Are you nuts? Your post is based on the assumption that FCP is free? Ha! It is a $1,000 product. That takes about 20 seconds to check on the web. There are bundled apps that come at no extra cost. FCP is not one of them.
I don't expect anyone to spend hours checking facts before posting a message on the web. But you are already on the web, why not check crucial simple facts?
"Why should Adobe expend a lot of costly engineering, QA, marketing and support costs on a small market..."
Who says the Mac OS X video editing market is small? Those people doing word processing, e-mail and gaming aren't exactly a target market for a $1000 video editing product. I haven't kept up with numbers recently, but last I heard the Mac market in areas like this (graphics, prepress, video editing) was about the same size as the Windows market. If your claim relies essentially on relative size (and it appears to) then it may be on rather shaky ground. Does anyone have any current statistics?
No, you are probably not a nerd, that would require several more IQ points. Linux is a mainstay of an enormous number of server rooms in companies large and small. These companies have influence (you have heard of IBM?) so your prediction has zero probability of coming true.
This result illustrates that 'no good deed goes unpunished'. The group should have simply posted the exploit instead of trying to help Microsoft limit the copyright infringement that would accompany and dwarf any linux related activity.
I suppose someone probably said air conditioning is not necessary or who needs elevators when stairs will do? These only point to the notion that what is 'necessary' is a function of time, If 802.11 protocols and infrastructure become ubiquitous everywhere else because of its unlicensed characteristic it hard to imagine how this will play out well for a government that sees this as a money grabbing opportunity.
Well, at least you had the idea of doing the math but your intuition is way off. A good TV picture is easily compressed to 1 or 2 megabits per second. Do you have any idea how many such streams would be needed to saturate even one fiber optic cable? Of course it depends on modulation technique and other details but your scenario of the fibers being saturated is farfetched. What is even more important is that bandwidth needed by an individual is not outrageous. I have 250 kbits with my cheap DSL line and that is within a factor of 4 or 5. If telecom prices were anything like processors, memory or drive space the bandwidth for video would be routinely available either now or soon and always dropping in price.
There is of course the issue of copyright always looming. Let's say you have a house and you decide to install gigabit ethernet. From a standpoint of bandwidth you could easily send webcam, DVD, HDTV, digitized NTSC TV from anywhere on that network to anywhere else. Is there a legitimate case for considering copyright infringement is you want to watch a program in your bedroom rather than the media room?
Assuming you decided a family should be able to view in the room of its choice, what has essentially changed if that room is in France and both ends have sufficient bandwidth (bought and paid for by the individuals)? If the source individual is being paid by the receiving individual I can see where the copyright owner might feel something is wrong with that picture. If no money or other consideration is changing hands (e.g. in the case of a dispersed family) how it gets a chance of being anyone else's business (from a practical, technical standpoint).
Thanks for not allowing such an obtuse statement to go unchallenged. I wonder if the parroting of this sort of obviously inaccurate comparison actually undermines their case? Almost anyone can see the flaw which you point out and wonder about the legitimacy of a law with such a deficient argument used to justify it. I think they would be better served to argue the more difficult but also more accurate issue of copyright infringement.
I think an amusing side effect of all this is that some have reached the conclusion that analogous activities like the sweater 'cloning' you describe must be illegal. But it isn't since sweater style is not covered (yet!) by copyright law. There are issues of trademark but if there is no effort to deceive (e.g. using fake labels) there isn't grounds for complaint. I suspect certain industries in some states with a compliant legislature may try passing restrictive laws but they would have a hard time with courts.
You could hardly be more dim-witted and uninformed. Congratulations, at least you've achieved some distinction. Now crawl back under your rock, troll (and an AC to boot).
Which Radeon card, which case and power supply? Did you include gigabit ethernet, firewire, usb2, and wifi? Does the case open easily allowing convenient access like my G4 tower or the shitty designed case I have for my Athlon 2400? Does bluetooth integrate easily with the resulting box? Oh, and as Harrison Ford's character in Bladerunner says in the bar scene, "Your papers all in order for that installation of XP Pro?" (OK, I altered the wording slightly). Yeah, $600 my ass.
If you go back 40 years I bet you would get the same smug dismissal at the idea of a packet switching network replacing the "professional" circuit switched network. It was a whole lot of work and never a certain thing but that is exactly what is happenning. The person posting the original suggestion has a serious point. If individuals are providing an increasing portion of the infrastructure as 802.11 and its successors are introduced it becomes a serious question why those who happen by historical accident to have government enforced monopolies should be the sole beneficiaries.
