t almost sounds to me like the same thing that I learned about sickle-cell anemia. That is, if you have the sickle-cell trait, you have partial sickle-cell anemia, but can still function relatively normal.
There's even more to it than that. A carrier (someone who has one chromosome with the defect, but not both) for sickle-cell, has some immunity to malaria. Therefore it's advantageous to be a carrier. However, having two chromosomes with the defect leads to serious problems.
Similarly, one could say in a society where analytical skills are valued, it is advantageous to have some genes which favor analytical over social skills. Too much, though, leads to serious problems.
With autism, the situation probably isn't as simple as a single gene, like in sickle-cell.
No, you have a good point: if you take the plant matter away, you are taking nutrients away. If you keep doing this, you'll eventually won't have enough nutrients to grow whatever it is you want to grow.
However, it is possible that this will still work without needing additional fertilizers. We don't really need all of the plant matter to make our fuel. It is possible, that in the refining process (when the plan matter is broken down into the fuel we want), we are left with a lot of waste which actually the nutrients that the plants need. We just need to put this waste back onto the ground.
At first, this sounds wrong, because you can't get something from nothing. But in this case, what we are really interested in, is the carbon cycle. In this cycle energy from the sun is used to combine water and CO2 to make some O2 and some compound (sugar, alchohol, and maybe cellulose), which can then be converted back into water and CO2 (using up O2) giving up energy. The nutrients the plants use, don't actually participate directly in this cycle. They form the factory that does the work, but they aren't actually consumed.
Having said this, I have no idea how the other details of the chemistry work, and if it possible to separate the nutrients from the fuel. I am making this up, since I only have enough knowledge to be dangerous. I'm just saying it's concievable you could use plants for energy without having to add fertilizer to the cycle.
Wouldn't a live action doom be faster? Double shotgun in the blubber butt should cure them.
I've often thought that a combined action game/exercise machine would be a great (although expensive) product. Use a treadmill or bike as a controller - pedal or run to make the character move. Sounds like a more fun way to burn calories to me. (I should do a google search to see if anyone's done this).
If the kids are too lazy to play real sports (soccer, football, baseball, general active play rather than watching tv) then what makes these people think that the kids won't be too lazy to play DDR?
There are lots of reasons a person might not want or be able to play the team sports you listed, but still enjoy DDR. Most real sports require opponents and teammates, and they aren't always available. You can force this issue in a school, by making people play together, but that's not terrible fun if the people don't get along. In addition, sports require that all the players be at similar skill levels, or else it doesn't work as well. In general, the overweight, uncoordinated, not social kid is not going to find team sports all that much fun.
As you alluded to, there are other sports and activities that don't require many other people (jogging, biking, hiking, throwing a ball against a wall), and really all this activity is, is another option. Notice that most of the activities I just listed are pretty boring to lots of people. Someone might find DDR more fun, or simply more accessible than the other options. If someone becomes more active because of this, then I consider it a good thing.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that some people are inactive because thay are lazy, and some people are inactive because they simply don't enjoy any of the active options available to them. It's not necessarily obvious who is who.
As far as whether this will work, despite what I said, I'm skeptical. I just don't think one game alone is going to have enough appeal to have much of an effect.
Now for a related rant...
My honest opinion on the subject of fitness in kids is that we've screwed them over by over scheduling their lives. It doesn't help that they are swimming in junk food, and plenty of non active activities (TV and video games), but I don't think this is the real problem. The real problem is no one just picks up a ball and plays in the street anymore. Instead we are driving our kids from one activity to the next. And we are overloading them with homework, too. So, the only exercise kids get is through organized sports. As I mentioned above, this doesn't work well for many kids who aren't athletic to begin with. So, we end up with a society were the athletic are pushed to be more athletic, and the rest become sloths on the sidelines.
"The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Onigman says.
This is somewhat off-topic, but this is the best example to show your friends, family, and senators why the DMCA is bad. Here we have a perfect example of something we should be legally allowed to do with traditionaly copyright law (space-shift), it's certainly technically feasible, and there is demand. But we can't actually legally do it, because of the DMCA.
Back on-topic, selling iPods preloaded with media is most likely illegal, unless you include the original media in the sale. (Just like selling any other type of copy of media is illegal).
What the majority of young women want is pretty much what you'd expect - entertaining, interesting, confident and funny men.
