I agree, television dosent do anything for me. I don't own one anymore because it has such a low bandwidth compared to surfing the net or reading. I can still see the odd show on someone else's box if something good comes along but I don't miss it at all.
Your right, It doesn't really matter a toss whose fault badly behaved youngsters are.
In the next few years we will have enough technology to track people and record what they do 24/7. And we will vote for it because no criminal act can be committed without it being recorded. So who cares whose fault it is? because we can send the scumbags to the electric chair without jury trial with 100% incontrovertible video proof of the crime. Just think - the jails will empty and we can execute more and more categories of criminal safe in the knowledge that innocent people are not being put to death. Brilliant Eh!!
You carry on filling the shops with violent video games and swapping snuff dvd's. Lets carry on assuming that people can breed without the slightest responsibility for raising their offspring to be useful members of society.
Just remember though that I fully expect everyone caught tailgating someone on the highway in a decade or two will be caught and brought to justice and I might even have the pleasure of watching their execution on public tv.
Yeah - we have to keep these peasants in their place, personally I dont know why we dont hang them for stealing software - after all we used to hang them for stealing sheep. On the other hand I just cant understand why london is full of teenagers shooting each other at the momment, I guess its because its not a criminal offence punishable by prison to carry a gun under age. Yup I think we have our priorities just about right - Siberia or worse for being in recipt of stolen software and a pat on the head for walking around the streets with a loaded illegal handgun.
Trade infringement is a problem that should be addressed but it is obviously being taken far more seriously by the criminal justice system than threats of injury to individuals because of the economic power of large companies. The law is falling into disrepute.
It would be cowardly not to. The problem with the ID card system and the state database is its potential for misuse not paranoia that the death squads will be on the street next week. The most likely problem comes when different departments of Government start data mining the information collected for excuses to impose penalties or deny services to individuals to save money. Government security organisations already have the ability to mine most databases for what they regard as suspicious individuals and this is unstoppable. What is most objectionable is that petty bureaucrats be allowed to pick off the tails of the normal distribution and discriminate against them. The first rule of Engineering is that if you want to control something then you have to measure it first.
If you look at the gruesome insurgent sniper videos that you can find at GUBA for example it is obvious that coalition forces are being shot in daylight. However it is also clear that they have no idea where the shots are coming from, so the location detection technology in this equipment would be very useful just to indicate which direction the threat was coming from. Its also true that the people who are being shot are mostly standing around waiting to be killed, if they were moving they wouldn't be targets. The videos are insurgent propaganda and not entertainment by the way, you are watching video of many soldiers being injured or killed.
I routinely calculate mean and standard deviation for 100 test file results. The test file also contains comments and calibration values - I am only interested in 40 or so of the columns. Its quicker to dump the whole thing as a.csv from MySQL rather than maintain the potentially interesting column names in the query for 8 different products. Then I run some graphing macros that do trend plots and capability histograms, everything copies and pastes as resizable jpgs in Word. I could use Minitab but it has a truly grim interface. Oh and before you slag off Access, its visual query builder is great for filtering out data from odbc connected test tables.
You can run a $50M dollar business with spreadsheets gluing vital bits of it together, you can build manufacturing capacity models in spreadsheets, you can do your shipping from a spreadsheet, you can track your rework and returns in spreadsheets. You don't go out and spend thousands of dollars on software such as a MES that will be out of date before its implemented. You do that when you get bought out and ISO9000 bogs the business down and your competitors overtake you. Who cares, its time to move on.
Of course I could use other tools, of course I will use other tools; I just dont see what point there is in hating a tool because its flexible, simple to use and has its limitations.
I do stuff in the real world, frankly I don't care what sniffy coder types think about how I do things. They are the ones sat in the back room as insignificant cogs in a large and broken machine. I work out front, mangling information and making the decisions that build the business that pays for these perfectionist parasites that have more interest in IT internal departmental metrics than producing anything usable by the rest of the business. Give me one more moron who spends the whole budget on standardizing all the applications because its going to save money in the long run and I'll show you one more business that isn't innovating and isn't going to survive the next paradigm shift. Of course I wait for the day that I will be pleasantly surprised by something instigated by the IT department that does more than moderate the amount of cash hemorrhaging into IT.
