguments for spending billions of dollars on the Apollo moon project was the unity of mankind bullshit. Playing golf on the moon didn't stop all the massacres that have happened since then. Pol Pot didn't look at the moon and think 'humankind has been there in the spirit of peace, therefore I should not order the murder of millions of my own people just because they wear glasses'. Osama didn't walk out of his cave, glance at the moon, and think 'if I order airliners full of people to be crashed into buildings full of people, then I be violating the spirit of the people who have traveled there in the name of peace'. No, and neither will walking on any dot in the night sky change the basic nature of uncivilized people.
So there may be a cave on Mars? So what? Grow up. We face climate change and peak oil in your lifetime. Dream about how you're going to feed, protect, and educate your grandchildren instead of being the first to enter some hole in the ground of what is just a dot in the night sky.
Here's my first suggestion for what to do with this thing. I want a handheld (something the size of an battery-powered face shaver or large cell phone) written language translator. On the out-facing side is a mini-scanner and on the other side is a graphics LCD screen.
Suppose you are in some place where you can't read the language (it does happen in the age of 500-seat 6000km airliners). You get a newspaper, wave the scanner over the text, and within about three seconds, the scanned writing appears in English on the LCD. You can either pop in small memory cards for different language families or have their programs stored on your laptop for downloading.
Another feature would be a built-in microphone with a program that has been trained to your voice so that you can speak into this mic and have your words translated into the written form of the local language and displayed on the LCD.
I'd be willing to pay about $100 US for this device. I'll bet a lot other people would also. Anyone interested in developing it? Would we have to pay royalities on a language? Could such a device be built on this new miniature PC card? Am I just dreaming?
I'm always amazed at the number of otherwise reasonable Slashdaughters who will actually defend bullshit laws like copyright just because it is the 'law'.
Good thing the Slashdot community doesn't concern itself with civil rights. If Slashdot had been around in the 1950's, then we would have spent fifty years endlessly debating the rights of the majority to enforce racial segration, down to seperate-but-equal water fountains.
Some things like slavery, racial segration, and RIAA extortion are just plain wrong. Regardless of how creative some of us are in coming up with weird pseudo-legalistic arguments for supporting them.
Slashdot Mirror
If the explosion or impact did actually release energy greater than 1000 Hiroshima bombs, then how could anyone tell whether the resulting mess might have been part of an alien ship. Any matter that is exposed to that amount of energy is going end up looking rather strange. And matter is matter everywhere, metal is metal, alloy is alloy. Any alien life form that came in a star ship from 50 or so light years away is going to be using a design for a star ship that is not all that much different from our designs (such as on Star Trek). And none of those designs are going to be able to survive a 1000x Hiroshima blast. So where does this fool get off saying that there might have been a 'alien star ship' in the wreakage? What he probably saw was the remains of a steam locomotive that went through an enormous blast. Of course, in the Soviet era, blaming unexplained results from any unusual event on space aliens was probably the best thing to do. And yes, I do know that the blast occurred before the Soviet era.
To my middle-aged ears, 192K BPS MP3 sounds fine. It doesn't have the phase-shifter effect found on 128K bps MP3s.
If you are younger in your teens or twenties, use 320K bps to get all the high frequencies that may be present in CD recordings. High frequency hearing diminishes with age.
CDs are heavily filtered above 16KHz-18KHz to avoid digital aliasing and this affects the sound. It's why musicians say that vinyl sounds better. Plus musicians get full audio range very loudly and clearly from their stage amps. Johnny Winter says that CDs sound like shit. He has been standing 10 feet away from an amp playing the sounds that come from his guitar for 40 years. Compared to that, well yes, everything else pales in comparison. You probably won't hear any difference.
What the top-flight music producers are really saying is "look, we get $50,000 - $100,000 plus percentage from every no-talent fuck band that walks in our studio off the top. Whether they sell ten or ten million albums, we still get ours. And this MP3 shit is causing people to not buy albums like they used to because instead of five friends buying the same 100 albums, now five friends buy one album each and make near-perfect copies for each other. So the record companies aren't signing as many no-talent one-hit wonder bands than they did ten years ago and this is beginning to affect our bottom-line as producers. And, as producers our greatest concern is to bring great music to the album-record-CD buying public, and we have to issue a statement saying that MP3 sucks. So there it is."
