You, sir, are a fool, and clearly need to brush up on your history. If you want more examples though, how about Alan Greenspan. Clearly he's incompetent too.
Very few DVDs for popular films come out 4 months after release. It's more like 6 months to a year. I'm also sorry to hear you have such poor second run cinemas - the ones here are really quite nice with good seating, great prints, and no issues with people talking suring the film. Sucks to be you I guess.
What you are talking about is only a problem if you begin with the assumption that all current trends will continue forever, when there's inadequate reason to make that leap. A very common mistake.
Not in the least. I am starting with the assumption that this current cannot last forever. The current account deficit cannot continue to grow indefinitely. The question, therefore, is "what will it take to reverse the trend?" There are several options including significant reduction in foreign investment, budget surpluses, massive increases in US exports coupled with levelling or reduction in imports, and significant devaluation of the US dollar. Some combination of some or all of those will be required, the question is simply a matter of what mix it will be. Budget surpluses currently look unlikely, and current trends on imports vs. exports mean the dramatic change required there is currently unlikely (without, say, devaluation of the US dollar to boost exports). That means there is a reasonable possibility of reduced foreign investment and a falling US Dollar. The US Dollar already took a fall last year and has stabilised while the fed continues to march up interest rates. They can't do that forever because they will (1) burst the housing bubble (2) strangle and economy still coming out of recession. Once they stop the downward pressure on the dollar is going to weigh in again.
There is still plenty of time for things to work out, but to ignore it and say there isn't a problem here is remarkably foolish.
No, any competent economist (as opposed to editorial writers for the New York Times) understands that trade deficits are completely irrelevant
We can presume then that Paul Volcker (Greenspan's predecessor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and former head of research at the World Bank) and the current head of the IMF, to pick two random examples, are not competent economists.
Yes, a current account deficit is not necessarily a bad thing, and a strong economy can easily carry one. The US current account deficit is, however, getting rather too large, and, more importantly, it is only continuing to grow, with no sign of levelling of or decreasing. That is bad no matter how you slice it.
If you want a nice detailed account of the US current account deficit, how it can be viewed, why it has been successfully carried in the past but may not work out so well now, try this paper which lays things out fairly well. It's old (2002), but covers the main points well.
Account deficits are a sign of financial health. Budget deficits are not. Chinese get $ and buy either US businesses, property, or debt.
The current account deficit can be looks on as foreign investment in the US and thus a good thing, yes. Certainly having a current account deficit is not necessarily bad. Having such a large current account deficit (as a percentage of GDP) is not good though. Having a consistently growing current account deficit is bad. Eventually that trend will have to reverse. Eventually China will get tired of buying US debt (they are already beginning to tire). The inevitable result is a fall in the value of the US Dollar.
It is possible to run a current account deficit if the countries with whom you have the debt have confidence in your economy and your ability to (eventually) service that debt. There is a lot of faith in the US economy, so it can afford to run large deficits, and can generally expect no problems. If it gets too big people start losing confidence. If the US keeps demanding more and more via an ever increasing trade deficit - well eventually that's just not going to work. Eventually people are going to want to cash in their cheques so to speak.
Get rid of the half hour of commercials Get some ushers to keep other people from being noisy and rude at the theatre Reduce the price of tickets
I go to a small second run cinema down the road from me to see my movies these days. The theatres are smaller but the screens are still big and the sound system is good. Because it's (a) smaller and (b) second run it is also generally a little quieter and doesn't have as many of the noisy teens that you see at mainstream multiplexes. They also don't bother with much in the way of ads before the film (they usually have 1 ad and 2-3 previews). Best of all tickets are $4.25 Canadian for evening sessions and only $3 on Tuesdays and for matinee sessions.
What do I lose out on? Well I don't get to see films the week, or even the month they're released. I have to wait about 2-3 months for it to hit the second run whent he theatre can get it cheaper. On average it hits the second run about half way between initial theatrical release and eventual DVD release.
Hunt around and see if there's a second run cinema near you - you get the benefits of a theatrical experience (big screen and good sound) without the annoyances and for a very reasonable price. If you're willing to wait for DVDs then waiting for second run shoudln't be a problem.
Your right of course, the studios are still making a huge amount of money. However another aspect that is worth noting is DVD sales, they are through the roof and generating more revenue than the box office.
