France -- good wine is practically free, Germany -- beer and sausages, Netherlands -- high quality Belgian beers for 1/6th the cost, clothing, hotels, and food.. (admittedly it is hard to find good food in the Netherlands, but it is possible.)
*sigh* You remind me of the EE graduate student who was showing me and my classmates around his lab one day. To prove the point that humans couldn't hear a 16kHz tone very well he quickly turned the power up from 1 to 11, and through pain practically paralyzed the half of the class that still had their hearing intact.
Many cars have the flickering tail LED lights, and it has nothing to do with DC-DC converters or other sources of ripple in the supply current. It's simply a matter of the duty cycle timer, the tail lights are "dimmed" not by limiting the current but by turning them completely on and off at a low frequency. The ones I've seen are in the 40-80Hz range, just stick an oscilloscope on there if you don't believe me. The flicker stops when the lights go to full illumination (i.e. the break petal is depressed).
Now go outside and look at some LED tail lights! Even if you have very poor vision you should be able to see the ones flickering at 40-50 Hz.
PS If you are legally blind, just don't comment on lighting. You are bound to suffer from foot in mouth at times; go take on those annoying audiophiles buying 1000 euro power chords.
For example, I'm pretty sure that you are not allowed to publicly perform that DVD (project it to a public audience) without a special license that doesn't come from the DVD store.
No license is involved in a DVD purchase, you buy a piece of plastic. What you can do with that piece of plastic is governed by local law and custom. You only need a license to do things not allowed by law. In the US, prohibited things include such infractions as watching it on a >9' diagonal projection screen, or allowing the general public to view its contents without providing them with alcohol.
Copyright regulations are only incidentally related to the "public exhibition" laws. These laws do not have anything to do with regulating the number of copies you make of the plastic disc nor the fate of such copies when you sell the disc. In the US they can be argued better under the commerce clause than the copyright clause, it's more like the laws that allow states to prevent the import of milk from other states; instead of a market regulation intended to help milk processing plants with a twelve day monopoly on fresh milk, it's a market regulation intended to fund the creation of movies via a twelve decade monopoly on the public exhibition of that movie. Twelve months would probably be sufficient and I think royalties rather than monopoly would be a better idea in the case of movies, as watching a movie is not quite the same thing as drinking a glass of fresh milk. But congress has wide latitude to regulate commerce between and within the states and could grant a 12 million year monopoly if they wanted to, quite separate from copyrights which in the US are limited in length to a term compatible with the public good.
Isn't it the US where convicted felons can't vote? So you can't vote, but you can be elected? Now that's a nice standard. "Nah, we can't have criminals affect the course of our society. We prefer being ruled by them."
The rule allowing felons to serve is a good one, and the one most democratic governments have it. The reason for it is to prevent the party in power from subverting democracy by making something the loyal opposition does a crime. They can still make something a crime of course, but if the electorate sees it as a scam they can override put the loyal opposition in power so that they can revert the law to it's former state.
But this isn't a case of voter suppression, the anti-bribery laws have been on the books a long time and a jury of his peers found him guilty of violating these laws. If he does manage to get re-elected he will probably resign and Sarah Palin will appoint a temporary Republican Senator who will serve until the vacancy election is held, and whoever he is he will probably win in this overwhelmingly Republican state. If Stevens loses, the Democrat Mark Begich will have six years to prove himself before standing for re-election.
If Stevens wins, but refuses to resign, the Senate will almost certainly kick him out; they are free to do this even if Bush pardons him. My guess is that a Bush will probably commute the imprisonment portion of Ted Steven's sentence, if he does not outright pardon him. Few want to see this elder statesman live out the remainder of his years in prison despite the shame he has brought to the Senate.
I have no real explanation for the release of free energy in this case, but there's definitely no offspring; I think you get the idea..
My understanding was that matter and anti-matter are more like straight women and straight men. When anti-matter and matter collide they emit gamma rays, and if the gamma rays are sufficiently dense they can condense back into either matter or anti-matter. So there are at least three good explanations for a mostly female universe: either there were more women to begin with, the laws of physics were different in this respect in the beginning, or when gamma rays condense more women are produced. My hope would be on the last one since it feels most efficient and we can test it in my lifetime, but we don't understand the mechanism for any of those scenarios. If we finish up the standard model and there is perfect symmetry everywhere then we'll have to accept that the universe was either born imbalanced or the laws of physics were somehow different at the beginning. Which would be unfortunate, because we probably won't have any means to simulate and observe a big bang anytime soon.
And before someone say the laws of physics never change, General Relativity and the Standard Model may be nearly as incomplete as Newtonian physics. Remember, Newtonian physics explains almost all of the workings of our solar system and was good enough for a long time. General Relativity may similarly be limited to the workings of the sparse universe we can observe today.
PS I've been out of school a long time and only took physics because it was a requirement for an engineering degree, but if I'm way off I'm sure some physics grad student will correct me.:)
The Port Authority could sell it if they so chose. Linux, on the other hand, cannot be sold in the same sense that you cannot sell the idea of a cloud.
I have as much right to sell the Brooklyn Bridge as the Port Authority Corporation of NY and NJ does. The bridge is owned by the City of New York, and I assure you it would be easier to get the few thousand copyright holders of Linux to sell than it would be to get New York City to to sell the symbol of the unification of the five boroughs. In fact, it might be easier to get the Congress of the United States of America to patent apple pie and sell the exclusive right of manufacture to China.
Most things in this world of ours have not been bought and sold within the last five minutes, and many things have never been bought or sold. This does not mean we can not estimate their economic value. In fact these estimates tend to be more conservative and ultimately more accurate than estimates based on sale values, as our banks have recently rediscovered. Sale values are for the most part based on irrational estimates of future earnings. Valuations based on actual economic productivity are retrospective rather than prospective so they lag true economic value but they also don't swing wildly like sale price based estimates and at any instant are more likely to be accurate than sale price based estimates.
If you look at our most accurate economic indicators they are all retrospective. Sometimes the economists figure out we were in a recession after we've left it, but that's the price you pay for accuracy. Sale prices instead follow our collectively predicted the future values, which tend to move in the right general direction most of the time, but are usually too optimistic and are sometimes too pessimistic. "Market corrections" happen after prices have gone wildly in one direction, when all those more accurate, but lagging, economic indicators were going the other way; then when they get published, the prices adjust up or down to match the real numbers.
Sounds like you are not in a business that generates IP. My business generates nothing but copyrighted software, but I'm glad you put copyright outside the ill concieved IP umbrella.
You can't even issue a DMCA notice without signing that you state under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate. How many millions of prosecutions have been carried out? How many millennia have the serial abusers of the DMCA been forced to cease operations due to their recklessness?
The ISP hosting the copyrighted data then deliberately drags their feet to remove the content, and once it's removed, its re-uploaded by the same user 5 minutes later. Here you have something I can agree with you on, the DMCA is ineffective when issued without any of the due diligence you are required to do before issuing the DMCA take down notice. If DMCA take-down notice abusers were prosecuted and their business operations shut down by the US Justice department, I believe you might see both DMCA notices fall in number and gain greater effect. A properly issued DMCA notice wouldn't be issued until enough evidence was collected to allow the copyright holder to follow up with the user that reposts the material five minutes later with a lawsuit. As it is DMCA notices are a drain on all legitimate economic activity and a joke for file sharer.