The real question here is why do the record companies demand that the bands that they sign use a top-flight $100,000 (plus percentage of sales) producer? Because it's the only way that they can be assured that they will get the same crisp homogenized Clear-Channel sound that will most-likely get profitable record sales from each of the no-experience bands that they have signed.
Of course the band pays the $100,000 to the producer up front out of their advance and they have no choice over who the producer is or what he (always a he) does to their sound.
The big issue here is the centralization of musical recording distributorship. This is a 20th century phenomenon. The best musicians and bands sign to one of a half dozen or so companies. The company then records the band, makes the recording sound good, embeds the recording into the medium (vinyl, tape, or CD disk) and distributes it around the world. This worked for 100 years. But it's failing now due to both technological change (home recording studios and MP3 distribution) and overwhelming levels of greed and corruption on the part of the record companies. All well documented on Slashdot over the years.
My mistake, the title of the great Roman Polanski movie referred to in the message above is not August Moon, Bitter Moon. From the early 1990s. It is one of those movies that makes you leave the theater in deep 'cinema shock', a dream-like twilight state induced by a powerful movie experience.
It is the last of the great type of movies that can only be called anti-date flicks. These are films that are so anti-romantic, but without being specifically 'dick-flicks' like action movies, that they drive you and your date apart after watching the movie like two like poles of a magnet.
These movies were prevalent in the early and mid-1970s and many are on the lists of what critics call their best films. From a modern perspective, it is hard to believe anyone would actually go on a date or even a casual quasi-romantic outing to one of these showings. These movies are carefully crafted to destroy any possibility of romantic mood. If you are actually going out on a date to one of these titles, like an old movie revival festival or retrospective, be sure to get your date's phone number and e-mail address before the movie because you certainly won't afterwards.
Some of the movies don't age well and many lose their venom when seen on the small screen from VHS or DVD. Not all are violent or bloody or creepy (but it helps). Here's my list, please add your own titles if you know of any movies in this particularly strange genre.
(in roughly chronological order)
El Topo 1969 Mexico
Clockwork Orange 1971 UK
Swept Away 1973 Italy the original not the Madonna remake
Chinatown 1974 USA
Seven Beauties 1976 Italy Wertmuller again, naturally
Taxi Driver 1976
About this time (1977), Hollywood changed because of Star Wars, anti-date movies weren't made anymore. In the 1980s the only movie that I recall that was in this category was Fatal Attaction. And even that was a date movie if you assured your girlfriend that you would never, never, ever do such a thing. Then it was romantic.
There must have been some anti-date movies after the 70s, but except for Bitter Moon, I don't recall any.
Now, movies are just a bore. It's more fun to talk about them than to actually watch them.
Comic books movies are embarrassing. Comic books are for children and we aren't children. To tell people that we really like comic book movies, such a Superman, Batman, X-Men, Transformers, is to tell people that you are still a child in your cultural development. Not as in 'child-like', but in 'retarded'. This is not a good thing.
Literature, and movies are in that category, is a very advanced and complex field. Comic books in terms of imagery , plot, character development, etc... is at the very bottom of the hierarchy of literature. Admitting to other people from other cultures that you're a great fan of comic books and comic book movies and then attempting to justify them as 'serious art' makes you the equivalent of being the guy at a major programmer's convention who tries to get people to take Turtle LOGO seriously.
Now before you start to flame me or boot me down to -2 Score, just a short word. This is simply a warning to people who usually don't interact in the non-tech world. If you actually are a serious fan of comic books and comic book movies, keep it quiet. Be quite discreet. This same advice goes out to the guy who still thinks that Turtle LOGO is a serious programming language.
Expand your perspective. Start by asking non-tech smart people, assuming that you know any, why they don't like comic book movies, and, more importantly, what they do like. Ask them to make copies for you if the movies are on DVD (show them how to do it); pick up fiction books and CD's from the library (reserve them by computer if you don't see them on the shelves). Even if you just watch a few minutes or only read a few pages, it is an exposure. Eventually something will grab you. Allow me to suggest crime novels by James Lee Burke (and his daughter Alifair), movies like August Moon by Roman Polanski, and CDs by Brian Eno, Paul Simon, and Steve Roach.
