With a sufficient number of pulsars there should be a pair such that a line between the two is sufficiently tangential to a gravitational wavefront to allow for coincidences to be detected in a period substantially shorter than a human lifetime.
I would be most surprised if the experiment was not designed so that this period should be less than the life expectancy of the lead researcher, less the median Nobel lag in Physics.
Most of them anyway - the Stross is a link to buy the ebook for a silly price, so why not try Accelerando instead, which is free, or any of a bunch of stories on his site.
I prefer analogue myself - I have at least ten times as many records as I have CDs; by "perfect copy" I meant identical to the original CD. This was a fundamental change, particularly because an nth generation copy is also identical to the original. Add a ubiquitous means of electronic distribution and it's bye-bye business model.
I firmly believe that the demise of the Vinyl LP was orchestrated by the recording industry
Doubtless.
in order to get consumers used to 'digital technology', and then down the track be able to control what those said consumers can do with things like DRM
No. Do you really think the record companies that smart? Have they given any indication of forward thinking like this, ever? LPs were deprecated in favour of CDs because the record companies realised they could resell everyone their record collection, and this would naturally generate insane amounts of profit. The scam was further enhanced by 1)selling at a higher price 2)selling back catalogue, so no production expenses and 3)cheaper production costs (NB probably not the case when CDs were newly introduced).
If the record companies had displayed any foresight they might have realised that digital media opened up the possibility of perfect copies, but to be fair to them there were at least 10 years between the introduction of CDs and CD writers becoming consumer products. Even if they had thought of this they would likely have been blinded by the massive profits to be made, and have gone ahead anyway.
No need for conspiracy theories to explain what can be explained by plain old greed.
Bear in mind that the LHC is going in the tunnel previously used for LEP - a large part of the LEP budget went on digging holes.
Funny story relating to earth-moving at CERN (possibly apocryphal); an experiment resulted in a neutrino beam passing through a nearby village. The locals, with a poor grasp of particle physics, were up in arms about radiation etc. Attempts to persuade them that the beam was harmless were to no avail. Eventually a solution was found - a large earth berm was constructed to "block" the neutrinos - and everybody was happy.
You need one of these. Shows that iPod-dock-on-dashboard type vendor lock-in is nothing new - these in-car record players used a special format you could only get from Columbia Records.
Talking on a cell phone isn't necessarily worse than eating, changing the radio, text messaging, or reading a book while driving, so they should all be treated the same.
It is (well, maybe not the last two, but they'd be dangerous driving by any standard). The problem with talking on the phone while you're driving is that your concentration suffers because (at least part of) your brain is in cyberspace. Using a phone - handsfree or not - has been shown to be as dangerous as drink-driving.
Wearign eatbelts is not the cause of people driving rechklessly. Those who WANT to drive recklessly will drive recklessly, seatbelt, or no seatbelt.
It's not a conscious decision on the part of the reckless drivers. Ever hear of risk compensation? GP is correct, seatbelt laws don't save lives, they just shift the fatalities from drivers to pedestrians, bikers, cyclists and other vulnerable road users.
The line of attack here is interfering with a growth factor. Unfortunately, cancer is generally good at mutating and "learning about" new growth factors. Hence, the saying "prostate cancer doesn't kill people -- prostate cancer metastasis kills people."
s/prostate//
It would be unsurprising if this technique joined the (already swollen) ranks of treatments that can successfully lower PSA without actually significantly reducing the number of patients who die, or significantly extending their lives.
Such as? As far as I am aware there are plenty of options for radical (ie potentially curative) treatment for early stage prostate cancer, but if you have advanced disease (ie the tumour extends outwith the prostate, or worse, there are distant metastases) it's pretty much hormone therapy (medical or surgical castration) until that stops working after a few years, and then you're screwed. This treatment seems to offer another option for these patients - agreed that it is unproven, experimental etc.
I read an article about how The Aphex Twin hid his own face in a graphical display of his music.