Right now there are a lot of anemic pipes terminating in home networks that have 100 megabit to gigabit bandwidth at the edge. With wireless nodes added to this mix it should be possible to start connecting to nearest neighbors at similar non-telco retarded bandwidth. So streaming video within the neighborhood should not be that difficult to achieve. You would be able to "borrow" a neighbor's DVD without physically moving the piece of plastic to your home.
Using protocols like "Mobile Mesh Routing Protocol" (see http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_transfer/mobilemesh/draft-grace-manet-mmrp-00.txt) it should be possible to have this true broadband extend at least a few hops. Yes, it is just the first few halting steps but notice that the exciting part (ie true broadband) has almost nothing to do with the incumbent telcos who just want to milk their present position as long as they can.
For those of you scoffing at the anti-telco sentiment shown consider the following reality check. Think of every other component of the digitial bounty: processor speed, memory capacity, motherboard capability, hard drive size, local network bandwidth, hell, even monitor size and capability. They've all increased by leaps and bounds. Now think about telco mediated connections. Notice those prices racing toward zero as costs go down? Neither do I. (For those pointing at the cost of putting up satellites or laying cable don't forget that multi-billion dollar chip fabs don't prevent your memory or processor chips to from tending toward zero.)
I can't state emphatically enough how much I oppose the idea of forcing everyone to a pay TV option. Having "free" over the air (OTA) broadcast service is one of the few constraints on even more rapacious monopoly pricing. What seems remarkable to me is how cable (and satellite which is the same thing through a different "pipe") has managed to evolve into the worst of both: you have to pay an ever increasing monthly bill and you still have to view an unending stream of commercials.
This move would weaken the ever fading idea that a citizen should not have to answer to anyone when operating equipment on his own property that does not threaten public safety. I have never had a "pirate" cable box or modified satellite reception box, but I still deeply resent the FBI using any of its resources to enforce the implicit police state laws that seek to make illegal many devices not approved by the current coporate oligarchs. If Louis Freeh (former head of FBI) had kept his eye on legitimate public safety issues maybe the Al Queada cells would have been more worried about raids by federal agents than citizens who dared to operate unapproved satellite reception equipment. (For the record I think these should be issues for the civil courts, not the criminal courts). Also bear in mind that we were only one vote on the Supreme Court away from having VCR's treated as illegal devices. For those who choose to view this possibility as absurd please recall that for a majority of the world population possession and use of unregulated photocopy machines was criminalized (old Soviet Union and friends).
Finally for those who have sufficiently powered PC's (e.g. I use an Athlon XP 2400+ which is $90 at NewEgg) you can receive the DTV (including HDTV) in your area by purchasing a $150 PCI card (from Dvico) and connecting it to an antenna for a charge of $0 per month. I didn't factor in the cost of monitor, hard drive, memory, DVD burner. But that is because I would want to have them in any case. The added cost was just $150 with no recurring charges. So now I read that an FCC economist wants to end that so one of his cronies (in an extended sense) can collect monopoly rent. Fey!
Forget all the other stale suggestions. The best book I've read recently is "lucky wander boy" by d. b. weiss. Not easily summarised but the protagonist emabarks on a project of critical analysis of classic arcade video games in order to bring more focus to his disconnected existence. There is some clever writing and observations that arise quite naturally from the material. The fictitious arcade game "Lucky Wander Boy" and its pursuit become the driving force of the narrative.
"So, if we don't act now we'll loose our technological leader within the next 30 years forever."
Is this anything like setting loose the dogs of war? Seriously, if you can't master the distinction between 'lose' and 'loose', how do you expect others to make favorable assumptions about how carefully you've studied an issue as complex as advanced math education?
On the more pertinent issue of Confucian versus Western education do you have a list of these Chinese mathematicians who you seem to claim have eclipsed their Western counterparts? Note that this should be about research results, not test results.
It isn't entirely clear, but it seems like you are claiming that ripping a CD to your hard drive is an infringement of the copyright. Would this include ripping it to a compressed format like mp3 or AAC? If that were so then there is a tremendous amount of copyright infringement occurring. If that is the case then where is the lawsuit from the RIAA against Apple for distributing iTunes with its computers? A fundamental capability of iTunes is the ability to rip CD's. There are many other commercial products for exactly the same purpose on PC's and Macs but no lawsuits that I've read about.
