One of my friends has a couple of dozen games imported from Japan. None of these games work on a typical region 4 player (Australia) and none of them were ever slated for release outside of Japan and some in the US.
This is one of the biggest reasons region free players and consoles are so popular here. We not only get DVDs and many console games at a much later date than the US, UK and other parts of the world, there are many games and DVDs that never make it to our shelves at all. The only way to get these is by importing them and the only way to play these games and DVDs is by moding the console or buying a region free DVD player (or hacking it so it does multiregion).
Technically, but not explicitly, region encoding of DVDs is not exactly legal under Australian competition laws. This is why the arguments of companies like Sony revolve around the copyright aspects of the region encoding. They know if they presented it as what it really is, artificial market control, DVD region coding would not exist at all in Australia and we wouldn't have to rely on 3rd party mod chips and we wouldn;t be paying the inflated prices from a reduced catalog. Thankfully our courts and some members of parliament are waking up to this and are ruling in favor of people who have legitimate use for mod chips and hacked players.
The most important part of Opera's zoom is that it also resizes forms, buttons and other interactive components in the page. Zoom in with Firefox on a page with forms and you find the text becomes way too big for the dialog boxes.
Trouble is that this stuff won't be marketed at Videophiles. It'll be marketed at Mom and Pop who want a theatre experience in the home they can share with the kids without forking over 80 dollars plus per viewing. It'll be marketed at that guy from accounting who took 2 years to understand that "right mouse button" mean't the other button on the mouse rather than a second mouse (one for left, one for right). It'll be marketed at the general domestic applience consumer who generally hasn't got a clue what they are really buying. It'll be marketed at your neighbour, you know, the guy with the $10,000 home theatre system that has a half dozen clocks all blinking at 12:00.
Here is what I think about butterfly (and any creature that goes through a laval/pupation stage)
By being born with little more than the ability to eat and move to the next meal they save the parent a huge amount of energy. Usually a parent creature has to drop a lot of their energy and food into incubating or laying an egg that will feed the young until they reach a fully matured stage.
With butterflies, flies and most other insects it becomes more efficient to lay an egg with only enough energy to create a rudimentary creature that does little more than eat and move to its next meal. This allows the parent to lay many many more eggs that have a chance of survival than if their eggs hatched directly into adult forms.
Now comes the fun part. The insect larva can slowly continue to develop into its adult form. It can develop wings, shed the extra legs change form as it matures. This is very bad for the species as it will eventually reacha point where it is niether lavae nor adult. It will go through some rather awkward stages where it becomes quite vulnerable. The earliest insects would likely have gone through this transformation as a gradual process while they ate, and probably wouldn't have a cocoon stage at all.
The species that will survive the best are going to be the ones that can hold off this transformation until they have enough food stored in their bodies to go hide somewhere. By hiding and going through the transformation in one go they avoid any awkward vulnerable stages (like developing large wings but having a body too big to fly). The ones that have the ability to create some form of protective shell (silk, folded leaves, or burrowing into the earth or into wood) have an even better chance of survival.
Basically the whole larva>cocoon>adult thing is to minimise the amount of energy the parent needs to spend on each egg, allowing more eggs and thus a greater survivability of the species.
There are enough alternate explainations to what these scientists are detecting that I also doubt the convenience of these planetary discoveries.
I understand what they are looking at, the wobble and doppler shifts etc, but to say without a doubt that they are detecting planets is pushing things a little. This new one, a jupiter sized gas giant orbiting every 80 hours a mere 8 million k from the star is moving at a pretty reasonable 10.5 million m/s or about 1/30th the speed of light.
These scientists may just be observing some odd gravitational effect. Maybe these stars they are looking at rotate a little off center. Maybe it is just interesting tidal effects from the other stars. etc etc.
It does however really capture the imagination to say that these interesting readings are actually planets.
Aaah. but the thing about DVD's is that you buy the player and plug it into the same tv as your vcr and away you go. You stick a dvd in and dribble mindlessly on the couch as you watch the pretty light show.
What the consumer won't tolerate is being told that "no.. sorry.. you need to buy this $5,000 tv to watch this new format properly, and it costs an extra $2,000 for the surround sound system. Oh and it has to be brand X".
Those that will likely be interested in this have already invested quite a lot of money in a good tv and suround stereo system for their home theatre. It is unlikely the masses will tolerate being told their 2 year old systems won't play the new tech properly.
But.. like you said, you can never underestimate the stupidity of the masses. Good marketing has a depressing habit of overiding what little common sense the masses have these days.
