Well, the RIAA might find out that millions of people are downloading artistic material that they claim to 'own'. And they would know who.
Would they launch millions of lawsuits against these people? Would they go to the ISP providers and demand that that these millions of people be denied service? And would they offer to compensate the ISPs for the millions of dollars in lost revenue?
Would they put a microchip like an RFID into the brains of each of these millions of people so that if these people ever again tryed to experience an artistic work by an 'artist' that they have downloaded then they would get a splitting headache for a day? You downloaded a Lady Gaga song once long ago to check out what the buzz on her was about and now whenever you see her picture in the mall the RFID chip in your head starts to blast migraines. So you don't ever go to shopping malls anymore and do retail shopping over the web instead? How many millions of people are going to be subjected to this before the mall owners get pissed?
Never forget: the RIAA is based on extortion. They don't care how many millions of people are downloading their product. They select a few people at random and focus their extensive brutal legal teams on these people, making their lives hell until they get paid off. The RIAA copyright 'violations' are just an excuse for extortion. If it wasn't copyright, then it would be something else.
We do have laws against this kind of thing. It's called RICO. It worked against the mafia and it will work against the RIAA.
If you ran a record company, and someone came to you with a list of the songs that people are willing to risk extortion to download and the names of those people, then you would have the perfect marketing tool. You know exactly who wants what in terms of artistic product. All that you don't know is the price that they are willing and able to pay. If they are downloading instead of buying, then the starting price point is too high. It's a negotiation beginning point; not a fucking Interpol crime. These downloaders are your customers, they are your best customers. Cultivate them; don't unleash the dogs of war against them.
Meanwhile, an assortment of British regulators have said there is nothing they can do to stop it.
Yes, there is something that we can do to stop this kind of activity. Find the people who are doing it and kill them. That usually stops it.
We don't need the people who are doing this. They don't contribute anything. They won't be missed by anybody. And if it means that their kids will be growing up without a daddy, well, then kill the kids too. They're only children, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Save the future generations grief.
While it sounds extreme and tongue-in-cheek, it's not. I realize that it feels horrible to order and facilitate the extra-judicial execution of financial criminals. But it is a feeling that decreases with each new asshole that we stuff into the wood chipper. It's good for the computer community. It gives faith to the general people that we can police our own industry. We 'take out the trash'. Gangsters do this kind of thing all the time. Plus there are too many people in the world already. These jerks won't be missed.
In the mid-1950s, Chinese Chairman Mao noticed that the revolution was getting a little stale (after having purged and killed all the productive people after winning in 1949).
So he announced a campaign to have people come forward with new ideas and reforms to get people excited again about the new government. "Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a thousand ideas break free!"
Some people came forward. And spoke out about the problems. And suggested reforms and solutions.
The communists rounded them up and put them into slave labor prison camps, for their re-education and the redirection of their labor for the people's benefit. There may still be a few remaining alive, left in the Chinese re-education camps.
I remember this whenever the government (Which government? Any government. Any group of men with guns that have permission to kill you) invites its citizens to come forth with suggestions for improving the way that they do things.
If you have ideas to reform and improve government operations, for God's sake, don't tell anyone. Quietly and discreetly discuss your ideas with others who have the power and authority (not necessarily the same thing) to make it happen. Just do it. Make your changes invisible and inevitable.
This doubly applies to people working in corporations.
I'm an AVR programmer. I prefer to work with assembler, because I come from an electronics background and assembler is closer to the electrons. I can, and occasionally do, work in C on the AVR and Visual BASIC on the PC.
Let me say, this stuff is hard. It's hard for programmers and electronic technicians. It's really hard for hobbyists and people who have little technical background. Artists are not going to be programming AVRs to make cool performance art projects with Arduinos. OK, maybe one or two, but not many.
Even rock-bottom beginning simple stuff like blinking an LED or making a beep when a button is pressed can be challenging on a microcontroller. It's not hard to know what to do; it's hard to actually do it and make it work 100% all the time.
Your average guy or performance artist is NOT going to be making a cat door that won't let the cat in the house with a mouse. Let's see, the cat pushes on the door with its nose. This flips a sensor that activates a camera that relays an image of the cat's face to a microcontroller. The MCU parses the pixels to determine that the image sector of the mouth of the cat is significantly different from the analysis of previous images of the cat's face. The door won't open.
Now if you're reading this, then yes, you can program something that might be able to do this. You're a Slashdaughter, for Christ's sake, you can do anything technical, and you know it. But you wouldn't be able to do it on a $1.59 microcontroller. And you sure wouldn't be able to do it if you didn't have thousands of hours of programming experience and technical training.
It doesn't matter what language or integrated development environment that you use, it's just not going to happen.
And frankly, most of the cool projects that performance artists want to do with computers would require a real gigahertz/gigabyte/advanced_OS PC to do, not an 8-bit microcontroller with 1K of RAM that can just barely run a microwave oven, let alone a telephone.
Performance artists want professional-level programming ability and talent at bargain-basement artists prices. But if you're not a beautiful woman into performance art who has the ability to hook up her beautiful friends to nerdy techno-geeks who actually do the programming, it's unlikely to happen.
I am having serious difficult believing that there could be any possibility of world-class advanced technology being developed by anyone in North Korea.
This is a zone where people have been kept at near starvation level of existance by a fanatical idealogical dynastic psychotic family of rulers for sixty years. And kept as slaves by the Japanese for fifty years prior to that (1945). Satellite photos show North Korea as the darkest place on Earth during the night hours. The few refugees that have escaped describe brutal Stalinist secret police forces everywhere and mass starvation prevailent in the countryside.
All access to the outside world is denied except for a few party elite. In its place is a brain-washing (and the North Koreans invented brain-washing) cult of Kim Il Sung and his son.
Sure they have a small number of Solzhenizen's 'First Circle' technical elite, but very few people are in this category. These poor fools managed to develop an atomic device and deliver it to the top leadership. This does not mean that the place is ready to join the civilized world.
North Korea is a great dilemma for the civilized world. As millions die from starvation and drug-resistant TB, do we just ignore them as we did Cambodia in the late 1970's? Do we risk stumbling into a pan-Asian war by trying to intervene with humanitarian aid? Do we just continue to do nothing under the guise of holding six-party talks? Do we form a coalition of China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia to murder the top 100 NK leaders, invade, and transform the place into a Chinese-style Socialist-Entrepenerial society? Do we just bring the 30000+ solders home that we have on the DMZ and tell the Koreans/Chinese/Japanese to deal with the situation themselves? I would favor the later policy, but I don't live there.
Manned space flight was a government program that has been determined to be too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and few people believe that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into space will solve them. Grown-up people chosen to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. NASA and its Tom Swift-space buffs can't accept it. I'm sorry, guys, but it's time to get real.