I'd add that they also want a man who is physically attractive, but other than that, you're absolutely right.
Although I don't think women are turned off by intelligent men, I do think it is wise not to let women know you work in a scientific field until they have an opportunity to learn that you are entertaining, interesting, confident and funny. Otherwise, some of the stereotypes about people in science could turn them off before they get to know you. It's not the intelligence that women are turned off by, it's the fear that they if you're a scientist you are probably unentertaining, uninteresting, and lacking in confidence.
Thanks (to you and others)! I was unaware of that ability. I was just (stupidly) repeating what I heard from a somewhat trusted source. I don't use iTunes much myself, so I never worried about enough to check.
I'm pretty sure iTunes has a mechanism to "delicense" a computer that you no longer want regestered to you. However, the delicensing is done from the computer you want delicensed. This means if the computer crashes/breaks unexpectedly you could be out of luck.
If you think the beef that people bring up in the comments in legitimate, then you need a clear policy prohibiting such abuses from submitters. Hopefully the submitters will change what they do, or this policy can give you abilty to change the submission/links to fit your new guidelines.
If you don't think that the beef people have is legitamate, then you've got a problem. Since this is largely a community run websight (the content is largely the forums, and the moderation is done by the community, too), you can't really force the websight to run at odds with the way such a large part of the community wants it to. You can perhaps nudge it with clear policies, but expect troubles if a lot of people strongly disagree.
Re:My C64 floppy could do that!
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Scanjet Music
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I had a tape drive on my PET2001, and the only way we could make music with it would be to record a BASIC program, then play the cassette in an audio tape player.
Of course, this meant that any music we made had only two tones. Which wasn't so bad, considering the #1 album at the time was "Thriller."
Thiller hit the charts in 1984, so what were you still doing with a PET2001 (instead of a C64)? Actually, that year I spent a lot of my time programming games on my VIC-20. There are some songs from that year (PYT from that album being one of them - blech!) with which I have a stong association of programming the VIC-20.
My first though on reading this headline was the 1541 drive trick, too.
Reading this thread has given me a few thoughts, and your post is broad enough that I can make them all here:
Regarding limiting capabilities... Microsoft is currently doing a dance with the media companies. Microsoft wants badly to be in on this game, but the media companies can basically make the rules because they control the content. I have no doubt that some of the decisions Microsoft is making are done to keep the media companies happy (hence no ability to copy to the Xbox 360). In addition, Microsoft wants people to do things their proprietary way, just like almost every company does. I'm not sure why they don't support WMV-HD, but I suspect they realize that this format isn't going to be a success. So, they've switched to HD-DVD as the horse they are going to back, and they don't want to confuse people by backing the WMV format.
Regarding hacking... Microsoft isn't necessarily concerned that a couple % of the Xboxes might be hacked to view content more easily. (Pirating games may be a real concern, though). They merely need to prevent a majority of people from doing this and they need to present the media companies with the face of a good partner.
Regarding the failure of the external hardrive... As someone above said, this isn't necessarily being made in order to be a smashing success on its own. It's really there because the Xbox 360 needs to support HD-DVD to compete with Blue-ray in the PS3. However, they couldn't support HD-DVD now because it would be too expensive, and probably impossible to make enough product. So, in the future some Xbox 360s will support HD-DVD out of the box. For those who don't care about HD-DVD capability, I'm sure there will still be a cheaper version without it. For those who want to upgrade, this add-on will be available, and will probably be significantly cheaper than a standalone player. I don't see how this is a bad thing. They are adding a desired capability to their product, and they are trying to be good to their earlier adopters by offering an upgrade. (That is, they are being good if the price is reasonable).
Why not put that money into creating cheap HD Antennas that output shitty analog to Pronged/Coax/Component so people can continue on as usual with a new antenna?
Uhm, because there's a lot involved with converting a HD signal to a standard pronged/coax/component signal. HD is digital, so you need a decoder (in addition to the demondulator). Currently the prices for such a box is about $200 (I think, this was a while ago). The hope is that by the time standard definition gets turned off, the boxes will be about $40, hence the $40 vouchers.
Let's do the math: 70 million TVs * $40 = $2.8 billion. So, if there are really only 70 million TV's that need converter boxes, and they can get $10 billion for the spectrum, the government stands to make a decent profit on this.