Which the studios adore! Due to an anachronistic accoutnign quirk video and DVD profits for a film get booked at a flat 20% of gross income. The remaining 80% is written off as "production and marketing expenses" regardless of how much it cost to produce or market the DVD. Given that most studios now have their own in house production and marketing of DVDs, and given that these days production and marketing costs are nothing like 80% of the gross income on DVDs, that's a huge amount of money going straight to studio coffers that never has to be booked as gross income for the film, and hence need not be shared with any participants signed up for a percentage of (not just net, even gross!) profits.
That is to say DVD is an absolute goldmine for studios because, for accouting purposes, they barely make any money at all, yet they make the studio a fortune.
Watch out for the coming trend: Simultaneous theatre and DVD release so that the studio can do simultaneous marketing and save themselves even more of that "80%". A very basic DVD will be released the same time as the film. Various higher quality with added features and new deluxe editions will then be released to milk the DVD business for all it's worth.
Don't think the studios are concerned about DVDs. They love them. The only people who should be worried about DVDs are the theatre owners who insist on putting 20 minutes of ads before the movie.
Their point was that a LOT of people are currently living far outside their means. The problem is that they're young enough to not yet feel the effects of their spending. It's a rather hideous sitation, and it may result in disasterous economic consequences.
The US trade deficit is appalling. And what's worse it's very steadily gowing. Quite simply this is not sustainable. At some point the current account deficit is going to have to turn around and start decreasing - the question is, what could cause that. Massive reductions is budget deficits would be a good start, but that doesn't seem to be happening (for those who will quote Bush speeches about reductions: it's largely book keeping and managing to push Iraq and Afghanistan expenses off the books for a while). A shift in consumer buying habits reducing the massive demand for imported goods might help a little - but as you say, the culture just isn't headed that way. The other option is for the US Dollar to drop significantly. That may not be pretty.
The US current account deficit is running at over 6% of GDP. That is, quite simply ridiculously high. 6% of GDP is the point where economists usually start getting very worried. It's the level that places like Argentina, and Indonesia were running before things broke badly. The US can hold out longer because the the US Dollar is the defacto global currency, so people are far more inclined to hold it. Somethign better start reversing the trend in the current account soon though, because this really can't go on forever, and if it snaps the way, say, Argentina did, things will not be pretty.
The Hollywood "box office slump" is highly overrated. They are, indeed, down 8% on last year. That is, they are down by about 1 bloakcbuster film, like say "The Passion of Christ" which managed to draw a lot of cash out of an otherwise non-movie going demographic. Given the remarkable year on year growth (this year is still up on 2003) with little levelling out and no dips, it makes as much sense to call 2004 anomolously successful as it does to this year unsuccessful. They are still making bucket loads of cash, more than they did in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 the list goes on.
I'm interested to know why people are apparently interested in pitching this year as "unsuccessful" or "performing poorly". I wonder whether that's a product of the studio and resulting media obsession with "first weekend box office takings", and hence a general media focus on immediate box office returns. I also wonder if it isn't in some part a pitch on the part of studios to queue up some more lobbied legislation while whining about the pirates destroying their profits.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Did you know that you could increase the budget for the whole of "General science, space and technology" (so that's science as well as space program spending) ten times, cut the military budget in half and break even on the deal. In terms of cost the space program, hell the entire science program in the US, is an absolute pittance compared to other major programs like defense and social security, and corporate tax breaks.
Honestly, there's a nice little calculator here that lets you dabble with increasing or decreasing spending in different areas. There are far jucier targets in which to reduce spending than the space program.
My understanding is that smartcars pass US safety standards just fine (they actually have pretty good safety features and perform better than a lot of standard US cars in crash tests). The issue is more to do with emission standards. It's not that they have particularly bad emissions, in fact a major study ranked the smartcar's tailpipe the least polluting in the world, ahead of more than 1,200 cars. It's just that it doesn't mean particulars of the US standard. Apparently the engine can converted so that it does, but Smart claims that would force the price above the $US14,000 mark they aim at.
The reason why the smartcar isn't allowed in the U.S. is because it is utterly and entirely unsafe. The thing crashes at like 15mph and you're lucky to live.
Unfortunately that's just bullshit. Smartcars have their issues (with a top speed on 135kph, and poor acceleration they aren't exactly ideal for highway driving) but safety is not amongst them. They are surprisingly well designed. Here's an article from Wired that discusses the safety issues of smartcars. In crash tests they actually rate better than Ford Escorts.