Sure, politicians will continue announce great new projects like manned Mars missions. But then they will quietly de-fund them to nearly nothing a few years later. They don't have any choice. Money that would have been spent on these projects has already been spent; and it's gone.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space exploration. There is no trillion dollars for anything left anywhere in the USA.
Money is not a physical good. Money is basically created out of nothing. If this conjured money doesn't in turn create real wealth, it disappears back to nothing by means of inflation. Space exploration does not create wealth by itself. It is only a combination of heavily-subsidized unfocused research and technological stunts done for national prestige. NASA engineers never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space in the coming years because there was already a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $650,000 mortgages to $10/hr janitors. And then there were all the trillions of dollars spent on federal government budget deficits.
All these trillion-dollar misadventures didn't create any real wealth. And therefore, the money disappeared. America was rich in the past, now it's not. There were great sums of money in the past available for funding giant government projects, but there aren't going to be any more of these giant projects in the future. The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of humanity don't exist anymore.
Space-cadets love to talk about the need to venture beyond the moon in order to save humanity from a soon-to-be dying Earth. But this is not science talking, it's a personality disorder. These guys assume that because their scientific prowess has created tools and techniques that can destroy the Earth, then it will inevitable happen. And that they have a right, and even a destiny, to make it happen. They confuse rockets with penises and hydrogen bombs with testicles. These guys are not clear-eyed, sober engineers; they are death-worshiping fascists. They are left-over 'Dr. Strangelove' techno-psychopaths from mid-20th century. They're pissed because 'little-minded people' wouldn't let them burn the Earth and rule the ashes. These men are transparently insane, and you shouldn't pay serious attention to them. Fortunately, their time has gone and they don't have the political power that they did fifty years ago.
We live in a different age now. This is the era of limits. Understand this and we will all prosper in new and unexpected ways. We all need to learn to differentiate fact from fantasy and leave the fantasies to the Hollywood. Space Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that has begun to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly. Don't let that happen to you.
This is not off-topic! It is about how to make cheap music. Not as cheap as moving 3000 songs between iPods and PCs with USB2, but cheaper than blowing your entire Pell grant at Guitar Center.
You can make a cheap keyboard by using a PS2 keyboard and an microcontroller. I've uploaded mine to the projects section of www.avrfreaks.net. Also there is a description of making a very cheap continous controller using a 16-cent InfraRed diode, a 16-cent InfraRed detector, and an op-amp. Moving your hand from 1 to 6 inches from the diode/detector pair changes the op-amp voltage between +0.2 and 4 volts. Plug this voltage into the microcontroller's analog-to-digital converter, map it to 0-127 range, and link it to the MIDI PitchBend or Filter Cutoff controller. Add a lot of reverb and echo-delay and you have very cool and very cheap sound.
Get a free VSTi host and some VSTi instruments for your PC. My absolute favorite is the Nanotron2, which is a Mellotron emulator. Moody Blues, King Crimson, and Strawberry Fields sound nearly exactly like the original recordings.
Not sure what to play? Download a MIDI file to sheet music notation program and some MIDI files of your favorite songs. You'll need to learn to read music and figure out what the chords are. But if you learned C++ then learning music notation is a breeze. Soon you'll just look at a cluster of notes and know that it's a E-flat, suspended, sixth chord.
Cheap MIDI synths like the Yamaha TX81Z allow you to get some seriously strange and industrial sounds. You can always resell any old cheap synth that you buy a year later for what you paid for it, if you grow tired of it.
To be unbelievable pedantic, the word "it's" should be "its". It's is a contraction of "it is", while "its" is the possessive pronoun.
It's (it is) the principal of its (belonging to it) meaning.
People get annoyed at this level of grammar, but machine translator programs require it to be precise. And we need machine language translator programs, because no one is going to learn a hundred languages. Even though we can visit a hundred countries on a month's paycheck now.
Whenever the province of Quebec appears in the news, what is usually lacking in the story is any mention of the ever-present language issue. Basically, the seven million people in Quebec speak French and the other five hundred million people in North America don't. To deal with this situation, the fanatics that have controlled Quebec for the past forty years (more or less) have institutionalized and perpetuated a peculiar fantasy that everyone else in NA must adapt to their need to continue using this legacy language in all manner of public interaction above the level of conversation. This is why you see French translations on products in places like Southern California and Mexico, where no one speaks French.
Now personally I like the French language. It's one of the civilized languages of the world, along with English and C++. All the other languages are distant also-rans. But the present generation of native French speakers are totally clueless as to how to restore this beautiful language to its proper place in the world. They are such nit-wits that they are risking the possibility of having French disappear from use in the next hundred years like all the other European and tribal legacy languages, like Polish and Apache.
What is desperately needed is a powerful, free, and widely-available computer program that accurately translates English, and eventually the other superfluous languages of the world, into French. And French back into English. The Turing test for this program would be to say something (speech-to-text included, of course!) into the program, translate it Eng to Frn, re-translate it back to Eng, and have it comprehensibly match the original speech.
This is what the people of Quebec should be working on during those long cold winter nights that start in mid-September and last until mid-May. But instead, we who venture to their beautiful country, get endless amounts of merde about our unwillingness to employ this wonderful language in our attempts at self-improvement through conversation with the people in this wonderful country. But mes amis, it's not unwillingness on our part, it's inability. It's not our fault that we were born in the 99.4% of the world that doesn't have French as a birth language. So, s'il vous plait, cut us some slack, Jacques.
And start developing the machine that will do the translating for us. It is more important than all the other technical issues in this wonderful country.
Je me souviens: Quebec I forgot: Ontario I never gave a shit: California ?Que?: everyone else in the western hemisphere
Re:Obsessional fools, not scientists
on
Mars500 Mission Begins
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...and just because the money isn't there today, doesn't mean the scientists, politicians and astronauts of tomorrow aren't falling in love with the whole space thing right now,...
The money isn't here today. And it's not going to be here tomorrow. That's my whole point. The money was pissed away. It's gone. And this means exactly that the scientists, et al. of tomorrow won't be falling in love with the whole Space thing. The whole Space thing is over. The scientists of today aren't re-falling-In-love with the three-masted wooden-sailing-ship thing of yesterday. That's over too.
The scientists, politicians and astronauts of tomorrow are going to be falling in love with the porn images of women from the end of the 20th-century that they can see on their little cell-phones.
...or that the technologies they'll need to get there aren't going to be massively cheaper by then.
