The difference is that China's currently bad, but slowly getting better, while the USA is currently good (at least relative to China) but getting worse.
True... but seriously, the US and China aren't anywhere near being in the same league oppression wise. That some citizens of an undeniably oppressive state (cultural revolution anyone?) believe otherwise isn't exactly convincing.
Of course, if you want real answers you should ask recent immigrants and their kids from China about it. I'd say the same about western immigrants to china, but aside from some businessmen I doubt there are many.
The problem with DVDs is they are already totally cramped. Turns out a lot of the "extras" weren't so extra after all. That's why you have brits buying American region 1 disks, because the EU region 2 disks skimped on the quality so they could include a dozen different language tracks.
A disk should allow for the regular HD-content, all the bonus materials, every language and dubbing tracks, previews, etc., all with room to spare. Alternatively, it should also allow for at least seven hours of normal-quality content. That way you can get a whole TV season on only 1-4 disks. Because there's a lot of non-HD content out there.
Here's what I hope they change with the next format, besides the obvious:
1) No regions. The ones they have never made any sense anyway - why on earth are Japan and Europe in the same group but Australia by itself? Language regions I could have understood. I understand the economics behind regions, but really. One world, one price.
2) Sophisticated sprite, text, and video control options. Did you know that DVD subtitles are limited to four colors to save space? Talk about a bad solution. And there's no way to control the sequence in video. There should be total control over what goes on screen, equivalent to what you could do with burnt-in material, but not burnt in. The ability to overlay sprites or auxilliary video to overlay signs or add censorship bars. Bleeping or replacing bad words. Skipping naughty bits. Or rehashing what you have into a director's cut. Actual text subtitles with PDF-style rendering to allow embedded fonts, and standard UTF options.
3) Built in, fully functional scripting language - python or perhaps a real-time language. Would allow for far greater interactivity. Also games, interactive data browsing, simple programs, and so forth. Also, if used intelligently would make controlling the many options much easier. For instance, to switch between english dub and native language+english subtitles, I wouldn't have to navigate menus to select the correct audio and subtitle options, guessing which was which because they only say "english 1" and so forth - I would press a button to toggle through the logical options.
4) The ability for outside files to wrap and modify DVD content. Particularly with the enhancements above, this would allow anyone to enhance a DVD for others. Specifically, by subtitling it in a language no one bothered to translate it into. Or editing it to suit parent's demands for kid-friendliness. Or, most attractively to the distributors, the ability to go back and fix errors AFTER the disks have shipped. A sane directory structure and system on the disk would make this a lot easier. As would a secondary region for writing in extra or per-disk data after they've been pressed.
It was obvious from day one that BT was going to revolutionize large/high-demand file delivery, legal or otherwise. Overloaded sites have always been a problem and commerical server networks just can't cut it. To me, anyway.
What we need is a new protocol/software to replace http that can handle this sort of thing automatically, so the benefits can extend beyond specifically chosen files to entire sites.
If I'm not mistaken the infrared technology relied on quantum dots. That report came out in January. Full spectrum cells also use quantum dots. You can mix them as you like to suit your purposes.
There aren't many details, but this technology does appear to involve quantum dots. It's possible the two technologies could be combined to yield even better efficiencies and returns.
Well folks, it looks like if these new technologies are even half as good as they claim to be, cheap efficient solar cells will finally be here within the next few years.
Personally I would think a hand squeezer device like this would be ideal. It's a very natural motion.
Compressed air IS useful if you need to deliver a lot of force at once, like with compressed air tools, or if you want to avoid using electrical devices for some reason.
Yeah well there's a distro center an hour away from me and when I first joined I had 2 day turnaround time, but now they are intentionally delaying sending my next movies. I can get 12 movies a month, period. See, people who actually get their money's worth are not the sort of customers they want. If there were another service in my area with a large anime selection, I would be gone.
But don't take my word for it. There's a whole site devoted to exactly this issue. Check out the customer opinions part and see for yourself.
This is not making energy from nothing. This is capturing energy that would have normally gone to waste. Even better, it is capturing the energy in a highly useful form, oil.