The problem with the DMCA is it does nothing to prevent the widespread abuse of anonymous filehosting. Heh, if you think that is the only or even major problem with the DMCA you haven't been paying attention. The DMCA kills oodles of competition in the tech sector and has cost trillions to the world economy since it was passed. Exempting the media sector of the economy from copyright protection at all would have had trivial economic cost in comparison.
The DMCA needs teeth to actually prosecute uploaders, rather than just weak half-assed requirements that the ISPS get around to eventually removing content temporarily when they feel like it. Seriously? This provision needs teeth, but to prosecute the DMCA issuers for their abuses. For instance $5,000,000 should be required to be placed in escrow before a DMCA notice is issued, and another $2,000,000 by the ISP who takes action on the notice, and statutory damages should be made available to the victim. Victims like John McCain could then receive either receive statutory damages of say $100,000 a day plus legal expenses by filing simple form, or receive actual damages by taking the abuser to court. No party other than the victim should be able to cash out the escrow without all parties' agreement or the on the order of the court, the victim seeking only statutory and legal consultation expenses should only be required to bring or mail standard response forms to their local county clerk and wait one or two business days. This would allow the DMCA to work without requiring the the Justice Department to actively prosecute the likes of EMI, which they have failed to do in hundreds of thousands of cases of abuse by the serial abusers of the DMCA.
All the provisions of the DMCA are ill conceived and there is no baby to worry about in throwing out this bathwater. Copyright regulations need to be replaced, but we need to rewind to 1790 and start patching these regulations to fit into the modern world. For one thing 14 year exclusivity terms are way to long in this world of instant communications and cheap copies. Make it 2-3 years of exclusivity instead, but make it iron tight in those years; then add some years of compulsory licensing where I don't have exclusivity, but can profit off the "Barnes and Noble" edition or the translation or anything else where someone else is profiting of my work. With effective means of collecting these royalties, effective meaning not tied to the copy but to the access and use of the material. And yes, I know this is incompatible with Berne and TRIPS. Toss em! After we have figured out a system of regulations that actually *work* we can start convincing the rest of the world to reform their regulatory systems to replace copyright with a more modern and effective set of regulatory income protections for creators.
Heh, gotta get back to work. You just got my goat with that post!
It's completely different provisions that make the DMCA unpopular.
The take down process and it's liability shield is probably the only half way decent part of an extremely flawed bill. But that does not mean that it is a "Good Thing", I've had my internet and phone service interrupted because of the "take it down and ask questions later" culture it has spawned at ISPs. In my case it was due to a bogus DMCA complaint from EMI on an IP address in a block that had been allocated to me, but hadn't even been placed into service yet. Maybe I could have sued for loss of business, but just starting that suit would have cost more than six days of lost business with very dubious chances of success.
In the eight years since the day the phones went dead I haven't had any more full interruptions, but enough close calls -- literally, the ISPs that I've paid a bit of a premium for since call me before breaking the link (and Verizon is long gone from the picture) -- that I really have no love for any of the DMCA. That someone who voted for the bill might lose his presidential bid in part due to it fills me the glee! That his proposed solution to YouTube is a special exemption for himself is funny and sad at the same time.
RMS wants source code to be released free for everyone.
The Chinese government (according to the extract provided in the slashdot summary...) wants to be able to inspect the source code for their own purposes (with the possibility implied by the article authors that they might then seek to gain from it).
The former is embracing freedom. The second is not.
I think that is a very important point. I've heard Eben Moglen talk about this. To paraphrase his take on the Free Software is Communism meme: Yes we do share some of the goals of communism, such as no child should be denied an education, but our methods are the polar opposite from that of Communist states. We rely on voluntary sharing to achieve our goals not the power of government, not only is this method successful with information because the costs of duplication are negligible and the positive network effects of sharing are immense, but we also don't believe the ends justify the means. We only want to use means that are moral and just irrespective of our goals.
But I think people are making a mountain out of a molehill here, if you read the article you'll see that China is only demanding the software to hardware crypto devices. All real crypto devices use public algorithms. And this software is already made available to all Western governments, Western ones just get the source by putting the source code requirement into procurement contracts. Since China is not asking for the VHDL for the hardware they have no hope of using this source for reverse engineering the devices, all they can do with it is check for the most obvious of illegal back doors.
Yes, it's wrong for the Chinese government to obtain this information by fiat rather than by the sugar of a procurement contract or a court order _after_ a crime has been committed. But this is not very news worthy, China has an authoritarian government and it has had one for as long as I've been alive. This is how authoritarian governments do things, in an authoritarian state when you refuse a customs search you are forcibly searched, in a liberal democracy they send you and your belongings back to where you came from. This permeates throughout the whole society. Writers here on/. are ascribing all kinds of nefarious motives, but I bet the motive is exactly the same as when their own government looks at this source code. It has nothing to do with reverse engineering these public algorithms and everything to do with looking for back holes. China is just using the same authoritarian methods as other authoritarian states; remember the US, Russia and France still have laws on the books banning the export of strong crypto to their 'enemies', left over from more authoritarian times. The US even has a recent history of serious proposals for much more draconian regulation of crypto, remember the Clipper Chip? Remember how you had to jump through hoops to get Netscape with a paltry 128-bit key support just so that it would take 5 minutes for a criminal to get your credit card from an online transaction instead of you broadcasting your banking information completely in the clear?
The article is also complete garbage. The article ends with some silly babble about how Microsoft has made their money by keeping it's source code a secret. Any large purchaser can get their hands on the source code to Microsoft's released products, the Chinese government has copies of it, so does your government. I've even had a Microsoft evangelist _beg_ me to look at the source to help them with a driver problem.
Here's an idea, use two copper wires separated by a dialectic. These are sold at electronics stores like radio-shack, and are even available with different colored and even clear dielectrics.
You will need to impedance match both ends of the transmission line. It's not as good, nor as convenient as RG6, but can be less conspicuous.
Many antennas actually have 300 ohm leads anyway, with a matching transformer for coax, so you actually transplant the matching transformer to the other end of the line.
Most pot growing is still illegal under California Law. Under Prop 215 you can grow pot for personal use provided your doctor has prescribed it.
You can also grow it as a designated agent for someone who has a doctor's recommendation under California Law. The main catch is you can't transport it to them.
Of course the federales can do a bust, but prosecuting people for trivial offenses which don't cross state lines is normally done on the State's dime; and I doubt the people of Wyoming want their taxes raised to keep all those California pot-heads in federal prisons if they manage to get a conviction. The feds just 'arrest' property, since when accused of a crime property in the USA is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Some individuals have put in a claim that their property is innocent of a crime and have had their pot plants returned, but this is rare -- and much more expensive than just growing some more, it is a weed after all.
It's not just the federales harassing the citizens of California. Some local authorities do it too. They are allowed to enforce the silliest of federal laws in addition to the local laws. But the brunt of the federal law kicks in at cultivation of 100 plants or possession of 100 kilos. Many growers in California consequently stay at 99 plants or less. You can get jail time for smaller amounts, but it's generally a misdemeanor and you also need to find a jury that will actually convict. Their main goal is to harass their victims and 'arrest' any cash they find lying around.
As to the topic at hand, you need to be a real idiot to install a road on your property without a closed gate at the entrance and not expect cars to accidentally drive down the road.
PS I find no use for pot in my own life but cringe at the waste of money, lives, and freedom the 'war' has cost us.
I think that the individual has the right to decide whether it's more important for him to gain a few dollars versus influencing which party wins.