If it does not constitute copyright infringement (to rip a CD to your drive) then why are so many tempted to insinuate the claim? If you are a lobbyist for the RIAA then that is only one among many stupid things you would have to maintain. But can the rest of dispense with such dim witted accusations? It is about as legitimate as claiming that videotaping a TV program is against the law.
How long has OS X been out? It comes with pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection. I don't mean the weak ass stuff that comes with Windows XP (please spare me the lecture, I have and XP box on my desk as well as a G4 running OS X). This is because it is built on top of BSD Unix rather than the latest hack from Microsoft. You might find it interesting how things change whether you are paying attention or not.
Since I generally agree with whay you say, I was going to make my English composition comment privately. However, your e-mail address is not publicly accessible. You use the word "loose" at least three times when the correct word is "lose" for the context each time. I only make the point because so many seem to be making this particular mistake.
I've only visited, not lived, in the UK so I have little familiarity with the details of this situation. However, even without details it is important to understand how much incredibly worse a coal fired plant is environmentally on a routine basis. For instance, in the U.S. a coal fired plant will release much more radiation into the environment. This is all background radiation and not the worse aspect of the situation but remains a remarkably perverse fact of how regulation works. What is much worse is the contribution of pollutants which lead to acid rain.
What goes wrong here is the willingness to make a bad choice between real world nuclear and real world coal based on an ideologically colored assessment of risks. Since France did go with the nuclear option we will have some ability to analyze which decision was better based on the actual experience. The test is imperfect but at least it exists.
Maybe relating a story with which I am somewhat familiar would be useful. Back in the early 70's there was a physics grad student at Caltech who received his doctorate for work done on something like ion propogation in silicon. Some years later it was determined that the data used to support the thesis was mainly noise. I don't think this implies there was anything necessarily wrong as the people involved were certainly capable and talented. But sometimes the phenomena being studied is worth the effort because it is not easily viewed. It took several more years and progress from others before it could be shown that the attempts in the thesis were not fruitful.
That example is from experimental physics where investigators can probe and explore with considerable freedom. In a case like the allegation that human action is the cause of so-called global warming an investigator is much more constrained. We do have generally agreed evidence of much larger climate changes having nothing to do with humanity since it predates human existence. Most of our careful observation comes from an almost absurdly fleeting moment in time. The chance that grand pronouncements affecting billions of dollars in economic impact are based on an exquisite analysis of the equivalent of noise is just too serious to overlook.
I'm not proposing that nothing ever be done to address the possibility of global warming and environmental degradation in general. For instance I think the replacement of most or all coal fired power plants with nuclear power plants is one of the great missed opportunities caused by "know nothing" environmentalists who tended to demand perfection rather than improvement.
Let's see if I can at least offer you a clue despite your reluctance to really consider the article. Ignore the recent past and look at the geological record. Consider all the extreme variations in climate for which there is incontrovertible evidence. For instance there were extended periods for which the entire Earth was essentially a snow ball. All of these significant variations without a human in sight. At this point the evidence of an effect is ambiguous and human causation even less so. On the other hand the economic-political motivation of many disputants is obvious.
The article just says it has a tuner. If you check ViewSonic's web site you learn it is an NTSC tuner built in and allows you to connect an HDTV set top box to one of its inputs. For those keeping score that means that after paying $400 for this box you still have to buy an ATSC tuner (ie an HDTV set top box) in order to display HDTV on you computer monitor. Notice that this still does not allow for high resolution capture of the signal for later viewing.
If you have PC game capable machine then you could probably buy one HDTV tuner card from DVICO which will be carried by www.digitalconection.com for $159. This allows you to view HDTV and record te compressed digital video signal to your hard drive.
This sort of discussion is just hopeless when so many are willing to say such silly things. Didn't anyone take a physics course? Does anyone care about the logistics involved? Just for seat of the pants consideration the Earth and its moon are roughly similar in size. What effort and cost would be involved in removing 1/10 of the Earth's mass from its gravity well? (Here is a hint: the crust does not extend anywhere near one tenth of the way toward the center). Now go sit down.
Anyone who has looked at the numbers knows there is a large difference between the Earth and its moon but just for fun the current cost per kilogram to put it in orbit (ie it hasn't even escaped the Earth's gravity well) is given as between $10,000 and $40,000. The mass of the Earth is about 6 x 10^24 kg. One tenth of that is 6 x 10^23 kg which we multiply by 10^4 $/kg to get $10^27. Wasn't the most recent US budget about $2 trillion? That would be $2 x 10^12. So ignoring many other factors we are looking at about 10^15 years to fund it. The age of the universe appears to be about 10^10 years so we are looking at about 100,000 times the age of the universe.
