The disparity of incomes allowing some gamers access to more resources or opportunities in games is not a new problem. In the play-by-mail games arena, it was a problem from day 1. When I played Starweb (http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/) in the late 70s, I had access to free long distance calls at night (this was before Bell was broken up and long distance was pretty expensive), quite an advantage in doing diplomacy compared to the players that had to rely on letters. The Schubel and Sons game "Tribes of Crane" allowed players to run multiple tribes and pay to submit extra order sheets with each turn. A basic turn was on the order of $10 in constant dollars, and there were players spending $200 per turn. On multiple positions. Submitting orders every 10 to 14 days. Needless to say, they owned your posterior if they took a dislike to you.
Sonny, the 360s were beautiful machines. Lots of blinking lights, switches, dials, even a large nameplate on top. The big emergency stop was always there in front, taunting you to pull it. When the new 370s came out with only a couple of lights on the front panel, I knew an era had passed.
Everytime I see one of these stories with "360" in the front, I flash back to my college days as an operator of an IBM 360/22 in a corporate data center. I'm officially old.
Second, you wrote: Eventually I got busted out by Amir Vahedi when my short-stacked 55 ran into his pocket tens. Oh well, that's poker.
Your Presto lost to Amir because you haven't been to BARGE. Ask Lee Jones about BARGE or look on r.g.poker. You would be more than welcome to attend this year. You'll never find a better group of pocker r00l3rz.
Also, a semi-regular geek-group $20+2 on Pokerstars would be fun.
Third, I never hated Wesley - I hated some of the idiot plots the idiot writers wrote for the show.
But I wish the conservatives currently in power were more interested in funding NASA than corporate tax breaks.
If you check, the current administration has increased NASA's budget and has threatened to veto the spending bill if a requested increase is not granted by congress.
The Space Exploration Initiative they proposed has exploration/colonization the Moon and Mars as explicit goals for NASA. The previous administration repeatedly cut the NASA budget and stopped all plans beyond building the space station.
..a new security bill coming up right before the election in November.
Except a quick check of the calendar at http://www.congress.gov/ shows that congress is not in session right now. The House has nothing on the schedule this week, and the Senate is not scheduled to convene until mid-November. Sigh. Can't journalists use the web yet?
I've got one of the boxes also. I don't have most of the problems that he does. My system works well - I feed the video to my Mitsubishi HD system, the audio to my Sony amp. I can easily control the volume with the remote supplied - hint: RTFM.
The delays in changing channels are about what he notes, but I've had a rock solid picture from the network feeds, HBO, TNT, INHDTV, etc. The DVR is adequate and does what we need it to do.
One hint on getting a good, stable picture. According to the techs that have done work on our system, the HD feeds are sensitive to signal strength - tight connections, good quality splitters and a feed that is like Goldilocks' porridge (neither too strong or weak) is required.
Friedman attributed the Reagan administration's focus on manned spaceflight as the primary reason for the lack of planetary missions in the 1980s.
Friedman is taking a cheap shot at a president he didn't like. The 80s had few planetary missions because the paradigm that planetary science used then was to build huge, multi-billion dollar probes to the outer planets. This took up all the space science dollars. Oh, and that little thing called the Hubble was developed in the 80s.
The emphasis now is on smaller probes that address questions raised by previous probes, with a billion dollar probe only now and then.
Long ago in high school, I competed in what was then called "Number Sense" - doing math problems mentally, no aid of scratch paper. (Calculators were an expensive novelty - 4 functions, Nixie tube displays, plugged into the wall, had 4 functions.) The system we all worked from is now called the "Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics", and it had lots of tricks for converting decimals to fractions and vice versa, multiplication of pairs of 4 digit numbers, etc. There are a lot of drills on visualization that helps in holding intermdiate results in the head. See http://www.speed-math.com or find the book on Amazon.
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The light comes out just a bit too blue.
True. However, at least one of the major lightbulb companies based here in the US has an aggressive program to bring LEDs to the masses. Right now, they are pushing R&D on advanced LED designs in cooperation with LED manufacturers and working on getting the color right. They anticipate that widespread home use is within this decade. They are nearly ready with replacements for commercial use.
Others have cited the problem of getting the Wal-Mart crowd to cough up a few extra bucks for LED bulbs even though they have better life cycle costs. Expect a strong government push to make the move, possibly including taxes or outright bans on the old bulbs. In many areas, there are building codes that limit the total wattage of lighting in new retail and commercial construction - to the point that current store designs are impossible to recreate.