Sometimes individual rights collide with the collective interest. When you choose to live in a country with a government, you give up some individual rights -- in exchange you get safety for your person. The old Icelandic Republic allowed the selling and buying of votes; within a few hundred years four families had cornered the market and civil war was the inevitable result. New democracies like the US don't allow the buying and selling of votes for a good reason. As a civilization, we learn from the mistakes of the past and try to avoid repeating them.
I was trying to explain why the figure is so high, but you really want to know how it is in fact derived?
It's very simple. You take the rate CO2 is released into the atmosphere, then you look at the rate CO2 is actually growing, the difference is the CO2 that's being absorbed by the environment. You take the rate the CO2 is absorbed and divide that into the delta between now and a century ago to determine the time to get back to those levels.
Now this 1000 year figure assumes we stopped producing a net gain of CO2 five years ago; but it's a nice easy number to remember and revising it to 1254 or whatever it stands at today _exactly_ serves no real purpose. We could also hit a tipping point where CO2 is not absorbed but instead expelled by the environment in response to higher temperatures or just higher CO2 concentrations, and we may also not need to go back to early industrial revolution CO2 levels, but instead find 1950's levels are ok.
The figure doesn't tell the whole story, and over the last two decades we've been learning where that absorbed CO2 is going. Some of those sinks have reached their limit and others are improving with higher CO2 levels. If it weren't for this absorption, we'd be in much worse shape right now. And it's important to know that we can't with any certainty say how fast 2020 CO2 levels will be absorbed until we get there, we can only estimate how long it would take to get us back to an earlier date from current level and slightly higher, since the rate of absorption varies with CO2 level.
Can you explain this a bit, please ? I'm honestly curious: I would have thought that the plant-cycle would clear CO2 out of the atmosphere in no time at all. I was under the impression that planting trees could actually be offset against car-production in real time, if you know what I mean.
The quote I've seen is that a car burns it's weight in ancient biomass each day. So you need to harvest a tree every week and make sure it never rots or gets eaten by termites each week. You've got to stop the plant-cycle, otherwise that carbon cycles back into the atmosphere, which we don't want. Cars are of course only a 1/4 of the problem, they burn a very clean fuel compared to the coal used in many electric power plants.
We are observing some neat responses in nature though. A lot of carbon leaves the air by absorption into the oceans. This makes the oceans more acidic, which decreases the shell building efficiency of shell building animals. This is a problem because those shells do remove lots of carbon from the oceans every day; allowing more to be absorbed from the air. However, we are seeing that some shell building critters are actually doing better. Maybe these will offset the ones that are doing worse, maybe not; time will tell.
The general assumption is that it will take about 1000 years to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere we have emitted so far. But this is something where time will tell. Maybe it will only take 500 years, maybe 2000. It really depends on how the complex biological systems of the many species of life on earth respond to the changes. This compares to few days to 10 years for other green house gases of note.
And while cow farts are a powerful pollutant, the solution is higher quality feed and a meaningful pollution tax would eliminate this contributor to global warming within a decade. This is why it doesn't keep scientists up at night; our political systems have already shown they can respond to a threat were the benefits of the solution begin to accrue while a single set of politicians is still in office.
Nothing is stopping you from just sending them some money.
And who says anything has?
You missed my point, by giving such a nice toy for such a small donation OLPC has attracted people to the program who are not only a drain on society in general but also threaten to be a drain on the OLPC project.
Some of the buyers in developed countries seem upset that the warranty period is only 30 days, and that they have to pay for shipping.
Some people are simply delusional. When I participated in G1G1 I assumed there was no warranty. My guess is the 30 day warranty is only there because of some stupid law. The way I see it, I made a donation to the OLPC Foundation, and got a neat little example of the technology I was funding. If mine had experienced any problems I would never have dreamed of draining OLPC's resources by returning it for replacement. I would have attempted a repair and reported on the success or failure of my repair, so that the knowledge could be disseminated to the children using the laptops.
I haven't experienced any problems, and I really wish commercial companies would adopt a technology like its screen or its ability to take falls and keep on ticking, and especially the power-saving technologies which makes this thing the only laptop that has never run out of juice one me; I carry around three heavy batteries with my regular laptop and run it in its maximal power saving mode and it still doesn't hold a candle to the OLPC.
The keyboard doesn't have the best feel, and I would only want commercial companies to copy it when making a keyboard for children. It is spill-proof. When I've spilled hot coffee and cold soda on it, I just had to wipe it off. Again, this is unlike my Sony Vaio and Lenovo T-61 keyboards which I've had to replace when even take-it-apart-deep-cleaning did not restore functionality post spill.
From what I've read, it appears the stuck key problem is fixable with a cleaning. Taking apart an OLPC is _much_easier_ than taking apart a commercial laptop, so I think this whole complaint is completely overblown. I'm not going to go so far as to say the article poster is an Intel sock puppet. I've seen they crazies who talk about having "bought" an OLPC right here on slashdot. Since the OLPC has never been on sale to individuals, you know these people are delusional right off the bat. The apparently large number of these folks either speaks to the success of the G1G1 program at reaching many many people, or it speaks to the sorry state of the war on drugs at it's goal of combating the crack epidemic. Either way, these idiots should be ignored, and I hope the folks at OLPC do not take these jokers seriously.
My only disappointment with the G1G1 program is that it wasn't G2G1, Give 2 Get 1. That could have resulted in more laptops in the hands of children, and fewer laptops in the hands of these complainers.
Since they already render the movies in a 3D world, I've always wondered why they don't make 3D versions of everything.
At least because of this, it should be little trouble (and very profitable) for them to go back and re-render their library in 3D.
The 2-D compositing is used to both to create special effects, which would need to be redone, removed, or at least placed at the right depth, and to do lots of fakey cinematic tricks like depth of field, which are used to make things look more real to the viewer looking at a flat screen projection. With stereo you actually want to make both the whole image sharp so as not to create undo eyestrain (your eyes have limited depth of field, so this will actually look the same to you when done right, but doing it right is not trivial, some scenes may need to be rethought completely.) Now, since the movie is made up of 2D layers composited together it takes years to render the first cut you are talking about 1/ fixing up stuff so that it looks right in stereo 2/ re-rendering the whole thing another two times, once for each eye.
It can be done for older movies. But it's much easier to do when you are making the movie, since you have the director paying full attention to the task and he can rethink scenes so they look great in regular projection and stereo projection.
I have to agree. I flew VA a couple months back and the killer features, like web browsing were just not online yet.. The in satellite reception was also not so great, JetBlue does a better job there.
I did enjoy the classic games running in MAME. But that also lacked polish, they didn't do a good job mapping the keys for the various games, and you couldn't hit meta keys so you couldn't reconfigure the key bindings yourself.
They also used black 000000h as their XVideo chromakey, which meant that when the video kept going when you were in some other app the video would leak into that app. If they had used 010101h instead this issue wouldn't exist and you would still get a black screen rather than a nasty blue or green one when video was starting up.
Overall, it was a good flight. The flight attendants were amazingly attentive. Who ever did the hiring should get a gold star.
Funny you refer to Jeff Han's demo, I was just thinking we were using those gestures for years at the NYU MRL & CAT. Not that this would stop Apple's patent application, I think the new and improved US patent office requires that the invention be invented by someone other than the patent applicant and used for at least 5 years prior to the first patent application being filed. But there were earlier one-touch gestures used in the 80's and early 90's for zooming, those could be used instead if Apple manages to patent some or all of the old multi-touch display zoom gestures. (PS I have no idea if NYU used those multitouch gestures first, I recall seeing them used in the 90's at some California school too.)