The technology isn't going to get cheaper. Cheap technology depends on cheap energy. Peak Oil is ensuring that energy will get very expensive in the next twenty years. As it does, the computer_silicon_Moore's Law_telecommunications revolution hits a brick wall. Prepare for it. Start now. Read or bleed. Learn or burn.
we can either waste huge swathes of money killing each other or on a space folly then I'll go with space folly every day.
You and I don't any choice in the matter. All we can do is refuse to kill each other and to protest space folly at every opportunity. And keep our money out of the hands of the madmen would waste it on murder and Space fantasies.
Be it by gazing at the stars and learning about the universe, about motivating and inspiring people to push the limits of the physical possible while they dream about doing awesome things, fed by media, scifi, fantasy, dream-technology or what have you. It inspires and makes you work for days, months, years without end to a seemingly useless purpose.
A perfect example of a quasi-religious obsession. And all this talk about working without end (and without adequate pay) reminds me of cotton fields and seperate drinking fountains.
We have evolved these decades, we have new minds, a new "basic understanding", we process information differently and our younglings and the active working society has different morals, different insights and different goals or knowledge as decades ago.
Horseshit. You're just an ignorant fool like all the rest of us. You talk like you need to get laid. You watch too many movies that have long poorly-focused scenes of model 'spaceships' with their wires removed by CGI.
These people are obsessional fools, not scientists or explorers. If these morons were serious in finding out what it was like to spend 500 days locked in a room, they could just ask any of the millions of people that the government (USA or Russian Federation, what's the difference?) is holding in prison.
Space Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There were trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there were' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of humanity don't exist anymore. They've been already spent; and they're gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Sure, apartheid was evil and cruel. Yeah, we all cheered when Nelson Mandela was elected President. They had our hopes, investments, and prayers. We all waved our plastic lighters when Paul Simon brought all those beautiful black Zulu singers on stage in the Graceland tour. We all believed.
Then we woke up. We found that South Africa has become the rape capital of the world. We found that most people there are superstitious and ignorant, and violent. Where most people still believe that drinking the blood of 13-year-old virgin cures AIDS. (It doesn't, guys, just in case you were wondering) Where the few remaining whites running productive farms in the countryside are hunted down, tortured, and murdered by the new South African police that just look the other way and call it justice. Where most international investments are skimmed by corrupt and incompetent government officials. Where no blacks outside of the government are better off than they were under apartheid. Where the whites have reestablished semi-segregated quasi-homelands with their own police and self-defense forces that mirror apartheid. Where nobody in their right mind is going to spend thousands of dollars to fly to this dangerous and remote part of the world just to watch a soccer game.
Africa is a giant mess. A half-assed collection of 'daylight democracies' and nighttime tribal savageries. South Africa is no different. And how do they deal with their problems.
Banning internet porn. Fucking buffoons. Bring back the Boers.
Space Exploration is a 20th century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be to expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Please excuse my {sigh} at the infinite inability of spacefaring Slashdaughters to understand contemporary political and economic reality.
If you combine all commercially rendered space services, and then also add all the funding scientific missions get, you're at a multi trillion market a year.
There is no market. Space funding is a government expense. It doesn't follow any of the economic rules that compose markets. It's all liabilities with no assets. It's not an investment with a reasonable expected rate of return. Governments fund space exploration because no business will do it. Governments do it for 'national prestige', military advantage, or old-fashioned corruption. There is no multi-trillion market in space, there is no market at all. There never has been and there never will be a commercially-successful business venture (that is, one that is not government subsided) in space.
Building an industrial complex on the moon doesn't help you lift things off earth. What it does do is let you launch things off the moon, into earth orbit and elsewhere, quite easily.
The cost of getting manufactured items and industrial complexes to the moon in the first place far exceeds any reduced cost of getting things from the moon to earth orbit.
If you can build and launch things off the moon, you can suddenly offer a service that is worth trillions a year in Earth dollars, at a marginal cost.
What, precisely, is that service? There is nothing on the moon. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put things on the moon is not going to turn into trillions of value by sending them back, regardless of marginal cost.
Yes, there is an up-front investment to make it happen. Yes that investment is rather large.
I'm going to assume that there is an American on the other end of this conversation. 20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Space Exploration is a 20th century American quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who believed it too strongly.
Installing an industrial complex on the moon is insane for anyone. Industrial complexes make things that other people buy. Things are only made when they can be sold. The transportation costs and the capital costs of building any form of industrial complex on the moon would make it impossible to make any profit from anything made on the moon.
In twenty years, it's going to nearly impossible to ship manufactured goods around the world, never mind shipping things between the earth and the moon....then they will simply drive space services prices down for rock bottom for anybody attempting to launch anything off -sic- earths gravity well
I fail to understand how wasting billions of dollars of Japanese taxpayer's money will do anything to make it easier to get material from the earth's surface to outer space. As peak-oil manifests itself over the next 20 years, it will become more transparently absurd to fill a 35-story-high tube full of $10_a_gallon rocket fuel to put anything in space. Robots, satellites, humans, bombs, international space stations,...anything.
Space exploration was a 20th-century phenomenon, like the Beatles or 15-foot automobiles with dorsal fins. That era is nearly over; it's not just beginning. Sorry to puncture your bubble and fantasies, but truth is truth.
We should not forget that Japan has never recovered from their 'lost decade' after their stock market, real estate, and banking system collapsed in early 1990s.
By standard accounting practices, their entire country is bankrupt. What keeps them going is a collective refusal to balance accounts; a cultural need to 'save face' at any cost; brutal suppression of minorities, the elderly, and the disabled; and massive government spending on dubious public-works projects.
They are the world's masters at 'bridge-to-nowhere' projects. Where other countries would waste public funds on unwinnable foreign wars and dubious public 'wars-on-drugs', 'wars-on-poverty', 'wars-on-discrimination', the Japanese don't fight insane wars, don't get high, don't keep troublesome minorities around, and don't feel any need to be embarrassed by their discrimination against inferior humans.
Therefore a propensity towards ridiculous 'feel-good' but meaningless public works projects like moon exploration.
The only people who need to take the Japanese seriously are the people who live in Japan. The rest of us are only obliged (the root of the word 'abrigato') to be courteous, polite, and respectful in our personal dealing with the Japanese, and fair in our business dealings. But we are under no obligation to take anything that they do seriously.
I cantankerously but humbly disagree with every conclusion of this article. I don't agree that college-trained people are generally smarter. I readily agree that college educated people are better at manipulating and understanding symbols and words than the general population. But they are not better at using the vast amount of stored knowledge and experience stored in those words and books to make their lives better. They are marginally better but not greatly so.
I live in Portland Oregon USA and hear constantly about the movement of smart and creative people into smart and creative cities, of which Portland is proclaimed to be. It is simply not true. People move here because life is easy here. We are a thousand miles from any urban center of global consequence.