You are correct that although what goes out may come right back in, energy will be gradually lost in the process. You still need a net input of energy. That could come out of the ground as it does now, in which case we would only be slowing down our mad dash to turn all the buried carbon in the world back into carbon dioxide... but it could also just as easily, perhaps even MORE easily, come from other sources. The most obvious being... random biomass. Not even something fancy like rapeseed, whatever you can lay your hands one. Grass, weeds, trash trees. That damned acacia or kudzu or duckweed or cedar that's ruining your local biome. Easily available everywhere, except maybe in the desert. Stuff that doesn't need fertilizer or pesticides or care or energy to produce, just sunlight, water, CO2, and dirt, and produces O2 in the process.
The "hydrogen economy" is a red herring. Hydrogen is a total bitch to store and transport, requires specialized equipment to use, and the energy needed to make it has to come from somewhere. It's only advantage is not producing carbon dioxide at the source. Diesel, OTOH, is ideal to store and use, and has a huge infrastructure built around it. Make that biodiesel, and it becomes renewable. And that is essentially what this technology is producing from waste. Add in some purposefully grown material to make up for losses, and you'll never need to import another barrel.
There's no need to worry about CO2 as a byproduct, if in the larger cycle you take in as much as you put out. If you no longer have to dig carbon out of the ground, you no longer have to worry about putting CO2 in the air.
You might want to build a solar thermal one though. After all, this process requires energy mainly in the form of heat, and a field of mirrors can capture solar thermal energy far better than a field of plants can. Geothermal, where applicable, would work pretty well too. Nukes, which are also thermal, would work, but they're not worth the hassle.
Not only does it produce useful energy carriers like oil and gas, it can also separate out pure carbon (useful for many purposes) and solids which are a mix of metals and minerals. Useful, partially refined minerals and metals which would require less energy to turn them into useful materials than the stuff you dug out of the ground to make the original material in the first place. The oil and gas themselves also make for a good feedstock for various petrochemicals, namely plastics.
That waste can including toxic or hazardous waste. Stuff we normally would have spent energy to dispose of and had to build a landfill for. Bonus!
Hey, you can also use this to produce relatively clean water that can of course be purified further. Since a natural candidate for this technology is wastewater, you'll probably be producing a lot of it too. Double bonus!
I can sum this up in one word. RECYCLING. Not today's bullshit recycling where only aluminum cans can be efficiently reused, because aluminum is so hideously energy intensive (you'd be better off buying plastic bottles and throwing them away energy-wise). Your garbage becomes an important resource. We're talking all types of waste, human, industrial, post-consumer, agricultural, toxic, everything.
Economically viable, universal RECYCLING, that takes care of dangerous materials to boot.
Hell, if it works as advertised, we'll be digging into our landfills instead of virgin soil for resources.
And it does happen in America. That's what anime fansubbing is all about - bringing Japanese animation outside Japan years before it gets put out on DVD overseas, if it is put out on DVD at all. The main differences are 1) fansubbing is a lot more work than just copying, 2) conscientious fansubbing groups stop fansubbing it when the series is licensed and 3) you will have to PAY MONEY to watch the licensed dvd version of what was meant to be shown for FREE on broadcast television. In rare cases it will be shown on TV, but only in dubbed form.
Really most of the blame for this goes to the Japanese producers, who rather than directly bringing their works to other countries via in-house localization and foreign subsidiaries choose to negotiate exclusive arrangements with completely separate companies on a per-series basis, generally well after the series has completed its original Japanese run, and to the highest bidder, and regardless of the quality of the final product.
I took the GRE on a computer. It was so much harder than when you do it on paper! When I took the SAT I had a bit of scratch paper that I would do calculations and diagrams on. I just put it next to the question. On the computer, I was constantly having to look up and down at the screen and the paper. I'm sure I wasted several minutes and probably made a number of mistakes just because I was doing that.
Also, the one-question-at-a-time format didn't suit me at all. I much prefer being able to skip a question and come back to it.