For a real indicator of where home media is going just take a look at the porn industry. They were the first to really embrace the vcr, among the first to seriously distribute via dvd, and the first form of media to really make use of the internet. Whatever way the porn industry goes with high definition dvds is likely the way the consumer will go. Imagine all that high resolution nookie, ultra detailed close ups and a system that totally surrounds you with the high definition sounds of heavy panting.
Your work here is good but I notice you conveniently ignored the latter part of that paragraph, the next sentence "It is fringe only because people like you treat it as such instead of honestly trying to evaluate which parts of its theory may be accurate." is the important part.
While the whole electric universe and plasma cosmology movement may be full of crackpottery and pseudoscience, Internic's point was that there may be parts of their theories that are spot on and may answer some important questions. But we may never know because scientists, and people like yourself, only ever look at the easy and obviously wrong parts, look at their association with creationism and other silly ideas, and conclude that everything that comes from these theories must therefore be wrong.
By dismissing everything without analysis, or worse only analysing things you can easily prove incorrect you are doing worse for science than these people. Sure some, maybe all of their science may be fundamentally flawed, but by saying all of it is wrong by only looking at the obvious flaws is like looking at Newton's work with alchemy and concluding from that his physics must be pseudoscientific crackpottery as well.
Insteaad we analysied the physics part of Newton's work, found it was good, and accepted it dismissing his alchemy work as just one of those little eccentricities that make great scientists so great.
I think you miss-understood the first part of the equation R. The recognisability of the main character.
I don't think they mean the recognisability of the actor playing the main character.
Now apply the equation to The Apprentice. R=8:Most of us want the kind of job offered but not all of us will go through reality TV to do it. D=10:Mr Trump takes the cake and the contestants are pretty up themselves too. V=2:Not really that witty, at least on purpose. F=5 : Some of those contestants are gonna get hurt but not physically. S=10:Yup, no need for explainations here. A=3:Someone is gonna win, the rest are gonna lose, they are the ones people watch this crap for. (((8x10+2)x5)+10)/3 for a score of 140. Yup. Toss poison spiders at the contestants every now and then and we have comedy gold.
In particular the reference to genetics, antibiotics and stress as possible causes.
I can guess the events leading to their health problems go something like this.
Sep 11. Fear and worry about terrorism. News blasts the gullible with images of death and destruction, and the possibility of the use of biological agents.
Family reacts by becoming a little isolationist and stocking up on serious antibiotics and other cleaning products to use around the house.
One year later levels of antibiotics and cleaning chemicals reach a critical point and the family starts falling ill.
Family goes to ill informed 2nd rate GP who spouts urban myth as fact. Or family just refuse to acknowledge that possibly all those cleaning products could be harmful, "after all they are cleaning products, how could something that is supposed to clean things possibly be harmful?" (Don't laugh, you probably all know someone who thinks like this ).
Family chooses to blame neighbours for failing health, typical delusions kick in. The fashionable cause for mysterious illness is radiation. Family erects aluminium sheets for "protection".
Neighbour politely asks for aluminium to be removed, family takes it as proof that something is up. Paranoia kicks in big time.
The final phase is their story turning up on slashdot where they are mocked and ridiculed.
But as parent posted, their money would be better spent on a psychologist. Still, someone should wander over there with the appropriate equipment and do some testing for radon and other harmful sources of radiation.
Advantages: Easy to program. Fast development. Very little to worry about with garbage management. Very very easy to learn compared to c++. Easy to use object model.
If you are not a hard core c guru but still need to hack out the occasional standalone then pascal is the way to go.
Took me a week to build a nice little stable app for work. Nothing special, just an autoloader for a multimedia cd with a few sound files, graphics and videos.
Nothing special unless you consider that, apart from a bit of php and python, I haven't done any programming for nearly 12 years. A week to update myself on the advances in pascal, figure out the object model, debug and compile is pretty good. And no I do not consider myself anything even approaching commercial level programming. So just imagine what someone more dedicated than I can achieve.
It is also powerful enough to compete with c++ on most levels (except os and drivers, but mainly because these already use c and interfacing with c on that level with something other than c is a pain).
Knowing the type of people that won't participate in such an experiment is just as important as the final reactions of the people who will participate.