Did I actually read something like "800 million to 1 billion dollars invested in geothermal could supply a significant percentage of US energy needs by 2050"? I think that this number is off by a factor of 1000 at least. 800 to a billion dollars is less than what the US spends on the Iraq war in a week and is about what California spends in a month on cosmetics.
Another serious problem that no one is talking about is the actual cost of transforming the economy to sustainable energy resources. By the time that most people realize that it has to be done, Peak Oil will have set in and the resources for conversion might be difficult to find.
People are going to have to make some hard choices: hard by 2007 standards at least. Does your city build a new sports stadium for $100 million and get an NBA team or does it spend the same amount on a municipal geothermal plant that will keep electricity rates at their current levels for the next thirty years while every other place has theirs growing 8% a year? In the US in 2007 you aren't going to find many if any people in authority who will make the rational decisions in such choices.
So what's geothermal anyway? Dig a hole a few thousand feet, put in a pipe to the bottom and pump in water? Sounds like an oil well already. Do you have to put the generator also at thousands of feet below the surface? If not, do you have to thermally insulate the pipe so that the steam doesn't reconvert to water thousands of feet below the generator? It's not easy, dearest Slashdaughters, and you aren't going to get it working on a major scale for 800 million dollars. Because if you could, it would have already have been done. (A conditional subjunctive future perfect verbal phrase, for all you grammar affectionados).
What da 'law' says and what it means are two completely different things. The law was passed to prevent people from copying the entire movie and selling these copies without paying royalities to the film studio that made the movie. What this person did was a make an ad-hoc (look it up) private promotional clip of the movie for someone who would be definitely pay to see the movie after viewing the clip.
Anyone who says that this person deserves to be punished so severely is either an idiot, a narrow-minded bigot who doesn't understand what the law means (many Slashdot responders who say 'the law is law' are in this category), or someone who has a financial interest in the USA private prison network who wants to throw everyone in jail because they make money from it.
If this person is severely punished for this minor mishap, then 100000 people from Slashdot should undertake to train another 100000 people on how to download movies and music from the web. Perversion of justice deserves an appropriate and determined response. I don't recommend that you tell the MPAA that you are doing this in protest to this individual case, just do it and let them figure it out.
I simply can't understand software company logic. They sell a 'product', that is, a cardboard box containing a disk and a book. A few years later they sell more or less the same product (a disk and a book in a cardboard box) with a few changes. But they won't reduce the cost of the previous product. They simply refuse to sell or allow anyone else to sell the previous product at a reduced rate. It makes no sense and no other business (or at least any business that actually makes things) works like this.
Company BozoTron makes Bozo-XKE, a software program that does, well, something. They release version 1.0 and it sells a few at $299 a box. Two years later, they release super-improved Bozo-XKE v2.0 (which does nothing more than muck up the user interface that all their customers took so long to learn, and fix a few bugs). It sells for $379 a box. But you can't buy the old version 1.0 at $100. And the owners of v1.0 can't sell their software for $100 to someone else and have BozoTron continue their support with the new owner. Some software companies might do this, but not BozoTron. You also can't split the v1.0 package and sell one part of it to a company (that will only use that section of the software, and doesn't need the rest of the package) for $50.
So absurd and insane. The only reasonable thing to do is just make copies of XKE and use them however you like. Which drives BozoTron nuts. But that wouldn't be happening if they were a reasonable company with a reasonable marketing plan to begin with. But they aren't, they're a software company, a fantasy business, a virtual corp that only works as long a people agree to continue to give them money.
Now I realize that this goes against everything that the Slashdot community believes in and threatens your livelihood, such that it is, but the only true value in software is what wealth it can create when applied to other economic resources. In itself, software is worthless. Its only value is when it's applied to other techniques, processes, and materials and increases the ability of those other techniques, processes, and materials to make money.
