When they talk about wind, I doubt they were thinking of the scattered molecules 600 miles out in space.
But anyway, come to think of it, the billiard ball analogy is something I read a long time ago which referred to the known biosphere, not the atmosphere. If you take 20 miles up as the top limit for life in the atmosphere and 5 miles down to the bottom of the sea, it scales down to a few thousandths of an inch of paint on a 2-inch billiard ball.
But go ahead and nitpick that too. There are probably some viruses floating around at 999 km!
The Honest Thief link is slashdotted so I'm totally ignorant of the details, but here's an observation: if the plan is to pay new musicians to put their non-recording-contract work online, Hooray! On the other hand, if the plan is merely to license content from record companies, then don't expect one actual musician to see a single penny of that money, ever.
If the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, the atmostphere would be about the thickness of the paint on the ball. This has always given me the impression that nothing happening in the atmosphere could have much physical effect on the planet. The change of a millisecond per day is definitely small.
The conservation of angular momentum should make this effect temporary, shouldn't it? As has been pointed out above in comments, if everybody ran West the Earth's rotation would speed up, but as soon as we stopped running it would return to what it was before. I would think this would hold true for wind effects as well.
Starting as a mere communications and education system, it has evolved into a multibillion dollar entertainment, marketing and anti-privacy engine, becoming a huge single point-of-failure that could collapse the world's economy within days.
DLL Hell is a great illustration of Microsoft's general approach to a whole lot of things. The original idea of DLLs was great if you can trust that everyone who modifies a DLL will maintain backward compatibility. In real life that won't happen. Strong Binding is a workaround for shortsighted thinking.
The mentality that everything would be ok if only everyone else would just do everything the same way you do only works if you can force everybody to follow your way... which is pretty much how Microsoft deals with the rest of the world.
Yeah, really. Back in my foolish days I could do 106 hours of Space Invaders / Missile Command / Centipede in a week without breaking a sweat. Or for that matter, blinking.
This isn't the first attempt to use blogs as billboards. Looks like some ad weenies figured out that they can't fake authenticity, so they decided to try buying it. IANAL, but deliberately concealing the fact that advertising is advertising seems like fraud to me.
One way to respond to this, if you don't like it, is to stop buying all Dr. Pepper products and let the company know you are not buying until they publicly apologize and terminate this ad campaign. You can tell them on their (flash) consumer contact page. Of course they could lie about that too I guess.
Yeah, I agree. In a more general sense, what is it with people who produce remakes, that they feel the need to mess with the original concept in strange ways? Example: I grew up watching the original Mission Impossible series, and there is No Freakin Way that Jim Phelps was a double agent. Sorry. Can't happen. Might as well recast Einstein as a Nazi sympathizer.
If they want to introduce a female hotshot pilot as a new principal character in Battlestar Galactica, no problem. But Starbuck is an existing character with a history, and He's A GUY. Oh well, let's make him an alien, or a Cylon whose programming went awry. Wait! How about a remake of the original Star Trek, and have Spock be a Klingon? Yeah!! The fans'll spend money on anything. Sadly, that's true.
Nice photos, but the story of why he needs that much space could be even more interesting. Surely nobody needs that much pr0n. It would be great for a home theater system, or ???
I've been waiting for a Mote movie ever since reading that book 20+ years ago. Now that the technology exists to do it well, any chance of it happening?
This article admirably illustrates the difficulty of making money from record sales, but it fails to mention that making money from record sales is not the point of making records. At least not for musicians. For musicians the point of making records is to get Exposure. Working musicians make their money by performing, and exposure translates into gigs. With an album on the charts, the Grungenuts, or whatever the hypothetical band was called, should expect to rake in some respectable bucks playing large venues. That's what making records really buys musicians.
Follow me on a paranoid journey to the future. I have a feeling that the main goal of Microsoft's involvement in rights management is merely a business tactic to make it harder to use non-Microsoft software. So far the government still allows you to write software that reads a Word document. But to read a rights-managed Word document it seems like you will either have to break the rights management (DMCA violation) or emulate whatever Microsoft does to respect the rights management (software patent infringement). I'm not sure which one is the rock and which one is the hard place, but I'm feeling squeezed already.
This is a good example of what I call peeing in the pool. Timeline claims that because Microsoft is not a law firm, SQL developers who believed Microsoft's statements about SQL licensing were acting irresponsibly. Wow! Score one for the ludicrous vision of each of us having a lawyer accompanying us everywhere like a guide dog.
So SQL Server developers, fearing legal harassment, start lookin into alternatives like MySQL, encouraging the development of new features like triggers and native stored procedures, and making MySQL even more attractive as competition. See how IP encourages innovation? Uh, sort of?
I just tested it on feeds from the major news media. The highest bursti-ness readings are on the words "Bush", "Iraq" and "terrorism." The software package I'm using was developed by a team of millions of independent non-programmers, and is called "Duh!".