The licensing scheme will, of course, be of an utmost importance to the community of developers and the "article" doesn't say anything about it. Let's hope it will be a truly free license, preferably GPL, so that the source can actually be modified and re-distributed.
Well the Doom, Quake, and Quake II source were all released as GPL, so I'm unsure why you would expect Carmack to suddenly change his mind and go with something different for the Quake III source.
This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source. Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done. Game engines, where being cutting edge counts for a lot, is one of those areas. At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold. Once you've stopped making cash out of your software then open source it and provide the community something to play with. You can end up with results like Tenebrae which is a fairly impressive open source engine considering it is built originally from Quake I source.
I wish there were some other commercial developers that could manage to follow the same sort of pattern. Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced? Are there some other applications that are currently locked up, not being sold nor developed, that could be opened up? I assume part of the problem is bookkeeping: you can keep software on your books as an asset even if you probably couldn't make a dime trying to sell it anymore - and "goodwill from the community" doesn't fit into accounting.
have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together.
Does your theory involve actually knowing what eigenvalues are, or are you just making shit up?
At best I'm guessing you're trying to imply some sort of principal component analysis across properties of the tracks, which involves finding eigenvalues (and eigenvectors) of the covariance matrix. That doesn't really make sense though because most of the properties are categorical (artist, genre, title, album) so PCA is hardly going to be meaningful, let alone help songs "flow together".
Other alternatives include trying to do some level of correlation across the Fourier transform of the actual music (end of one track correlating with beginning of next), but aside from failing to account for volume and beat information, it also fails to have anything whatsoever to do with eigenvalues.
Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.
I'm not sure that there is compelling enough evidence to suggest that we should cease engaging in behaviors that have serious pros outside of global warming.
I think there is compelling enough evidence to try to shift to more efficient, sustainable, or less potentially damaging versions of behaviours that have serious pros outside of global warming. There are a lot of simple (and cost efficient) things you can do just in terms of architecture and insulation that can make a house much more energy efficient - there's no reason not to. There are lots of simple things with side benefits that people can do to be less dependent on cars: walk or bike if it's a short distance (which has benefits for fitness); take a bus or train whenever it fits your route and schedule - it's not hard; help make cities more pedestrian friendly - it can often make cities more plesant to live in too. There are lots of potential research areas for alternative sources of energy, soures of increased energy efficiency, and means to shift more painlessly to more flexible energy sources (hydrogen fuel cell cars - the electricity has to come from somewhere, but transitioning to new power plants in less painful than suddenly transitioning every automobile). All of that represents things that have enough benefits that we should be putting time and money into researching them anyway - the concerns about global warming simply give these things a higher priority again.
I don't think (any sane) people are talking about simply ditching what we have, but instead focussing efforts on using, developing, and transitioning to better, more fficient, and cleaner technologies.
Lord Grey (first post) already gave a fairly good description, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, the patent is for software that can detect all manners of numbers (e.g. 1, II, "three", etc.) and highlight them in a given document.
I'm glad to know that, for example, taking the regular expressions from here and using them here counts as stunningly creative and non-obvious.
The ability to find an highlight given patterns of expressions in a document is very old indeed. The difference seems to be that instead of using a powerful generalised pattern matching system (like, say, regular expressions) we are restricting ourselves to a particular set of patterns - specifically patterns representing numbers. Of course patterns representing numbers (in word and other forms) already formatted for ready use as regular expressions have been around for quite some time too.
There might be some merit in the particular pattern matching that Microsoft uses to identify numbers (in potentially many languages), and maybe they can copyright the regular expression (or whatever matching system they're using) to do the indentification. That makes perfect sense and is entirely reasonable. I don't see how a patent on a concept that is simply a specialisation of existing concepts really makes a lot of sense though.
This is almost the same has creating a search that highlights a given word in an article or document, similar to the find feature with Firefox.
They're only extending the search to include all numbers and words representing numbers. Essentially instead of searching for just one word, number, or collection of symbols, they're searching for a whole bunch at the same time and emphasizing the results.
You know I could swear I've essentially done this in Emacs myself numerous times. At the basic level there's "search-for-regexp" [0-9][0-9]*\.[0-9]*, and it doesn't take a genius to write a macro with a more complicated regexp to cover "one", "two", "hundred" etc. if you're actually doing it very often. And of course the search highlights every occurence in the document.