Here's a page about this. Note that this technique is clearly audible in the music, a "discordant, metallic scratching" according to this Wired article, so it wouldn't be suitable for watermarking. Supreme irony at the end of the Wired piece, BTW: "It doesn't sound a lot like music...[m]ore conventional artists like Britney Spears would have some trouble hiding this."
If everyone did this, then economies of scale would cause the price of photovoltaics to drop to a level where they are affordable to all without subsidy. Using government subsidy to kickstart the market seems entirely appropriate to me.
I'm sure there are many people who would make excellent musicians who simply decided there were better and easier ways to survive.
I doubt it. I want to listen to music made by people who are driven to create great art without regard for the rewards. There is already far too much mediocre music out there created by the careerist types you seem to want to encourage.
So my question is: how much does the Wii cost in the UK, before taxes are added?
VAT is 17.5% on "luxury" items like the Wii, so the price before tax is £153, or $286 (using the exchange rate quoted above). IIRC the GC was £180 at launch too, so we're not being ripped off quite so badly this time.
Copyright-enforced royalties should be a kind of pension for creators, offering some financial security to people who've spent their lives creating works of art (visual, literary, musical, etc).
Why?
Why shouldn't those who earn their living creating intellectual property plan for their retirement the same way everyone else does, by saving a proportion of the money they earn during their working life, in their case by selling/licensing/exhibiting/performing their creations? If the point of copyright is to encourage creators to produce more work, then lengthy copyright terms which allow successful artists to sit on their arses watching the cash roll in for the rest of their lives without producing more work seem counterproductive.
Apparently there have been many more copies of Shenmue 2 pressed than is normal. Sega may have given MS an exclusive license for north america, but they're not exactly making it difficult for american DC owners to import a copy. And I'm sure every online uk games retailer will be offering nice Shenmue+boot disk bundles - here's one example - possibly a bit pricey at £65 (~$100) for game+bootdisk+shipping.
I was reading in a recent Sky & Telescope about a German teenager who got some pretty good pictures of the ISS + shuttle with a 4 inch (!) 'scope and a webcam. Found his website here.
People seem to be assuming the mystery game referred to in the article is Phantasy Star Online, but this IGN article says its Guru Guru Onsen 2, a collection of minigames including mahjong and poker. That's not to say PSO won't be multiplatform in the future; after all, it's already been announced for Gamecube, and it'd surely be cheaper for Sega to have GC users connect to the existing PSO servers.
Are you kidding? Crazy Taxi has to be just about the worst example I can think of in terms of intrusive advertising; "take me to the Original Levis' Store" says the guy jumping into your cab, and it winds me up every time. I don't mind so much when it's appropriate product placement like skateboards and clothing in THPS or real cars in a driving game. The very worst example I've played has to be Metropolis Street Racer, with adverts for real products interspersed with the music in its innovative but extremely sucky fake radio stations. Fortunately the music is so bad you'll turn it off after 10 minutes play:)
Slashdot Mirror
With a sufficient number of pulsars there should be a pair such that a line between the two is sufficiently tangential to a gravitational wavefront to allow for coincidences to be detected in a period substantially shorter than a human lifetime.
I would be most surprised if the experiment was not designed so that this period should be less than the life expectancy of the lead researcher, less the median Nobel lag in Physics.
Here.
Most of them anyway - the Stross is a link to buy the ebook for a silly price, so why not try Accelerando instead, which is free, or any of a bunch of stories on his site.
I prefer analogue myself - I have at least ten times as many records as I have CDs; by "perfect copy" I meant identical to the original CD. This was a fundamental change, particularly because an nth generation copy is also identical to the original. Add a ubiquitous means of electronic distribution and it's bye-bye business model.
Doubtless.
No. Do you really think the record companies that smart? Have they given any indication of forward thinking like this, ever? LPs were deprecated in favour of CDs because the record companies realised they could resell everyone their record collection, and this would naturally generate insane amounts of profit. The scam was further enhanced by 1)selling at a higher price 2)selling back catalogue, so no production expenses and 3)cheaper production costs (NB probably not the case when CDs were newly introduced).