Back in the eighties I had a lot of friends who produced public cable access TV shows. You can borrow the cameras and use the studios and editing facilities. Depends on the city, but in Portland Oregon all you had to pay for was tape. Most of the shows were on the level of two people sitting in the studio with a fake potted plant between them. But there were some scripted stories shot on location with local actors, or at least acting students. Very amateurish but occasionally interesting and sometimes actually good.
My point is that people who want to do these things are already doing them. There's nothing holding back anybody from producing audio drama and throwing it on Live365 etc.
Companies certainly shouldn't be given copyrights on laws, building codes etc, which the public paid to create. On the other hand, if somebody like Westlaw has taken the trouble to produce a legal database searching system that is faster or better than what's publicly available, I don't see that they have to give it away for free. Finding and filtering the information is a valuable service.
Such services should be publicly available, but rather than force the companies to give them away I would rather see the government hire these companies as contractors to produce public access systems. Certainly don't give them ownership of information, but by all means pay them to do the job of organizing it and to produce access engines that the public, including libraries, can use.
It seems incredible that people have to pay someone $100/hour to tell them if something they want to do is legal. Yet the list of legally hazardous activities grows constantly as the law gets more complex. This is something computers can definitely change, and case law databases are only the beginning. Imagine a legal expert system that would listen to your situation and give you a competent legal opinion, whether it's for a criminal defense or adding a second story to your house. I doubt that such systems will exist anytime soon, but I hope that when they do the government will have the foresight to buy them from the developers and make them freely available.
I really like the idea of maintaining a Back trail that includes leaf nodes of browsing paths. But I was kind of hoping their list of Back Button Improvements would include dealing with sites that hijack your Back button to do a refresh or launch sixteen popups. Like maybe add them to a Ban-This-Damn-Site-From-My-Browser list.
If this pattern is truly global, then it probably means that a few years the Music world will be pretty much the same as it is now, except without the Recording Industry. People who are predicting the demise of record companies say there will be no more Michael Jacksons, just an amorphous mass of musicians offering their music free on the web and making a living off concert dates. But according to the Power Law, there will be superstars even when the star-making machinery is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Most bike wheels have a circumference over 50 inches. The speed is going to be more like 10 mph, not 23.
When they talk about wind, I doubt they were thinking of the scattered molecules 600 miles out in space.
But anyway, come to think of it, the billiard ball analogy is something I read a long time ago which referred to the known biosphere, not the atmosphere. If you take 20 miles up as the top limit for life in the atmosphere and 5 miles down to the bottom of the sea, it scales down to a few thousandths of an inch of paint on a 2-inch billiard ball.
But go ahead and nitpick that too. There are probably some viruses floating around at 999 km!
The Honest Thief link is slashdotted so I'm totally ignorant of the details, but here's an observation: if the plan is to pay new musicians to put their non-recording-contract work online, Hooray! On the other hand, if the plan is merely to license content from record companies, then don't expect one actual musician to see a single penny of that money, ever.
If the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, the atmostphere would be about the thickness of the paint on the ball. This has always given me the impression that nothing happening in the atmosphere could have much physical effect on the planet. The change of a millisecond per day is definitely small.
The conservation of angular momentum should make this effect temporary, shouldn't it? As has been pointed out above in comments, if everybody ran West the Earth's rotation would speed up, but as soon as we stopped running it would return to what it was before. I would think this would hold true for wind effects as well.
your school bus wasn't being frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs, and torched to 2500 degrees, six times a year, either.
You obviously didn't go to my school. We did those things to our buses routinely!
Starting as a mere communications and education system, it has evolved into a multibillion dollar entertainment, marketing and anti-privacy engine, becoming a huge single point-of-failure that could collapse the world's economy within days.
Who woulda thunkit.
DLL Hell is a great illustration of Microsoft's general approach to a whole lot of things. The original idea of DLLs was great if you can trust that everyone who modifies a DLL will maintain backward compatibility. In real life that won't happen. Strong Binding is a workaround for shortsighted thinking.
... which is pretty much how Microsoft deals with the rest of the world.
The mentality that everything would be ok if only everyone else would just do everything the same way you do only works if you can force everybody to follow your way
Yeah, really. Back in my foolish days I could do 106 hours of Space Invaders / Missile Command / Centipede in a week without breaking a sweat. Or for that matter, blinking.
This isn't the first attempt to use blogs as billboards. Looks like some ad weenies figured out that they can't fake authenticity, so they decided to try buying it. IANAL, but deliberately concealing the fact that advertising is advertising seems like fraud to me.
One way to respond to this, if you don't like it, is to stop buying all Dr. Pepper products and let the company know you are not buying until they publicly apologize and terminate this ad campaign. You can tell them on their (flash) consumer contact page. Of course they could lie about that too I guess.
Then have a Coke and a smile.