Every so often somebody ask's if I'm THAT cryptochrome of the "Cryptochrome's Hotline Anime Review" AKA CHAR website from way back when. I am. Yes, it's dead. Read on for why.
I first got started on anime back when a Japanese friend loaned me unsubtitled videotapes straight from Japan of popular TV shows and OVAs; The original Patlabor, Dirty Pair, and Urusei Yatsura Movie 4 (which I have since seen subtitled, and it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense - thanks, Mamoru Oshii). I was immediately hooked (especially on Dirty Pair). Later I joined the anime club in high school, saw Akira and Tank Police (also untranslated, but at least we had a script), and my fate was sealed.
I watched rented anime now and again in college, but there were few titles available, multi-volume series were never complete at any local video stores, and buying was far too expensive for my student budget. Plus I had other distractions.
And then I discovered online fansubs. Suddenly a wealth of anime was at my fingertips, in a variety of formats. There was VivoPlayer, which I think was not so bad for the time except it lacked little things like "fast-forward", "reverse", and any sort of seek. MPEG was good quality but far too large, and so RealVideo took over. A standard episode was about 50MB in size and was likely a bad capture of a videotaped fansub. Hotline (now defunct) servers grouped themselves into ad-hoc communities of file traders. Lacking a steady broadband connection, I started a website with reviews of all the anime I had seen.
Then somebody hacked together the original DivX, which immediately took over the scene. Fansubbing groups began to organize themselves in IRC channels, and do their own work. The then-new DVDs and recording cards made capturing clean video much easier. File sizes and screen resolution quickly grew with the advent of broadband, higher computing power, and big hard drives, eventually settling on the now-standard 175MB per episode (that's 4 per CD-ROM). There were only two problems. Number one, raws were hard to come by, because somebody in Japan had to send them to America. Somehow that was resolved thanks to clandestine Japanese P2P. The other, and more important one, was that fansub distribution was bottlenecked - there were never enough servers. The IRC channels were your best bet, and products eventually percolated down to DirectConnect sites (Hotline Software had imploded by this time).
Then somehow I discovered BitTorrent - relatively early, with the free porn to beta test it - and I realized immediately it would change everything. That this was what would allow unfettered anime distribution, and it would be a killer app for BitTorrent itself. I told Bram - he wasn't interested. I told the IRC distro servers, but they were too busy serving to care. I think I even borrowed a tracker and seeded a choice episode or two, but most people were too busy trying to get a download slot on the regular servers to install some beta software they'd never heard of. But a few months later, a couple major channels set up stable torrents for their releases. Weeks later, every major fansubbing group that didn't suck was doing it. The gates were open. Viewership and fansubbing groups increased dramatically. EVERYTHING that came out of Japan was getting fansubbed. I discovered the parallel world of manga scanlation (comics translation) around this time, which I strongly suspect was an offshoot.
Funny thing is... by this time, I was getting tired of anime. Like Hollywood movies, once you've seen enough of them you realize they are all the same, and most aren't very good. Sturgen's law applies: 90% of anime is crap - but then again, 90% of everything is crap. I always knew that, but I had to burn out on it before I would stop trying to watch everything I could get my hands on, which thank to the exploding Fansub community was a lot. Fortunately, 10% of it is not, which is the only stuff I try to watch these days. But I let my site die, which was ta
Prosecute the companies that use spam for spamming. Make the spamming companies and ISPs liable as well. If you're feeling particularly uncharitable, make it so that people whose computers were infected with spammer trojans are also liable, but give them the option of suing their OS maker. Prosecute aggressively.
iWork needs a spreadsheet and database. In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration. Unfortunately there are no integrated alternatives.
If this/these programs are in the works and simply waiting for Tiger's Core Data framework, that's fine. I'm planning on upgrading to Tiger ASAP anyway. But if iWorks with the spreadsheet/database is included on new systems, I will buy a new machine.
Automatic deployment of units would be a nice start. Micromanaging is fine in the early game but it really drags towards the end.
Making it run in real time would be interesting as well, so long as you control the pace of time. Balancing law enforcement (with the scientists and workers and tax collectors, etc) would be a nice touch that would help with controlling corruption.
