In a sense, I'm fairly sure the US already does this. I know Canada does in an underhanded way. Any company that wants to score a government contract in Canada has to have the manufacturing and support done by Canadians. So if HP wants to sell us some computers, they have to keep their call centre in Hull, PQ open.
Instinctively, infants will hold their breath if their face is covered. The same holds true when they are immersed in water. But we do have an instinctive swimming method that works fairly well: the dog paddle. It's pure physical strength that prevents a baby from being able to swim instinctively.
What I've noticed as a former lifeguard is that when people drown, their instinctive motion is similar to climbing a ladder. In fact, they're dog-paddling, except that they're vertical. Likewise, the first stroke kids "learn" when they start swimming is the dog paddle. Other strokes, such as front crawl, back crawl, breast stroke, side stroke, etc. are not natural motions. They're swimming motions that we have learned over time to use, because they're more efficient.
The thing is... nobody teaches how to "dog paddle". It's just something that you do.
So yes... infants can "swim". At least, they could if they had the strength and/or stamina to swim. They certainly have an instinctive swimming stroke.
Dragonflies catch many insects, not just flies. You're right that most bugs have compound eyes, though, so it is an interesting question.
A point, though... they wouldn't have to be thinking "human-style" eyes. It's probably more of a defensive measure than an offensive measure, though... as birds have normal eyes, not compound eyes. Their eyes are also, largely, on the sides of their heads, and wouldn't give them great depth perception.
You also forget the single most important reason they chose the shuttle design: Reusability. The shuttles are Reusable launch vehicles. Sure, they cost a lot more than a capsule, they're more complicated, more can go wrong, but they can be reused. Had they been flying capsules instead of the shuttles, the cost to date would have been much higher than it was. Considering the shoestring that NASA gets to work with these days, that's important.
Apollo 6 is sitting in a museum I pass every day on my way to work. I'm not aware of any shuttles that are sitting in a museum.
You're not accounting for acceleration. The final speed can easily be higher than the average.
At the start of the 6 seconds, the speed was zero. It travelled under rocket power for 4.65 seconds, at which point an additional set of rockets was ignited. They report that the final speed was roughly 6,400 mph.
On a smaller scale, you can duplicate the experiment with your car. Go out and run a quarter mile. Time it, and look at your exit speed. You'll invariably find that your exit speed is higher than your average speed.
Does the PCI bus even have enough bandwidth for this kind of video card to make a difference, though? I was under the impression that it wasn't worth getting a high end video card for PCI, because the bus just wasn't fast enough for it to be effective.
Meh... looking at that Dawn, I'm thinking that my GeForce3 64MB video card just isn't good enough...:)
I suggest you check out http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers They're currently blocking 971 FQDN's that are serving up ads. I'm using their list on my DNS... while I still see popups, it's exceptionally fun to see a DNS/no resolve error instead of an irritating flashing picture. ^_^
It's very hard to patent DNA sequences. It's a very difficult case to argue. Sure, you could point out many exceptions, but on the whole, it's a difficult thing to do.
Just for your own info- It's not legal to patent a DNA or RNA sequence in Canada. That information is considered "public domain". At best, you can patent the method you use to derive the DNA sequence, or to implant it if you're talking about genetic engineering/cloning.
Remember the stories a few months ago about Canada refusing to honour the patents on lab mice that had been engineered in Boston? The logic was that you can patent the method used to engineer the mice, but the mice that were being resold in Canada weren't violating the copyright, because they were the results of breeding, not cloning.
I'd say yes... we've found forms of bacteria that exist deep within the earth that actually feed on sulfur. If they can evolve on Earth, I think that such a life form can evolve elsewehre, too.
There's a difference. Biodiesel is available today, and will run in all Diesel engines. It's clean and cheap: 1L of vegetable oil will make 900mL of Biodiesel. It's becoming even cheaper to manufacture as it comes into use, and with the rising price of oil, Biodiesel is approaching par with gasoline.
Take a look at the emissions here. Significantly cleaner than Diesel, which is cleaner than Gasoline anyway.