If the record companies had displayed any foresight they might have realised that digital media opened up the possibility of perfect copies, but to be fair to them there were at least 10 years between the introduction of CDs and CD writers becoming consumer products. Even if they had thought of this they would likely have been blinded by the massive profits to be made, and have gone ahead anyway.
No need for conspiracy theories to explain what can be explained by plain old greed.
Bear in mind that the LHC is going in the tunnel previously used for LEP - a large part of the LEP budget went on digging holes.
Funny story relating to earth-moving at CERN (possibly apocryphal); an experiment resulted in a neutrino beam passing through a nearby village. The locals, with a poor grasp of particle physics, were up in arms about radiation etc. Attempts to persuade them that the beam was harmless were to no avail. Eventually a solution was found - a large earth berm was constructed to "block" the neutrinos - and everybody was happy.
You need one of these. Shows that iPod-dock-on-dashboard type vendor lock-in is nothing new - these in-car record players used a special format you could only get from Columbia Records.
It's not a conscious decision on the part of the reckless drivers. Ever hear of risk compensation? GP is correct, seatbelt laws don't save lives, they just shift the fatalities from drivers to pedestrians, bikers, cyclists and other vulnerable road users.
If everyone did this, then economies of scale would cause the price of photovoltaics to drop to a level where they are affordable to all without subsidy. Using government subsidy to kickstart the market seems entirely appropriate to me.
This high-res version of the image has pointers to the objects of interest - I still can't figure out which pixel is supposed to be the rover though.
Why shouldn't those who earn their living creating intellectual property plan for their retirement the same way everyone else does, by saving a proportion of the money they earn during their working life, in their case by selling/licensing/exhibiting/performing their creations? If the point of copyright is to encourage creators to produce more work, then lengthy copyright terms which allow successful artists to sit on their arses watching the cash roll in for the rest of their lives without producing more work seem counterproductive.
Apparently there have been many more copies of Shenmue 2 pressed than is normal. Sega may have given MS an exclusive license for north america, but they're not exactly making it difficult for american DC owners to import a copy. And I'm sure every online uk games retailer will be offering nice Shenmue+boot disk bundles - here's one example - possibly a bit pricey at £65 (~$100) for game+bootdisk+shipping.
...cool, but in no way practical/useful
...better than nothing, but tv resolution sucks for the web (also european browser is v. crappy, us one prob. better)
...if you're prepared to shell out $150 on ebay for a BBA ($150! For an ethernet card!)
...if you already have a pc to d/l or rip your mp3s and burn them onto cd
agreed
Jet Set Radio Future is an xbox exclusive
No need to run DC-Linux + MAME, though, when there's a dreamcast port of mame by the guy who ported it to digital cameras a while back
I think you mean Robert Harris. Thomas Harris is the author of Silence of the Lambs etc.
I was reading in a recent Sky & Telescope about a German teenager who got some pretty good pictures of the ISS + shuttle with a 4 inch (!) 'scope and a webcam. Found his website here.
People seem to be assuming the mystery game referred to in the article is Phantasy Star Online, but this IGN article says its Guru Guru Onsen 2, a collection of minigames including mahjong and poker. That's not to say PSO won't be multiplatform in the future; after all, it's already been announced for Gamecube, and it'd surely be cheaper for Sega to have GC users connect to the existing PSO servers.
Are you kidding? Crazy Taxi has to be just about the worst example I can think of in terms of intrusive advertising; "take me to the Original Levis' Store" says the guy jumping into your cab, and it winds me up every time. I don't mind so much when it's appropriate product placement like skateboards and clothing in THPS or real cars in a driving game. The very worst example I've played has to be Metropolis Street Racer, with adverts for real products interspersed with the music in its innovative but extremely sucky fake radio stations. Fortunately the music is so bad you'll turn it off after 10 minutes play :)
See here for details. There's a NeXT cube in a glass case in a foyer at CERN, with a sign on it reading "World's first web server, 1992".
This guy is a troll, not the real Katz. Check his other recent comments.