PS Even if they get a patent it will probably be for using these gestures on a hand-held or even just on a phone, since there is such obvious prior art for using them with larger multi-touch displays. Remember, putting a keyboard on a handheld was recently patented... You can always just add specificity to get a patent: you can't patent swinging on a swing from side to side, because someone else still holds a valid US patent for that; but you can patent swinging on a swing on a sunny day, because that hasn't been recently patented. Just like you can patent centuries old auctioning algorithms for use on the internet! I'm sure once those expire someone will be able to patent those same centuries old maths on the WORLD WIDE WEB!
My example about the dating of primate and human evolution was to prove that these type of huge "corrections" have occured even in other scientific fields as well. So what we know to be absolutely true today, can be completely off tomorrow.
Scientists never know anything to be "absolutely true". Absolute truth is the domain of charlatans, liars and cheats.
When geology started scientists proved that certain rocks in England were "millions of years old!", and postulated based on that that the earth might be "hundreds of millions of years old!". But those numbers seem quaint and even silly today. As new rocks were discovered we soon learned that they were billions of years old, and when we learned about plate tectonics we realized the Earth could be older than the oldest rocks we could find. Our guess as to what the milkyway even looks like are based on looking at other galaxies and then seeing similar structures in our own local neighborhood. We can't actually look at it like we look at other galaxies. We are inside of it; close by stars and dust obscure our view, and our vantage point is that of someone looking at a plane from the side.
What we can see are 'standard candles', that is stars emitting light within a certain range based on our knowledge of nuclear reactions and our ability to calculate apparent mass and composition. This rests on nuclear reaction theory for stars of large mass that we can not test as easily as we can test say simple nuclear decay, and it also rests on a number of approximations for the amount of dust vs "dark matter" in the intervening space (once you know how bright the star is at it's surface, you then base it's distance from you on how bright it appears to you on earth; the stuff in between matters). Terms like "dark matter" and "dark energy" should be hints that we can be off by several magnitudes. If one star is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 light years away, while it sounds like a huge difference, the same approximations can tell us that another star is between 5 and 10 light years away.
To put this in perspective, does it really matter if homo split off from ape 1 or 2 or 4 million years ago. Or, whether modern man is 50, 100, or 200 thousand years old? Even what happened in your day yesterday is not completely known to you. You have forgotten most of it, and what you do remember is colored by your dreams last night and your mind's ability to integrate it into what has happened before. But you'll make do with your imperfect knowledge of the day, this month you'll have an idea of how warm it was based on the weather this year + the fact that you don't remember it being an unseasonable day, and ten years from now you'll have an idea based on the season, and ten thousand years from now, people reading your description of your day will have an idea of the weather based on the season and climate. All are less accurate than if I had asked you yesterday how warm it was, but so long as you understand the data and it's approximate accuracy it is still useful. It's useful to have an idea of how long ago ape split off from man vs when modern man split off from other human species, but the day the month and the year isn't important when you're dealing with large numbers like this. The order of magnitude is all you need for any useful work. The processes probably took many years anyway. Except in the laboratory, speciation doesn't happen overnight...
Their cost estimate is not one billion, but one hundred billion. One hundred million taxpayers is not a bad estimate. It of course depends on your definition of 'taxpayer'. If you go broad you'll have more than 300 million, if you only count people who pay more to the government than they receive in terms of services it may be only a few million people.
I have a difficult time believing that such a paltry sum could build a real high speed network throughout the country.
That's like $8/month per tax payer spread over a decade. At that level of cheapness every ISP would be running fiber to the curb, I would have 20 fibers running in front of my house already. Heck, they telephone or cable company could just charge some exorbitant amount for plain old telephone service or cable tv, like $10/month, and pay for this thing!:)
If they had thrown out a figure of 10 trillion dollars I would have been the first on the bandwagon telling my government that they must spend the money now, but a 100 billion is just not a believable sum. I'm sure you could wire up a small portion of the population living in densely populated areas for that amount and then use a small tax on those connections to slowly reach rural populations, but then you have to convince rural states that the investment is still a good idea and that the project won't stall after that first 20% is covered.
Also 100Mbps? If you're building it now you should set the speed at 10Tbps and then try to upgrade it later when faster speeds are cheaper. The short distances you are dealing with in fiber to the curb allow for multi-mode fiber which gives you a bit more leeway for expansion, but you still need the network design and the physical fiber itself to allow for the future speeds you will want to introduce.
can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in to Circuit City, buying something, and refusing to show ID?
Um, I never show ID at Circuit City nor do they ask for it and CC doesn't have receipt checkers in NYC either. If a few people in stand up for thier rights in a particular store, CC and others will back down immediately in that store. The millions of dollars in revenue are worth more to them than that sweet feeling of undeserved power your employees get from being pricks to your customers.
I this case just the opposite, also mentioned in the article she dislikes the only good parts of that heinous law, the exemption that allows Google search, MySpace, YouTube and most of the internet to exist. Initially she only liked the anti-first-amendment clauses of the DMCA, but she "came around" on the part that allows her to decide whether it's legal to watch a DVD.
FYI She still opposes DVD watching and she is a self-proclaimed Luddite and doesn't own a computer.
That someone who doesn't own a computer has been put in charge of regulating the high tech sector of the second largest economy in the world frightens me to the same level that the horse lawyer put in charge of terrorist and emergency response did after the Katrina fuckup.
Where do they find these people? Is it the same type of process by which they find jurors who have never seen or heard any news for years for high profile cases? Ms. Peters, have you even read a book?No.Have you ever seen a computer?No.Have you ever visited a library?No.Do you know what a library is?My papa said it's a den of reds!Yes quite correct, now the next question, do you know what a Television is?No.Are you sure?Yes.Ms. Peters, you're HIRED!But I'm just here on a field trip..Never mind that, you are now in charge of the technology sector of our economy. Make sure you listen to this guy from the RIAA and this other guy from the MPAA, don't worry they will tell you exactly what to do.Yes, Sir Chaney, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir!
Too many people still only have analog TVs. Watch them decide to push back the OTA deadline next. Until analog only TVs are under 5% of the install base, they won't make that move.
This ruling isn't saying that cable operators must continue to broadcast analog signals, all it says is that if they go all digital they must provide the option of letting people rent a set top box and can not rely on all their customers having a digital TV tuner.
I don't know of any Cable operators that don't already provide set top boxes for at least some of their customers. In fact I don't know of any that don't prefer their customers to have set top boxes over QAM TV's without a CableCard slot. The STBs allow them to have programming tiers without the much more expensive pole based filtering. These boxes don't even have to be the expensive $100 set top boxes. They just have to have a QAM tuner and a cheap MPEG-2 chip, it's a $15 box we're talking about here.
In reality, almost all cable companies will rent $50 to a $100 boxes to their customers at $5 a month so as to be able to up-sell to other higher cost service tiers and provide pay-per-view programming. They may lose a little money doing this for the granny who only watches ABC News when their franchise agreement requires them to only charge a certain amount for "Antenna Only" customers, but they will use that paper loss to renegotiate their franchise agreement when it is up, and in reality they will have a profit from doing this due to the customers in this tier that will be tempted by the up-selling opportunities this more expensive set top box provides.
In short, this is non-news. The FCC is just requiring something the Cable Companies have been doing anyway for over a decade as they have been switching to all digital head ends. By "requiring" it, this only means that Cable Companies have an excuse to charge more in the future for what they have already done to save money.
If the FCC required C-SPAN and the like to be sent in the clear for QAM tuning TV sets, that would be news.