Applications like iPhoto and iTunes show that there are ways to order information other than folders.
The paradigm behind "smart playlists" of iTunes and "smart albums" of iPhoto has been around in databases and functional programming languages for a while. The interesting thing is that Apple will be using this paradigm extensively with OS X 10.4 "Tiger". Tiger establishes extensive metadata indexing for all files and plugin data, which allows it to use "smart folders" that open to reveal all files that meet certain criteria. So "smart" organization will be present in the finder, mail, and probably a bunch of other things as well. I use "smart" organization extensively in iTunes and iPhoto, and I look forward to using it elsewhere. This will save a lot of clutter and busywork.
As for Raskin, that "Leap" paradigm sounds interesting, the "commands" paradigm has been experiemented with but has major limitations, and that "Zoom" idea of his looks like a bitch-and-a-half to implement or use for any system of significant size or complexity. Talk about clutter. Wouldn't a hypertext system where there were some cues about what lies beyond the click and shortcuts for getting around be more effective?
Every kid I've ever met has been quite naiive, not at all mentally attractive in an adult sense. Sure, some are more mature than your average kid, and a lot of them think that they have an adult perspective, but I've never actually met one that actually does. Working for a living and living on your own teaches you a lot of important things you just don't get when you're living under mommy and/or daddy's roof. The only way in which kids are smarter is that they are open to ideas, wheras adults tend to become set in their ways - but adults have gone through the process of weeding out good ideas from bad, while kids are still going through it.
Now what you do see are quite a few adults who are as immature as high schoolers.
Russia also has problems with corruption, widespread prostitution, and (surprise surprise) an exploding rate of HIV infection. It's like Thailand all over again.
IMHO the label and definition of terrorism is flexible, and frequently twisted to suit the aims of the one alleging it. How do I define terrorism? Violent actions at least in part taken to sow terror upon some target and sap their will to oppose you and allow you to win by attrition. A particularly ugly form of psychological warfare, it's not about "civilians" per se. And it has always existed.
By my defintion, terrorism is mainly invoked by both sides when guerilla tactics are involved. Which is to say most modern conflicts. Just what do you think a "Shock and Awe" campaign is supposed to be about? Taking out targets? It's about frightening civilians with a huge display of force to convince them not to oppose us. And it didn't entirely work, because of our inability to put boots on the ground.
The US military is one of the best militaries in the world - when it comes to destroying and rebuilding stuff. But we are surely one of the worst when it comes to occupation. Our inadequate numbers of infantry mean can rarely control a country. Wars are always won through a combination of blood and treasure, and we've demonstrated we're far more willing to spend treasure than blood when it comes to anything beyond defending America directly. Consequently psychological warfare becomes an essential part of our tactics.
These new robots kill two birds with one stone - ultimately they'll be cheaper than soldiers to use and get the numbers up, and all the more demoralizing for their inhumanity. They are part of a future where wars are consistently won not by cunning or determination or patriotism or righteousness, but by money and technology alone.
Actually that tatoo idea sounds really interesting... they could be printed into the skin with perfect detail.
Of course printing normal skin will be the norm. Something they didn't mention in the article - what is the quality of the skin itself? Will it be regular textured skin with the cells properly arranged or shiny scar tissue with the cells an unorganized mass or saggy elderly skin? What about more complicated structures like hair follicles? What about nerves - will the new skin have sensation, or will nerves grow into it? Will all the sublayers of skin be properly related, and will the proper connective tissue be generated?
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that China's currently bad, but slowly getting better, while the USA is currently good (at least relative to China) but getting worse.
True... but seriously, the US and China aren't anywhere near being in the same league oppression wise. That some citizens of an undeniably oppressive state (cultural revolution anyone?) believe otherwise isn't exactly convincing.
Of course, if you want real answers you should ask recent immigrants and their kids from China about it. I'd say the same about western immigrants to china, but aside from some businessmen I doubt there are many.
The problem with DVDs is they are already totally cramped. Turns out a lot of the "extras" weren't so extra after all. That's why you have brits buying American region 1 disks, because the EU region 2 disks skimped on the quality so they could include a dozen different language tracks.