So indeed, if XP is making you money and the cost of going to Vista is going to cost you more money than XP is making for you, then nobody is going to switch to Vista. Microsoft should franchise their old operating systems. Let some other company buy a support license from Microsoft to be the people who adapt and fix the bugs in Windows 98 and continue to support it in its various business environments. They are fools for expecting people to abandon old OS installs and go to unproven alternatives. That used to work for the first twenty-five years of the office PC, but it's beginning to change. People are beginning to realize that their corporate PC needs don't match Microsoft's corporate expansion needs. It used to be that what was good for Microsoft was good for the rest of the corporate community. Now that basic symbionic relationship is splitting. This would be good for the Linux community, but they are too splintered for reliable corporate support. It would be good for Apple, but they took too much LSD and it still shows with their obsession with flashy expensive electronic trinkets instead of rugged flexible low-cost computing systems. Eventually someone else will step up to fill the needs that Microsoft used to be able to do before they lost their way.
No, I didn't bring up the term. Whenever someone corrects a grammar mistake in Slashdot they get called a "grammar nazi". I'm pointing out that this is a wildly inappropriate term to use. Its common usage on Slashdot can lead people into believing that it's a common and and accepted usage to call someone any kind of 'nazi' because of annoying habits.
In the real world, this can lead to incidents of extreme social embarrassment in certain groups. Its usage on Slashdot should stop.
No, by outside the Geek community, I mean the community that would use the term 'nazi' as a general purpose word meaning a person who is obsessed with unimportant details.
In many parts of the world, like Eastern Europe and Israel, the term 'nazi' is a loaded word and one not to be used lightly. It very specifically refers to those who murdered millions in the 1940s.
To use this word casually to mean someone who annoys you with irrelevant details would be to commit a major social gaffe. It's the kind of thing that could cost your company contracts and embarrass your CEO. It's not a term to be tossed around in the manner that geeks often do when they use 'loaded' words almost as verbal weapons, purposelfully to attempt to shock.
As geeks, we're used to this. But using loaded words unsuspectingly in different communities can have major and unwanted consequences.
It's quite possible that many geeks who use the term 'nazi' to simply mean a person with annoying habits are not aware of how loaded this word can be among some groups. I'm just cautioning them to avoid its usage. Not that geeks ever pay attention to people trying to warn them about avoidable social embarrassment.
It's like a guy from Asia who listens to a lot of hip-hop and has come to believe that the term 'nigger' means 'good' or 'high quality'. He comes to America and starts using the word without any realization of how loaded the term is here. Until someone tells him. That's what I'm trying to do. Just tell people that it's not socially proper to just toss off the word 'nazi'.
There probably isn't much difference between these two constructions. My mistake.
But my point is that you won't just throw symbols around in precision code and not expect it to make a difference. You don't tolerate sloppy C language structure because it would destroy the functionality of your work. Same is true with English language structure. And English is a lot easier than C to express a complex and subtle meaning or thought.
Slashdaughters, please stop using the term 'grammar Nazis'. The Nazis (a shortened version of the German words for national socialism) were a group of very evil and dangerous men who started a war that left 70,000,000 people dead and half of the civilized world in ruins in the 1940s. They systematically murdered nearly every Jewish person in areas under their occupation.
The term 'nazi' is not a acceptable metaphor for those of us who request precision in language structure. It insults the memory of the good people who were slaughtered by this criminals. Perhaps 'grammar martinet' after:
martinet \mar-t'n-ET\, noun:
1. A strict disciplinarian.
2. One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods.
And there is no reason to criticize precision grammar anyway. This shit is important. We can't make functional language translation software if people don't use precision grammar. The difference between (its and it's) is just as important as the difference between [ *(function_name) and * function_name].
But seriously, stop using the term 'grammar nazi' or anything 'nazi'. It is assured to cause you social embarrassment outside of the geek community.
Let's all take a minute and try to read between the lines here. Why is anyone seriously thinking about doing this when it is so much easier and cheaper just to pump the oil out of the North Sea and use that oil to generate electricity? The off-shore oil rigs are already there and paid for. Land-based oil-fired power plants can be made just as clean and green as off-shore wind plants. And you don't have to worry about anyone cutting the power cable or other mischief. If you have the oil, then the cost of generating power from that oil is greatly cheaper than getting the same amount of power from wind regardless of how you play with the spreadsheet numbers.
Maybe the unspoken truth here is that there isn't any more North Sea oil. Maybe it's mostly already been pumped out and played. Why else would anyone want or need to put big expensive and fragile wind mills on top of proven productive oil fields in the absolute worse place on earth for wind-mills to be? In the middle of the North Sea? Not even Europeans are dumb enough to be doing this if they didn't absolutely have to. And they are doing it so there is a reasonable possibility that the North Sea oil is nearly gone.