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France -- good wine is practically free, Germany -- beer and sausages, Netherlands -- high quality Belgian beers for 1/6th the cost, clothing, hotels, and food.. (admittedly it is hard to find good food in the Netherlands, but it is possible.)
*sigh* You remind me of the EE graduate student who was showing me and my classmates around his lab one day. To prove the point that humans couldn't hear a 16kHz tone very well he quickly turned the power up from 1 to 11, and through pain practically paralyzed the half of the class that still had their hearing intact.
Many cars have the flickering tail LED lights, and it has nothing to do with DC-DC converters or other sources of ripple in the supply current. It's simply a matter of the duty cycle timer, the tail lights are "dimmed" not by limiting the current but by turning them completely on and off at a low frequency. The ones I've seen are in the 40-80Hz range, just stick an oscilloscope on there if you don't believe me. The flicker stops when the lights go to full illumination (i.e. the break petal is depressed).
Now go outside and look at some LED tail lights! Even if you have very poor vision you should be able to see the ones flickering at 40-50 Hz.
PS If you are legally blind, just don't comment on lighting. You are bound to suffer from foot in mouth at times; go take on those annoying audiophiles buying 1000 euro power chords.
For example, I'm pretty sure that you are not allowed to publicly perform that DVD (project it to a public audience) without a special license that doesn't come from the DVD store.
No license is involved in a DVD purchase, you buy a piece of plastic. What you can do with that piece of plastic is governed by local law and custom. You only need a license to do things not allowed by law. In the US, prohibited things include such infractions as watching it on a >9' diagonal projection screen, or allowing the general public to view its contents without providing them with alcohol.
Copyright regulations are only incidentally related to the "public exhibition" laws. These laws do not have anything to do with regulating the number of copies you make of the plastic disc nor the fate of such copies when you sell the disc. In the US they can be argued better under the commerce clause than the copyright clause, it's more like the laws that allow states to prevent the import of milk from other states; instead of a market regulation intended to help milk processing plants with a twelve day monopoly on fresh milk, it's a market regulation intended to fund the creation of movies via a twelve decade monopoly on the public exhibition of that movie. Twelve months would probably be sufficient and I think royalties rather than monopoly would be a better idea in the case of movies, as watching a movie is not quite the same thing as drinking a glass of fresh milk. But congress has wide latitude to regulate commerce between and within the states and could grant a 12 million year monopoly if they wanted to, quite separate from copyrights which in the US are limited in length to a term compatible with the public good.
Isn't it the US where convicted felons can't vote? So you can't vote, but you can be elected? Now that's a nice standard. "Nah, we can't have criminals affect the course of our society. We prefer being ruled by them."
The rule allowing felons to serve is a good one, and the one most democratic governments have it. The reason for it is to prevent the party in power from subverting democracy by making something the loyal opposition does a crime. They can still make something a crime of course, but if the electorate sees it as a scam they can override put the loyal opposition in power so that they can revert the law to it's former state.
But this isn't a case of voter suppression, the anti-bribery laws have been on the books a long time and a jury of his peers found him guilty of violating these laws. If he does manage to get re-elected he will probably resign and Sarah Palin will appoint a temporary Republican Senator who will serve until the vacancy election is held, and whoever he is he will probably win in this overwhelmingly Republican state. If Stevens loses, the Democrat Mark Begich will have six years to prove himself before standing for re-election.
If Stevens wins, but refuses to resign, the Senate will almost certainly kick him out; they are free to do this even if Bush pardons him. My guess is that a Bush will probably commute the imprisonment portion of Ted Steven's sentence, if he does not outright pardon him. Few want to see this elder statesman live out the remainder of his years in prison despite the shame he has brought to the Senate.
I have no real explanation for the release of free energy in this case, but there's definitely no offspring; I think you get the idea ..
My understanding was that matter and anti-matter are more like straight women and straight men. When anti-matter and matter collide they emit gamma rays, and if the gamma rays are sufficiently dense they can condense back into either matter or anti-matter. So there are at least three good explanations for a mostly female universe: either there were more women to begin with, the laws of physics were different in this respect in the beginning, or when gamma rays condense more women are produced. My hope would be on the last one since it feels most efficient and we can test it in my lifetime, but we don't understand the mechanism for any of those scenarios. If we finish up the standard model and there is perfect symmetry everywhere then we'll have to accept that the universe was either born imbalanced or the laws of physics were somehow different at the beginning. Which would be unfortunate, because we probably won't have any means to simulate and observe a big bang anytime soon.
And before someone say the laws of physics never change, General Relativity and the Standard Model may be nearly as incomplete as Newtonian physics. Remember, Newtonian physics explains almost all of the workings of our solar system and was good enough for a long time. General Relativity may similarly be limited to the workings of the sparse universe we can observe today.
PS I've been out of school a long time and only took physics because it was a requirement for an engineering degree, but if I'm way off I'm sure some physics grad student will correct me. :)
The Port Authority could sell it if they so chose. Linux, on the other hand, cannot be sold in the same sense that you cannot sell the idea of a cloud.
I have as much right to sell the Brooklyn Bridge as the Port Authority Corporation of NY and NJ does. The bridge is owned by the City of New York, and I assure you it would be easier to get the few thousand copyright holders of Linux to sell than it would be to get New York City to to sell the symbol of the unification of the five boroughs. In fact, it might be easier to get the Congress of the United States of America to patent apple pie and sell the exclusive right of manufacture to China.
Most things in this world of ours have not been bought and sold within the last five minutes, and many things have never been bought or sold. This does not mean we can not estimate their economic value. In fact these estimates tend to be more conservative and ultimately more accurate than estimates based on sale values, as our banks have recently rediscovered. Sale values are for the most part based on irrational estimates of future earnings. Valuations based on actual economic productivity are retrospective rather than prospective so they lag true economic value but they also don't swing wildly like sale price based estimates and at any instant are more likely to be accurate than sale price based estimates.
If you look at our most accurate economic indicators they are all retrospective. Sometimes the economists figure out we were in a recession after we've left it, but that's the price you pay for accuracy. Sale prices instead follow our collectively predicted the future values, which tend to move in the right general direction most of the time, but are usually too optimistic and are sometimes too pessimistic. "Market corrections" happen after prices have gone wildly in one direction, when all those more accurate, but lagging, economic indicators were going the other way; then when they get published, the prices adjust up or down to match the real numbers.
Sounds like you are not in a business that generates IP.
My business generates nothing but copyrighted software, but I'm glad you put copyright outside the ill concieved IP umbrella.
You can't even issue a DMCA notice without signing that you state under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate.
How many millions of prosecutions have been carried out? How many millennia have the serial abusers of the DMCA been forced to cease operations due to their recklessness?
The ISP hosting the copyrighted data then deliberately drags their feet to remove the content, and once it's removed, its re-uploaded by the same user 5 minutes later.
Here you have something I can agree with you on, the DMCA is ineffective when issued without any of the due diligence you are required to do before issuing the DMCA take down notice. If DMCA take-down notice abusers were prosecuted and their business operations shut down by the US Justice department, I believe you might see both DMCA notices fall in number and gain greater effect. A properly issued DMCA notice wouldn't be issued until enough evidence was collected to allow the copyright holder to follow up with the user that reposts the material five minutes later with a lawsuit. As it is DMCA notices are a drain on all legitimate economic activity and a joke for file sharer.
The problem with the DMCA is it does nothing to prevent the widespread abuse of anonymous filehosting.