The earth fluctuates between being warmer and cooler. It has been much warmer in the past. It has been warm enough, in fact, for peat moss to grow there (though peat moss can grow in relatively chilly conditions).
Does this invalidate concerns about global warming? Not especially. Even if the warming were entiely natural it doesn't mean it's going to suit humans terribly well, particularly if the change is fairly abrupt. On the other hand the rate of warming (which is the main point for climatologists who are concerned about global warming) has increased very dramatically over the last 100 years. There is an increasing amount of data showing this rate of warming is unprecenedented over the last 1000 years. Interestingly the increasing rate of warming correlates very closely with increased CO2 (and other) emissions following the industrial revolution. There is enough data regarding how CO2 and methane can trap heat and produce warming to lend creedence to the claim that it may be a causal, rather than just correlated, relationship. If we really have provided a powerful enough new driver to significantly alter the behaviour of the system then that is definitely cause fr some concern. The global climate is a very complex system and we know little about its stability with new forces acting on it, nor do we understand the tipping points of the system which can result in sudden and complete changes in behaviour.
So yes, the earth was warmer, and no, that's not especially meaningful to discussions about current global warming.
So, wait....if it's not natural for this formerly "permafrost" peat bog to be melting, how is it that this peat moss was, at some point, able to grow in the first place?
Oh it's natural for peat moss to be able to grow there, given the right gloal climate. The question is more whether it is natural for humans to continue populating the areas we do in a global climate in which peat moss grows there. The earth and the global climate are, historically, remarkably resilient; humans, and other fauna, are not.
While it may seem paradoxical that even though we can't be sure if changes could lead to sudden warming or sudden cooling, pumping out tons and tons of greenhouse gasses into the air is basically performing a huge, uncontrolled experiment in global climate change.
It's not that hard to imagine why we can't really tell whether sudden warming or sudden cooling will be the result.
Imagine a pendulum. It's a ridiculously simplified model, but it provides the right basic mechanics to get the idea across. Set a pendulum swinging and it fluctuates naturally back and forth about an equilibrium. If you give the pendlum a hard push while it's swinging a couple of different things can happen: it can swing up high reach it's peack then swing back hard just as high in the opposite direction; alternatively you can push it so hard that it swings up over the top and just keeps going round and round in the same direction.
In essence we are giving the global climate a push. Is it a hard push? Hard enough to push past a tipping point, or swing back hard in the other direction? It's easy to enumerate all the significant forces acting on a pendulum, but if you give one a push it can still be hard to guess which way it will go. The number of different forces acting in rough balance to keep the global climate gently fluctuating is frighteningly large, and many we can currently only guess at. Which way will things go? Will forces dampen the pendulums swing or exaggerate it? What are all the different tipping points for all those different forces? These are very non-trivial questions.
The only really obvious thing is that introducing a new and unchecked driving force to a potentially unstable system is not especially clever. What exactly will happen is unclear, but surely it is sensible for us to seek our own equilibrium that suits us rather than letting nature find its own equilibrium that may not.
And speaking of "bullshit", did you know that bovine flatulence is a major soure of atmoshperic methane?
Indeed. methane produced by sheep and cattle is one of the prime obstructions to New Zealand meeting its Kyoto treaty goals. Apparently it's more the burping than the farting, but still...
So you're saying that the system fluctuates, is at times unstable and can undergo rapid a dramatic change. Are you sure that adding a new significant unchecked driver to an unstable system is all that wise? Wouldn't you be concerned that it could trigger one of those extremely dramatic shifts?
I'm sure that the system as a whole will find a new equilibrium around the new input, it just might not be plesant for humans in the short to medium term. The question isn't whether the global climate can cope with us, but whether we can cope with the global climate.
It seems sensible to me that, being intelligent and capable, we should try and find our own sustainable equilibrium rather than just pushing the system as hard as we can and finding out what balance it decides to strike to deal with it.
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You, sir, are a fool, and clearly need to brush up on your history. If you want more examples though, how about Alan Greenspan. Clearly he's incompetent too.
Jedidiah.
Very few DVDs for popular films come out 4 months after release. It's more like 6 months to a year. I'm also sorry to hear you have such poor second run cinemas - the ones here are really quite nice with good seating, great prints, and no issues with people talking suring the film. Sucks to be you I guess.