For example, we have a company called Wieden+Kennedy, who are a world-renowned employer of creative people. They make advertising. Everybody loathes advertising, and everyone does as much as possible to minimize their exposure to it. If a person is really creative, then why would they be wasting their creativity on advertising? Hense they are not creative: they're just people who have the annoying talent of recycling cliches to sell things that no one would buy if they weren't persuaded to do so by 'creative' people.
Real creative people make useful things and solve real problems. In Portland, 'creative' people make nothing and create real problems.
As for the relationship between technical abilities and creativity: there is very little. Look at the vast majority of postings here on Slashdot that follow every story. Dim, moronic, childish, dull, embarrassing. Not creative. If there were any intrinsic connection between creativity and technical/scientific/engineering ability, we would see it here. We don't.
Creativity is what creativity does. You can't measure it. It's not a fashion and real creativity is rarely noticed for what it is.
Are we going to lose all the great music that was made in the last third of the 20th century? NO, Because hundreds of millions of people refuse to obey the law as brought down from Mt. Sinai by the RIAA. By making millions of bootleg illegal MP3 copies of the our generation's music, we ensure that it will be around through any data disaster that could befall any centralized data storage depository.
The more widespread data is; the more protected that it is.
It's the culture of the 'greatest generation' that's going to disappear. The people who were born in the first third of the 20th century and lived their lives trusting their culture to corporate jerkoffs. Heard any great music from the 1930s or 1940s lately? It's quite possible that you never will. No one's collecting it. No one's preserving it. No one's copying it. No one's distributing it. When the vinyl from that time all chips, breaks, and wears out, the music of that era is gone.
If you want to protect your data, copy it, bury it, review it, play with it. But for god's sakes, don't encrypt it
"It was ten years ago today, all my tech stocks blew away, they've been going in and out of style, but you're guaranteed to lose a pile"
apologies to Sir Paul...
But seriously, folks, this is a bubble price. Like the $656,565 valuation on that crappy three-room clapboard box-house that you almost bought in Fresno three years ago. *I hope that you passed that one by*.
Bubbles exist in markets. When they burst, the people who believed that the price was a realistic valuation lose most if not all of their money.
Now is the time to sell your Apple stock. EXXON owns the world's energy supply: Apple owns some coolness. Is Apple the second most valuable company in the world behind Exxon?
No f***ing way.
A lot of people lost a lot of money believing in tech stocks ten years ago. Heed their lesson.
Yes, You're right. I got a chance to see this movie again recently when I found it as a DVD on the shelf of the local library. It's a forgotten classic. The plot, editing, and pace is crisp and timeless. The characters are scary and cruel without slipping (too much) into over-dramatic parody. The issues and background is as relevant now as it was then. And it's fascinating to see South Beach without all blonde T&A and psychedelic colors that characterizes CGI:Miami.
And speaking of hot T&A with not-a-little bit of B&D, Martha Keller's character Dhalia Ihad is one true bad-ass for the ages. "Zhere ahre no accidents!"
Is this an American pop culture reference somehow related to lighter-than-air atmospheric transport vehicles? If so, then how about a link for all the Slashdaughters who aren't plugged into American pop culture.
For me, reference to lighter-than-air atmospheric vehicles always invokes a reference to Bruce Dern's portrayal of John McCain in the 1977 film "Black Sunday". In this film, Mr. Dern plays a tortured Vietnam Vet Navy Pilot P.O.W. who teams up with a beautiful Swiss-Palestinian female terrorist to deliver a big surprise at the Super Bowl to all the little Moms and Dads and the kids sitting in the stands, eating their little weenies, and watching the big game.
In the late 1980s I worked for a biomedical company (BMSI) in Silicon Valley that made EEG equipment. They stored the EEG waveforms on a video tape. The image on the video tape had the EEG waveforms from 16 head sensors on the left of the screen and an image of the patient on the right. Patients would try to get 100% disability checks for life by claiming to be epileptic. They would spend a night in a monitored sleep lab, and then do a little horizontal dance while pretending to be asleep. Our equipment matched the brainwave recording to the image of the patient twitching to verify or disprove nocturnal epilepsy.
It doesn't really matter that you can or can't do real high-level research at home on DIY equipment. It only matters that you can build calibrated and reliable medical equipment that delivers accurate results at a small fraction of the cost of the equipment used in American hospitals. As we all know, the US medical health care system is collapsing. The recent legal reforms are basically meaningless and consist mostly of administrative and billing changes. If you can do a $1500 sleep apnea test or overnight EEG recording on DIY equipment for $50, then you are a welcome and honored member of the new health care system that is self-generating now underneath the bloated, corrupt, and crumbling official health care system.
Just be discreet at the present time.
By the way, instead of digitizing and storing the EEG waveforms directly, do a FFT on 1024 samples. The EEG waveform is basically sinusoidal so it can be recreated mathematically. Determine the formula that will regenerate the recorded waveform sample, and only store the offsets and co-efficients of the sine wave formula that will recreate that segment of the waveform accurately. You will get a 1000-to-1 data compression and be able to get all the circuitry into a hand-held small package.
... ending a stop-engine notification to the list of participating vehicles stopped at the traffic signal...
Let's see... A whole line of middle-class people making the daily commute from the city center to the prosperous suburbs. They pass daily through the ring of dangerous and not-so-prosperous blighted urban areas that surround the city center with all its gleaming skyscrapers.
A resident presses a button, which sends a signal to a hacked cell-phone tower, which sends a series of codes that transmits a set of random stop-engine notifications that immediately disables one in ten autos. A huge traffic jam and multi-car crash happens. The local residents of the not-so-prosperous blighted urban areas, annoyed at the delay in receiving their reparations checks, run out onto the highway and have a joyous time relieving the immobilized overpaid suburbanites of their surplus belonging, petty cash, and rectal chastity. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
And next week,just when it seems that all is back to normal, it all happens again. And again.
Someone discovers that the ability to disrupt the normal operation of a motor vehicle is patented by IBM. Who quietly paid off politicians to mandate that this ability to wirelessly stop car engines in all new vehicles (using chips and equipment supplied by a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary company). Huge waves of lawsuits against IBM result. IBM goes bankrupt. People refuse to drive into the city. Prosperous gleaming skyscrapers can't pay property tax and start to empty out. Pissed NWMs burn down large sections of the city.
City becomes another Detroit.
I can't believe that people actually get paid to develop stupid shit like this. What are they thinking? In the depths of their souls and the distant regions of their pointed little heads, they must truly believe that it still is 1962, and it will be forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Thirty years after marrying her, my ex-wife now has more chins than the Beijing phone directory.