Biodiesel is definitely a much more viable and clean alternative to hydrogen fuel cells. It isn't quite as clean as H2 cells, but it's available now.
How can it be "truely full color" and "make any color possible" when it's only got normal red green and blue LED technology to work with?
I would wager that this "true full colour" that they're talking about would be the same "true full colour" that your monitor and TV are doing. 16.7 million colours, isn't it? AFAIK, that's far more colours than the human eye can distinguish.
To put things in perspective... I doubt very much that you can distinguish between 520.5nm and 520.55nm light. Green is green. It doesn't really matter that the thing can only display colours in increments of 0.001nm, because you'll never be able to tell the difference.
I understand your points about the extremes of the spectrum, but that's a comparatively small amount of the visible spectrum that doesn't really occur often enough to discount it.
Besides... this "true colour" they're advertising could just be in comparison to existing technologies.;)
Palladium is a software solution that uses parts of the "palladium hardware" you mention. In reality, the hardware is a different implementation all together and has very little to do with Microsoft's Palladium. Linux will run just fine on hardware that's TCSA aware.
Hmm... as I read the majority of responses, people are piping up saying it's a freedom of speech issue. Though it will become clear that IANAL, allow me the liberty of playing devil's advocate, if you will.
It is a free speech issue. I recall several stories about companies in Utah cutting DVD's and VHS tapes to remove "questionable" material, and then selling those cuts as "family-safe" versions of the movie. I remember a lot of people saying that such cutting shouldn't be allowed, because it interfered with freedom of speech, and because it delegated the burden of protecting our families.
Why, then, are those same people saying that preventing this sort of cutting is bad? I don't really view stifling this technology as a machine for censorship, but as a machine against censorship.
What's to keep the government from mandating such a control feature in the DVD player? The US is already starting to look far too Orwellian since 9/11, and I would not put such a mandate past your government. In the interests of "protecting" the people from "terrorists", mind you.
Face it. We are better off without some technologies.
On another note.... A lot of people have a v-chip in their TV, but how many can honestly tell me they use it?
If you're not using the v-chip in your TV, why on earth would you want one in your DVD? If anything, a DVD would be easier to censor: I don't want my kid watching Terminator 2, so I keep that DVD in the locked part of the cabinet. There is no risk of the kid channel surfing and finding himself watching a porno DVD (check the audio commentary track!), so such a device would, in the end, be quite useless.
While I don't agree with the RIAA or MPAA in most cases, I do think that they've made a good decision on this one. I doubt that anybody with half a brain would need such a DVD player to prevent their kids from viewing questionable DVD's. By that same token, I have no doubt that adding a "v-chip" to my DVD player would raise the price for a new player by 50 bucks or more, just like the v-chips did to TV. And frankly, the implication of allowing such a device in a 1984 society scares me.
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain
Perhaps you're right. But consider the following: By downloading an MP3, you are saving yourself $17 by not buying the CD. It may not be much, but it's still a private financial gain. 17 bucks is 17 bucks. Multiply by the number of MP3's you might have (currently a little over 4,000 in my collection, though I ripped the huge majority of that myself), and it comes out to a *lot* of money you might have saved.
All I can say is thank heavens the US has no jurisdiction in my neck of the woods.:)
VHS is far from dead. It'll be several years before it disappears entirely: not until recordable DVD's are as cheap as VHS. That won't happen until a couple years after they can actually agree on a format for recordable DVD's. (/wave, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc.)
As you walk into the local Blockbuster or Videoflicks, do you not notice that 80% of the content on the shelves is still VHS?
How visible those lines are depends a lot on your monitor, and your resolution/refresh rate, too. I'm at 1152x864 right now (stupid monitor drops to 60Hz refresh rate at 1280), and the lines are fairly pronounced on my 17" Trinitron. (KDS Avitron 7TF).
But before reading your post I hadn't seen them in a very long time. I had to pull up a white page and squint at it about 2.5" from the top and bottom before I saw the lines, and I doubt I'll see them after the next time I leave the computer for a few hours.
When I drop the resolution to 1024x768 the lines are less noticable. Even less so at 800x600, and at 640x480 they disappear entirely.