Heh, if you think that is the only or even major problem with the DMCA you haven't been paying attention. The DMCA kills oodles of competition in the tech sector and has cost trillions to the world economy since it was passed. Exempting the media sector of the economy from copyright protection at all would have had trivial economic cost in comparison.
The DMCA needs teeth to actually prosecute uploaders, rather than just weak half-assed requirements that the ISPS get around to eventually removing content temporarily when they feel like it.
Seriously? This provision needs teeth, but to prosecute the DMCA issuers for their abuses. For instance $5,000,000 should be required to be placed in escrow before a DMCA notice is issued, and another $2,000,000 by the ISP who takes action on the notice, and statutory damages should be made available to the victim. Victims like John McCain could then receive either receive statutory damages of say $100,000 a day plus legal expenses by filing simple form, or receive actual damages by taking the abuser to court. No party other than the victim should be able to cash out the escrow without all parties' agreement or the on the order of the court, the victim seeking only statutory and legal consultation expenses should only be required to bring or mail standard response forms to their local county clerk and wait one or two business days. This would allow the DMCA to work without requiring the the Justice Department to actively prosecute the likes of EMI, which they have failed to do in hundreds of thousands of cases of abuse by the serial abusers of the DMCA.
All the provisions of the DMCA are ill conceived and there is no baby to worry about in throwing out this bathwater. Copyright regulations need to be replaced, but we need to rewind to 1790 and start patching these regulations to fit into the modern world. For one thing 14 year exclusivity terms are way to long in this world of instant communications and cheap copies. Make it 2-3 years of exclusivity instead, but make it iron tight in those years; then add some years of compulsory licensing where I don't have exclusivity, but can profit off the "Barnes and Noble" edition or the translation or anything else where someone else is profiting of my work. With effective means of collecting these royalties, effective meaning not tied to the copy but to the access and use of the material. And yes, I know this is incompatible with Berne and TRIPS. Toss em! After we have figured out a system of regulations that actually *work* we can start convincing the rest of the world to reform their regulatory systems to replace copyright with a more modern and effective set of regulatory income protections for creators.
Heh, gotta get back to work. You just got my goat with that post!
It's completely different provisions that make the DMCA unpopular.
The take down process and it's liability shield is probably the only half way decent part of an extremely flawed bill. But that does not mean that it is a "Good Thing", I've had my internet and phone service interrupted because of the "take it down and ask questions later" culture it has spawned at ISPs. In my case it was due to a bogus DMCA complaint from EMI on an IP address in a block that had been allocated to me, but hadn't even been placed into service yet. Maybe I could have sued for loss of business, but just starting that suit would have cost more than six days of lost business with very dubious chances of success.
In the eight years since the day the phones went dead I haven't had any more full interruptions, but enough close calls -- literally, the ISPs that I've paid a bit of a premium for since call me before breaking the link (and Verizon is long gone from the picture) -- that I really have no love for any of the DMCA. That someone who voted for the bill might lose his presidential bid in part due to it fills me the glee! That his proposed solution to YouTube is a special exemption for himself is funny and sad at the same time.
RMS wants source code to be released free for everyone.
The Chinese government (according to the extract provided in the slashdot summary...) wants to be able to inspect the source code for their own purposes (with the possibility implied by the article authors that they might then seek to gain from it).
The former is embracing freedom. The second is not.
I think that is a very important point. I've heard Eben Moglen talk about this. To paraphrase his take on the Free Software is Communism meme: Yes we do share some of the goals of communism, such as no child should be denied an education, but our methods are the polar opposite from that of Communist states. We rely on voluntary sharing to achieve our goals not the power of government, not only is this method successful with information because the costs of duplication are negligible and the positive network effects of sharing are immense, but we also don't believe the ends justify the means. We only want to use means that are moral and just irrespective of our goals.
But I think people are making a mountain out of a molehill here, if you read the article you'll see that China is only demanding the software to hardware crypto devices. All real crypto devices use public algorithms. And this software is already made available to all Western governments, Western ones just get the source by putting the source code requirement into procurement contracts. Since China is not asking for the VHDL for the hardware they have no hope of using this source for reverse engineering the devices, all they can do with it is check for the most obvious of illegal back doors.
Yes, it's wrong for the Chinese government to obtain this information by fiat rather than by the sugar of a procurement contract or a court order _after_ a crime has been committed. But this is not very news worthy, China has an authoritarian government and it has had one for as long as I've been alive. This is how authoritarian governments do things, in an authoritarian state when you refuse a customs search you are forcibly searched, in a liberal democracy they send you and your belongings back to where you came from. This permeates throughout the whole society. Writers here on /. are ascribing all kinds of nefarious motives, but I bet the motive is exactly the same as when their own government looks at this source code. It has nothing to do with reverse engineering these public algorithms and everything to do with looking for back holes. China is just using the same authoritarian methods as other authoritarian states; remember the US, Russia and France still have laws on the books banning the export of strong crypto to their 'enemies', left over from more authoritarian times. The US even has a recent history of serious proposals for much more draconian regulation of crypto, remember the Clipper Chip? Remember how you had to jump through hoops to get Netscape with a paltry 128-bit key support just so that it would take 5 minutes for a criminal to get your credit card from an online transaction instead of you broadcasting your banking information completely in the clear?
The article is also complete garbage. The article ends with some silly babble about how Microsoft has made their money by keeping it's source code a secret. Any large purchaser can get their hands on the source code to Microsoft's released products, the Chinese government has copies of it, so does your government. I've even had a Microsoft evangelist _beg_ me to look at the source to help them with a driver problem.
Here's an idea, use two copper wires separated by a dialectic. These are sold at electronics stores like radio-shack, and are even available with different colored and even clear dielectrics.
You will need to impedance match both ends of the transmission line. It's not as good, nor as convenient as RG6, but can be less conspicuous.
Many antennas actually have 300 ohm leads anyway, with a matching transformer for coax, so you actually transplant the matching transformer to the other end of the line.
Most pot growing is still illegal under California Law. Under Prop 215 you can grow pot for personal use provided your doctor has prescribed it.
You can also grow it as a designated agent for someone who has a doctor's recommendation under California Law. The main catch is you can't transport it to them.
Of course the federales can do a bust, but prosecuting people for trivial offenses which don't cross state lines is normally done on the State's dime; and I doubt the people of Wyoming want their taxes raised to keep all those California pot-heads in federal prisons if they manage to get a conviction. The feds just 'arrest' property, since when accused of a crime property in the USA is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Some individuals have put in a claim that their property is innocent of a crime and have had their pot plants returned, but this is rare -- and much more expensive than just growing some more, it is a weed after all.
It's not just the federales harassing the citizens of California. Some local authorities do it too. They are allowed to enforce the silliest of federal laws in addition to the local laws. But the brunt of the federal law kicks in at cultivation of 100 plants or possession of 100 kilos. Many growers in California consequently stay at 99 plants or less. You can get jail time for smaller amounts, but it's generally a misdemeanor and you also need to find a jury that will actually convict. Their main goal is to harass their victims and 'arrest' any cash they find lying around.
As to the topic at hand, you need to be a real idiot to install a road on your property without a closed gate at the entrance and not expect cars to accidentally drive down the road.
PS I find no use for pot in my own life but cringe at the waste of money, lives, and freedom the 'war' has cost us.
I think that the individual has the right to decide whether it's more important for him to gain a few dollars versus influencing which party wins.