Thats what makes the difference between a good psych project and "just a bunch of wierdo's dunking people in nasty gunk"
This is very very close to the mark. Other things to consider when looking at the drivel that "rates" is to look at when this stuff is aired. Prime time usually coincides with the typical family dinner time and an hour or so afterwards, in otherwords when people plonk themselves in front of the tube and shovel down their evening meal. The next rating slot is set for after the kids go to bed and mom and pop veg on the couch.
Almost anything will rate in this timeslot. The trick is to have one or two good shows in that slot during the week, that way the mindless masses get into the habit of tuning in at a certain time of day to watch. Once the habit is set you can then air whatever the latest garbage some smack addled exec dreamt up.
One other thing of note is that you don't want something to rate too well, you want it to rate just above your competitor. This way you keep the price for advertising high without it going through the roof. If something rates too high, because the price for advertising is proportional to the ratings, it will often be pulled because the advertisers are no longer willing to pay.
This is often why shows that rate well will somtimes get bumped to later, non rating timeslots. It brings up the advertising revenue for these later slots while keeping prime time affordable.
Part of this problem, IIRC, is because the Australian cable companies are not allowed to show the same programs that free to air channels show until a certain time after the free to air channel have shown the program.
So with something like West Wing, the cable channels are screwed when the free to air operators delay or put on hold their broadcasts.
When it comes to exchange rate for technology the Australian dollar always buys significantly less than the official exchange rates. compare prices here with prices here
It works out at about A$1.00 = US$0.56 This is pretty typical for any technology purchased in Australia and shipping costs and volume issues just don't make up for the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/search?q=boomless+supersonic +flight
Aint Google a wonderful thing.
One of my friends has a couple of dozen games imported from Japan. None of these games work on a typical region 4 player (Australia) and none of them were ever slated for release outside of Japan and some in the US.
This is one of the biggest reasons region free players and consoles are so popular here. We not only get DVDs and many console games at a much later date than the US, UK and other parts of the world, there are many games and DVDs that never make it to our shelves at all. The only way to get these is by importing them and the only way to play these games and DVDs is by moding the console or buying a region free DVD player (or hacking it so it does multiregion).
Technically, but not explicitly, region encoding of DVDs is not exactly legal under Australian competition laws. This is why the arguments of companies like Sony revolve around the copyright aspects of the region encoding. They know if they presented it as what it really is, artificial market control, DVD region coding would not exist at all in Australia and we wouldn't have to rely on 3rd party mod chips and we wouldn;t be paying the inflated prices from a reduced catalog. Thankfully our courts and some members of parliament are waking up to this and are ruling in favor of people who have legitimate use for mod chips and hacked players.
The most important part of Opera's zoom is that it also resizes forms, buttons and other interactive components in the page.
Zoom in with Firefox on a page with forms and you find the text becomes way too big for the dialog boxes.
Trouble is that this stuff won't be marketed at Videophiles.
It'll be marketed at Mom and Pop who want a theatre experience in the home they can share with the kids without forking over 80 dollars plus per viewing.
It'll be marketed at that guy from accounting who took 2 years to understand that "right mouse button" mean't the other button on the mouse rather than a second mouse (one for left, one for right).
It'll be marketed at the general domestic applience consumer who generally hasn't got a clue what they are really buying.
It'll be marketed at your neighbour, you know, the guy with the $10,000 home theatre system that has a half dozen clocks all blinking at 12:00.
Viri in latin has nothing to do with viruses.? stem=vir&ending=i
http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl
Viri is man.
Virus is poison or slimy liquid and is not pluralised in latin as far as I am aware.
Here is what I think about butterfly (and any creature that goes through a laval/pupation stage)
By being born with little more than the ability to eat and move to the next meal they save the parent a huge amount of energy. Usually a parent creature has to drop a lot of their energy and food into incubating or laying an egg that will feed the young until they reach a fully matured stage.
With butterflies, flies and most other insects it becomes more efficient to lay an egg with only enough energy to create a rudimentary creature that does little more than eat and move to its next meal. This allows the parent to lay many many more eggs that have a chance of survival than if their eggs hatched directly into adult forms.
Now comes the fun part. The insect larva can slowly continue to develop into its adult form. It can develop wings, shed the extra legs change form as it matures. This is very bad for the species as it will eventually reacha point where it is niether lavae nor adult. It will go through some rather awkward stages where it becomes quite vulnerable. The earliest insects would likely have gone through this transformation as a gradual process while they ate, and probably wouldn't have a cocoon stage at all.