Jedidiah.
What you are talking about is only a problem if you begin with the assumption that all current trends will continue forever, when there's inadequate reason to make that leap. A very common mistake.
Not in the least. I am starting with the assumption that this current cannot last forever. The current account deficit cannot continue to grow indefinitely. The question, therefore, is "what will it take to reverse the trend?" There are several options including significant reduction in foreign investment, budget surpluses, massive increases in US exports coupled with levelling or reduction in imports, and significant devaluation of the US dollar. Some combination of some or all of those will be required, the question is simply a matter of what mix it will be. Budget surpluses currently look unlikely, and current trends on imports vs. exports mean the dramatic change required there is currently unlikely (without, say, devaluation of the US dollar to boost exports). That means there is a reasonable possibility of reduced foreign investment and a falling US Dollar. The US Dollar already took a fall last year and has stabilised while the fed continues to march up interest rates. They can't do that forever because they will (1) burst the housing bubble (2) strangle and economy still coming out of recession. Once they stop the downward pressure on the dollar is going to weigh in again.
There is still plenty of time for things to work out, but to ignore it and say there isn't a problem here is remarkably foolish.
Jedidiah.
No, any competent economist (as opposed to editorial writers for the New York Times) understands that trade deficits are completely irrelevant
We can presume then that Paul Volcker (Greenspan's predecessor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and former head of research at the World Bank) and the current head of the IMF, to pick two random examples, are not competent economists.
Yes, a current account deficit is not necessarily a bad thing, and a strong economy can easily carry one. The US current account deficit is, however, getting rather too large, and, more importantly, it is only continuing to grow, with no sign of levelling of or decreasing. That is bad no matter how you slice it.
If you want a nice detailed account of the US current account deficit, how it can be viewed, why it has been successfully carried in the past but may not work out so well now, try this paper which lays things out fairly well. It's old (2002), but covers the main points well.
Jedidiah.
Account deficits are a sign of financial health. Budget deficits are not. Chinese get $ and buy either US businesses, property, or debt.
The current account deficit can be looks on as foreign investment in the US and thus a good thing, yes. Certainly having a current account deficit is not necessarily bad. Having such a large current account deficit (as a percentage of GDP) is not good though. Having a consistently growing current account deficit is bad. Eventually that trend will have to reverse. Eventually China will get tired of buying US debt (they are already beginning to tire). The inevitable result is a fall in the value of the US Dollar.
It is possible to run a current account deficit if the countries with whom you have the debt have confidence in your economy and your ability to (eventually) service that debt. There is a lot of faith in the US economy, so it can afford to run large deficits, and can generally expect no problems. If it gets too big people start losing confidence. If the US keeps demanding more and more via an ever increasing trade deficit - well eventually that's just not going to work. Eventually people are going to want to cash in their cheques so to speak.
Jedidiah.
Get rid of the half hour of commercials
Get some ushers to keep other people from being noisy and rude at the theatre
Reduce the price of tickets
I go to a small second run cinema down the road from me to see my movies these days. The theatres are smaller but the screens are still big and the sound system is good. Because it's (a) smaller and (b) second run it is also generally a little quieter and doesn't have as many of the noisy teens that you see at mainstream multiplexes. They also don't bother with much in the way of ads before the film (they usually have 1 ad and 2-3 previews). Best of all tickets are $4.25 Canadian for evening sessions and only $3 on Tuesdays and for matinee sessions.
What do I lose out on? Well I don't get to see films the week, or even the month they're released. I have to wait about 2-3 months for it to hit the second run whent he theatre can get it cheaper. On average it hits the second run about half way between initial theatrical release and eventual DVD release.
Hunt around and see if there's a second run cinema near you - you get the benefits of a theatrical experience (big screen and good sound) without the annoyances and for a very reasonable price. If you're willing to wait for DVDs then waiting for second run shoudln't be a problem.
Jedidiah.
Your right of course, the studios are still making a huge amount of money. However another aspect that is worth noting is DVD sales, they are through the roof and generating more revenue than the box office.
Which the studios adore! Due to an anachronistic accoutnign quirk video and DVD profits for a film get booked at a flat 20% of gross income. The remaining 80% is written off as "production and marketing expenses" regardless of how much it cost to produce or market the DVD. Given that most studios now have their own in house production and marketing of DVDs, and given that these days production and marketing costs are nothing like 80% of the gross income on DVDs, that's a huge amount of money going straight to studio coffers that never has to be booked as gross income for the film, and hence need not be shared with any participants signed up for a percentage of (not just net, even gross!) profits.