I was in Thailand 18 months ago for a wedding, and saw Tux painted on the windows of computer storefronts in several locations - Bangkok, Phuket, and the Bangkok suburbs. There were quite a few internet cafes, with cheap rates to send or receive emails.
In addition, pirated IP was easily available. PS1 games, PC games, and music CDs were $5 each. I was offered NT version 4.0 server for $25 by a street vendor. Not many pirated DVDs, but lots of movies on video CD.
I have seen LED booklights at Sam's clubs in Houston. Two drawbacks when compared to the usual ones: no jack for external powerpack and they use expensive Lithium Ion batteries.
There are a few. My former state rep. here in Texas, who now is in another district, is an EE that does web design for political sites when not passing laws. I worked with him to kill the UCITA from being adopted in Texas.
I am writing him today to try to get this bill killed in Texas.
The data on the recorder may also give insight as to what did or did not happen on ascent, as it records the same sensor data during the climb to orbit. This could give insight as to how strong the foam impact was and where it hit on the wing.
White light LEDs are not quite there yet for home use. There are two drawbacks:
First, as others have noted they are not as efficient as compact fluorescents. Remember that they need low voltage DC so you have transformer losses to factor in.
Second, the less expensive ones are very, very "blue" in their output and have big dips in the output spectrum. The light is very "harsh".
Some co-workers follow LED technology for professional reasons (think of a place where spare light bulbs can only be brought up every 3-6 months at $10k/pound transport costs), and passed me some papers that project that they will probably be ready for home use by 2010, and industrial use somewhat before that. They already are starting to dominate in areas where the cost of replacement is high, or where a burn out is a safety hazard.
"Global piracy on the physical side costs the recording industry over $4 billion* a year. That doesn't even include losses on-line. While the physical piracy problem is not new, our markets continued to expand. Now that consumer purchasing is threatened as well, the impact of all piracy is greater." concluded Rosen.
The source of the $4 billion figure is attributed to "IFPI, the international association representing the recording industry worldwide." Good thing she passed that one off on someone else. I just don't see where the justification for that figure could possibly come from. The numbers are simply not there. In short, this is total bullshit.
Maybe not. The author of the article goes on to argue that file swapping, which may have killed the singles market, couldn't add up to this amount. Alas, he didn't read the quote properly. $4 billion is what they attribute to physical piracy, not online swapping. There are parts of the world where you can buy just about any CD, music or software, for a fraction of the price of retail. In a street market in Thailand I saw MS Office and NT Server for $20 (with activation keys), music CDs of current US and European pop releases for $5, PS games for $5-10. All were in jewel cases with artwork.
Physical piracy is their real enemy, not file sharing.
Come to your own conclusions. My feeling is that she is either:
A: a professional product reviewer, in which case Amazon should include a disclaimer that she is being paid for her reviews,
B: a compulsive liar / attention-seeker,
C: a collection of reviewers all publishing under one pseudonym, in which case Amazon should include a disclaimer that she is not a real person.
D: the marketing department for Amazon / Target, in which case Amazon should include a disclaimer that she is being paid and is not a real person.
A quick Google search indicates that there is a Gail Cooke that lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth area according to some news-type stories. She also pops up as a reviewer in a few "community" papers, the kind that are delivered weekly or so for free. She also has had reviews in the Dallas Morning News. My conclusion is A - sort of.
It is entirely possible that she is on the "reviewer's list" for a number of major publishers, and therefore gets review copies of new releases sent automatically. So, to keep the books coming, she writes reviews and shotguns them to newspapers and then to Amazon and B&N. She may have been canny enough to leverage her Amazon ranking to get on comparable lists for consumer goods also. I'd guess she isn't paid directly, but may make a nice sum by disposing of the reviewed goods. (The gcooke on eBay seems to be a male in TN, however.)
The book industry seems to not care if negative reviews are published about their products, so a bad review won't get you dumped from the comp list. This may be due to the fact that it is not hard to fill up the book review space in a periodical with only "good" reviews, with only "must review" blockbuster books getting the negative ones. With 100k+ books a year being published, an editor can simple choose this as a policy. At least this is what an editor at a major daily paper told me.
The film business is another matter. There are a group of reviewers for obscure media outlets (North Zulch Review Gazette, KSLASHDOT-TV in Core Dump, etc.) that can be counted on to almost always give a review that contains one phrase of praise that can be quoted in print ads. They can get incredible junket treatment in return - first class airfare to premieres/previews, great food, etc.