A disk should allow for the regular HD-content, all the bonus materials, every language and dubbing tracks, previews, etc., all with room to spare. Alternatively, it should also allow for at least seven hours of normal-quality content. That way you can get a whole TV season on only 1-4 disks. Because there's a lot of non-HD content out there.
Here's what I hope they change with the next format, besides the obvious:
1) No regions. The ones they have never made any sense anyway - why on earth are Japan and Europe in the same group but Australia by itself? Language regions I could have understood. I understand the economics behind regions, but really. One world, one price.
2) Sophisticated sprite, text, and video control options. Did you know that DVD subtitles are limited to four colors to save space? Talk about a bad solution. And there's no way to control the sequence in video. There should be total control over what goes on screen, equivalent to what you could do with burnt-in material, but not burnt in. The ability to overlay sprites or auxilliary video to overlay signs or add censorship bars. Bleeping or replacing bad words. Skipping naughty bits. Or rehashing what you have into a director's cut. Actual text subtitles with PDF-style rendering to allow embedded fonts, and standard UTF options.
3) Built in, fully functional scripting language - python or perhaps a real-time language. Would allow for far greater interactivity. Also games, interactive data browsing, simple programs, and so forth. Also, if used intelligently would make controlling the many options much easier. For instance, to switch between english dub and native language+english subtitles, I wouldn't have to navigate menus to select the correct audio and subtitle options, guessing which was which because they only say "english 1" and so forth - I would press a button to toggle through the logical options.
4) The ability for outside files to wrap and modify DVD content. Particularly with the enhancements above, this would allow anyone to enhance a DVD for others. Specifically, by subtitling it in a language no one bothered to translate it into. Or editing it to suit parent's demands for kid-friendliness. Or, most attractively to the distributors, the ability to go back and fix errors AFTER the disks have shipped. A sane directory structure and system on the disk would make this a lot easier. As would a secondary region for writing in extra or per-disk data after they've been pressed.
It was obvious from day one that BT was going to revolutionize large/high-demand file delivery, legal or otherwise. Overloaded sites have always been a problem and commerical server networks just can't cut it. To me, anyway.
What we need is a new protocol/software to replace http that can handle this sort of thing automatically, so the benefits can extend beyond specifically chosen files to entire sites.
So it's come to this.
If I'm not mistaken the infrared technology relied on quantum dots. That report came out in January. Full spectrum cells also use quantum dots. You can mix them as you like to suit your purposes.
There aren't many details, but this technology does appear to involve quantum dots. It's possible the two technologies could be combined to yield even better efficiencies and returns.
Well folks, it looks like if these new technologies are even half as good as they claim to be, cheap efficient solar cells will finally be here within the next few years.
Compressed air doesn't hold a lot of energy by weight, you'd be better off buying a battery.
See more about energy density here.
Personally I would think a hand squeezer device like this would be ideal. It's a very natural motion.
Compressed air IS useful if you need to deliver a lot of force at once, like with compressed air tools, or if you want to avoid using electrical devices for some reason.
Yeah well there's a distro center an hour away from me and when I first joined I had 2 day turnaround time, but now they are intentionally delaying sending my next movies. I can get 12 movies a month, period. See, people who actually get their money's worth are not the sort of customers they want. If there were another service in my area with a large anime selection, I would be gone.
But don't take my word for it. There's a whole site devoted to exactly this issue. Check out the customer opinions part and see for yourself.
This is a great idea.
This is not making energy from nothing. This is capturing energy that would have normally gone to waste. Even better, it is capturing the energy in a highly useful form, oil.
You are correct that although what goes out may come right back in, energy will be gradually lost in the process. You still need a net input of energy. That could come out of the ground as it does now, in which case we would only be slowing down our mad dash to turn all the buried carbon in the world back into carbon dioxide... but it could also just as easily, perhaps even MORE easily, come from other sources. The most obvious being... random biomass. Not even something fancy like rapeseed, whatever you can lay your hands one. Grass, weeds, trash trees. That damned acacia or kudzu or duckweed or cedar that's ruining your local biome. Easily available everywhere, except maybe in the desert. Stuff that doesn't need fertilizer or pesticides or care or energy to produce, just sunlight, water, CO2, and dirt, and produces O2 in the process.