That is to say DVD is an absolute goldmine for studios because, for accouting purposes, they barely make any money at all, yet they make the studio a fortune.
Watch out for the coming trend: Simultaneous theatre and DVD release so that the studio can do simultaneous marketing and save themselves even more of that "80%". A very basic DVD will be released the same time as the film. Various higher quality with added features and new deluxe editions will then be released to milk the DVD business for all it's worth.
Don't think the studios are concerned about DVDs. They love them. The only people who should be worried about DVDs are the theatre owners who insist on putting 20 minutes of ads before the movie.
Jedidiah.
Their point was that a LOT of people are currently living far outside their means. The problem is that they're young enough to not yet feel the effects of their spending. It's a rather hideous sitation, and it may result in disasterous economic consequences.
The US trade deficit is appalling. And what's worse it's very steadily gowing. Quite simply this is not sustainable. At some point the current account deficit is going to have to turn around and start decreasing - the question is, what could cause that. Massive reductions is budget deficits would be a good start, but that doesn't seem to be happening (for those who will quote Bush speeches about reductions: it's largely book keeping and managing to push Iraq and Afghanistan expenses off the books for a while). A shift in consumer buying habits reducing the massive demand for imported goods might help a little - but as you say, the culture just isn't headed that way. The other option is for the US Dollar to drop significantly. That may not be pretty.
The US current account deficit is running at over 6% of GDP. That is, quite simply ridiculously high. 6% of GDP is the point where economists usually start getting very worried. It's the level that places like Argentina, and Indonesia were running before things broke badly. The US can hold out longer because the the US Dollar is the defacto global currency, so people are far more inclined to hold it. Somethign better start reversing the trend in the current account soon though, because this really can't go on forever, and if it snaps the way, say, Argentina did, things will not be pretty.
Jedidiah.
The Hollywood "box office slump" is highly overrated. They are, indeed, down 8% on last year. That is, they are down by about 1 bloakcbuster film, like say "The Passion of Christ" which managed to draw a lot of cash out of an otherwise non-movie going demographic. Given the remarkable year on year growth (this year is still up on 2003) with little levelling out and no dips, it makes as much sense to call 2004 anomolously successful as it does to this year unsuccessful. They are still making bucket loads of cash, more than they did in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 the list goes on.
I'm interested to know why people are apparently interested in pitching this year as "unsuccessful" or "performing poorly". I wonder whether that's a product of the studio and resulting media obsession with "first weekend box office takings", and hence a general media focus on immediate box office returns. I also wonder if it isn't in some part a pitch on the part of studios to queue up some more lobbied legislation while whining about the pirates destroying their profits.
Jedidiah.
Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen 4,5,6 (as advanced from 1,2,3).
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Did you know that you could increase the budget for the whole of "General science, space and technology" (so that's science as well as space program spending) ten times, cut the military budget in half and break even on the deal. In terms of cost the space program, hell the entire science program in the US, is an absolute pittance compared to other major programs like defense and social security, and corporate tax breaks.
Honestly, there's a nice little calculator here that lets you dabble with increasing or decreasing spending in different areas. There are far jucier targets in which to reduce spending than the space program.
Jedidiah.
My understanding is that smartcars pass US safety standards just fine (they actually have pretty good safety features and perform better than a lot of standard US cars in crash tests). The issue is more to do with emission standards. It's not that they have particularly bad emissions, in fact a major study ranked the smartcar's tailpipe the least polluting in the world, ahead of more than 1,200 cars. It's just that it doesn't mean particulars of the US standard. Apparently the engine can converted so that it does, but Smart claims that would force the price above the $US14,000 mark they aim at.
Jedidiah.
The reason why the smartcar isn't allowed in the U.S. is because it is utterly and entirely unsafe. The thing crashes at like 15mph and you're lucky to live.
Unfortunately that's just bullshit. Smartcars have their issues (with a top speed on 135kph, and poor acceleration they aren't exactly ideal for highway driving) but safety is not amongst them. They are surprisingly well designed. Here's an article from Wired that discusses the safety issues of smartcars. In crash tests they actually rate better than Ford Escorts.