That is why some people rudely laugh at you (or mutter something nasty about the quality of a liberal arts education) when you adopt a stance of concern about these issues.
It helps in this case to have some knowledge of the specific history of the colonies. The government of King George III regularly abused citizens by repeated prosecutions. This influenced the Constitution when independence was achieved.
Thank you for voicing what seems to me a logical conclusion from reading the article. The tawdry sensationalism seems mysterious considering the topic. For instance:
"One vendor shipped faulty 54g equipment for review, and we found that not only was the signal indecipherable by an 802.11b adapter, but it was also jumbled when the mobile units moved more than 20 feet away. A replacement unit shipped two weeks later works correctly."
So? And your point is what? Gee, an advance review unit that was defective and needed to be replaced. Stop the presses! Also their apparent source seems to be possibly biased:
"Hunn believes that the 11g concept is redundant, and should never have been developed. "I've already said that.11g is a bastard concept - it should have been put down eighteen months ago,...""
I think the editors at The Register should be ashamed they allowed this article to be published in this form. Someone is not doing his job.
It sounds like you might need at least a little review also. An object, any object, at the right distance from the Earth will naturally fall around the Earth (assuming the right initial conditions so it is above a point on the equator and its velocity vector is perpendicular to its displacement and contained in the equatorial plane) and remain above the same point at all times. If it is too close then the acceleration of gravity will force it to advance slowly while if it is too far away it will move slower than the rotation of the Earth under it. All this involves no cable at all and is absolutely routine for many communications satellites.
Attaching a cable to these two points that do not move relative to each other is some other engineering challenge. Analyzing it could probably start from considering a satellite dragging a long cable and examining what forces would need to be used to cause it to extend straight down to the Earth's surface. I don't believe Newton examined anything like this in the Principia. Since he did describe gravitation and dynamics mathematically I suppose you could glibly indicate that the needed results follow but I believe you have left a considerable exercise for the reader.
How can one deal with this computers on a regular and continuing basis and still come out with a jack ass statement like:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
Pardon me? When new procesors are announced do they have performance increases that are proportional to their existing speed or are they some lesser quantity. For example when 300 MHz processors were current the next interesting products were hundreds of MHz faster. When processors were 1 MHz (the original 6502 in the Apple II) the improvements were 2 and 4 MHz. Now with GHz processors we look at new generations measured in multiples of existing speeds, not a few MHz or even hundreds of MHz faster.
A similar story is true of memory density. The original Mac had 64K of RAM. Each generation wasn't just larger, it went up by an order of magnitude. Now we can easily afford and use a gigabyte of memory.
Hard drives started around 5 to 10 megabytes. The build up to current 100's of gigabytes of storage (all at static price levels) was obviously exponential.
Just how dim do you have to be to miss the fact that fixed price improvements come as multiples of existing levels which is what defines exponential growth which is the actual content of Moore's Law?
Did I read the article carefully? No, because I quickly reached the conclusion that the author was a moron with the ignorance that is only obtained via studying for an advanced degree in one of the less rigorous academic fields. If you are looking for insight read some of the observations of Carver Mead who obtained the fundamental insight back in the 60's and helped to create the phenomenon that has transformed the world (as dimensions get smaller almost every performance aspect improves so we are on a roller coaster until we butt up against fundamental limitations which themselves seem to recede as ever more human ingenuity is applied to every detail).
When I was an undergrad I worked for a physics professor whose research included experimental measurements that pertained to general relativity. He showed me the archives of the kooks that are invariably drawn to the challenge of refuting general relatiivity. He was always getting these silly things in the mail and few of the authors had any sort of understanding of physics at any level. The same seems to be true of Moore's Law today. But in this case you can't have a requirement that a disputant at least have some knowledge of differential geometry. You just have to be able to spell the names.
Oh please! Can you name even one person in our home galaxy who has pirated a copy of "The Matrix" DVD? I'm not saying that no one has ever burned a copy; I mean a person who has a copy but does not also own a legitimate commercial copy. Note that the DMCA not only makes it illegal to make a fair use backup copy of a disc that you have purchased, it makes it illegal to even discuss the details of how it is done. It is a police state law and it is evil.