Sometimes individual rights collide with the collective interest. When you choose to live in a country with a government, you give up some individual rights -- in exchange you get safety for your person. The old Icelandic Republic allowed the selling and buying of votes; within a few hundred years four families had cornered the market and civil war was the inevitable result. New democracies like the US don't allow the buying and selling of votes for a good reason. As a civilization, we learn from the mistakes of the past and try to avoid repeating them.
Ah, I did indeed misunderstand your question.
I was trying to explain why the figure is so high, but you really want to know how it is in fact derived?
It's very simple. You take the rate CO2 is released into the atmosphere, then you look at the rate CO2 is actually growing, the difference is the CO2 that's being absorbed by the environment. You take the rate the CO2 is absorbed and divide that into the delta between now and a century ago to determine the time to get back to those levels.
Now this 1000 year figure assumes we stopped producing a net gain of CO2 five years ago; but it's a nice easy number to remember and revising it to 1254 or whatever it stands at today _exactly_ serves no real purpose. We could also hit a tipping point where CO2 is not absorbed but instead expelled by the environment in response to higher temperatures or just higher CO2 concentrations, and we may also not need to go back to early industrial revolution CO2 levels, but instead find 1950's levels are ok.
The figure doesn't tell the whole story, and over the last two decades we've been learning where that absorbed CO2 is going. Some of those sinks have reached their limit and others are improving with higher CO2 levels. If it weren't for this absorption, we'd be in much worse shape right now. And it's important to know that we can't with any certainty say how fast 2020 CO2 levels will be absorbed until we get there, we can only estimate how long it would take to get us back to an earlier date from current level and slightly higher, since the rate of absorption varies with CO2 level.
Can you explain this a bit, please ? I'm honestly curious: I would have thought that the plant-cycle would clear CO2 out of the atmosphere in no time at all. I was under the impression that planting trees could actually be offset against car-production in real time, if you know what I mean.
The quote I've seen is that a car burns it's weight in ancient biomass each day. So you need to harvest a tree every week and make sure it never rots or gets eaten by termites each week. You've got to stop the plant-cycle, otherwise that carbon cycles back into the atmosphere, which we don't want. Cars are of course only a 1/4 of the problem, they burn a very clean fuel compared to the coal used in many electric power plants.
We are observing some neat responses in nature though. A lot of carbon leaves the air by absorption into the oceans. This makes the oceans more acidic, which decreases the shell building efficiency of shell building animals. This is a problem because those shells do remove lots of carbon from the oceans every day; allowing more to be absorbed from the air. However, we are seeing that some shell building critters are actually doing better. Maybe these will offset the ones that are doing worse, maybe not; time will tell.
The general assumption is that it will take about 1000 years to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere we have emitted so far. But this is something where time will tell. Maybe it will only take 500 years, maybe 2000. It really depends on how the complex biological systems of the many species of life on earth respond to the changes. This compares to few days to 10 years for other green house gases of note.
And while cow farts are a powerful pollutant, the solution is higher quality feed and a meaningful pollution tax would eliminate this contributor to global warming within a decade. This is why it doesn't keep scientists up at night; our political systems have already shown they can respond to a threat were the benefits of the solution begin to accrue while a single set of politicians is still in office.
Nothing is stopping you from just sending them some money.
And who says anything has?
You missed my point, by giving such a nice toy for such a small donation OLPC has attracted people to the program who are not only a drain on society in general but also threaten to be a drain on the OLPC project.
Some of the buyers in developed countries seem upset that the warranty period is only 30 days, and that they have to pay for shipping.
Some people are simply delusional. When I participated in G1G1 I assumed there was no warranty. My guess is the 30 day warranty is only there because of some stupid law. The way I see it, I made a donation to the OLPC Foundation, and got a neat little example of the technology I was funding. If mine had experienced any problems I would never have dreamed of draining OLPC's resources by returning it for replacement. I would have attempted a repair and reported on the success or failure of my repair, so that the knowledge could be disseminated to the children using the laptops.
I haven't experienced any problems, and I really wish commercial companies would adopt a technology like its screen or its ability to take falls and keep on ticking, and especially the power-saving technologies which makes this thing the only laptop that has never run out of juice one me; I carry around three heavy batteries with my regular laptop and run it in its maximal power saving mode and it still doesn't hold a candle to the OLPC.
The keyboard doesn't have the best feel, and I would only want commercial companies to copy it when making a keyboard for children. It is spill-proof. When I've spilled hot coffee and cold soda on it, I just had to wipe it off. Again, this is unlike my Sony Vaio and Lenovo T-61 keyboards which I've had to replace when even take-it-apart-deep-cleaning did not restore functionality post spill.
From what I've read, it appears the stuck key problem is fixable with a cleaning. Taking apart an OLPC is _much_easier_ than taking apart a commercial laptop, so I think this whole complaint is completely overblown. I'm not going to go so far as to say the article poster is an Intel sock puppet. I've seen they crazies who talk about having "bought" an OLPC right here on slashdot. Since the OLPC has never been on sale to individuals, you know these people are delusional right off the bat. The apparently large number of these folks either speaks to the success of the G1G1 program at reaching many many people, or it speaks to the sorry state of the war on drugs at it's goal of combating the crack epidemic. Either way, these idiots should be ignored, and I hope the folks at OLPC do not take these jokers seriously.
My only disappointment with the G1G1 program is that it wasn't G2G1, Give 2 Get 1. That could have resulted in more laptops in the hands of children, and fewer laptops in the hands of these complainers.
Since they already render the movies in a 3D world, I've always wondered why they don't make 3D versions of everything.
At least because of this, it should be little trouble (and very profitable) for them to go back and re-render their library in 3D.
The 2-D compositing is used to both to create special effects, which would need to be redone, removed, or at least placed at the right depth, and to do lots of fakey cinematic tricks like depth of field, which are used to make things look more real to the viewer looking at a flat screen projection. With stereo you actually want to make both the whole image sharp so as not to create undo eyestrain (your eyes have limited depth of field, so this will actually look the same to you when done right, but doing it right is not trivial, some scenes may need to be rethought completely.) Now, since the movie is made up of 2D layers composited together it takes years to render the first cut you are talking about 1/ fixing up stuff so that it looks right in stereo 2/ re-rendering the whole thing another two times, once for each eye.
It can be done for older movies. But it's much easier to do when you are making the movie, since you have the director paying full attention to the task and he can rethink scenes so they look great in regular projection and stereo projection.
I have to agree. I flew VA a couple months back and the killer features, like web browsing were just not online yet.. The in satellite reception was also not so great, JetBlue does a better job there.
I did enjoy the classic games running in MAME. But that also lacked polish, they didn't do a good job mapping the keys for the various games, and you couldn't hit meta keys so you couldn't reconfigure the key bindings yourself.
They also used black 000000h as their XVideo chromakey, which meant that when the video kept going when you were in some other app the video would leak into that app. If they had used 010101h instead this issue wouldn't exist and you would still get a black screen rather than a nasty blue or green one when video was starting up.
Overall, it was a good flight. The flight attendants were amazingly attentive. Who ever did the hiring should get a gold star.
Funny you refer to Jeff Han's demo, I was just thinking we were using those gestures for years at the NYU MRL & CAT. Not that this would stop Apple's patent application, I think the new and improved US patent office requires that the invention be invented by someone other than the patent applicant and used for at least 5 years prior to the first patent application being filed. But there were earlier one-touch gestures used in the 80's and early 90's for zooming, those could be used instead if Apple manages to patent some or all of the old multi-touch display zoom gestures. (PS I have no idea if NYU used those multitouch gestures first, I recall seeing them used in the 90's at some California school too.)