The "hydrogen economy" is a red herring. Hydrogen is a total bitch to store and transport, requires specialized equipment to use, and the energy needed to make it has to come from somewhere. It's only advantage is not producing carbon dioxide at the source. Diesel, OTOH, is ideal to store and use, and has a huge infrastructure built around it. Make that biodiesel, and it becomes renewable. And that is essentially what this technology is producing from waste. Add in some purposefully grown material to make up for losses, and you'll never need to import another barrel.
There's no need to worry about CO2 as a byproduct, if in the larger cycle you take in as much as you put out. If you no longer have to dig carbon out of the ground, you no longer have to worry about putting CO2 in the air.
You might want to build a solar thermal one though. After all, this process requires energy mainly in the form of heat, and a field of mirrors can capture solar thermal energy far better than a field of plants can. Geothermal, where applicable, would work pretty well too. Nukes, which are also thermal, would work, but they're not worth the hassle.
Not only does it produce useful energy carriers like oil and gas, it can also separate out pure carbon (useful for many purposes) and solids which are a mix of metals and minerals. Useful, partially refined minerals and metals which would require less energy to turn them into useful materials than the stuff you dug out of the ground to make the original material in the first place. The oil and gas themselves also make for a good feedstock for various petrochemicals, namely plastics.
That waste can including toxic or hazardous waste. Stuff we normally would have spent energy to dispose of and had to build a landfill for. Bonus!
Hey, you can also use this to produce relatively clean water that can of course be purified further. Since a natural candidate for this technology is wastewater, you'll probably be producing a lot of it too. Double bonus!
I can sum this up in one word. RECYCLING. Not today's bullshit recycling where only aluminum cans can be efficiently reused, because aluminum is so hideously energy intensive (you'd be better off buying plastic bottles and throwing them away energy-wise). Your garbage becomes an important resource. We're talking all types of waste, human, industrial, post-consumer, agricultural, toxic, everything.
Economically viable, universal RECYCLING, that takes care of dangerous materials to boot.
Hell, if it works as advertised, we'll be digging into our landfills instead of virgin soil for resources.
And it does happen in America. That's what anime fansubbing is all about - bringing Japanese animation outside Japan years before it gets put out on DVD overseas, if it is put out on DVD at all. The main differences are 1) fansubbing is a lot more work than just copying, 2) conscientious fansubbing groups stop fansubbing it when the series is licensed and 3) you will have to PAY MONEY to watch the licensed dvd version of what was meant to be shown for FREE on broadcast television. In rare cases it will be shown on TV, but only in dubbed form.
Really most of the blame for this goes to the Japanese producers, who rather than directly bringing their works to other countries via in-house localization and foreign subsidiaries choose to negotiate exclusive arrangements with completely separate companies on a per-series basis, generally well after the series has completed its original Japanese run, and to the highest bidder, and regardless of the quality of the final product.
I took the GRE on a computer. It was so much harder than when you do it on paper! When I took the SAT I had a bit of scratch paper that I would do calculations and diagrams on. I just put it next to the question. On the computer, I was constantly having to look up and down at the screen and the paper. I'm sure I wasted several minutes and probably made a number of mistakes just because I was doing that.
Also, the one-question-at-a-time format didn't suit me at all. I much prefer being able to skip a question and come back to it.
Every so often somebody ask's if I'm THAT cryptochrome of the "Cryptochrome's Hotline Anime Review" AKA CHAR website from way back when. I am. Yes, it's dead. Read on for why.
I first got started on anime back when a Japanese friend loaned me unsubtitled videotapes straight from Japan of popular TV shows and OVAs; The original Patlabor, Dirty Pair, and Urusei Yatsura Movie 4 (which I have since seen subtitled, and it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense - thanks, Mamoru Oshii). I was immediately hooked (especially on Dirty Pair). Later I joined the anime club in high school, saw Akira and Tank Police (also untranslated, but at least we had a script), and my fate was sealed.