Well, the RIAA might find out that millions of people are downloading artistic material that they claim to 'own'. And they would know who.
Would they launch millions of lawsuits against these people? Would they go to the ISP providers and demand that that these millions of people be denied service? And would they offer to compensate the ISPs for the millions of dollars in lost revenue?
Would they put a microchip like an RFID into the brains of each of these millions of people so that if these people ever again tryed to experience an artistic work by an 'artist' that they have downloaded then they would get a splitting headache for a day? You downloaded a Lady Gaga song once long ago to check out what the buzz on her was about and now whenever you see her picture in the mall the RFID chip in your head starts to blast migraines. So you don't ever go to shopping malls anymore and do retail shopping over the web instead? How many millions of people are going to be subjected to this before the mall owners get pissed?
Never forget: the RIAA is based on extortion. They don't care how many millions of people are downloading their product. They select a few people at random and focus their extensive brutal legal teams on these people, making their lives hell until they get paid off. The RIAA copyright 'violations' are just an excuse for extortion. If it wasn't copyright, then it would be something else.
We do have laws against this kind of thing. It's called RICO. It worked against the mafia and it will work against the RIAA.
If you ran a record company, and someone came to you with a list of the songs that people are willing to risk extortion to download and the names of those people, then you would have the perfect marketing tool. You know exactly who wants what in terms of artistic product. All that you don't know is the price that they are willing and able to pay. If they are downloading instead of buying, then the starting price point is too high. It's a negotiation beginning point; not a fucking Interpol crime. These downloaders are your customers, they are your best customers. Cultivate them; don't unleash the dogs of war against them.
Meanwhile, an assortment of British regulators have said there is nothing they can do to stop it.
Yes, there is something that we can do to stop this kind of activity. Find the people who are doing it and kill them. That usually stops it.
We don't need the people who are doing this. They don't contribute anything. They won't be missed by anybody. And if it means that their kids will be growing up without a daddy, well, then kill the kids too. They're only children, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Save the future generations grief.
While it sounds extreme and tongue-in-cheek, it's not. I realize that it feels horrible to order and facilitate the extra-judicial execution of financial criminals. But it is a feeling that decreases with each new asshole that we stuff into the wood chipper. It's good for the computer community. It gives faith to the general people that we can police our own industry. We 'take out the trash'. Gangsters do this kind of thing all the time. Plus there are too many people in the world already. These jerks won't be missed.
In the mid-1950s, Chinese Chairman Mao noticed that the revolution was getting a little stale (after having purged and killed all the productive people after winning in 1949).
So he announced a campaign to have people come forward with new ideas and reforms to get people excited again about the new government. "Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a thousand ideas break free!"
Some people came forward. And spoke out about the problems. And suggested reforms and solutions.
The communists rounded them up and put them into slave labor prison camps, for their re-education and the redirection of their labor for the people's benefit. There may still be a few remaining alive, left in the Chinese re-education camps.
I remember this whenever the government (Which government? Any government. Any group of men with guns that have permission to kill you) invites its citizens to come forth with suggestions for improving the way that they do things.
If you have ideas to reform and improve government operations, for God's sake, don't tell anyone. Quietly and discreetly discuss your ideas with others who have the power and authority (not necessarily the same thing) to make it happen. Just do it. Make your changes invisible and inevitable.
This doubly applies to people working in corporations.
Stay low, stay effective, stay informed, stay relevant, and stay alive.
I'm an AVR programmer. I prefer to work with assembler, because I come from an electronics background and assembler is closer to the electrons. I can, and occasionally do, work in C on the AVR and Visual BASIC on the PC.
Let me say, this stuff is hard. It's hard for programmers and electronic technicians. It's really hard for hobbyists and people who have little technical background. Artists are not going to be programming AVRs to make cool performance art projects with Arduinos. OK, maybe one or two, but not many.
Even rock-bottom beginning simple stuff like blinking an LED or making a beep when a button is pressed can be challenging on a microcontroller. It's not hard to know what to do; it's hard to actually do it and make it work 100% all the time.
Your average guy or performance artist is NOT going to be making a cat door that won't let the cat in the house with a mouse. Let's see, the cat pushes on the door with its nose. This flips a sensor that activates a camera that relays an image of the cat's face to a microcontroller. The MCU parses the pixels to determine that the image sector of the mouth of the cat is significantly different from the analysis of previous images of the cat's face. The door won't open.
Now if you're reading this, then yes, you can program something that might be able to do this. You're a Slashdaughter, for Christ's sake, you can do anything technical, and you know it.
But you wouldn't be able to do it on a $1.59 microcontroller. And you sure wouldn't be able to do it if you didn't have thousands of hours of programming experience and technical training.
It doesn't matter what language or integrated development environment that you use, it's just not going to happen.
And frankly, most of the cool projects that performance artists want to do with computers would require a real gigahertz/gigabyte/advanced_OS PC to do, not an 8-bit microcontroller with 1K of RAM that can just barely run a microwave oven, let alone a telephone.
Performance artists want professional-level programming ability and talent at bargain-basement artists prices. But if you're not a beautiful woman into performance art who has the ability to hook up her beautiful friends to nerdy techno-geeks who actually do the programming, it's unlikely to happen.
I am having serious difficult believing that there could be any possibility of world-class advanced technology being developed by anyone in North Korea.
This is a zone where people have been kept at near starvation level of existance by a fanatical idealogical dynastic psychotic family of rulers for sixty years. And kept as slaves by the Japanese for fifty years prior to that (1945). Satellite photos show North Korea as the darkest place on Earth during the night hours. The few refugees that have escaped describe brutal Stalinist secret police forces everywhere and mass starvation prevailent in the countryside.
All access to the outside world is denied except for a few party elite. In its place is a brain-washing (and the North Koreans invented brain-washing) cult of Kim Il Sung and his son.
Sure they have a small number of Solzhenizen's 'First Circle' technical elite, but very few people are in this category. These poor fools managed to develop an atomic device and deliver it to the top leadership. This does not mean that the place is ready to join the civilized world.
North Korea is a great dilemma for the civilized world. As millions die from starvation and drug-resistant TB, do we just ignore them as we did Cambodia in the late 1970's? Do we risk stumbling into a pan-Asian war by trying to intervene with humanitarian aid? Do we just continue to do nothing under the guise of holding six-party talks? Do we form a coalition of China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia to murder the top 100 NK leaders, invade, and transform the place into a Chinese-style Socialist-Entrepenerial society? Do we just bring the 30000+ solders home that we have on the DMZ and tell the Koreans/Chinese/Japanese to deal with the situation themselves? I would favor the later policy, but I don't live there.