I am dying to know how Google runs its business, maybe they have finally discovered how to run a business without the inefficiencies I have seen my whole working life foisted onto end users. I laugh so much it hurts when I recall the time I worked with the team implementing a big name ERP to replace the companies home grown system. Boy it was fun at go live, oh the broken bits, the fear, the inability to ship anything for a week, the..oh hoh oh ha ha... anyway it more or less worked after a month. And they were the good guys really, it only sacked all the planners and recreated their jobs somewhere else. The point is that it doesn't matter how much reusable object oriented C++ the bloody thing uses, if it is set up so that you have to scan every item on a pallet four times before you can get it on a lorry and there are 50 items on the pallet then you need to hire a body to scan all day long in addition to your minimum wage fork lift truck driver. Getting anal over the technology is actually a crime when we don't have a good handle on how to build applications that the users can use to get a job done. Now theres a skill that should be worth a shed load more than a perfectionist coder. And great code can be very valuable, I hope air traffic control uses some..
So all quedos to Microsoft for the magnificent tin opener that is Excel. I'm just concerned that the new interface may have dumbed it down with wizards and icons and broken it. I see elsewhere in the discussion that the underlying engine has been beefed up, so lets hope not.
I think you have the analysis just about right. Its surprising how few other posts have any inkling of the political situation in Iraq. Must be that free press we place so much reliance on. It sells more papers to be gazing at our own navels rather than looking outside the playpen.
Its why dudes like Sistani have been acting so relaxed - democracy has handed Iraq to the Shia on a plate, its inevitable. The sooner things quieten down and the Americans retreat into the desert to guard the oil wells the sooner the Iraq government can normalize relationships with Iran and Syria. Not exactly an encouraging prospect given the lunatics running Iran at the moment.
Ok, I don't give a toss about the crappy ribbon interface - they finally gave Excel enough horsepower for it to be usable, I want a copy. I don't like screen filling eye candy ribbons and would gladly pay extra to get rid of them and replace them with hidden drop down menus. I guess I could buy my own 22" monitor for work so there is enough room for the dross. I don't even care that millions of dollars are going to be spent on retraining non computer savy people to use this crappy product differentiation marketing device. They finally upgraded excels core functionality, hurray! I can ditch minitab!
I would buy into the new version of office if it could actually do more for me - I need more than 256 columns, and 64k rows. This change of style over substance will doom the release to failure. - I cant even look up the words for the voice activated menues in this dogs breakfast of a marketing disaster. Death to Microsoft! and not a moment too soon. Where are the voice activated menues by the way?
Its not quite that simple though is it? Because to maintain your 1 g acceleration up near relativistic speeds the ship would start accumulating mass in an exponential fashion requiring unbelievable quantities of energy to maintain the acceleration.
So you would probably only get to 50% light speed before any conceivable stock of propulsion energy would become exhausted. you would get far less time dilation and maybe you would need significantly more than a single lifetime to get to Andromeda.
Its curious isn't it, I haven't either. On the other hand maybe the people involved in these roles are battle hardened and callous after many years of dealing with people as disposable objects.
Its common courtesy to explain what you wanted from them what you were looking for and didnt find. Given that information they can either reassess what skills they need to work on or which roles they should be applying for. You might learn something useful about the efficiency of your own hiring processes and target it better. In these days of qualification inflation the skill list in job advertisements often looks more like a supermarket stock list than a job specification.
I'm just making a guess here but it goes something like
we get the age and size from the frequency of the microwave background radiation.
The background is measured at 3.5 kelvin (degrees above absolute zero) which relates to the microwave frequency by wiens law (sorry very rusty on the details, frequency of the light given off by an object at a certain temperature is defined by the laws of thermodynamics, the hotter it is the shorter the wavelength).
when the big bang occurred particle physics can give a value for the temperature of the universe.
When you look at the oldest light it came from the glow of the universe at that temperature - and it started out with a wavelength related to that temperature.
That oldest light has been stretched by the red shift by the expansion rate of the universe and is now at a very long wavelength which we see as the microwave background radiation in every direction in space.
we can measure the rate of expansion of the universe by looking at standard candles (supernova which pop with the same brightness - so we know how far away they are by their brightness) and measure their red shift. So we know how much red shift occurs for a certain distance.
so if we look at how much red shift the oldest light has suffered from its original high frequency we can work out how far away it comes from - or how old it is - because it has traveled to us at the speed of light 3*10exp8 m/s.
The figure that comes out of this pile of logic is apparently around 13 billion years. Maybe someone can verify or correct that this is the logical linkage used in the calculation.
Theres some great copyrighted material on Utube if you ignore the current dross How about "A Song by Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti from 1987 made with a Commodore Amiga 500"
Latvians have a pretty similar one too Dievturba, check it out on Wikipedia. Its my favorite one this week!
Folk in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster wouldn't have much to argue about either, bless his noodley appendages.