I seem to recall that the NSA has had problems over the past several years, trying to sort out the insane quantity of data to pick out the droplets of information they needed to know about. This has been likened to trying to drink from a fire house with a straw.
Now add in the CIA, FBI, TSA and all other TLA databases. A copy of a powerpoint presentation given by DARPA on TIA has been floating around. Interestingly, privacy was listed as one of the major concerns.
Everyone needs to get out of panic mode. The whole project, as of now, is a research effort to try to build intelligent query agents that can be given what kind of information to look for, to correlate, and to report. The queries go out, look around databases, and then report back to an analyst. The first phase research (which is just starting) will use a few existing government databases. Your credit card transactions are safe for now.
That said, we need to keep an eye on this and be sure it doesn't evolve into a massive filter of all digital data in the US.
MAKE one version, charge a reasonable price for it...$49.95...then if I do anything truely useful with it charge a royality for having written and compiled my code, or drawn my picture, etc with it...say 2% of the net profit I got from using your product to make my product...
This was tried, back in the Good Old Days(tm). Many early compilers and (especially) special purpose libraries had such licence terms. Didn't work out. It is also an accounting nightmare. Suppose I use VC++ to write a program, Star Office to write the manual, Emacs to build the online support info web pages, Mozilla mail to correspond with users, and Perl to write scripts to process user bug reports. Who gets how much of the 2% of net? More importantly, what is the definition of net? With MPAA/RIAA Accounting(tm) I can make sure I never show a profit.....
as reprehensible as forced registration is this might be a reasonable place for it...the registration code for the product would be burned into the anything that comes out of the product allowing things to be traced back to the end user/corporation.
According to some friends in the All Bidness, figuring out how to safely and economically "mine" these deposits is one of the holy grails of energy research.
Scientific American has had several articles on these compounds. See:
Further, what right does the federal government have to regulate intrastate use of the radio spectrum?
It has an obligation to enforce the treaties that we have signed on spectrum use. We agreed to abide by WARC allocation of spectrum quite a while ago. In addition, broadcasting radio and TV are frequently interstate in nature.
GOTO Handled Subscripted Labels Improperly
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
A program I was working on for an IBM 370 under the DOS/VS PL/I Checkout compiler had a problem handling a GOTO statement that used a subscripted label as a target. It choked on a statment of the form:
I = some lookup function result GOTO LABEL(I);
LABEL(1): processing code LABEL(2): more code
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
Satellite radio may not be a viable alternative. According to the XM web site, Clear Channel is a "strategic partner" of XM. They have to go to CC for shows like Art Bell, rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, etc.
Re:Star Wars creamed the spin-offs from day one.
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 1
This isn't true: Lucas and Star Wars defined spin-off marketing from day one. Prior to Star Wars, spin-off marketing of movies was practically unheard of, and certainly never made more money than the film itself even when it did appear.
Um. Well, Disney is the example of spin-off marketing. There is a lot of the Mouse's stuff out there and there has been for years. (Example: Coonskin caps in the 50s from the Davy Crockett shows. Mousketeer ears. Disneyworld.) All Lucas did was wake the other studios up to the possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
The disparity of incomes allowing some gamers access to more resources or opportunities in games is not a new problem. In the play-by-mail games arena, it was a problem from day 1. When I played Starweb (http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/) in the late 70s, I had access to free long distance calls at night (this was before Bell was broken up and long distance was pretty expensive), quite an advantage in doing diplomacy compared to the players that had to rely on letters. The Schubel and Sons game "Tribes of Crane" allowed players to run multiple tribes and pay to submit extra order sheets with each turn. A basic turn was on the order of $10 in constant dollars, and there were players spending $200 per turn. On multiple positions. Submitting orders every 10 to 14 days. Needless to say, they owned your posterior if they took a dislike to you.
Sonny, the 360s were beautiful machines. Lots of blinking lights, switches, dials, even a large nameplate on top. The big emergency stop was always there in front, taunting you to pull it. When the new 370s came out with only a couple of lights on the front panel, I knew an era had passed.
Everytime I see one of these stories with "360" in the front, I flash back to my college days as an operator of an IBM 360/22 in a corporate data center. I'm officially old.
First, thanks for answering these questions.
Second, you wrote: Eventually I got busted out by Amir Vahedi when my short-stacked 55 ran into his pocket tens. Oh well, that's poker.
Your Presto lost to Amir because you haven't been to BARGE. Ask Lee Jones about BARGE or look on r.g.poker. You would be more than welcome to attend this year. You'll never find a better group of pocker r00l3rz.