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Are you nuts? Your post is based on the assumption that FCP is free? Ha! It is a $1,000 product. That takes about 20 seconds to check on the web. There are bundled apps that come at no extra cost. FCP is not one of them.
I don't expect anyone to spend hours checking facts before posting a message on the web. But you are already on the web, why not check crucial simple facts?
"Why should Adobe expend a lot of costly engineering, QA, marketing and support costs on a small market..."
Who says the Mac OS X video editing market is small? Those people doing word processing, e-mail and gaming aren't exactly a target market for a $1000 video editing product. I haven't kept up with numbers recently, but last I heard the Mac market in areas like this (graphics, prepress, video editing) was about the same size as the Windows market. If your claim relies essentially on relative size (and it appears to) then it may be on rather shaky ground. Does anyone have any current statistics?
No, you are probably not a nerd, that would require several more IQ points. Linux is a mainstay of an enormous number of server rooms in companies large and small. These companies have influence (you have heard of IBM?) so your prediction has zero probability of coming true.
This result illustrates that 'no good deed goes unpunished'. The group should have simply posted the exploit instead of trying to help Microsoft limit the copyright infringement that would accompany and dwarf any linux related activity.
I suppose someone probably said air conditioning is not necessary or who needs elevators when stairs will do? These only point to the notion that what is 'necessary' is a function of time, If 802.11 protocols and infrastructure become ubiquitous everywhere else because of its unlicensed characteristic it hard to imagine how this will play out well for a government that sees this as a money grabbing opportunity.
Well, at least you had the idea of doing the math but your intuition is way off. A good TV picture is easily compressed to 1 or 2 megabits per second. Do you have any idea how many such streams would be needed to saturate even one fiber optic cable? Of course it depends on modulation technique and other details but your scenario of the fibers being saturated is farfetched. What is even more important is that bandwidth needed by an individual is not outrageous. I have 250 kbits with my cheap DSL line and that is within a factor of 4 or 5. If telecom prices were anything like processors, memory or drive space the bandwidth for video would be routinely available either now or soon and always dropping in price.
There is of course the issue of copyright always looming. Let's say you have a house and you decide to install gigabit ethernet. From a standpoint of bandwidth you could easily send webcam, DVD, HDTV, digitized NTSC TV from anywhere on that network to anywhere else. Is there a legitimate case for considering copyright infringement is you want to watch a program in your bedroom rather than the media room?
Assuming you decided a family should be able to view in the room of its choice, what has essentially changed if that room is in France and both ends have sufficient bandwidth (bought and paid for by the individuals)? If the source individual is being paid by the receiving individual I can see where the copyright owner might feel something is wrong with that picture. If no money or other consideration is changing hands (e.g. in the case of a dispersed family) how it gets a chance of being anyone else's business (from a practical, technical standpoint).
Thanks for not allowing such an obtuse statement to go unchallenged. I wonder if the parroting of this sort of obviously inaccurate comparison actually undermines their case? Almost anyone can see the flaw which you point out and wonder about the legitimacy of a law with such a deficient argument used to justify it. I think they would be better served to argue the more difficult but also more accurate issue of copyright infringement.
I think an amusing side effect of all this is that some have reached the conclusion that analogous activities like the sweater 'cloning' you describe must be illegal. But it isn't since sweater style is not covered (yet!) by copyright law. There are issues of trademark but if there is no effort to deceive (e.g. using fake labels) there isn't grounds for complaint. I suspect certain industries in some states with a compliant legislature may try passing restrictive laws but they would have a hard time with courts.
You could hardly be more dim-witted and uninformed. Congratulations, at least you've achieved some distinction. Now crawl back under your rock, troll (and an AC to boot).
Which Radeon card, which case and power supply? Did you include gigabit ethernet, firewire, usb2, and wifi? Does the case open easily allowing convenient access like my G4 tower or the shitty designed case I have for my Athlon 2400? Does bluetooth integrate easily with the resulting box? Oh, and as Harrison Ford's character in Bladerunner says in the bar scene, "Your papers all in order for that installation of XP Pro?" (OK, I altered the wording slightly). Yeah, $600 my ass.