It seems that no one is addressing what seems to me to be a major concern about putting anything valuable far out in the ocean. It is very difficult to protect it from intentional destruction.
Defense of power generation facilities is a low priority on land because your country's armed forces protect it and everything else that is within the borders. Outside of the country's landmass, it becomes difficult to protect major power installations. If your region's power requirements are substantially provided by far off-shore generators, then any bozo with a big boat and a big gun on his big boat can shut down your region's power grid for months. In fact all it takes is one Allahhead with a Cessna loaded with TNT to shut down the grid, if he knows which ocean tower is the central command-and-control unit of the power cluster.
Granted the vast amount of ocean is going to mitigate the mischief, but it isn't going to stop submarine torpedos from psycho rogue governments or even agent-provocateurs from your 'friendly' neighbors. No, you have to get out there and patrol, patrol, patrol. Which costs a lot of money. And whose expense is never entered into the cost-benefit estimate reports before these types of projects are built.
So yeah, it's one thing to build this project in the middle of the God-forsaken North Sea and another to build it fifty miles off the West Coast of the USA.
Either way it sucks for them, and history will not be kind to us for forcing them into having to choose between really bad options while we, for the most part, live well.
But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I can't believe that they don't see anything unusual about having ten children and a sub-minimum wage job as an illegal immigrant 2000 miles away from their family.
But in the end, I get by and they either starve or depend on the kindness of strangers. Regardless of how hard that they work. Because the work that they do can't support ten kids in another country. And people will call me cruel and heartless because I allow this starvation to happen.
If we were dealing with millions of feral cats and dogs, then my very liberal friends would have no problem taking active steps to control their reproduction patterns. But we're dealing with humans, and the situation is different. It's a subject that no one will talk about. But if and when a 'die-off' occurs, the best that the good people will say if they say anything at all about the subject, is that it was the result of a 'disfunctional culture'. Followed by an embarrassed silence, and a quick change of subject to the new wine at Trader Joe's.
Thanks for the reply. I also did farm labor for several summers, picking shade tobacco in Western Massachusetts. I also picked up the spoiled crop of orange overripe cucumbers. You're right, it sucks. It's hard to put that in delicate language in a public forum as diverse as Slashdot since you never know who your audience will be and you don't have a lot of space to convince people that you're not a bigot( or if you are, you're not a stupid bigot).
I have to agree, technology is the way out of lose:lose situations. I think that is why we are all so into it, almost to point of being an alternative religion.
Hello, I posted my long-winded comment after twenty or so joke comments that had nothing to do with the actual subject.
I don't think that robots are going to harvest because at the present it is still too expensive to do so. Migrant labor is still much cheaper.
If the robots suddenly became very cheap, and that is always a possibility, then putting tens of thousands of migrant workers out of jobs would have consequences. One is that many of them would stave, and two is that many would turn to crime to get money. They are not going to become middle-class.
I don't know the ratio of illegal to legal migrant workers (harvest food pickers). I do know that a significant number of them are Anglo-American and have been doing migrant food picking for generations. The Grapes of Wraft descendants.
It's a touchy subject. Because an introduction of high-tech such as robots into serf labor occupations means someone is going to lose and lose big. And these are people that have little or nothing to lose. When you take things from the very poor, like their livelihoods, they can be expected to react violently.
To introduce changes that can be reasonably expected to induce starvation and violence among the people at the bottom of the economic ladder is not progress, or advancement. Some thought should be given to alternatives before simply just doing it. That was my point. It's a subject that can fill many books. It should be handled with care in a little Slashdot message.
"The labor problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws," Jim Schwass said.
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
In order to avoid audio artifacts caused by aliasing of the digital signal, the audio must be filtered so that no frequencies approach the sample rate. The filters needed to do this by their very nature distort the audio signal. Because the CD sample rate's Nyquist frequency (1/2 the sample rate) is so close to upper range of human hearing, the filters actually do change the upper audio frequencies. There are phase shifts and decibel bumps all over the post 15KHz high frequency range. This is what causes the perception that CD audio is inferior to vinyl. Because it's true. It's true even though in theory the sample rate covers all audible frequencies.