The Greatful Dead is a bad example because, as you said, "they're an established band with a devoted fanbase". (On the other hand, they are a good example, since their popularity stems from their live shows, not from radio play of their recordings. Still, I don't think they'd be nearly the phenomenom they were if they never had a recording contract).
You bring up a good point with your example of Battlestar Galactica: nobody benefits if free exposure is not available. It's really a balancing act between giving away things to get you interested and making you buy it to make money. If songs were never available for free (no radio, no trading music) you'd never buy anything since you wouldn't know what you're missing. Of course, if everything was free, then nobody would make any money.
The business types recognize this balancing act, and they want to maximize their profit. This means they will want free distribution mechanisms they can control. (If they can't control it, they might not hit the sweetest spot on their profit curve). Random trading isn't something they can control so they don't like it, regardless of whether it's actually helping or hurting them.
This musician should do what many others have done and start his or her own website. Make the music available there, free of charge or for a small fee.
How many musicians have succeeded in making a living this way? Without the exposure the record labels can give you (through their lock on radio) you aren't going to sell many songs. There may be one or two exceptions, (Ani DeFranco come to mind) but it's pretty rare.
If they were stupid enough to sign a restrictive contract with some media label, the just wait until the agreement expires.
Perhaps, but some contracts don't ever expire. I believe the contracts are usually based on # of albums, not a set amount of time. And guess what, the record company gets to decide when to release the album. So they can sit on it as long as they want, and you're f**ked.
And if you did get out of the contract, what are you going to do, get a better deal from a different record company? Unless you are already successful, it's not going to happen.
Perhaps this study could've been labelled: "Having monogamous relationship and no sex prior to marriage decreases men's probabilities of having prostate cancer".
Perhaps, but according to the study, the most important time of your life is your 20's, which is somewhat low compared to the average age when men get married. In addition, the study said that it's best if you do it more than 5 times a week, which is unrealistic for many (most)? people after NGL//science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/30/053 0236&tid=191&tid=14 wears off.
I just tried it out, and it's pretty good once you give it a few different artists. I'm just wondering if one of the 400 attributes is whether the singer can sing on-key.
Now, if there was only a way to make this comptible with an iPOD, then they'd really have something.
This would make sense, since the XBox isn't a whole lot cheaper to make now as it was when it was introduced. Microsoft doesn't own the IP to the chips in the first Xbox, so it has to buy the chips at whatever prices the contracts with Intel and Nvidia dictate. The price of hardrive probably hasn't dropped much either - (the cheapest hardrives are always around $50, regardless of the capacity). So, Microsoft is still probably losing money on every Xbox sold, (perhaps worse now then when the system was introduced). Why would they want to continue this?
I'm willing to bet a large part of the reason for the early introduction of the Xbox 360 is to reverse this trend, not simply to beat PS3 to market. If you look at the design choices of the 360 - no hardrive in the basic edition, buying the IP rather than buying the chips, you realize Microsoft learned from their mistakes with the first Xbox.
Yes, it is different, and no it may not be. The difference is, as they state in the article:
The new silicon was tested repeatedly over the course of a year to ensure it met the classical criteria of a laser, such as threshold behavior, optical gain, spectral line-width narrowing and self-collimated and focused light emission.
These are characteristics for stimulated (the "s" in laser) emission, not spontenous emission, which is what you had in the previous photoluminesence work.
However, it may not actually be caused by a different phenomenon then in porous silicon. It simply may just be more efficient in this geometry. It's a result that's not well understood at the moment.
There's nothing wrong with the fact that people in the record business make money. What bothers me is just how badly stacked the record contracts are against the artists. The artists get a small piece of every record sold, which would be fine. Except, first the artist needs to recoup. This means that the artist must first pay back all the money the record company gave them to make and market the album. So, unless the record is a phenomenal hit, the artists don't make squat (besides their advance, which they also owe the record company), even through the record companies may have made a fair amount of money.
It seems the thrust of this article is that the digital revolution is going to allow all sorts of different licensing schemes: You can rent the movie for a day, the book for a few months, etc (all by downloading to your computer at the press of a button and a charge to your credit card). If we force fair use rules to apply here, he believes you can get around the terms of the license.