Also, a semi-regular geek-group $20+2 on Pokerstars would be fun.
Third, I never hated Wesley - I hated some of the idiot plots the idiot writers wrote for the show.
almost the same range with the oscillation frequency of molecules inside the battery
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy! This is the first step to building a true oscillator overthruster !
If you check, the current administration has increased NASA's budget and has threatened to veto the spending bill if a requested increase is not granted by congress.
The Space Exploration Initiative they proposed has exploration/colonization the Moon and Mars as explicit goals for NASA. The previous administration repeatedly cut the NASA budget and stopped all plans beyond building the space station.
Except a quick check of the calendar at http://www.congress.gov/ shows that congress is not in session right now. The House has nothing on the schedule this week, and the Senate is not scheduled to convene until mid-November. Sigh. Can't journalists use the web yet?
I've got one of the boxes also. I don't have most of the problems that he does. My system works well - I feed the video to my Mitsubishi HD system, the audio to my Sony amp. I can easily control the volume with the remote supplied - hint: RTFM.
The delays in changing channels are about what he notes, but I've had a rock solid picture from the network feeds, HBO, TNT, INHDTV, etc. The DVR is adequate and does what we need it to do.
One hint on getting a good, stable picture. According to the techs that have done work on our system, the HD feeds are sensitive to signal strength - tight connections, good quality splitters and a feed that is like Goldilocks' porridge (neither too strong or weak) is required.
Friedman attributed the Reagan administration's focus on manned spaceflight as the primary reason for the lack of planetary missions in the 1980s.
Friedman is taking a cheap shot at a president he didn't like. The 80s had few planetary missions because the paradigm that planetary science used then was to build huge, multi-billion dollar probes to the outer planets. This took up all the space science dollars. Oh, and that little thing called the Hubble was developed in the 80s.
The emphasis now is on smaller probes that address questions raised by previous probes, with a billion dollar probe only now and then.
Long ago in high school, I competed in what was then called "Number Sense" - doing math problems mentally, no aid of scratch paper. (Calculators were an expensive novelty - 4 functions, Nixie tube displays, plugged into the wall, had 4 functions.) The system we all worked from is now called the "Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics", and it had lots of tricks for converting decimals to fractions and vice versa, multiplication of pairs of 4 digit numbers, etc. There are a lot of drills on visualization that helps in holding intermdiate results in the head. See http://www.speed-math.com or find the book on Amazon.
True. However, at least one of the major lightbulb companies based here in the US has an aggressive program to bring LEDs to the masses. Right now, they are pushing R&D on advanced LED designs in cooperation with LED manufacturers and working on getting the color right. They anticipate that widespread home use is within this decade. They are nearly ready with replacements for commercial use.
Others have cited the problem of getting the Wal-Mart crowd to cough up a few extra bucks for LED bulbs even though they have better life cycle costs. Expect a strong government push to make the move, possibly including taxes or outright bans on the old bulbs. In many areas, there are building codes that limit the total wattage of lighting in new retail and commercial construction - to the point that current store designs are impossible to recreate.
I was in Thailand 18 months ago for a wedding, and saw Tux painted on the windows of computer storefronts in several locations - Bangkok, Phuket, and the Bangkok suburbs. There were quite a few internet cafes, with cheap rates to send or receive emails.
In addition, pirated IP was easily available. PS1 games, PC games, and music CDs were $5 each. I was offered NT version 4.0 server for $25 by a street vendor. Not many pirated DVDs, but lots of movies on video CD.
I have seen LED booklights at Sam's clubs in Houston. Two drawbacks when compared to the usual ones: no jack for external powerpack and they use expensive Lithium Ion batteries.
There are a few. My former state rep. here in Texas, who now is in another district, is an EE that does web design for political sites when not passing laws. I worked with him to kill the UCITA from being adopted in Texas.
I am writing him today to try to get this bill killed in Texas.
The data on the recorder may also give insight as to what did or did not happen on ascent, as it records the same sensor data during the climb to orbit. This could give insight as to how strong the foam impact was and where it hit on the wing.
First, as others have noted they are not as efficient as compact fluorescents. Remember that they need low voltage DC so you have transformer losses to factor in.
Second, the less expensive ones are very, very "blue" in their output and have big dips in the output spectrum. The light is very "harsh".