Jedidiah,
The licensing scheme will, of course, be of an utmost importance to the community of developers and the "article" doesn't say anything about it. Let's hope it will be a truly free license, preferably GPL, so that the source can actually be modified and re-distributed.
Well the Doom, Quake, and Quake II source were all released as GPL, so I'm unsure why you would expect Carmack to suddenly change his mind and go with something different for the Quake III source.
Jedidiah.
This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source. Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done. Game engines, where being cutting edge counts for a lot, is one of those areas. At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold. Once you've stopped making cash out of your software then open source it and provide the community something to play with. You can end up with results like Tenebrae which is a fairly impressive open source engine considering it is built originally from Quake I source.
I wish there were some other commercial developers that could manage to follow the same sort of pattern. Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced? Are there some other applications that are currently locked up, not being sold nor developed, that could be opened up? I assume part of the problem is bookkeeping: you can keep software on your books as an asset even if you probably couldn't make a dime trying to sell it anymore - and "goodwill from the community" doesn't fit into accounting.
Jedidiah.
have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together.
Does your theory involve actually knowing what eigenvalues are, or are you just making shit up?
At best I'm guessing you're trying to imply some sort of principal component analysis across properties of the tracks, which involves finding eigenvalues (and eigenvectors) of the covariance matrix. That doesn't really make sense though because most of the properties are categorical (artist, genre, title, album) so PCA is hardly going to be meaningful, let alone help songs "flow together".
Other alternatives include trying to do some level of correlation across the Fourier transform of the actual music (end of one track correlating with beginning of next), but aside from failing to account for volume and beat information, it also fails to have anything whatsoever to do with eigenvalues.
Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.
Jedidiah.
I'm not sure that there is compelling enough evidence to suggest that we should cease engaging in behaviors that have serious pros outside of global warming.
I think there is compelling enough evidence to try to shift to more efficient, sustainable, or less potentially damaging versions of behaviours that have serious pros outside of global warming. There are a lot of simple (and cost efficient) things you can do just in terms of architecture and insulation that can make a house much more energy efficient - there's no reason not to. There are lots of simple things with side benefits that people can do to be less dependent on cars: walk or bike if it's a short distance (which has benefits for fitness); take a bus or train whenever it fits your route and schedule - it's not hard; help make cities more pedestrian friendly - it can often make cities more plesant to live in too. There are lots of potential research areas for alternative sources of energy, soures of increased energy efficiency, and means to shift more painlessly to more flexible energy sources (hydrogen fuel cell cars - the electricity has to come from somewhere, but transitioning to new power plants in less painful than suddenly transitioning every automobile). All of that represents things that have enough benefits that we should be putting time and money into researching them anyway - the concerns about global warming simply give these things a higher priority again.
I don't think (any sane) people are talking about simply ditching what we have, but instead focussing efforts on using, developing, and transitioning to better, more fficient, and cleaner technologies.
Jedidiah.
Three good places to start to get the core theory down (after which the practicalities are much easier to learn) are Applications of Process Algebra, Communication and Concurrency, and finally Communicating Sequential Processes which is available for free (the link is to a PDF of the book).
Jedidiah.
Lord Grey (first post) already gave a fairly good description, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, the patent is for software that can detect all manners of numbers (e.g. 1, II, "three", etc.) and highlight them in a given document.
I'm glad to know that, for example, taking the regular expressions from here and using them here counts as stunningly creative and non-obvious.
The ability to find an highlight given patterns of expressions in a document is very old indeed. The difference seems to be that instead of using a powerful generalised pattern matching system (like, say, regular expressions) we are restricting ourselves to a particular set of patterns - specifically patterns representing numbers. Of course patterns representing numbers (in word and other forms) already formatted for ready use as regular expressions have been around for quite some time too.
There might be some merit in the particular pattern matching that Microsoft uses to identify numbers (in potentially many languages), and maybe they can copyright the regular expression (or whatever matching system they're using) to do the indentification. That makes perfect sense and is entirely reasonable. I don't see how a patent on a concept that is simply a specialisation of existing concepts really makes a lot of sense though.
Jedidiah.
This is almost the same has creating a search that highlights a given word in an article or document, similar to the find feature with Firefox.
They're only extending the search to include all numbers and words representing numbers. Essentially instead of searching for just one word, number, or collection of symbols, they're searching for a whole bunch at the same time and emphasizing the results.