It's a complicated issue, and I'm not sure where I stand. On the one hand, if you rent something, then I don't believe fair use rules apply. You shouldn't be entitled to make a back-up copy of a movie you are renting. On the other hand, I can envision a future where everything is locked down, and you'll never really own anything. (The content providers might find it for more profitable to force us to rent everything).
We also can hardly trust that the DRM mechanisms on things you rent and things you own won't be intertwined. If you try to access the things you own (say to back something up), you'll be necessarily breaking the mechanism used to protect things that are rented. (This is sort of the point of the article, but it's not our fault they the content providers find this need to lock down purchased, not rented, content more than is justifiable).
I'm not sure I believe you. I'd be surprised if your PIII 450 can handle decoding most of the torrents available for download. I know my Celeron 466 couldn't handle MP4's (or similar) with greater than 320x240 resolution.
I actually did use my Celeron as a PVR and it almost worked. Encoding was fine (with a hardware encoder), but decoding was a little iffy.
I think the point in the article (not the clearest or greatest aritcle written) was that music bought from any of the stores is DRM laden. The only DRM flavor that works with iPods is from iTunes. So, if you opt for an iPod you are stuck with iTunes for all your on-line purchases. In addition, the DRM flavor from iTunes doesn't work with other portable music players. So, if you opt for iTunes, your purchases only work with an iPod. (So, the iTunes/iPod contingent are in their own sandbox and can't easily play with others. Since this sandbox is bigger and better than all the other sandboxes, I don't think this bothers many people).
Of course, you can get around this by using non-DRM laden mp3 files, but no legitamate on-line stores sells such a thing. However, non-DRM laden files can be made from most of the stores by first burning a CD. (Something the article did point out). And, of course there are other sources of non-DRM laden files.
Films might benifit from a switch to HD/BR-DVD but I am very skeptical.
Actually, I think films will benefit dramatically from this, and this is the real market. All those people who are shelling out thousands of dollars for HDTV sets are starved for HD content to put on them. Sure DVD's look pretty good on a good HDTV set, but HD DVD's (either format) will look much better.
With better compression technologies available now than which DVD first came out I am sure that it would be possible to put a much better quality film (visually at least;o) on a standard DVD
I agree that I'm dissappointed with the compression technology used in the new standards. I really think they should have gone to a wavelet encoding method. The artifacts created by wavelet encoding are much less noticable than the blocky artifacts created by the current (sine/cosine) encoding techniques. (Wavelet encoding is a lot harder to do, but I don't think the decoding is that much harder then the currently methods). Whether any compression is good enough to encode good quality HDTV at DVD bitrates, however, is open to debate, although I'd say probably not.
I certainly wouldn't even consider buying a film I already own on DVD on HD/BR-DVD.
This is definitely an issues. People have pretty large libraries of DVD's, and they aren't going to want to jump right out and replace those libraries. I think many people will simply start buying movies in the new format without replacing their old libraries (except for a few favourites, though). Eventually, though, DVD's will dissappear from the stores and most people will replace the movies they care about. (Over the time frame of 10-20 years).
I agree with the original poster who thought the Firefly universe is an unrealistic anachronism. I also agree that the original Star Wars universe got it reasonably right. But there is a difference...
In the original Star Wars movies people were living in dirty deserts and subsistence farming, but they still had (limited) access to relatively current technology, such as the used robots and patchwork spaceships. These people were poor, and without access to much resources, but what resources they had fit the time and place they were living.
In Firefly it seemed like the people in the frontier are completely isolated from other parts of the universe they live in. It's not that I expect the frontier folk to have access the best technology, but the fact that they are so completely isolated from the rest of the universe seems bizarre. (Now I've only watched about 15 minutes of Firefly, so I could be way off base here, so go easy on me if I'm wrong).
As an observer of this conversation. I don't get it.
He said...
The money basically goes into the economy as a whole in both situations
and you replied...
(i.e. wasted, since the choices the government makes have nothing to do with efficiency)
So, the government just takes the money and burns it? Smarter people than us can argue all day about the efficiency of government and where best to put money in order to help the economy. I won't pretend to know what's best. Still, it appears to me that regardless of whether the money is in the pocket of some rich guy, or some poor guy (or a teacher, police officer, or someone else employed by the government) the money is going to get either spent or saved/invested. Either way, the money returns to the economy.