I watched rented anime now and again in college, but there were few titles available, multi-volume series were never complete at any local video stores, and buying was far too expensive for my student budget. Plus I had other distractions.
And then I discovered online fansubs. Suddenly a wealth of anime was at my fingertips, in a variety of formats. There was VivoPlayer, which I think was not so bad for the time except it lacked little things like "fast-forward", "reverse", and any sort of seek. MPEG was good quality but far too large, and so RealVideo took over. A standard episode was about 50MB in size and was likely a bad capture of a videotaped fansub. Hotline (now defunct) servers grouped themselves into ad-hoc communities of file traders. Lacking a steady broadband connection, I started a website with reviews of all the anime I had seen.
Then somebody hacked together the original DivX, which immediately took over the scene. Fansubbing groups began to organize themselves in IRC channels, and do their own work. The then-new DVDs and recording cards made capturing clean video much easier. File sizes and screen resolution quickly grew with the advent of broadband, higher computing power, and big hard drives, eventually settling on the now-standard 175MB per episode (that's 4 per CD-ROM). There were only two problems. Number one, raws were hard to come by, because somebody in Japan had to send them to America. Somehow that was resolved thanks to clandestine Japanese P2P. The other, and more important one, was that fansub distribution was bottlenecked - there were never enough servers. The IRC channels were your best bet, and products eventually percolated down to DirectConnect sites (Hotline Software had imploded by this time).
Then somehow I discovered BitTorrent - relatively early, with the free porn to beta test it - and I realized immediately it would change everything. That this was what would allow unfettered anime distribution, and it would be a killer app for BitTorrent itself. I told Bram - he wasn't interested. I told the IRC distro servers, but they were too busy serving to care. I think I even borrowed a tracker and seeded a choice episode or two, but most people were too busy trying to get a download slot on the regular servers to install some beta software they'd never heard of. But a few months later, a couple major channels set up stable torrents for their releases. Weeks later, every major fansubbing group that didn't suck was doing it. The gates were open. Viewership and fansubbing groups increased dramatically. EVERYTHING that came out of Japan was getting fansubbed. I discovered the parallel world of manga scanlation (comics translation) around this time, which I strongly suspect was an offshoot.
Funny thing is... by this time, I was getting tired of anime. Like Hollywood movies, once you've seen enough of them you realize they are all the same, and most aren't very good. Sturgen's law applies: 90% of anime is crap - but then again, 90% of everything is crap. I always knew that, but I had to burn out on it before I would stop trying to watch everything I could get my hands on, which thank to the exploding Fansub community was a lot. Fortunately, 10% of it is not, which is the only stuff I try to watch these days. But I let my site die, which was ta
Prosecute the companies that use spam for spamming. Make the spamming companies and ISPs liable as well. If you're feeling particularly uncharitable, make it so that people whose computers were infected with spammer trojans are also liable, but give them the option of suing their OS maker. Prosecute aggressively.
Excel can be sorta kinda used for database purposes, and sorta kinda used in a relational database way with some rather complicated IF statements.
iWork needs a spreadsheet and database. In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration. Unfortunately there are no integrated alternatives.
If this/these programs are in the works and simply waiting for Tiger's Core Data framework, that's fine. I'm planning on upgrading to Tiger ASAP anyway. But if iWorks with the spreadsheet/database is included on new systems, I will buy a new machine.
Indeed. I guess Jenna's not such a wonder after all.
Now Ron Jeremy, HE'S a wonder of the world! Proof positive there is a benevolent god smiling down on unattractive men.
Automatic deployment of units would be a nice start. Micromanaging is fine in the early game but it really drags towards the end.
Making it run in real time would be interesting as well, so long as you control the pace of time. Balancing law enforcement (with the scientists and workers and tax collectors, etc) would be a nice touch that would help with controlling corruption.
Potentially this could allow for people to make more representative/interesting sets of civilization advances and benefits.