PS Even if they get a patent it will probably be for using these gestures on a hand-held or even just on a phone, since there is such obvious prior art for using them with larger multi-touch displays. Remember, putting a keyboard on a handheld was recently patented... You can always just add specificity to get a patent: you can't patent swinging on a swing from side to side, because someone else still holds a valid US patent for that; but you can patent swinging on a swing on a sunny day, because that hasn't been recently patented. Just like you can patent centuries old auctioning algorithms for use on the internet! I'm sure once those expire someone will be able to patent those same centuries old maths on the WORLD WIDE WEB!
My example about the dating of primate and human evolution was to prove that these type of huge "corrections" have occured even in other scientific fields as well. So what we know to be absolutely true today, can be completely off tomorrow.
Scientists never know anything to be "absolutely true". Absolute truth is the domain of charlatans, liars and cheats.
When geology started scientists proved that certain rocks in England were "millions of years old!", and postulated based on that that the earth might be "hundreds of millions of years old!". But those numbers seem quaint and even silly today. As new rocks were discovered we soon learned that they were billions of years old, and when we learned about plate tectonics we realized the Earth could be older than the oldest rocks we could find. Our guess as to what the milkyway even looks like are based on looking at other galaxies and then seeing similar structures in our own local neighborhood. We can't actually look at it like we look at other galaxies. We are inside of it; close by stars and dust obscure our view, and our vantage point is that of someone looking at a plane from the side.
What we can see are 'standard candles', that is stars emitting light within a certain range based on our knowledge of nuclear reactions and our ability to calculate apparent mass and composition. This rests on nuclear reaction theory for stars of large mass that we can not test as easily as we can test say simple nuclear decay, and it also rests on a number of approximations for the amount of dust vs "dark matter" in the intervening space (once you know how bright the star is at it's surface, you then base it's distance from you on how bright it appears to you on earth; the stuff in between matters). Terms like "dark matter" and "dark energy" should be hints that we can be off by several magnitudes. If one star is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 light years away, while it sounds like a huge difference, the same approximations can tell us that another star is between 5 and 10 light years away.
To put this in perspective, does it really matter if homo split off from ape 1 or 2 or 4 million years ago. Or, whether modern man is 50, 100, or 200 thousand years old? Even what happened in your day yesterday is not completely known to you. You have forgotten most of it, and what you do remember is colored by your dreams last night and your mind's ability to integrate it into what has happened before. But you'll make do with your imperfect knowledge of the day, this month you'll have an idea of how warm it was based on the weather this year + the fact that you don't remember it being an unseasonable day, and ten years from now you'll have an idea based on the season, and ten thousand years from now, people reading your description of your day will have an idea of the weather based on the season and climate. All are less accurate than if I had asked you yesterday how warm it was, but so long as you understand the data and it's approximate accuracy it is still useful. It's useful to have an idea of how long ago ape split off from man vs when modern man split off from other human species, but the day the month and the year isn't important when you're dealing with large numbers like this. The order of magnitude is all you need for any useful work. The processes probably took many years anyway. Except in the laboratory, speciation doesn't happen overnight...
Their cost estimate is not one billion, but one hundred billion. One hundred million taxpayers is not a bad estimate. It of course depends on your definition of 'taxpayer'. If you go broad you'll have more than 300 million, if you only count people who pay more to the government than they receive in terms of services it may be only a few million people.
I have a difficult time believing that such a paltry sum could build a real high speed network throughout the country.
:)
That's like $8/month per tax payer spread over a decade. At that level of cheapness every ISP would be running fiber to the curb, I would have 20 fibers running in front of my house already. Heck, they telephone or cable company could just charge some exorbitant amount for plain old telephone service or cable tv, like $10/month, and pay for this thing!
If they had thrown out a figure of 10 trillion dollars I would have been the first on the bandwagon telling my government that they must spend the money now, but a 100 billion is just not a believable sum. I'm sure you could wire up a small portion of the population living in densely populated areas for that amount and then use a small tax on those connections to slowly reach rural populations, but then you have to convince rural states that the investment is still a good idea and that the project won't stall after that first 20% is covered.
Also 100Mbps? If you're building it now you should set the speed at 10Tbps and then try to upgrade it later when faster speeds are cheaper. The short distances you are dealing with in fiber to the curb allow for multi-mode fiber which gives you a bit more leeway for expansion, but you still need the network design and the physical fiber itself to allow for the future speeds you will want to introduce.
can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in to Circuit City, buying something, and refusing to show ID?
Um, I never show ID at Circuit City nor do they ask for it and CC doesn't have receipt checkers in NYC either. If a few people in stand up for thier rights in a particular store, CC and others will back down immediately in that store. The millions of dollars in revenue are worth more to them than that sweet feeling of undeserved power your employees get from being pricks to your customers.
I this case just the opposite, also mentioned in the article she dislikes the only good parts of that heinous law, the exemption that allows Google search, MySpace, YouTube and most of the internet to exist. Initially she only liked the anti-first-amendment clauses of the DMCA, but she "came around" on the part that allows her to decide whether it's legal to watch a DVD.
FYI She still opposes DVD watching and she is a self-proclaimed Luddite and doesn't own a computer.
That someone who doesn't own a computer has been put in charge of regulating the high tech sector of the second largest economy in the world frightens me to the same level that the horse lawyer put in charge of terrorist and emergency response did after the Katrina fuckup.
Where do they find these people? Is it the same type of process by which they find jurors who have never seen or heard any news for years for high profile cases? Ms. Peters, have you even read a book? No. Have you ever seen a computer? No. Have you ever visited a library? No. Do you know what a library is? My papa said it's a den of reds! Yes quite correct, now the next question, do you know what a Television is? No. Are you sure? Yes. Ms. Peters, you're HIRED! But I'm just here on a field trip.. Never mind that, you are now in charge of the technology sector of our economy. Make sure you listen to this guy from the RIAA and this other guy from the MPAA, don't worry they will tell you exactly what to do. Yes, Sir Chaney, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir!
Too many people still only have analog TVs. Watch them decide to push back the OTA deadline next. Until analog only TVs are under 5% of the install base, they won't make that move.
This ruling isn't saying that cable operators must continue to broadcast analog signals, all it says is that if they go all digital they must provide the option of letting people rent a set top box and can not rely on all their customers having a digital TV tuner.
I don't know of any Cable operators that don't already provide set top boxes for at least some of their customers. In fact I don't know of any that don't prefer their customers to have set top boxes over QAM TV's without a CableCard slot. The STBs allow them to have programming tiers without the much more expensive pole based filtering. These boxes don't even have to be the expensive $100 set top boxes. They just have to have a QAM tuner and a cheap MPEG-2 chip, it's a $15 box we're talking about here.
In reality, almost all cable companies will rent $50 to a $100 boxes to their customers at $5 a month so as to be able to up-sell to other higher cost service tiers and provide pay-per-view programming. They may lose a little money doing this for the granny who only watches ABC News when their franchise agreement requires them to only charge a certain amount for "Antenna Only" customers, but they will use that paper loss to renegotiate their franchise agreement when it is up, and in reality they will have a profit from doing this due to the customers in this tier that will be tempted by the up-selling opportunities this more expensive set top box provides.
In short, this is non-news. The FCC is just requiring something the Cable Companies have been doing anyway for over a decade as they have been switching to all digital head ends. By "requiring" it, this only means that Cable Companies have an excuse to charge more in the future for what they have already done to save money.
If the FCC required C-SPAN and the like to be sent in the clear for QAM tuning TV sets, that would be news.