Manned space flight was a government program that has been determined to be
too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding
levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and few people
believe that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into space will solve
them. Grown-up people chosen to make hard and realistic decisions about our
public funds and resources have decided this. NASA and its Tom Swift-space buffs
can't accept it. I'm sorry, guys, but it's time to get real.
Sure, politicians will continue announce great new projects like manned Mars
missions. But then they will quietly de-fund them to nearly nothing a few years
later. They don't have any choice. Money that would have been spent on these
projects has already been spent; and it's gone.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because
they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that
their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for
space exploration. There is no trillion dollars for anything left anywhere in
the USA.
Money is not a physical good. Money is basically created out of nothing. If
this conjured money doesn't in turn create real wealth, it disappears back to
nothing by means of inflation. Space exploration does not create wealth by
itself. It is only a combination of heavily-subsidized unfocused research and
technological stunts done for national prestige. NASA engineers never
understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand
economics.
There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space in the coming
years because there was already a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan
war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on
maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too
big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $650,000 mortgages to
$10/hr janitors. And then there were all the trillions of dollars spent on federal
government budget deficits.
All these trillion-dollar misadventures didn't create any real wealth. And
therefore, the money disappeared. America was rich in the past, now it's not.
There were great sums of money in the past available for funding giant government
projects, but there aren't going to be any more of these giant projects in the future.
The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on
the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of
humanity don't exist anymore.
Space-cadets love to talk about the need to venture beyond the moon in order
to save humanity from a soon-to-be dying Earth. But this is not science
talking, it's a personality disorder. These guys assume that because their
scientific prowess has created tools and techniques that can destroy the Earth,
then it will inevitable happen. And that they have a right, and even a destiny,
to make it happen. They confuse rockets with penises and hydrogen bombs with
testicles. These guys are not clear-eyed, sober engineers; they are death-worshiping
fascists. They are left-over 'Dr. Strangelove' techno-psychopaths from mid-20th
century. They're pissed because 'little-minded people' wouldn't let them burn
the Earth and rule the ashes. These men are transparently insane, and you shouldn't
pay serious attention to them. Fortunately, their time has gone and they don't
have the political power that they did fifty years ago.
We live in a different age now. This is the era of limits. Understand this
and we will all prosper in new and unexpected ways. We all need to learn to
differentiate fact from fantasy and leave the fantasies to the Hollywood. Space
Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that has begun to manifest itself
as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Don't let that happen to you.
This is not off-topic! It is about how to make cheap music. Not as cheap as moving 3000 songs between iPods and PCs with USB2, but cheaper than blowing your entire Pell grant at Guitar Center.
You can make a cheap keyboard by using a PS2 keyboard and an microcontroller. I've uploaded mine to the projects section of www.avrfreaks.net. Also there is a description of making a very cheap continous controller using a 16-cent InfraRed diode, a 16-cent InfraRed detector, and an op-amp. Moving your hand from 1 to 6 inches from the diode/detector pair changes the op-amp voltage between +0.2 and 4 volts. Plug this voltage into the microcontroller's analog-to-digital converter, map it to 0-127 range, and link it to the MIDI PitchBend or Filter Cutoff controller. Add a lot of reverb and echo-delay and you have very cool and very cheap sound.
Get a free VSTi host and some VSTi instruments for your PC. My absolute favorite is the Nanotron2, which is a Mellotron emulator. Moody Blues, King Crimson, and Strawberry Fields sound nearly exactly like the original recordings.
Not sure what to play? Download a MIDI file to sheet music notation program and some MIDI files of your favorite songs. You'll need to learn to read music and figure out what the chords are. But if you learned C++ then learning music notation is a breeze. Soon you'll just look at a cluster of notes and know that it's a E-flat, suspended, sixth chord.
Cheap MIDI synths like the Yamaha TX81Z allow you to get some seriously strange and industrial sounds. You can always resell any old cheap synth that you buy a year later for what you paid for it, if you grow tired of it.
To be unbelievable pedantic, the word "it's" should be "its". It's is a contraction of "it is", while "its" is the possessive pronoun.
It's (it is) the principal of its (belonging to it) meaning.
People get annoyed at this level of grammar, but machine translator programs require it to be precise. And we need machine language translator programs, because no one is going to learn a hundred languages. Even though we can visit a hundred countries on a month's paycheck now.
Whenever the province of Quebec appears in the news, what is usually lacking in the story is any mention of the ever-present language issue. Basically, the seven million people in Quebec speak French and the other five hundred million people in North America don't. To deal with this situation, the fanatics that have controlled Quebec for the past forty years (more or less) have institutionalized and perpetuated a peculiar fantasy that everyone else in NA must adapt to their need to continue using this legacy language in all manner of public interaction above the level of conversation. This is why you see French translations on products in places like Southern California and Mexico, where no one speaks French.
Now personally I like the French language. It's one of the civilized languages of the world, along with English and C++. All the other languages are distant also-rans. But the present generation of native French speakers are totally clueless as to how to restore this beautiful language to its proper place in the world. They are such nit-wits that they are risking the possibility of having French disappear from use in the next hundred years like all the other European and tribal legacy languages, like Polish and Apache.
What is desperately needed is a powerful, free, and widely-available computer program that accurately translates English, and eventually the other superfluous languages of the world, into French. And French back into English. The Turing test for this program would be to say something (speech-to-text included, of course!) into the program, translate it Eng to Frn, re-translate it back to Eng, and have it comprehensibly match the original speech.
This is what the people of Quebec should be working on during those long cold winter nights that start in mid-September and last until mid-May. But instead, we who venture to their beautiful country, get endless amounts of merde about our unwillingness to employ this wonderful language in our attempts at self-improvement through conversation with the people in this wonderful country. But mes amis, it's not unwillingness on our part, it's inability. It's not our fault that we were born in the 99.4% of the world that doesn't have French as a birth language. So, s'il vous plait, cut us some slack, Jacques.
And start developing the machine that will do the translating for us. It is more important than all the other technical issues in this wonderful country.
Je me souviens: Quebec I forgot: Ontario I never gave a shit: California ?Que?: everyone else in the western hemisphere
...and just because the money isn't there today, doesn't mean the scientists, politicians and astronauts of tomorrow aren't falling in love with the whole space thing right now,...
The money isn't here today. And it's not going to be here tomorrow. That's my whole point. The money was pissed away. It's gone. And this means exactly that the scientists, et al. of tomorrow won't be falling in love with the whole Space thing. The whole Space thing is over. The scientists of today aren't re-falling-In-love with the three-masted wooden-sailing-ship thing of yesterday. That's over too.
The scientists, politicians and astronauts of tomorrow are going to be falling in love with the porn images of women from the end of the 20th-century that they can see on their little cell-phones.