I suppose it's about time I buy a new monitor, but honestly, 1152x864 resolution is fine. I'm a bit sad to see that Sony isn't going to be making Trinitrons any more, because anything larger than about 17" or 19" is too large for my desk, and I'll be damned if I'm going to shell out a thousand bucks for an LCD that's physically incapable of a refresh rate anywhere near what I have on my CRT.
The only way that medical problems such as cancer will be cured is by medical research. If medical research companies are not able to recover their investment, then the research will stop.
Unless, of course, they go back to public funding for such projects.... Here in Canuckistan, we're weird that way.
Who are we kidding here? Even on/. when someone mentiones "Windows", in 99% of the cases, that person isn't refering to X11, but MS Windows.
Strictly speaking, this isn't entirely true. A "window" in the computer world refers to the viewable part of a computer program. The front end. Apple copyrighted the term first, when they launched their first GUI. Microsoft had to copyright their o/s as "Microsoft Windows" because of Apple's copyright.
Tough call what mine is. There's a huge number of events I can remember with exquisite detail (semi-eidetic memory), but the timeline loses cohesion. It's kind of weird. Ask me what's the earliest, and I can't really tell you. Ask me to describe an event, and I'll give you more detail than you'd think possible.
When you ask for the earliest memory, half a dozen immediately popped to mind. I'm 21 (22 in February), and they're all from many years ago. Maybe it was the time I went to see my mother's cousin Allison. That event stands out because we stayed the night, and I woke up around 3am with her boyfriend's "pet" tarantula sleeping on my face.
Maybe it was learning to count to 10 in French. I remember with great detail walking down 2nd Ave. in the small town I still live in, and having David, my nanny's boyfriend (now her husband), teaching me while we were walking to a soccer field where Sylvie (the nanny) was with my older brother, and I remember having a lot of trouble learning to pronounce "cinq".
Maybe it was my first soccer practice, when I threw a temper tantrum and my dad pulled me from the field and took me home.
Then there's a family dinner at my grandmother's, many years ago. My uncle had just returned from Korea (he worked, and still does, with Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and had been on the ambassadorial staff). I remember two things: first, my uncle brought me a jacket from the Soeul Olympics (was a satiny blue plush jacket that I wore for over a year before outgrowing it), and second, my grandmother's big dog, a mastiff named Maggie.
All of these events happened around the same time in my life. But I can't, for the life of me, tell you what order they happened in. Memory's funny that way, I think. You have a lot of memories in your mind, but you have to be prompted. The question "what's your earliest memory" is loaded, because your earliest memory changes from moment to moment. Really, the only answer to that question is "5 seconds ago", because the remainder of your memories aren't currently on your mind. Memories aren't there unless they're prompted.
You say you can only remember about 7 years back. If I were to ask you what the first Christmas gift you remember was, you could probably go back a lot farther than 7 years. What if I asked you about the first sports team you were on? It all comes flooding back if I ask you the right questions.
It's not what they're putting in it, it's how it's served.... Bitter Cold. You'd be amazed at the things that people decide to try out when it's 40 below.
Hmm... I bought the DVD set last week (2 days after it was released. I would have bought it earlier, but I was hung over....)
I'm not sure I recognized any section that was "castrated". I've watched the whole series, and didn't see anything that struck me as castrated. Except, possibly, the few scenes that had been deleted, but they were missing from the original theatrical versions, too. I love the documentaries, and the commentary tracks are good, too.
To set aside your fears, the Lybians are still in it. The doc still gets shot with the AK-47, which then jams when they point it at Michael J. Fox. And they still crash when they pull out a rocket launcher and point it at the DeLorean. I don't think they could cut that out and keep the feeling.
Unless you Americans are getting the shaft on it. Mine's the Canadian version, with the French-language track available as well. I'm also not noticing the widescreen matting problems that are reported, so that could be a region-specific problem, too.
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pining for the fjords, would we?
In a sense, I'm fairly sure the US already does this. I know Canada does in an underhanded way. Any company that wants to score a government contract in Canada has to have the manufacturing and support done by Canadians. So if HP wants to sell us some computers, they have to keep their call centre in Hull, PQ open.