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t almost sounds to me like the same thing that I learned about sickle-cell anemia. That is, if you have the sickle-cell trait, you have partial sickle-cell anemia, but can still function relatively normal.
There's even more to it than that. A carrier (someone who has one chromosome with the defect, but not both) for sickle-cell, has some immunity to malaria. Therefore it's advantageous to be a carrier. However, having two chromosomes with the defect leads to serious problems.
Similarly, one could say in a society where analytical skills are valued, it is advantageous to have some genes which favor analytical over social skills. Too much, though, leads to serious problems.
With autism, the situation probably isn't as simple as a single gene, like in sickle-cell.
No, you have a good point: if you take the plant matter away, you are taking nutrients away. If you keep doing this, you'll eventually won't have enough nutrients to grow whatever it is you want to grow.
However, it is possible that this will still work without needing additional fertilizers. We don't really need all of the plant matter to make our fuel. It is possible, that in the refining process (when the plan matter is broken down into the fuel we want), we are left with a lot of waste which actually the nutrients that the plants need. We just need to put this waste back onto the ground.
At first, this sounds wrong, because you can't get something from nothing. But in this case, what we are really interested in, is the carbon cycle. In this cycle energy from the sun is used to combine water and CO2 to make some O2 and some compound (sugar, alchohol, and maybe cellulose), which can then be converted back into water and CO2 (using up O2) giving up energy. The nutrients the plants use, don't actually participate directly in this cycle. They form the factory that does the work, but they aren't actually consumed.
Having said this, I have no idea how the other details of the chemistry work, and if it possible to separate the nutrients from the fuel. I am making this up, since I only have enough knowledge to be dangerous. I'm just saying it's concievable you could use plants for energy without having to add fertilizer to the cycle.
Wouldn't a live action doom be faster? Double shotgun in the blubber butt should cure them.
I've often thought that a combined action game/exercise machine would be a great (although expensive) product. Use a treadmill or bike as a controller - pedal or run to make the character move. Sounds like a more fun way to burn calories to me. (I should do a google search to see if anyone's done this).
If the kids are too lazy to play real sports (soccer, football, baseball, general active play rather than watching tv) then what makes these people think that the kids won't be too lazy to play DDR?
There are lots of reasons a person might not want or be able to play the team sports you listed, but still enjoy DDR. Most real sports require opponents and teammates, and they aren't always available. You can force this issue in a school, by making people play together, but that's not terrible fun if the people don't get along. In addition, sports require that all the players be at similar skill levels, or else it doesn't work as well. In general, the overweight, uncoordinated, not social kid is not going to find team sports all that much fun.
As you alluded to, there are other sports and activities that don't require many other people (jogging, biking, hiking, throwing a ball against a wall), and really all this activity is, is another option. Notice that most of the activities I just listed are pretty boring to lots of people. Someone might find DDR more fun, or simply more accessible than the other options. If someone becomes more active because of this, then I consider it a good thing.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that some people are inactive because thay are lazy, and some people are inactive because they simply don't enjoy any of the active options available to them. It's not necessarily obvious who is who.
As far as whether this will work, despite what I said, I'm skeptical. I just don't think one game alone is going to have enough appeal to have much of an effect.
Now for a related rant...
My honest opinion on the subject of fitness in kids is that we've screwed them over by over scheduling their lives. It doesn't help that they are swimming in junk food, and plenty of non active activities (TV and video games), but I don't think this is the real problem. The real problem is no one just picks up a ball and plays in the street anymore. Instead we are driving our kids from one activity to the next. And we are overloading them with homework, too. So, the only exercise kids get is through organized sports. As I mentioned above, this doesn't work well for many kids who aren't athletic to begin with. So, we end up with a society were the athletic are pushed to be more athletic, and the rest become sloths on the sidelines.
"The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Onigman says.
This is somewhat off-topic, but this is the best example to show your friends, family, and senators why the DMCA is bad. Here we have a perfect example of something we should be legally allowed to do with traditionaly copyright law (space-shift), it's certainly technically feasible, and there is demand. But we can't actually legally do it, because of the DMCA.
Back on-topic, selling iPods preloaded with media is most likely illegal, unless you include the original media in the sale. (Just like selling any other type of copy of media is illegal).