If you go back 40 years I bet you would get the same smug dismissal at the idea of a packet switching network replacing the "professional" circuit switched network. It was a whole lot of work and never a certain thing but that is exactly what is happenning. The person posting the original suggestion has a serious point. If individuals are providing an increasing portion of the infrastructure as 802.11 and its successors are introduced it becomes a serious question why those who happen by historical accident to have government enforced monopolies should be the sole beneficiaries.
h /draft-grace-manet-mmrp-00.txt) it should be possible to have this true broadband extend at least a few hops. Yes, it is just the first few halting steps but notice that the exciting part (ie true broadband) has almost nothing to do with the incumbent telcos who just want to milk their present position as long as they can.
Right now there are a lot of anemic pipes terminating in home networks that have 100 megabit to gigabit bandwidth at the edge. With wireless nodes added to this mix it should be possible to start connecting to nearest neighbors at similar non-telco retarded bandwidth. So streaming video within the neighborhood should not be that difficult to achieve. You would be able to "borrow" a neighbor's DVD without physically moving the piece of plastic to your home.
Using protocols like "Mobile Mesh Routing Protocol" (see http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_transfer/mobilemes
For those of you scoffing at the anti-telco sentiment shown consider the following reality check. Think of every other component of the digitial bounty: processor speed, memory capacity, motherboard capability, hard drive size, local network bandwidth, hell, even monitor size and capability. They've all increased by leaps and bounds. Now think about telco mediated connections. Notice those prices racing toward zero as costs go down? Neither do I. (For those pointing at the cost of putting up satellites or laying cable don't forget that multi-billion dollar chip fabs don't prevent your memory or processor chips to from tending toward zero.)
I can't state emphatically enough how much I oppose the idea of forcing everyone to a pay TV option. Having "free" over the air (OTA) broadcast service is one of the few constraints on even more rapacious monopoly pricing. What seems remarkable to me is how cable (and satellite which is the same thing through a different "pipe") has managed to evolve into the worst of both: you have to pay an ever increasing monthly bill and you still have to view an unending stream of commercials.
This move would weaken the ever fading idea that a citizen should not have to answer to anyone when operating equipment on his own property that does not threaten public safety. I have never had a "pirate" cable box or modified satellite reception box, but I still deeply resent the FBI using any of its resources to enforce the implicit police state laws that seek to make illegal many devices not approved by the current coporate oligarchs. If Louis Freeh (former head of FBI) had kept his eye on legitimate public safety issues maybe the Al Queada cells would have been more worried about raids by federal agents than citizens who dared to operate unapproved satellite reception equipment. (For the record I think these should be issues for the civil courts, not the criminal courts). Also bear in mind that we were only one vote on the Supreme Court away from having VCR's treated as illegal devices. For those who choose to view this possibility as absurd please recall that for a majority of the world population possession and use of unregulated photocopy machines was criminalized (old Soviet Union and friends).
Finally for those who have sufficiently powered PC's (e.g. I use an Athlon XP 2400+ which is $90 at NewEgg) you can receive the DTV (including HDTV) in your area by purchasing a $150 PCI card (from Dvico) and connecting it to an antenna for a charge of $0 per month. I didn't factor in the cost of monitor, hard drive, memory, DVD burner. But that is because I would want to have them in any case. The added cost was just $150 with no recurring charges. So now I read that an FCC economist wants to end that so one of his cronies (in an extended sense) can collect monopoly rent. Fey!
Forget all the other stale suggestions. The best book I've read recently is "lucky wander boy" by d. b. weiss. Not easily summarised but the protagonist emabarks on a project of critical analysis of classic arcade video games in order to bring more focus to his disconnected existence. There is some clever writing and observations that arise quite naturally from the material. The fictitious arcade game "Lucky Wander Boy" and its pursuit become the driving force of the narrative.
"So, if we don't act now we'll loose our technological leader within the next 30 years forever."
Is this anything like setting loose the dogs of war? Seriously, if you can't master the distinction between 'lose' and 'loose', how do you expect others to make favorable assumptions about how carefully you've studied an issue as complex as advanced math education?
On the more pertinent issue of Confucian versus Western education do you have a list of these Chinese mathematicians who you seem to claim have eclipsed their Western counterparts? Note that this should be about research results, not test results.
It isn't entirely clear, but it seems like you are claiming that ripping a CD to your hard drive is an infringement of the copyright. Would this include ripping it to a compressed format like mp3 or AAC? If that were so then there is a tremendous amount of copyright infringement occurring. If that is the case then where is the lawsuit from the RIAA against Apple for distributing iTunes with its computers? A fundamental capability of iTunes is the ability to rip CD's. There are many other commercial products for exactly the same purpose on PC's and Macs but no lawsuits that I've read about.