I'd be surprised if the US wasn't doing similar.
... Kinda.
Instinctively, infants will hold their breath if their face is covered. The same holds true when they are immersed in water. But we do have an instinctive swimming method that works fairly well: the dog paddle. It's pure physical strength that prevents a baby from being able to swim instinctively.
What I've noticed as a former lifeguard is that when people drown, their instinctive motion is similar to climbing a ladder. In fact, they're dog-paddling, except that they're vertical. Likewise, the first stroke kids "learn" when they start swimming is the dog paddle. Other strokes, such as front crawl, back crawl, breast stroke, side stroke, etc. are not natural motions. They're swimming motions that we have learned over time to use, because they're more efficient.
The thing is... nobody teaches how to "dog paddle". It's just something that you do.
So yes... infants can "swim". At least, they could if they had the strength and/or stamina to swim. They certainly have an instinctive swimming stroke.
Dragonflies catch many insects, not just flies. You're right that most bugs have compound eyes, though, so it is an interesting question.
A point, though... they wouldn't have to be thinking "human-style" eyes. It's probably more of a defensive measure than an offensive measure, though... as birds have normal eyes, not compound eyes. Their eyes are also, largely, on the sides of their heads, and wouldn't give them great depth perception.
Still... a very interesting idea.
Erm, it's Apollo 7. Sorry about the confusion...
l oc.html
Interesting reading: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo
You also forget the single most important reason they chose the shuttle design: Reusability. The shuttles are Reusable launch vehicles. Sure, they cost a lot more than a capsule, they're more complicated, more can go wrong, but they can be reused. Had they been flying capsules instead of the shuttles, the cost to date would have been much higher than it was. Considering the shoestring that NASA gets to work with these days, that's important.
Apollo 6 is sitting in a museum I pass every day on my way to work. I'm not aware of any shuttles that are sitting in a museum.
You're not accounting for acceleration. The final speed can easily be higher than the average.
At the start of the 6 seconds, the speed was zero. It travelled under rocket power for 4.65 seconds, at which point an additional set of rockets was ignited. They report that the final speed was roughly 6,400 mph.
On a smaller scale, you can duplicate the experiment with your car. Go out and run a quarter mile. Time it, and look at your exit speed. You'll invariably find that your exit speed is higher than your average speed.
Does the PCI bus even have enough bandwidth for this kind of video card to make a difference, though? I was under the impression that it wasn't worth getting a high end video card for PCI, because the bus just wasn't fast enough for it to be effective.
:)
Meh... looking at that Dawn, I'm thinking that my GeForce3 64MB video card just isn't good enough...
There's *tons* more out there...
I suggest you check out http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers
They're currently blocking 971 FQDN's that are serving up ads. I'm using their list on my DNS... while I still see popups, it's exceptionally fun to see a DNS/no resolve error instead of an irritating flashing picture. ^_^
It's very hard to patent DNA sequences. It's a very difficult case to argue. Sure, you could point out many exceptions, but on the whole, it's a difficult thing to do.
Just for your own info-
It's not legal to patent a DNA or RNA sequence in Canada. That information is considered "public domain". At best, you can patent the method you use to derive the DNA sequence, or to implant it if you're talking about genetic engineering/cloning.
Remember the stories a few months ago about Canada refusing to honour the patents on lab mice that had been engineered in Boston? The logic was that you can patent the method used to engineer the mice, but the mice that were being resold in Canada weren't violating the copyright, because they were the results of breeding, not cloning.
I'd say yes... we've found forms of bacteria that exist deep within the earth that actually feed on sulfur. If they can evolve on Earth, I think that such a life form can evolve elsewehre, too.
There's a difference. Biodiesel is available today, and will run in all Diesel engines. It's clean and cheap: 1L of vegetable oil will make 900mL of Biodiesel. It's becoming even cheaper to manufacture as it comes into use, and with the rising price of oil, Biodiesel is approaching par with gasoline.
Take a look at the emissions here. Significantly cleaner than Diesel, which is cleaner than Gasoline anyway.