What the majority of young women want is pretty much what you'd expect - entertaining, interesting, confident and funny men.
I'd add that they also want a man who is physically attractive, but other than that, you're absolutely right.
Although I don't think women are turned off by intelligent men, I do think it is wise not to let women know you work in a scientific field until they have an opportunity to learn that you are entertaining, interesting, confident and funny. Otherwise, some of the stereotypes about people in science could turn them off before they get to know you. It's not the intelligence that women are turned off by, it's the fear that they if you're a scientist you are probably unentertaining, uninteresting, and lacking in confidence.
Thanks (to you and others)! I was unaware of that ability. I was just (stupidly) repeating what I heard from a somewhat trusted source. I don't use iTunes much myself, so I never worried about enough to check.
I'm pretty sure iTunes has a mechanism to "delicense" a computer that you no longer want regestered to you. However, the delicensing is done from the computer you want delicensed. This means if the computer crashes/breaks unexpectedly you could be out of luck.
If you think the beef that people bring up in the comments in legitimate, then you need a clear policy prohibiting such abuses from submitters. Hopefully the submitters will change what they do, or this policy can give you abilty to change the submission/links to fit your new guidelines.
If you don't think that the beef people have is legitamate, then you've got a problem. Since this is largely a community run websight (the content is largely the forums, and the moderation is done by the community, too), you can't really force the websight to run at odds with the way such a large part of the community wants it to. You can perhaps nudge it with clear policies, but expect troubles if a lot of people strongly disagree.
I had a tape drive on my PET2001, and the only way we could make music with it would be to record a BASIC program, then play the cassette in an audio tape player.
Of course, this meant that any music we made had only two tones. Which wasn't so bad, considering the #1 album at the time was "Thriller."
Thiller hit the charts in 1984, so what were you still doing with a PET2001 (instead of a C64)? Actually, that year I spent a lot of my time programming games on my VIC-20. There are some songs from that year (PYT from that album being one of them - blech!) with which I have a stong association of programming the VIC-20.
My first though on reading this headline was the 1541 drive trick, too.
Pretty good post from an anon coward...
Reading this thread has given me a few thoughts, and your post is broad enough that I can make them all here:
Regarding limiting capabilities... Microsoft is currently doing a dance with the media companies. Microsoft wants badly to be in on this game, but the media companies can basically make the rules because they control the content. I have no doubt that some of the decisions Microsoft is making are done to keep the media companies happy (hence no ability to copy to the Xbox 360). In addition, Microsoft wants people to do things their proprietary way, just like almost every company does. I'm not sure why they don't support WMV-HD, but I suspect they realize that this format isn't going to be a success. So, they've switched to HD-DVD as the horse they are going to back, and they don't want to confuse people by backing the WMV format.
Regarding hacking... Microsoft isn't necessarily concerned that a couple % of the Xboxes might be hacked to view content more easily. (Pirating games may be a real concern, though). They merely need to prevent a majority of people from doing this and they need to present the media companies with the face of a good partner.
Regarding the failure of the external hardrive... As someone above said, this isn't necessarily being made in order to be a smashing success on its own. It's really there because the Xbox 360 needs to support HD-DVD to compete with Blue-ray in the PS3. However, they couldn't support HD-DVD now because it would be too expensive, and probably impossible to make enough product. So, in the future some Xbox 360s will support HD-DVD out of the box. For those who don't care about HD-DVD capability, I'm sure there will still be a cheaper version without it. For those who want to upgrade, this add-on will be available, and will probably be significantly cheaper than a standalone player. I don't see how this is a bad thing. They are adding a desired capability to their product, and they are trying to be good to their earlier adopters by offering an upgrade. (That is, they are being good if the price is reasonable).
Why not put that money into creating cheap HD Antennas that output shitty analog to Pronged/Coax/Component so people can continue on as usual with a new antenna?
Uhm, because there's a lot involved with converting a HD signal to a standard pronged/coax/component signal. HD is digital, so you need a decoder (in addition to the demondulator). Currently the prices for such a box is about $200 (I think, this was a while ago). The hope is that by the time standard definition gets turned off, the boxes will be about $40, hence the $40 vouchers.
Let's do the math: 70 million TVs * $40 = $2.8 billion. So, if there are really only 70 million TV's that need converter boxes, and they can get $10 billion for the spectrum, the government stands to make a decent profit on this.