If it does not constitute copyright infringement (to rip a CD to your drive) then why are so many tempted to insinuate the claim? If you are a lobbyist for the RIAA then that is only one among many stupid things you would have to maintain. But can the rest of dispense with such dim witted accusations? It is about as legitimate as claiming that videotaping a TV program is against the law.
How long has OS X been out? It comes with pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection. I don't mean the weak ass stuff that comes with Windows XP (please spare me the lecture, I have and XP box on my desk as well as a G4 running OS X). This is because it is built on top of BSD Unix rather than the latest hack from Microsoft. You might find it interesting how things change whether you are paying attention or not.
Since I generally agree with whay you say, I was going to make my English composition comment privately. However, your e-mail address is not publicly accessible. You use the word "loose" at least three times when the correct word is "lose" for the context each time. I only make the point because so many seem to be making this particular mistake.
I've only visited, not lived, in the UK so I have little familiarity with the details of this situation. However, even without details it is important to understand how much incredibly worse a coal fired plant is environmentally on a routine basis. For instance, in the U.S. a coal fired plant will release much more radiation into the environment. This is all background radiation and not the worse aspect of the situation but remains a remarkably perverse fact of how regulation works. What is much worse is the contribution of pollutants which lead to acid rain.
What goes wrong here is the willingness to make a bad choice between real world nuclear and real world coal based on an ideologically colored assessment of risks. Since France did go with the nuclear option we will have some ability to analyze which decision was better based on the actual experience. The test is imperfect but at least it exists.
Maybe relating a story with which I am somewhat familiar would be useful. Back in the early 70's there was a physics grad student at Caltech who received his doctorate for work done on something like ion propogation in silicon. Some years later it was determined that the data used to support the thesis was mainly noise. I don't think this implies there was anything necessarily wrong as the people involved were certainly capable and talented. But sometimes the phenomena being studied is worth the effort because it is not easily viewed. It took several more years and progress from others before it could be shown that the attempts in the thesis were not fruitful.
That example is from experimental physics where investigators can probe and explore with considerable freedom. In a case like the allegation that human action is the cause of so-called global warming an investigator is much more constrained. We do have generally agreed evidence of much larger climate changes having nothing to do with humanity since it predates human existence. Most of our careful observation comes from an almost absurdly fleeting moment in time. The chance that grand pronouncements affecting billions of dollars in economic impact are based on an exquisite analysis of the equivalent of noise is just too serious to overlook.
I'm not proposing that nothing ever be done to address the possibility of global warming and environmental degradation in general. For instance I think the replacement of most or all coal fired power plants with nuclear power plants is one of the great missed opportunities caused by "know nothing" environmentalists who tended to demand perfection rather than improvement.
Let's see if I can at least offer you a clue despite your reluctance to really consider the article. Ignore the recent past and look at the geological record. Consider all the extreme variations in climate for which there is incontrovertible evidence. For instance there were extended periods for which the entire Earth was essentially a snow ball. All of these significant variations without a human in sight. At this point the evidence of an effect is ambiguous and human causation even less so. On the other hand the economic-political motivation of many disputants is obvious.
The article just says it has a tuner. If you check ViewSonic's web site you learn it is an NTSC tuner built in and allows you to connect an HDTV set top box to one of its inputs. For those keeping score that means that after paying $400 for this box you still have to buy an ATSC tuner (ie an HDTV set top box) in order to display HDTV on you computer monitor. Notice that this still does not allow for high resolution capture of the signal for later viewing.
If you have PC game capable machine then you could probably buy one HDTV tuner card from DVICO which will be carried by www.digitalconection.com for $159. This allows you to view HDTV and record te compressed digital video signal to your hard drive.
This sort of discussion is just hopeless when so many are willing to say such silly things. Didn't anyone take a physics course? Does anyone care about the logistics involved? Just for seat of the pants consideration the Earth and its moon are roughly similar in size. What effort and cost would be involved in removing 1/10 of the Earth's mass from its gravity well? (Here is a hint: the crust does not extend anywhere near one tenth of the way toward the center). Now go sit down.
Anyone who has looked at the numbers knows there is a large difference between the Earth and its moon but just for fun the current cost per kilogram to put it in orbit (ie it hasn't even escaped the Earth's gravity well) is given as between $10,000 and $40,000. The mass of the Earth is about 6 x 10^24 kg. One tenth of that is 6 x 10^23 kg which we multiply by 10^4 $/kg to get $10^27. Wasn't the most recent US budget about $2 trillion? That would be $2 x 10^12. So ignoring many other factors we are looking at about 10^15 years to fund it. The age of the universe appears to be about 10^10 years so we are looking at about 100,000 times the age of the universe.