Biodiesel is definitely a much more viable and clean alternative to hydrogen fuel cells. It isn't quite as clean as H2 cells, but it's available now.
How can it be "truely full color" and "make any color possible" when it's only got normal red green and blue LED technology to work with?
;)
I would wager that this "true full colour" that they're talking about would be the same "true full colour" that your monitor and TV are doing. 16.7 million colours, isn't it? AFAIK, that's far more colours than the human eye can distinguish.
To put things in perspective... I doubt very much that you can distinguish between 520.5nm and 520.55nm light. Green is green. It doesn't really matter that the thing can only display colours in increments of 0.001nm, because you'll never be able to tell the difference.
I understand your points about the extremes of the spectrum, but that's a comparatively small amount of the visible spectrum that doesn't really occur often enough to discount it.
Besides... this "true colour" they're advertising could just be in comparison to existing technologies.
oh wait. that's gonna come back to bite me in the ass, isn't it?
bah. wrong link. ignore me....
:p
how long before somebody flames me on that
Palladium is a software solution that uses parts of the "palladium hardware" you mention. In reality, the hardware is a different implementation all together and has very little to do with Microsoft's Palladium. Linux will run just fine on hardware that's TCSA aware.
Hmm... as I read the majority of responses, people are piping up saying it's a freedom of speech issue. Though it will become clear that IANAL, allow me the liberty of playing devil's advocate, if you will.
It is a free speech issue. I recall several stories about companies in Utah cutting DVD's and VHS tapes to remove "questionable" material, and then selling those cuts as "family-safe" versions of the movie. I remember a lot of people saying that such cutting shouldn't be allowed, because it interfered with freedom of speech, and because it delegated the burden of protecting our families.
Why, then, are those same people saying that preventing this sort of cutting is bad? I don't really view stifling this technology as a machine for censorship, but as a machine against censorship.
What's to keep the government from mandating such a control feature in the DVD player? The US is already starting to look far too Orwellian since 9/11, and I would not put such a mandate past your government. In the interests of "protecting" the people from "terrorists", mind you.
Face it. We are better off without some technologies.
On another note.... A lot of people have a v-chip in their TV, but how many can honestly tell me they use it?
If you're not using the v-chip in your TV, why on earth would you want one in your DVD? If anything, a DVD would be easier to censor: I don't want my kid watching Terminator 2, so I keep that DVD in the locked part of the cabinet. There is no risk of the kid channel surfing and finding himself watching a porno DVD (check the audio commentary track!), so such a device would, in the end, be quite useless.
While I don't agree with the RIAA or MPAA in most cases, I do think that they've made a good decision on this one. I doubt that anybody with half a brain would need such a DVD player to prevent their kids from viewing questionable DVD's. By that same token, I have no doubt that adding a "v-chip" to my DVD player would raise the price for a new player by 50 bucks or more, just like the v-chips did to TV. And frankly, the implication of allowing such a device in a 1984 society scares me.
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain
:)
Perhaps you're right. But consider the following: By downloading an MP3, you are saving yourself $17 by not buying the CD. It may not be much, but it's still a private financial gain. 17 bucks is 17 bucks. Multiply by the number of MP3's you might have (currently a little over 4,000 in my collection, though I ripped the huge majority of that myself), and it comes out to a *lot* of money you might have saved.
All I can say is thank heavens the US has no jurisdiction in my neck of the woods.
VHS is far from dead. It'll be several years before it disappears entirely: not until recordable DVD's are as cheap as VHS. That won't happen until a couple years after they can actually agree on a format for recordable DVD's. (/wave, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc.)
As you walk into the local Blockbuster or Videoflicks, do you not notice that 80% of the content on the shelves is still VHS?
Did you actually read the article?
How visible those lines are depends a lot on your monitor, and your resolution/refresh rate, too. I'm at 1152x864 right now (stupid monitor drops to 60Hz refresh rate at 1280), and the lines are fairly pronounced on my 17" Trinitron. (KDS Avitron 7TF).