The Greatful Dead is a bad example because, as you said, "they're an established band with a devoted fanbase". (On the other hand, they are a good example, since their popularity stems from their live shows, not from radio play of their recordings. Still, I don't think they'd be nearly the phenomenom they were if they never had a recording contract).
You bring up a good point with your example of Battlestar Galactica: nobody benefits if free exposure is not available. It's really a balancing act between giving away things to get you interested and making you buy it to make money. If songs were never available for free (no radio, no trading music) you'd never buy anything since you wouldn't know what you're missing. Of course, if everything was free, then nobody would make any money.
The business types recognize this balancing act, and they want to maximize their profit. This means they will want free distribution mechanisms they can control. (If they can't control it, they might not hit the sweetest spot on their profit curve). Random trading isn't something they can control so they don't like it, regardless of whether it's actually helping or hurting them.
This musician should do what many others have done and start his or her own website. Make the music available there, free of charge or for a small fee.
How many musicians have succeeded in making a living this way? Without the exposure the record labels can give you (through their lock on radio) you aren't going to sell many songs. There may be one or two exceptions, (Ani DeFranco come to mind) but it's pretty rare.
If they were stupid enough to sign a restrictive contract with some media label, the just wait until the agreement expires.
Perhaps, but some contracts don't ever expire. I believe the contracts are usually based on # of albums, not a set amount of time. And guess what, the record company gets to decide when to release the album. So they can sit on it as long as they want, and you're f**ked.
And if you did get out of the contract, what are you going to do, get a better deal from a different record company? Unless you are already successful, it's not going to happen.
Perhaps this study could've been labelled: "Having monogamous relationship and no sex prior to marriage decreases men's probabilities of having prostate cancer".
//science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/30/053 0236&tid=191&tid=14 wears off.
Perhaps, but according to the study, the most important time of your life is your 20's, which is somewhat low compared to the average age when men get married. In addition, the study said that it's best if you do it more than 5 times a week, which is unrealistic for many (most)? people after NGL
I just tried it out, and it's pretty good once you give it a few different artists. I'm just wondering if one of the 400 attributes is whether the singer can sing on-key.
Now, if there was only a way to make this comptible with an iPOD, then they'd really have something.
This would make sense, since the XBox isn't a whole lot cheaper to make now as it was when it was introduced. Microsoft doesn't own the IP to the chips in the first Xbox, so it has to buy the chips at whatever prices the contracts with Intel and Nvidia dictate. The price of hardrive probably hasn't dropped much either - (the cheapest hardrives are always around $50, regardless of the capacity). So, Microsoft is still probably losing money on every Xbox sold, (perhaps worse now then when the system was introduced). Why would they want to continue this?
I'm willing to bet a large part of the reason for the early introduction of the Xbox 360 is to reverse this trend, not simply to beat PS3 to market. If you look at the design choices of the 360 - no hardrive in the basic edition, buying the IP rather than buying the chips, you realize Microsoft learned from their mistakes with the first Xbox.
Yes, it is different, and no it may not be. The difference is, as they state in the article:
The new silicon was tested repeatedly over the course of a year to ensure it met the classical criteria of a laser, such as threshold behavior, optical gain, spectral line-width narrowing and self-collimated and focused light emission.
These are characteristics for stimulated (the "s" in laser) emission, not spontenous emission, which is what you had in the previous photoluminesence work.
However, it may not actually be caused by a different phenomenon then in porous silicon. It simply may just be more efficient in this geometry. It's a result that's not well understood at the moment.
There's nothing wrong with the fact that people in the record business make money. What bothers me is just how badly stacked the record contracts are against the artists. The artists get a small piece of every record sold, which would be fine. Except, first the artist needs to recoup. This means that the artist must first pay back all the money the record company gave them to make and market the album. So, unless the record is a phenomenal hit, the artists don't make squat (besides their advance, which they also owe the record company), even through the record companies may have made a fair amount of money.
It seems the thrust of this article is that the digital revolution is going to allow all sorts of different licensing schemes: You can rent the movie for a day, the book for a few months, etc (all by downloading to your computer at the press of a button and a charge to your credit card). If we force fair use rules to apply here, he believes you can get around the terms of the license.