The technology isn't going to get cheaper. Cheap technology depends on cheap energy. Peak Oil is ensuring that energy will get very expensive in the next twenty years. As it does, the computer_silicon_Moore's Law_telecommunications revolution hits a brick wall.
Prepare for it. Start now. Read or bleed. Learn or burn.
we can either waste huge swathes of money killing each other or on a space folly then I'll go with space folly every day.
You and I don't any choice in the matter. All we can do is refuse to kill each other and to protest space folly at every opportunity. And keep our money out of the hands of the madmen would waste it on murder and Space fantasies.
Be it by gazing at the stars and learning about the universe, about motivating and inspiring people to push the limits of the physical possible while they dream about doing awesome things, fed by media, scifi, fantasy, dream-technology or what have you. It inspires and makes you work for days, months, years without end to a seemingly useless purpose.
A perfect example of a quasi-religious obsession. And all this talk about working without end (and without adequate pay) reminds me of cotton fields and seperate drinking fountains.
We have evolved these decades, we have new minds, a new "basic understanding", we process information differently and our younglings and the active working society has different morals, different insights and different goals or knowledge as decades ago.
Horseshit. You're just an ignorant fool like all the rest of us. You talk like you need to get laid. You watch too many movies that have long poorly-focused scenes of model 'spaceships' with their wires removed by CGI.
Grow up. Get a life.
These people are obsessional fools, not scientists or explorers. If these morons were serious in finding out what it was like to spend 500 days locked in a room, they could just ask any of the millions of people that the government (USA or Russian Federation, what's the difference?) is holding in prison.
Space Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There were trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there were' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of humanity don't exist anymore. They've been already spent; and they're gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Sure, apartheid was evil and cruel. Yeah, we all cheered when Nelson Mandela was elected President. They had our hopes, investments, and prayers. We all waved our plastic lighters when Paul Simon brought all those beautiful black Zulu singers on stage in the Graceland tour. We all believed.
Then we woke up. We found that South Africa has become the rape capital of the world. We found that most people there are superstitious and ignorant, and violent. Where most people still believe that drinking the blood of 13-year-old virgin cures AIDS. (It doesn't, guys, just in case you were wondering) Where the few remaining whites running productive farms in the countryside are hunted down, tortured, and murdered by the new South African police that just look the other way and call it justice. Where most international investments are skimmed by corrupt and incompetent government officials. Where no blacks outside of the government are better off than they were under apartheid. Where the whites have reestablished semi-segregated quasi-homelands with their own police and self-defense forces that mirror apartheid. Where nobody in their right mind is going to spend thousands of dollars to fly to this dangerous and remote part of the world just to watch a soccer game.
Africa is a giant mess. A half-assed collection of 'daylight democracies' and nighttime tribal savageries. South Africa is no different. And how do they deal with their problems.
Banning internet porn. Fucking buffoons. Bring back the Boers.
Space Exploration is a 20th century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be to expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
You'll have to excuse my [sigh],
Please excuse my {sigh} at the infinite inability of spacefaring Slashdaughters to understand contemporary political and economic reality.
If you combine all commercially rendered space services, and then also add all the funding scientific missions get, you're at a multi trillion market a year.
There is no market. Space funding is a government expense. It doesn't follow any of the economic rules that compose markets. It's all liabilities with no assets. It's not an investment with a reasonable expected rate of return. Governments fund space exploration because no business will do it. Governments do it for 'national prestige', military advantage, or old-fashioned corruption. There is no multi-trillion market in space, there is no market at all. There never has been and there never will be a commercially-successful business venture (that is, one that is not government subsided) in space.
Building an industrial complex on the moon doesn't help you lift things off earth. What it does do is let you launch things off the moon, into earth orbit and elsewhere, quite easily.
The cost of getting manufactured items and industrial complexes to the moon in the first place far exceeds any reduced cost of getting things from the moon to earth orbit.
If you can build and launch things off the moon, you can suddenly offer a service that is worth trillions a year in Earth dollars, at a marginal cost.
What, precisely, is that service? There is nothing on the moon. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put things on the moon is not going to turn into trillions of value by sending them back, regardless of marginal cost.
Yes, there is an up-front investment to make it happen. Yes that investment is rather large.
I'm going to assume that there is an American on the other end of this conversation. 20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Space Exploration is a 20th century American quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who believed it too strongly.
Installing an industrial complex on the moon is insane for anyone. Industrial complexes make things that other people buy. Things are only made when they can be sold. The transportation costs and the capital costs of building any form of industrial complex on the moon would make it impossible to make any profit from anything made on the moon.
In twenty years, it's going to nearly impossible to ship manufactured goods around the world, never mind shipping things between the earth and the moon. ...then they will simply drive space services prices down for rock bottom for anybody attempting to launch anything off -sic- earths gravity well
I fail to understand how wasting billions of dollars of Japanese taxpayer's money will do anything to make it easier to get material from the earth's surface to outer space. As peak-oil manifests itself over the next 20 years, it will become more transparently absurd to fill a 35-story-high tube full of $10_a_gallon rocket fuel to put anything in space. Robots, satellites, humans, bombs, international space stations,...anything.
Space exploration was a 20th-century phenomenon, like the Beatles or 15-foot automobiles with dorsal fins. That era is nearly over; it's not just beginning. Sorry to puncture your bubble and fantasies, but truth is truth.
We should not forget that Japan has never recovered from their 'lost decade' after their stock market, real estate, and banking system collapsed in early 1990s.
By standard accounting practices, their entire country is bankrupt. What keeps them going is a collective refusal to balance accounts; a cultural need to 'save face' at any cost; brutal suppression of minorities, the elderly, and the disabled; and massive government spending on dubious public-works projects.
They are the world's masters at 'bridge-to-nowhere' projects. Where other countries would waste public funds on unwinnable foreign wars and dubious public 'wars-on-drugs', 'wars-on-poverty', 'wars-on-discrimination', the Japanese don't fight insane wars, don't get high, don't keep troublesome minorities around, and don't feel any need to be embarrassed by their discrimination against inferior humans.
Therefore a propensity towards ridiculous 'feel-good' but meaningless public works projects like moon exploration.
The only people who need to take the Japanese seriously are the people who live in Japan. The rest of us are only obliged (the root of the word 'abrigato') to be courteous, polite, and respectful in our personal dealing with the Japanese, and fair in our business dealings. But we are under no obligation to take anything that they do seriously.
I cantankerously but humbly disagree with every conclusion of this article. I don't agree that college-trained people are generally smarter. I readily agree that college educated people are better at manipulating and understanding symbols and words than the general population. But they are not better at using the vast amount of stored knowledge and experience stored in those words and books to make their lives better. They are marginally better but not greatly so.