But before reading your post I hadn't seen them in a very long time. I had to pull up a white page and squint at it about 2.5" from the top and bottom before I saw the lines, and I doubt I'll see them after the next time I leave the computer for a few hours.
When I drop the resolution to 1024x768 the lines are less noticable. Even less so at 800x600, and at 640x480 they disappear entirely.
I suppose it's about time I buy a new monitor, but honestly, 1152x864 resolution is fine. I'm a bit sad to see that Sony isn't going to be making Trinitrons any more, because anything larger than about 17" or 19" is too large for my desk, and I'll be damned if I'm going to shell out a thousand bucks for an LCD that's physically incapable of a refresh rate anywhere near what I have on my CRT.
The only way that medical problems such as cancer will be cured is by medical research. If medical research companies are not able to recover their investment, then the research will stop.
Unless, of course, they go back to public funding for such projects.... Here in Canuckistan, we're weird that way.
Who are we kidding here? Even on /. when someone mentiones "Windows", in 99% of the cases, that person isn't refering to X11, but MS Windows.
Strictly speaking, this isn't entirely true. A "window" in the computer world refers to the viewable part of a computer program. The front end. Apple copyrighted the term first, when they launched their first GUI. Microsoft had to copyright their o/s as "Microsoft Windows" because of Apple's copyright.
Tough call what mine is. There's a huge number of events I can remember with exquisite detail (semi-eidetic memory), but the timeline loses cohesion. It's kind of weird. Ask me what's the earliest, and I can't really tell you. Ask me to describe an event, and I'll give you more detail than you'd think possible.
When you ask for the earliest memory, half a dozen immediately popped to mind. I'm 21 (22 in February), and they're all from many years ago. Maybe it was the time I went to see my mother's cousin Allison. That event stands out because we stayed the night, and I woke up around 3am with her boyfriend's "pet" tarantula sleeping on my face.
Maybe it was learning to count to 10 in French. I remember with great detail walking down 2nd Ave. in the small town I still live in, and having David, my nanny's boyfriend (now her husband), teaching me while we were walking to a soccer field where Sylvie (the nanny) was with my older brother, and I remember having a lot of trouble learning to pronounce "cinq".
Maybe it was my first soccer practice, when I threw a temper tantrum and my dad pulled me from the field and took me home.
Then there's a family dinner at my grandmother's, many years ago. My uncle had just returned from Korea (he worked, and still does, with Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and had been on the ambassadorial staff). I remember two things: first, my uncle brought me a jacket from the Soeul Olympics (was a satiny blue plush jacket that I wore for over a year before outgrowing it), and second, my grandmother's big dog, a mastiff named Maggie.
All of these events happened around the same time in my life. But I can't, for the life of me, tell you what order they happened in. Memory's funny that way, I think. You have a lot of memories in your mind, but you have to be prompted. The question "what's your earliest memory" is loaded, because your earliest memory changes from moment to moment. Really, the only answer to that question is "5 seconds ago", because the remainder of your memories aren't currently on your mind. Memories aren't there unless they're prompted.
You say you can only remember about 7 years back. If I were to ask you what the first Christmas gift you remember was, you could probably go back a lot farther than 7 years. What if I asked you about the first sports team you were on? It all comes flooding back if I ask you the right questions.
It's not what they're putting in it, it's how it's served.... Bitter Cold. You'd be amazed at the things that people decide to try out when it's 40 below.
Hmm... I bought the DVD set last week (2 days after it was released. I would have bought it earlier, but I was hung over....)
I'm not sure I recognized any section that was "castrated". I've watched the whole series, and didn't see anything that struck me as castrated. Except, possibly, the few scenes that had been deleted, but they were missing from the original theatrical versions, too. I love the documentaries, and the commentary tracks are good, too.
To set aside your fears, the Lybians are still in it. The doc still gets shot with the AK-47, which then jams when they point it at Michael J. Fox. And they still crash when they pull out a rocket launcher and point it at the DeLorean. I don't think they could cut that out and keep the feeling.
Unless you Americans are getting the shaft on it. Mine's the Canadian version, with the French-language track available as well. I'm also not noticing the widescreen matting problems that are reported, so that could be a region-specific problem, too.