It's a complicated issue, and I'm not sure where I stand. On the one hand, if you rent something, then I don't believe fair use rules apply. You shouldn't be entitled to make a back-up copy of a movie you are renting. On the other hand, I can envision a future where everything is locked down, and you'll never really own anything. (The content providers might find it for more profitable to force us to rent everything).
We also can hardly trust that the DRM mechanisms on things you rent and things you own won't be intertwined. If you try to access the things you own (say to back something up), you'll be necessarily breaking the mechanism used to protect things that are rented. (This is sort of the point of the article, but it's not our fault they the content providers find this need to lock down purchased, not rented, content more than is justifiable).
I'm not sure I believe you. I'd be surprised if your PIII 450 can handle decoding most of the torrents available for download. I know my Celeron 466 couldn't handle MP4's (or similar) with greater than 320x240 resolution.
I actually did use my Celeron as a PVR and it almost worked. Encoding was fine (with a hardware encoder), but decoding was a little iffy.
I think the point in the article (not the clearest or greatest aritcle written) was that music bought from any of the stores is DRM laden. The only DRM flavor that works with iPods is from iTunes. So, if you opt for an iPod you are stuck with iTunes for all your on-line purchases. In addition, the DRM flavor from iTunes doesn't work with other portable music players. So, if you opt for iTunes, your purchases only work with an iPod. (So, the iTunes/iPod contingent are in their own sandbox and can't easily play with others. Since this sandbox is bigger and better than all the other sandboxes, I don't think this bothers many people).
Of course, you can get around this by using non-DRM laden mp3 files, but no legitamate on-line stores sells such a thing. However, non-DRM laden files can be made from most of the stores by first burning a CD. (Something the article did point out). And, of course there are other sources of non-DRM laden files.
Films might benifit from a switch to HD/BR-DVD but I am very skeptical.
;o) on a standard DVD
Actually, I think films will benefit dramatically from this, and this is the real market. All those people who are shelling out thousands of dollars for HDTV sets are starved for HD content to put on them. Sure DVD's look pretty good on a good HDTV set, but HD DVD's (either format) will look much better.
With better compression technologies available now than which DVD first came out I am sure that it would be possible to put a much better quality film (visually at least
I agree that I'm dissappointed with the compression technology used in the new standards. I really think they should have gone to a wavelet encoding method. The artifacts created by wavelet encoding are much less noticable than the blocky artifacts created by the current (sine/cosine) encoding techniques. (Wavelet encoding is a lot harder to do, but I don't think the decoding is that much harder then the currently methods). Whether any compression is good enough to encode good quality HDTV at DVD bitrates, however, is open to debate, although I'd say probably not.
I certainly wouldn't even consider buying a film I already own on DVD on HD/BR-DVD.
This is definitely an issues. People have pretty large libraries of DVD's, and they aren't going to want to jump right out and replace those libraries. I think many people will simply start buying movies in the new format without replacing their old libraries (except for a few favourites, though). Eventually, though, DVD's will dissappear from the stores and most people will replace the movies they care about. (Over the time frame of 10-20 years).
I agree with the original poster who thought the Firefly universe is an unrealistic anachronism. I also agree that the original Star Wars universe got it reasonably right. But there is a difference...
In the original Star Wars movies people were living in dirty deserts and subsistence farming, but they still had (limited) access to relatively current technology, such as the used robots and patchwork spaceships. These people were poor, and without access to much resources, but what resources they had fit the time and place they were living.
In Firefly it seemed like the people in the frontier are completely isolated from other parts of the universe they live in. It's not that I expect the frontier folk to have access the best technology, but the fact that they are so completely isolated from the rest of the universe seems bizarre. (Now I've only watched about 15 minutes of Firefly, so I could be way off base here, so go easy on me if I'm wrong).
As an observer of this conversation. I don't get it.
He said...
The money basically goes into the economy as a whole in both situations
and you replied...
(i.e. wasted, since the choices the government makes have nothing to do with efficiency)
So, the government just takes the money and burns it? Smarter people than us can argue all day about the efficiency of government and where best to put money in order to help the economy. I won't pretend to know what's best. Still, it appears to me that regardless of whether the money is in the pocket of some rich guy, or some poor guy (or a teacher, police officer, or someone else employed by the government) the money is going to get either spent or saved/invested. Either way, the money returns to the economy.