I live in Portland Oregon USA and hear constantly about the movement of smart and creative people into smart and creative cities, of which Portland is proclaimed to be. It is simply not true. People move here because life is easy here. We are a thousand miles from any urban center of global consequence.
For example, we have a company called Wieden+Kennedy, who are a world-renowned employer of creative people. They make advertising. Everybody loathes advertising, and everyone does as much as possible to minimize their exposure to it. If a person is really creative, then why would they be wasting their creativity on advertising? Hense they are not creative: they're just people who have the annoying talent of recycling cliches to sell things that no one would buy if they weren't persuaded to do so by 'creative' people.
Real creative people make useful things and solve real problems. In Portland, 'creative' people make nothing and create real problems.
As for the relationship between technical abilities and creativity: there is very little. Look at the vast majority of postings here on Slashdot that follow every story. Dim, moronic, childish, dull, embarrassing. Not creative. If there were any intrinsic connection between creativity and technical/scientific/engineering ability, we would see it here. We don't.
Creativity is what creativity does. You can't measure it. It's not a fashion and real creativity is rarely noticed for what it is.
Are we going to lose all the great music that was made in the last third of the 20th century? NO, Because hundreds of millions of people refuse to obey the law as brought down from Mt. Sinai by the RIAA. By making millions of bootleg illegal MP3 copies of the our generation's music, we ensure that it will be around through any data disaster that could befall any centralized data storage depository.
The more widespread data is; the more protected that it is.
It's the culture of the 'greatest generation' that's going to disappear. The people who were born in the first third of the 20th century and lived their lives trusting their culture to corporate jerkoffs. Heard any great music from the 1930s or 1940s lately? It's quite possible that you never will. No one's collecting it. No one's preserving it. No one's copying it. No one's distributing it. When the vinyl from that time all chips, breaks, and wears out, the music of that era is gone.
If you want to protect your data, copy it, bury it, review it, play with it. But for god's sakes, don't encrypt it
"It was ten years ago today, all my tech stocks blew away,
they've been going in and out of style, but you're guaranteed to lose a pile"
apologies to Sir Paul...
But seriously, folks, this is a bubble price. Like the $656,565 valuation on that crappy three-room clapboard box-house that you almost bought in Fresno three years ago. *I hope that you passed that one by*.
Bubbles exist in markets. When they burst, the people who believed that the price was a realistic valuation lose most if not all of their money.
Now is the time to sell your Apple stock. EXXON owns the world's energy supply: Apple owns some coolness. Is Apple the second most valuable company in the world behind Exxon?
No f***ing way.
A lot of people lost a lot of money believing in tech stocks ten years ago. Heed their lesson.
Yes, You're right. I got a chance to see this movie again recently when I found it as a DVD on the shelf of the local library. It's a forgotten classic. The plot, editing, and pace is crisp and timeless. The characters are scary and cruel without slipping (too much) into over-dramatic parody. The issues and background is as relevant now as it was then. And it's fascinating to see South Beach without all blonde T&A and psychedelic colors that characterizes CGI:Miami.
And speaking of hot T&A with not-a-little bit of B&D, Martha Keller's character Dhalia Ihad is one true bad-ass for the ages. "Zhere ahre no accidents!"
Is this an American pop culture reference somehow related to lighter-than-air atmospheric transport vehicles? If so, then how about a link for all the Slashdaughters who aren't plugged into American pop culture.
For me, reference to lighter-than-air atmospheric vehicles always invokes a reference to Bruce Dern's portrayal of John McCain in the 1977 film "Black Sunday".
In this film, Mr. Dern plays a tortured Vietnam Vet Navy Pilot P.O.W. who teams up with a beautiful Swiss-Palestinian female terrorist to deliver a big surprise at the Super Bowl to all the little Moms and Dads and the kids sitting in the stands, eating their little weenies, and watching the big game.
In the late 1980s I worked for a biomedical company (BMSI) in Silicon Valley that made EEG equipment. They stored the EEG waveforms on a video tape. The image on the video tape had the EEG waveforms from 16 head sensors on the left of the screen and an image of the patient on the right. Patients would try to get 100% disability checks for life by claiming to be epileptic. They would spend a night in a monitored sleep lab, and then do a little horizontal dance while pretending to be asleep. Our equipment matched the brainwave recording to the image of the patient twitching to verify or disprove nocturnal epilepsy.
It doesn't really matter that you can or can't do real high-level research at home on DIY equipment. It only matters that you can build calibrated and reliable medical equipment that delivers accurate results at a small fraction of the cost of the equipment used in American hospitals. As we all know, the US medical health care system is collapsing. The recent legal reforms are basically meaningless and consist mostly of administrative and billing changes. If you can do a $1500 sleep apnea test or overnight EEG recording on DIY equipment for $50, then you are a welcome and honored member of the new health care system that is self-generating now underneath the bloated, corrupt, and crumbling official health care system.
Just be discreet at the present time.
By the way, instead of digitizing and storing the EEG waveforms directly, do a FFT on 1024 samples. The EEG waveform is basically sinusoidal so it can be recreated mathematically. Determine the formula that will regenerate the recorded waveform sample, and only store the offsets and co-efficients of the sine wave formula that will recreate that segment of the waveform accurately. You will get a 1000-to-1 data compression and be able to get all the circuitry into a hand-held small package.
Let's see... A whole line of middle-class people making the daily commute from the city center to the prosperous suburbs. They pass daily through the ring of dangerous and not-so-prosperous blighted urban areas that surround the city center with all its gleaming skyscrapers.
A resident presses a button, which sends a signal to a hacked cell-phone tower, which sends a series of codes that transmits a set of random stop-engine notifications that immediately disables one in ten autos. A huge traffic jam and multi-car crash happens. The local residents of the not-so-prosperous blighted urban areas, annoyed at the delay in receiving their reparations checks, run out onto the highway and have a joyous time relieving the immobilized overpaid suburbanites of their surplus belonging, petty cash, and rectal chastity. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
And next week,just when it seems that all is back to normal, it all happens again. And again.
Someone discovers that the ability to disrupt the normal operation of a motor vehicle is patented by IBM. Who quietly paid off politicians to mandate that this ability to wirelessly stop car engines in all new vehicles (using chips and equipment supplied by a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary company). Huge waves of lawsuits against IBM result. IBM goes bankrupt. People refuse to drive into the city. Prosperous gleaming skyscrapers can't pay property tax and start to empty out. Pissed NWMs burn down large sections of the city.
City becomes another Detroit.
I can't believe that people actually get paid to develop stupid shit like this. What are they thinking? In the depths of their souls and the distant regions of their pointed little heads, they must truly believe that it still is 1962, and it will be forever.