The species that will survive the best are going to be the ones that can hold off this transformation until they have enough food stored in their bodies to go hide somewhere. By hiding and going through the transformation in one go they avoid any awkward vulnerable stages (like developing large wings but having a body too big to fly). The ones that have the ability to create some form of protective shell (silk, folded leaves, or burrowing into the earth or into wood) have an even better chance of survival.
Basically the whole larva>cocoon>adult thing is to minimise the amount of energy the parent needs to spend on each egg, allowing more eggs and thus a greater survivability of the species.
Just an idea.
There are enough alternate explainations to what these scientists are detecting that I also doubt the convenience of these planetary discoveries.
I understand what they are looking at, the wobble and doppler shifts etc, but to say without a doubt that they are detecting planets is pushing things a little. This new one, a jupiter sized gas giant orbiting every 80 hours a mere 8 million k from the star is moving at a pretty reasonable 10.5 million m/s or about 1/30th the speed of light.
These scientists may just be observing some odd gravitational effect. Maybe these stars they are looking at rotate a little off center. Maybe it is just interesting tidal effects from the other stars. etc etc.
It does however really capture the imagination to say that these interesting readings are actually planets.
We should all be exclusively using laserjets anyway, why is anyone happy the inkjet technology has a new lease on life?
Show me the laser equivalent of the this and I will think about it.
Aaah. but the thing about DVD's is that you buy the player and plug it into the same tv as your vcr and away you go. You stick a dvd in and dribble mindlessly on the couch as you watch the pretty light show.
What the consumer won't tolerate is being told that "no.. sorry.. you need to buy this $5,000 tv to watch this new format properly, and it costs an extra $2,000 for the surround sound system. Oh and it has to be brand X".
Those that will likely be interested in this have already invested quite a lot of money in a good tv and suround stereo system for their home theatre. It is unlikely the masses will tolerate being told their 2 year old systems won't play the new tech properly.
But.. like you said, you can never underestimate the stupidity of the masses. Good marketing has a depressing habit of overiding what little common sense the masses have these days.
For a real indicator of where home media is going just take a look at the porn industry. They were the first to really embrace the vcr, among the first to seriously distribute via dvd, and the first form of media to really make use of the internet. Whatever way the porn industry goes with high definition dvds is likely the way the consumer will go.
Imagine all that high resolution nookie, ultra detailed close ups and a system that totally surrounds you with the high definition sounds of heavy panting.
That should be "parts of their theories have merit" rather than "parts of their theories are spot on".
Stupid slashcode, not having an edit function.
Your work here is good but I notice you conveniently ignored the latter part of that paragraph, the next sentence
"It is fringe only because people like you treat it as such instead of honestly trying to evaluate which parts of its theory may be accurate."
is the important part.
While the whole electric universe and plasma cosmology movement may be full of crackpottery and pseudoscience, Internic's point was that there may be parts of their theories that are spot on and may answer some important questions. But we may never know because scientists, and people like yourself, only ever look at the easy and obviously wrong parts, look at their association with creationism and other silly ideas, and conclude that everything that comes from these theories must therefore be wrong.
By dismissing everything without analysis, or worse only analysing things you can easily prove incorrect you are doing worse for science than these people. Sure some, maybe all of their science may be fundamentally flawed, but by saying all of it is wrong by only looking at the obvious flaws is like looking at Newton's work with alchemy and concluding from that his physics must be pseudoscientific crackpottery as well.
Insteaad we analysied the physics part of Newton's work, found it was good, and accepted it dismissing his alchemy work as just one of those little eccentricities that make great scientists so great.
I think you miss-understood the first part of the equation R. The recognisability of the main character.
:Most of us want the kind of job offered but not all of us will go through reality TV to do it. :Not really that witty, at least on purpose. :Someone is gonna win, the rest are gonna lose, they are the ones people watch this crap for.
I don't think they mean the recognisability of the actor playing the main character.
Now apply the equation to The Apprentice.
R=8
D=10:Mr Trump takes the cake and the contestants are pretty up themselves too.
V=2
F=5 : Some of those contestants are gonna get hurt but not physically.
S=10:Yup, no need for explainations here.
A=3
(((8x10+2)x5)+10)/3
for a score of 140.
Yup. Toss poison spiders at the contestants every now and then and we have comedy gold.
Why with honey of course.
Haven't you ever heard.
If it keeps the peas on the knife then it's sure to keep them on the plate.
From the Lupus foundation of America
linky
In particular the reference to genetics, antibiotics and stress as possible causes.
I can guess the events leading to their health problems go something like this.