If CDs audio were sampled at a 96KHz rate and reproduced at that rate also, then yes, they would sound the same as vinyl records. Because the upper audio components of the signal that give the brain clues to nature of the audio signal would be unchanged.
The only real data that we have on CD sales comes from the entities that have the most to gain by claiming that CD sales are rapidly falling. By claiming that CD sales are lower each year, the three or four multinational media entertainment companies that believe they own most of the world's recorded music can use that claim to push for laws that will make it impossible to copy a CD with a computer drive. Sure there will be a hundred people on Slashdot who can break the encryption, but there will also be a billion people who won't be able to do so.
Let's look at this from another perspective: CDs are bought primarily by young people, and the world's percentage of young people is booming like never before. CDs are a middle class good and the world's middle class is expanding like never before. CDs are a low-cost item and are marketed as a self-contained impulse status purchase: the world's new exploding set of middle-class young people are eager to buy low-cost status items.
Therefore, it is impossible for CD sales to be falling. Sow could they be? Generally in economics, when it is impossible for something to happen, then it doesn't happen. In all probability, the media companies are lying, and CD sales are actually strong. It's like Enron telling everyone that business is booming and then going bankrupt in a flash. It's a huge lie repeatedly told by the people who have the most to gain from this lie. It won't be the first time that something like this has happened.
So take this claim of decreased CD sales with skepticism. There is no reason for it to be true.
Summer 1977 Probably you weren't born yet or were an infant.
In any event your parents were sneaking a few tokes on a joint in the parking lot of the theater (and a few gulps of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill) that was showing Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Marathon Man ('is it safe?'), or Black Sunday (' Zere ahr no accidents!' Martha Keller and Ahhnold - jeez what a team!)
Honda is losing all their credibilty on a piece-of-shit CVCC engine. Mazda is blowing their wad on a Wankel. Toyota is toying around with the uglyest cars ever made. GM gives us the Vega, Ford the Pinto, and AMC brings up the rear with the Pacer. And the only pants that we could buy a bell-bottoms. No wonder we needed to get stoned and right now if not sooner.
If you could predict a car for 30 years in the future that you would want to buy you could have done worse than a Hyundai Accent with a ten year warranty or a Prius. Hell you could have just kept your BFAC (Big F*ucking American Car, with the emphasis on Big), your Monte Carlo or Riviera.
So the car that I want 30 years from now. Small, for good mileage. Cheap. everyone's going to be poor with the coming Peak Oil and Global Warming situations manifesting. Big Tires for driving on really bad roads. Safe, with serious air bags. Durable; something that will last a long time. Bulletproof safe, because the Peak Oil and Global Warming situations are going knock a lot people out of the middle class and they're going to looking to fuck with someone just like me for no other reason than I have a car and have the ability to make enough money to not have to live with people like them. Vandal-proof,with special coating on the exterior so that spraypainted gang symbols just wash off. Theft-proof, with a tracking device so if the shitpeople actually do manage tosteal it then I can get it back quickly.
Are you looking for a career with a real future? Make cars like the one described above. I'll buy it and so will millions of other people.
Police, in America less so than elsewhere, are basically fascists. There are good guys which always include them, and bad guys, (more often than not, you).
According to this worldview, everything they do is legal and everything you do is illegal. They have the power to use lethal violence against anyone that they feel is illegal. Which is everyone, including you.
But their resources are limited and there is a lot of paperwork to fill out for every illegal (you, baby) that they process. So they have to be selective. Anything outside the local norm gets selected. (You are outside someone's local norm).
When you understand this mentality, you understand the police everywhere in the world. There are only two other things that you need to know. 1: Having a lot of money changes you from being illegal to being legal, especially if you give some of this money to the police. 2: In most legal systems, the police don't determine whether a person or activity is guilty of anything. The courts do and the courts are a completely different branch of government from the police.
In America, the court's determination of your guilt is directly dependent upon the amount of money that you spend on lawyers. This isn't opinion or bias or fantasy, it's a basic fact that is simply never discussed publicly.
The question of whether it is illegal to video the police is irrelevant, the real question is whether the person arrested is willing and able to spend what is necessary to affirm his innocence in a court of law in the US.