You know I could swear I've essentially done this in Emacs myself numerous times. At the basic level there's "search-for-regexp" [0-9][0-9]*\.[0-9]*, and it doesn't take a genius to write a macro with a more complicated regexp to cover "one", "two", "hundred" etc. if you're actually doing it very often. And of course the search highlights every occurence in the document.
Jedidiah.
The earth fluctuates between being warmer and cooler. It has been much warmer in the past. It has been warm enough, in fact, for peat moss to grow there (though peat moss can grow in relatively chilly conditions).
Does this invalidate concerns about global warming? Not especially. Even if the warming were entiely natural it doesn't mean it's going to suit humans terribly well, particularly if the change is fairly abrupt. On the other hand the rate of warming (which is the main point for climatologists who are concerned about global warming) has increased very dramatically over the last 100 years. There is an increasing amount of data showing this rate of warming is unprecenedented over the last 1000 years. Interestingly the increasing rate of warming correlates very closely with increased CO2 (and other) emissions following the industrial revolution. There is enough data regarding how CO2 and methane can trap heat and produce warming to lend creedence to the claim that it may be a causal, rather than just correlated, relationship. If we really have provided a powerful enough new driver to significantly alter the behaviour of the system then that is definitely cause fr some concern. The global climate is a very complex system and we know little about its stability with new forces acting on it, nor do we understand the tipping points of the system which can result in sudden and complete changes in behaviour.
So yes, the earth was warmer, and no, that's not especially meaningful to discussions about current global warming.
Jedidiah.
So, wait....if it's not natural for this formerly "permafrost" peat bog to be melting, how is it that this peat moss was, at some point, able to grow in the first place?
Oh it's natural for peat moss to be able to grow there, given the right gloal climate. The question is more whether it is natural for humans to continue populating the areas we do in a global climate in which peat moss grows there. The earth and the global climate are, historically, remarkably resilient; humans, and other fauna, are not.
Jedidiah.
While it may seem paradoxical that even though we can't be sure if changes could lead to sudden warming or sudden cooling, pumping out tons and tons of greenhouse gasses into the air is basically performing a huge, uncontrolled experiment in global climate change.
It's not that hard to imagine why we can't really tell whether sudden warming or sudden cooling will be the result.
Imagine a pendulum. It's a ridiculously simplified model, but it provides the right basic mechanics to get the idea across. Set a pendulum swinging and it fluctuates naturally back and forth about an equilibrium. If you give the pendlum a hard push while it's swinging a couple of different things can happen: it can swing up high reach it's peack then swing back hard just as high in the opposite direction; alternatively you can push it so hard that it swings up over the top and just keeps going round and round in the same direction.
In essence we are giving the global climate a push. Is it a hard push? Hard enough to push past a tipping point, or swing back hard in the other direction? It's easy to enumerate all the significant forces acting on a pendulum, but if you give one a push it can still be hard to guess which way it will go. The number of different forces acting in rough balance to keep the global climate gently fluctuating is frighteningly large, and many we can currently only guess at. Which way will things go? Will forces dampen the pendulums swing or exaggerate it? What are all the different tipping points for all those different forces? These are very non-trivial questions.
The only really obvious thing is that introducing a new and unchecked driving force to a potentially unstable system is not especially clever. What exactly will happen is unclear, but surely it is sensible for us to seek our own equilibrium that suits us rather than letting nature find its own equilibrium that may not.
Jedidiah.
And speaking of "bullshit", did you know that bovine flatulence is a major soure of atmoshperic methane?
Indeed. methane produced by sheep and cattle is one of the prime obstructions to New Zealand meeting its Kyoto treaty goals. Apparently it's more the burping than the farting, but still...
Jedidiah.
So you're saying that the system fluctuates, is at times unstable and can undergo rapid a dramatic change. Are you sure that adding a new significant unchecked driver to an unstable system is all that wise? Wouldn't you be concerned that it could trigger one of those extremely dramatic shifts?
I'm sure that the system as a whole will find a new equilibrium around the new input, it just might not be plesant for humans in the short to medium term. The question isn't whether the global climate can cope with us, but whether we can cope with the global climate.
It seems sensible to me that, being intelligent and capable, we should try and find our own sustainable equilibrium rather than just pushing the system as hard as we can and finding out what balance it decides to strike to deal with it.
Jedidiah.