That is why some people rudely laugh at you (or mutter something nasty about the quality of a liberal arts education) when you adopt a stance of concern about these issues.
It helps in this case to have some knowledge of the specific history of the colonies. The government of King George III regularly abused citizens by repeated prosecutions. This influenced the Constitution when independence was achieved.
Thank you for voicing what seems to me a logical conclusion from reading the article. The tawdry sensationalism seems mysterious considering the topic. For instance:
.11g is a bastard concept - it should have been put down eighteen months ago,...""
"One vendor shipped faulty 54g equipment for review, and we found that not only was the signal indecipherable by an 802.11b adapter, but it was also jumbled when the mobile units moved more than 20 feet away. A replacement unit shipped two weeks later works correctly."
So? And your point is what? Gee, an advance review unit that was defective and needed to be replaced. Stop the presses! Also their apparent source seems to be possibly biased:
"Hunn believes that the 11g concept is redundant, and should never have been developed. "I've already said that
I think the editors at The Register should be ashamed they allowed this article to be published in this form. Someone is not doing his job.
It sounds like you might need at least a little review also. An object, any object, at the right distance from the Earth will naturally fall around the Earth (assuming the right initial conditions so it is above a point on the equator and its velocity vector is perpendicular to its displacement and contained in the equatorial plane) and remain above the same point at all times. If it is too close then the acceleration of gravity will force it to advance slowly while if it is too far away it will move slower than the rotation of the Earth under it. All this involves no cable at all and is absolutely routine for many communications satellites.
Attaching a cable to these two points that do not move relative to each other is some other engineering challenge. Analyzing it could probably start from considering a satellite dragging a long cable and examining what forces would need to be used to cause it to extend straight down to the Earth's surface. I don't believe Newton examined anything like this in the Principia. Since he did describe gravitation and dynamics mathematically I suppose you could glibly indicate that the needed results follow but I believe you have left a considerable exercise for the reader.
How can one deal with this computers on a regular and continuing basis and still come out with a jack ass statement like:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
Pardon me? When new procesors are announced do they have performance increases that are proportional to their existing speed or are they some lesser quantity. For example when 300 MHz processors were current the next interesting products were hundreds of MHz faster. When processors were 1 MHz (the original 6502 in the Apple II) the improvements were 2 and 4 MHz. Now with GHz processors we look at new generations measured in multiples of existing speeds, not a few MHz or even hundreds of MHz faster.
A similar story is true of memory density. The original Mac had 64K of RAM. Each generation wasn't just larger, it went up by an order of magnitude. Now we can easily afford and use a gigabyte of memory.
Hard drives started around 5 to 10 megabytes. The build up to current 100's of gigabytes of storage (all at static price levels) was obviously exponential.
Just how dim do you have to be to miss the fact that fixed price improvements come as multiples of existing levels which is what defines exponential growth which is the actual content of Moore's Law?
Did I read the article carefully? No, because I quickly reached the conclusion that the author was a moron with the ignorance that is only obtained via studying for an advanced degree in one of the less rigorous academic fields. If you are looking for insight read some of the observations of Carver Mead who obtained the fundamental insight back in the 60's and helped to create the phenomenon that has transformed the world (as dimensions get smaller almost every performance aspect improves so we are on a roller coaster until we butt up against fundamental limitations which themselves seem to recede as ever more human ingenuity is applied to every detail).
When I was an undergrad I worked for a physics professor whose research included experimental measurements that pertained to general relativity. He showed me the archives of the kooks that are invariably drawn to the challenge of refuting general relatiivity. He was always getting these silly things in the mail and few of the authors had any sort of understanding of physics at any level. The same seems to be true of Moore's Law today. But in this case you can't have a requirement that a disputant at least have some knowledge of differential geometry. You just have to be able to spell the names.
Oh please! Can you name even one person in our home galaxy who has pirated a copy of "The Matrix" DVD? I'm not saying that no one has ever burned a copy; I mean a person who has a copy but does not also own a legitimate commercial copy. Note that the DMCA not only makes it illegal to make a fair use backup copy of a disc that you have purchased, it makes it illegal to even discuss the details of how it is done. It is a police state law and it is evil.