For instance: photography (+sci +happy) allows porn (+happy, opens Jenna Jameson wonder)
Applications like iPhoto and iTunes show that there are ways to order information other than folders.
The paradigm behind "smart playlists" of iTunes and "smart albums" of iPhoto has been around in databases and functional programming languages for a while. The interesting thing is that Apple will be using this paradigm extensively with OS X 10.4 "Tiger". Tiger establishes extensive metadata indexing for all files and plugin data, which allows it to use "smart folders" that open to reveal all files that meet certain criteria. So "smart" organization will be present in the finder, mail, and probably a bunch of other things as well. I use "smart" organization extensively in iTunes and iPhoto, and I look forward to using it elsewhere. This will save a lot of clutter and busywork.
As for Raskin, that "Leap" paradigm sounds interesting, the "commands" paradigm has been experiemented with but has major limitations, and that "Zoom" idea of his looks like a bitch-and-a-half to implement or use for any system of significant size or complexity. Talk about clutter. Wouldn't a hypertext system where there were some cues about what lies beyond the click and shortcuts for getting around be more effective?
Every kid I've ever met has been quite naiive, not at all mentally attractive in an adult sense. Sure, some are more mature than your average kid, and a lot of them think that they have an adult perspective, but I've never actually met one that actually does. Working for a living and living on your own teaches you a lot of important things you just don't get when you're living under mommy and/or daddy's roof. The only way in which kids are smarter is that they are open to ideas, wheras adults tend to become set in their ways - but adults have gone through the process of weeding out good ideas from bad, while kids are still going through it.
Now what you do see are quite a few adults who are as immature as high schoolers.
Russia also has problems with corruption, widespread prostitution, and (surprise surprise) an exploding rate of HIV infection. It's like Thailand all over again.
IMHO the label and definition of terrorism is flexible, and frequently twisted to suit the aims of the one alleging it. How do I define terrorism? Violent actions at least in part taken to sow terror upon some target and sap their will to oppose you and allow you to win by attrition. A particularly ugly form of psychological warfare, it's not about "civilians" per se. And it has always existed.
By my defintion, terrorism is mainly invoked by both sides when guerilla tactics are involved. Which is to say most modern conflicts. Just what do you think a "Shock and Awe" campaign is supposed to be about? Taking out targets? It's about frightening civilians with a huge display of force to convince them not to oppose us. And it didn't entirely work, because of our inability to put boots on the ground.
The US military is one of the best militaries in the world - when it comes to destroying and rebuilding stuff. But we are surely one of the worst when it comes to occupation. Our inadequate numbers of infantry mean can rarely control a country. Wars are always won through a combination of blood and treasure, and we've demonstrated we're far more willing to spend treasure than blood when it comes to anything beyond defending America directly. Consequently psychological warfare becomes an essential part of our tactics.
These new robots kill two birds with one stone - ultimately they'll be cheaper than soldiers to use and get the numbers up, and all the more demoralizing for their inhumanity. They are part of a future where wars are consistently won not by cunning or determination or patriotism or righteousness, but by money and technology alone.
The ESA would certainly be interested. The Chinese and Japanese might take an interest as well.
Actually that tatoo idea sounds really interesting... they could be printed into the skin with perfect detail.
Of course printing normal skin will be the norm. Something they didn't mention in the article - what is the quality of the skin itself? Will it be regular textured skin with the cells properly arranged or shiny scar tissue with the cells an unorganized mass or saggy elderly skin? What about more complicated structures like hair follicles? What about nerves - will the new skin have sensation, or will nerves grow into it? Will all the sublayers of skin be properly related, and will the proper connective tissue be generated?
Why can't Apple have a promotion with some product I'd actually want to buy?
"Now what do you have to wash that awful taste out of my mouth?"
"Mountain Dew or crab juice."
"Blecch! Ew! Sheesh! I'll take a crab juice."
The truth is that Bush _was_ AWOL. Did not meet his committments. Guardsmen today who did what Bush did would be in the brig for a long time or wose.
You know what would be worse? Send them to a war zone indefinitely.
Oh, wait...