Sep 11. Fear and worry about terrorism. News blasts the gullible with images of death and destruction, and the possibility of the use of biological agents.
Family reacts by becoming a little isolationist and stocking up on serious antibiotics and other cleaning products to use around the house.
One year later levels of antibiotics and cleaning chemicals reach a critical point and the family starts falling ill.
Family goes to ill informed 2nd rate GP who spouts urban myth as fact. Or family just refuse to acknowledge that possibly all those cleaning products could be harmful, "after all they are cleaning products, how could something that is supposed to clean things possibly be harmful?" (Don't laugh, you probably all know someone who thinks like this ).
Family chooses to blame neighbours for failing health, typical delusions kick in. The fashionable cause for mysterious illness is radiation. Family erects aluminium sheets for "protection".
Neighbour politely asks for aluminium to be removed, family takes it as proof that something is up. Paranoia kicks in big time.
The final phase is their story turning up on slashdot where they are mocked and ridiculed.
But as parent posted, their money would be better spent on a psychologist. Still, someone should wander over there with the appropriate equipment and do some testing for radon and other harmful sources of radiation.
Advantages: Easy to program. Fast development. Very little to worry about with garbage management. Very very easy to learn compared to c++. Easy to use object model.
If you are not a hard core c guru but still need to hack out the occasional standalone then pascal is the way to go.
Took me a week to build a nice little stable app for work. Nothing special, just an autoloader for a multimedia cd with a few sound files, graphics and videos.
Nothing special unless you consider that, apart from a bit of php and python, I haven't done any programming for nearly 12 years. A week to update myself on the advances in pascal, figure out the object model, debug and compile is pretty good. And no I do not consider myself anything even approaching commercial level programming. So just imagine what someone more dedicated than I can achieve.
It is also powerful enough to compete with c++ on most levels (except os and drivers, but mainly because these already use c and interfacing with c on that level with something other than c is a pain).
Nah.. for graphic design, drawing or anything where fine direct control over the cursor there is http://www.wacom-asia.com/products/cintiq/cintiq21 x/cintiq21x.html
This is where you need a Tome Raider.
[Enter, stage left, busty librarian with guns on her hips]
Knowing the type of people that won't participate in such an experiment is just as important as the final reactions of the people who will participate.
Thats what makes the difference between a good psych project and "just a bunch of wierdo's dunking people in nasty gunk"
This is very very close to the mark. Other things to consider when looking at the drivel that "rates" is to look at when this stuff is aired.
Prime time usually coincides with the typical family dinner time and an hour or so afterwards, in otherwords when people plonk themselves in front of the tube and shovel down their evening meal. The next rating slot is set for after the kids go to bed and mom and pop veg on the couch.
Almost anything will rate in this timeslot. The trick is to have one or two good shows in that slot during the week, that way the mindless masses get into the habit of tuning in at a certain time of day to watch. Once the habit is set you can then air whatever the latest garbage some smack addled exec dreamt up.
One other thing of note is that you don't want something to rate too well, you want it to rate just above your competitor. This way you keep the price for advertising high without it going through the roof. If something rates too high, because the price for advertising is proportional to the ratings, it will often be pulled because the advertisers are no longer willing to pay.
This is often why shows that rate well will somtimes get bumped to later, non rating timeslots. It brings up the advertising revenue for these later slots while keeping prime time affordable.
Part of this problem, IIRC, is because the Australian cable companies are not allowed to show the same programs that free to air channels show until a certain time after the free to air channel have shown the program.
So with something like West Wing, the cable channels are screwed when the free to air operators delay or put on hold their broadcasts.
When it comes to exchange rate for technology the Australian dollar always buys significantly less than the official exchange rates.
compare
prices here with
prices here
It works out at about A$1.00 = US$0.56
This is pretty typical for any technology purchased in Australia and shipping costs and volume issues just don't make up for the difference.
Lawsuit
SCO has finally decided who they are going to file suit against.
Cheers
Z
is what we need to recover a the old episodes. Just zip out 30 to 40 light years record the old broadcasts and then bring it all back.
that or build a time machine.
12 partridges in pear trees, 22 turtle doves, 30 french hens, 36 calling birds, 40 gold rings, 42 geese-a-laying, 40 maids-a-milking, 36 ladies dancing, 30 lords-a-leaping, 22 pipers piping, and 12 drummers drumming in all. That's one heck of a bounty! :)
But won't the neighbours complain about the noise?
If they had problems with the simpsons parody imagine the fit they would have over this show