The police everywhere are always going to arrest you for videotaping them. Whether or not they kill you, beat you half to death while you're in their custody, or simply detain you for a period of time depends on the traditions of the local jurisdiction.
One thing is for sure. If you do video tape the police in action, make sure that the image is being broadcast to another recording machine that they don't know about. This way you will have something to bargain with in court and you won't have to spend as money proving your innocence than if the police just take the tape from your machine.
This is not fantasy, this is the way that the world works once you get away from your PC.
This argument is absurd. In the real world, one can use gestures and rephrasing of the sentence to get the intended meaning across. We need a cheap and reasonably reliable communication device for real-world real-time situations, not something that can translate literature or pass academic worse-case situations.
People who say we need an AI supercomputer to handle basic language translation needs have probably never been in a situation where they have been completely isolated from everyone by the lack of speaking even one word of the local language. This happens all the time in the real world. Especially now when a week's pay and a 24-hour journey will get you to a million places where nobody speaks English or any other language that you took one class in while at college.
And a week's pay or NGO grant gets anyone who comes from a place where no one speaks or studies English to right to your neighborhood as well.
There is an overwhelming need for small powerful flexible cheap language translators. And telling people that it can't be done with or without an AI supercomputer doesn't help the situation any.
Thank you.
Before we get all excited about the possibility of a hole in the ground, I would like to take this opportunity to remind Slashdaughters that Mars is basically for a realistic purposes just a bright star in the night sky, nothing more.
... ...We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid war, so why shouldn't we spend the same on a science project that holds out the possibility of uniting all mankind.
There is nothing gained by spending hundreds of billions of dollars going there.
But,
- There is a real limit to the number of projects that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on before we run out of money and have nothing but dreams and rocks to show for our money. Also the money spent on the insane war hasn't been earned yet. It's been financed out of future obligations that our grandchildren must pay or suffer Argentinian-style economic collapse.
- Mankind doesn't give a shit about rockets unless they are carrying hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines being delivered to people who are different from themselves. One of the arguments for spending billions of dollars on the Apollo moon project was the unity of mankind bullshit. Playing golf on the moon didn't stop all the massacres that have happened since then. Pol Pot didn't look at the moon and think 'humankind has been there in the spirit of peace, therefore I should not order the murder of millions of my own people just because they wear glasses'. Osama didn't walk out of his cave, glance at the moon, and think 'if I order airliners full of people to be crashed into buildings full of people, then I be violating the spirit of the people who have traveled there in the name of peace'. No, and neither will walking on any dot in the night sky change the basic nature of uncivilized people.
So there may be a cave on Mars? So what? Grow up. We face climate change and peak oil in your lifetime. Dream about how you're going to feed, protect, and educate your grandchildren instead of being the first to enter some hole in the ground of what is just a dot in the night sky.
Be realistic, the 21st century demands it.
Here's my first suggestion for what to do with this thing. I want a handheld (something the size of an battery-powered face shaver or large cell phone) written language translator. On the out-facing side is a mini-scanner and on the other side is a graphics LCD screen.
Suppose you are in some place where you can't read the language (it does happen in the age of 500-seat 6000km airliners). You get a newspaper, wave the scanner over the text, and within about three seconds, the scanned writing appears in English on the LCD. You can either pop in small memory cards for different language families or have their programs stored on your laptop for downloading.
Another feature would be a built-in microphone with a program that has been trained to your voice so that you can speak into this mic and have your words translated into the written form of the local language and displayed on the LCD.
I'd be willing to pay about $100 US for this device. I'll bet a lot other people would also. Anyone interested in developing it? Would we have to pay royalities on a language? Could such a device be built on this new miniature PC card? Am I just dreaming?
I'm always amazed at the number of otherwise reasonable Slashdaughters who will actually defend bullshit laws like copyright just because it is the 'law'.
Good thing the Slashdot community doesn't concern itself with civil rights. If Slashdot had been around in the 1950's, then we would have spent fifty years endlessly debating the rights of the majority to enforce racial segration, down to seperate-but-equal water fountains.
Some things like slavery, racial segration, and RIAA extortion are just plain wrong. Regardless of how creative some of us are in coming up with weird pseudo-legalistic arguments for supporting them.