Some co-workers follow LED technology for professional reasons (think of a place where spare light bulbs can only be brought up every 3-6 months at $10k/pound transport costs), and passed me some papers that project that they will probably be ready for home use by 2010, and industrial use somewhat before that. They already are starting to dominate in areas where the cost of replacement is high, or where a burn out is a safety hazard.
Maybe not. The author of the article goes on to argue that file swapping, which may have killed the singles market, couldn't add up to this amount. Alas, he didn't read the quote properly. $4 billion is what they attribute to physical piracy, not online swapping. There are parts of the world where you can buy just about any CD, music or software, for a fraction of the price of retail. In a street market in Thailand I saw MS Office and NT Server for $20 (with activation keys), music CDs of current US and European pop releases for $5, PS games for $5-10. All were in jewel cases with artwork.
Physical piracy is their real enemy, not file sharing.
A quick Google search indicates that there is a Gail Cooke that lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth area according to some news-type stories. She also pops up as a reviewer in a few "community" papers, the kind that are delivered weekly or so for free. She also has had reviews in the Dallas Morning News. My conclusion is A - sort of.
It is entirely possible that she is on the "reviewer's list" for a number of major publishers, and therefore gets review copies of new releases sent automatically. So, to keep the books coming, she writes reviews and shotguns them to newspapers and then to Amazon and B&N. She may have been canny enough to leverage her Amazon ranking to get on comparable lists for consumer goods also. I'd guess she isn't paid directly, but may make a nice sum by disposing of the reviewed goods. (The gcooke on eBay seems to be a male in TN, however.)
The book industry seems to not care if negative reviews are published about their products, so a bad review won't get you dumped from the comp list. This may be due to the fact that it is not hard to fill up the book review space in a periodical with only "good" reviews, with only "must review" blockbuster books getting the negative ones. With 100k+ books a year being published, an editor can simple choose this as a policy. At least this is what an editor at a major daily paper told me.
The film business is another matter. There are a group of reviewers for obscure media outlets (North Zulch Review Gazette, KSLASHDOT-TV in Core Dump, etc.) that can be counted on to almost always give a review that contains one phrase of praise that can be quoted in print ads. They can get incredible junket treatment in return - first class airfare to premieres/previews, great food, etc.
Now add in the CIA, FBI, TSA and all other TLA databases. A copy of a powerpoint presentation given by DARPA on TIA has been floating around. Interestingly, privacy was listed as one of the major concerns.
Everyone needs to get out of panic mode. The whole project, as of now, is a research effort to try to build intelligent query agents that can be given what kind of information to look for, to correlate, and to report. The queries go out, look around databases, and then report back to an analyst. The first phase research (which is just starting) will use a few existing government databases. Your credit card transactions are safe for now.
That said, we need to keep an eye on this and be sure it doesn't evolve into a massive filter of all digital data in the US.
This was tried, back in the Good Old Days(tm). Many early compilers and (especially) special purpose libraries had such licence terms. Didn't work out. It is also an accounting nightmare. Suppose I use VC++ to write a program, Star Office to write the manual, Emacs to build the online support info web pages, Mozilla mail to correspond with users, and Perl to write scripts to process user bug reports. Who gets how much of the 2% of net? More importantly, what is the definition of net? With MPAA/RIAA Accounting(tm) I can make sure I never show a profit.....
And this is easily hacked.
Scientific American has had several articles on these compounds. See:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0009EC CC-3F88-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&pageNumber=1&catID=4
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E0 257-B855-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&pageNumber=1&catID= 2
It has an obligation to enforce the treaties that we have signed on spectrum use. We agreed to abide by WARC allocation of spectrum quite a while ago. In addition, broadcasting radio and TV are frequently interstate in nature.
A program I was working on for an IBM 370 under the DOS/VS PL/I Checkout compiler had a problem handling a GOTO statement that used a subscripted label as a target. It choked on a statment of the form:
I = some lookup function result
GOTO LABEL(I);
LABEL(1):
processing code
LABEL(2):
more code
Satellite radio may not be a viable alternative. According to the XM web site, Clear Channel is a "strategic partner" of XM. They have to go to CC for shows like Art Bell, rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, etc.
Um. Well, Disney is the example of spin-off marketing. There is a lot of the Mouse's stuff out there and there has been for years. (Example: Coonskin caps in the 50s from the Davy Crockett shows. Mousketeer ears. Disneyworld.) All Lucas did was wake the other studios up to the possibilities.
Of course, that is not what the solution is, it's programming the criminals to be incapable of crime. Maybe he watched AntiTrust instead.
And Tron was awful, awful, awful.