Yeah, I agree. In a more general sense, what is it with people who produce remakes, that they feel the need to mess with the original concept in strange ways? Example: I grew up watching the original Mission Impossible series, and there is No Freakin Way that Jim Phelps was a double agent. Sorry. Can't happen. Might as well recast Einstein as a Nazi sympathizer.
If they want to introduce a female hotshot pilot as a new principal character in Battlestar Galactica, no problem. But Starbuck is an existing character with a history, and He's A GUY. Oh well, let's make him an alien, or a Cylon whose programming went awry. Wait! How about a remake of the original Star Trek, and have Spock be a Klingon? Yeah!! The fans'll spend money on anything. Sadly, that's true.
Nice photos, but the story of why he needs that much space could be even more interesting. Surely nobody needs that much pr0n. It would be great for a home theater system, or ???
I've been waiting for a Mote movie ever since reading that book 20+ years ago. Now that the technology exists to do it well, any chance of it happening?
This article admirably illustrates the difficulty of making money from record sales, but it fails to mention that making money from record sales is not the point of making records. At least not for musicians. For musicians the point of making records is to get Exposure. Working musicians make their money by performing, and exposure translates into gigs. With an album on the charts, the Grungenuts, or whatever the hypothetical band was called, should expect to rake in some respectable bucks playing large venues. That's what making records really buys musicians.
Follow me on a paranoid journey to the future. I have a feeling that the main goal of Microsoft's involvement in rights management is merely a business tactic to make it harder to use non-Microsoft software. So far the government still allows you to write software that reads a Word document. But to read a rights-managed Word document it seems like you will either have to break the rights management (DMCA violation) or emulate whatever Microsoft does to respect the rights management (software patent infringement). I'm not sure which one is the rock and which one is the hard place, but I'm feeling squeezed already.
If you see a guy who looks like you on a flying skateboard, stay out of his way.
and introduce him to girls and beer in high school. He'll never get anything done.
This is a good example of what I call peeing in the pool. Timeline claims that because Microsoft is not a law firm, SQL developers who believed Microsoft's statements about SQL licensing were acting irresponsibly. Wow! Score one for the ludicrous vision of each of us having a lawyer accompanying us everywhere like a guide dog.
So SQL Server developers, fearing legal harassment, start lookin into alternatives like MySQL, encouraging the development of new features like triggers and native stored procedures, and making MySQL even more attractive as competition. See how IP encourages innovation? Uh, sort of?
I just tested it on feeds from the major news media. The highest bursti-ness readings are on the words "Bush", "Iraq" and "terrorism." The software package I'm using was developed by a team of millions of independent non-programmers, and is called "Duh!".
Back in the eighties I had a lot of friends who produced public cable access TV shows. You can borrow the cameras and use the studios and editing facilities. Depends on the city, but in Portland Oregon all you had to pay for was tape. Most of the shows were on the level of two people sitting in the studio with a fake potted plant between them. But there were some scripted stories shot on location with local actors, or at least acting students. Very amateurish but occasionally interesting and sometimes actually good.
My point is that people who want to do these things are already doing them. There's nothing holding back anybody from producing audio drama and throwing it on Live365 etc.
Wow, watching the movie I could have sworn the face of Gollum was modelled on William DeVane. Those guys must look a lot alike. See if you can see it.
Companies certainly shouldn't be given copyrights on laws, building codes etc, which the public paid to create. On the other hand, if somebody like Westlaw has taken the trouble to produce a legal database searching system that is faster or better than what's publicly available, I don't see that they have to give it away for free. Finding and filtering the information is a valuable service.
Such services should be publicly available, but rather than force the companies to give them away I would rather see the government hire these companies as contractors to produce public access systems. Certainly don't give them ownership of information, but by all means pay them to do the job of organizing it and to produce access engines that the public, including libraries, can use.
It seems incredible that people have to pay someone $100/hour to tell them if something they want to do is legal. Yet the list of legally hazardous activities grows constantly as the law gets more complex. This is something computers can definitely change, and case law databases are only the beginning. Imagine a legal expert system that would listen to your situation and give you a competent legal opinion, whether it's for a criminal defense or adding a second story to your house. I doubt that such systems will exist anytime soon, but I hope that when they do the government will have the foresight to buy them from the developers and make them freely available.
I really like the idea of maintaining a Back trail that includes leaf nodes of browsing paths. But I was kind of hoping their list of Back Button Improvements would include dealing with sites that hijack your Back button to do a refresh or launch sixteen popups. Like maybe add them to a Ban-This-Damn-Site-From-My-Browser list.
Apparently she is smarter than we ever thought.
If this pattern is truly global, then it probably means that a few years the Music world will be pretty much the same as it is now, except without the Recording Industry. People who are predicting the demise of record companies say there will be no more Michael Jacksons, just an amorphous mass of musicians offering their music free on the web and making a living off concert dates. But according to the Power Law, there will be superstars even when the star-making machinery is gone.
Say, Jeff, you can prove that you paid for that copy of "King of the Pecos" that you're watching on your Zaurus, right?
:-)
Right?