Even the fiercest Discordians and Slackers wouldn't kill you for those beliefs, though they might feel tempted to murder you for wearing too loud a shirt in a built up area.
On the other hand for having such radical ideas, throughout history the Christian Church would have sought you out and killed you to protect its meme.
You will be retired when your copyright expires, what do you want the money for - to feed the businesses that actually make money out of your copyrighted work? This is just stupid, half the problem with modern musical art is that its warped into appalling crap by the businesses that make money out of the genre. Do we want to put more art into their hands? I dont think so. It may be tough to make money in the music business for the artists but I dont think we are going to help them by handing yet more influence to the mega corps that the artists are forced to work for by handing out hundred year copyright for them to manage.
As for Paul Mcartney, he must be making a lot of money out of performing and I doubt that hes going to stop earning from his early work before he is dead in any case.
None of this makes any sense to me unless you regard music as a commodity like real estate - and if it has become just a commodity like real estate then I'm not surprised that nobody is buying it any more because it obviously has no meaning and is therefore pointless and dead. Maybe thats the real reason they want to extend copyright - they know that all the decent music with any value to the punters was made 50 years ago and more money is being made out of it than any of the latest big promotions?
I think I'll settle for the working hypothesis that evolution has created diverse lifeforms. The scientific method uses working hypothesis and changes when a piece of evidence is available to change the model.
Meanwhile a bunch of people who are rather keen to find other people to argue with and if possible exterminate or be exterminated by invest great efforts in attacking working hypothesis where they contradict the literal words of books written a couple of thousands of years ago by semi illiterate peasants. I'm not keen on this pitchforking babies into ovens to make soap kind of stuff so I'm more than happy to consider the possibility that the author of the book that this particular bunch of fanatics follow, may have designed the whole shop - the mysterious process of bringing it into being, currently being the subject of investigation. Just so long as these old book fanatics are happy to admit that the same geezer wrote all the other books that other equally vociferous fanatics are willing to exterminate all life on earth in the service of for.
Its either that or the book people should stick to the rules on procreating, preparing food and hair cutting from the books and settle for sciences working hypothesis on describing how things get to be in the state that they are. The peasants that wrote the books are just as qualified to tell us how to procreate, prepare food and cut hair as any living authority but they didn't have 2000 years of observation to explain how all this hair and stuff came to be there in the first place.
Who says TV is bad? I just dont have time to watch it. I agree the BBC does some good stuff, we get some entertaining American series too in the UK - I've seen a load of episodes of the West Wing on DVD and occasionaly on the network, great fun. I try and sit and watch all the TV that my girlfriends watch, saw a lot of Buffy that way. But at the end of the day there are other things you can do with your life other than watching a lot of broadcast TV.
Ho Hum, its been 25 years since I watched TV on a regular basis. I can still catch a show if I visit people.
I read, listen to music or speech, watch DVD's and have been online since 94. I dont miss Tv a bit.
Having said that Youtube has been fantastic, everything from Geriatric1927, skateboarding dogs, The Dresden Dolls, to rare videos of minor stars of yesteryear, fabulous. I don't suppose it will last much longer when copyright is finally imposed. Half the content will die and the rest will degenerate into an online version of CB radio attached to an online DVD shop and we will all move on to pastures new.
Disagreeable though Putins reign may be I dont automatically think this apalling act was comissioned by him. If you take a look on Wikipedia at Polonium 210 you will see that it is used in commercial elctrostatic dissipators. If I was AlQuaida I could buy these things and dissolve the Polonium in Hydochloric acid and make a Polonium salt. This material is 5000 times more toxic than radium and totaly leathal if you can get a pin heads worth to be drunk by your victim.
The assasination would be a handy political thing for Al Quaida, to stop Russia from supplying Europe with oil and gas and force Russia to sell to China and India instead. That way you would be more likely to see a continued occupation of Iraq and a continued running sore between the West and the Moslem world - not to mention the increased likelyhood of war between the West and oil supplying Arab states. All this is grist to the mill of Al Quaida which needs continued conflict in order to exist. Remember that their winning card is that their warped religion allows them to kill as many of their own people as the enemy in order to achieve their goals - and to get away with doing this.
Putin is the obvious source of this assasination but its an increadibly stupid move if you want to increase the value of your oil and gas revenues where the more customers there are the higher a price you can charge. I dont think it was at the behest of Putin. Though its always possible it was done by a stupid Russian criminal who hoped to gain favour. My guess is that it was commissioned by a chezen cell under the direction of Al Quaida.
Have no fear, with any luck H5N1 is going to give the rats a chance at it sometime soon.
I grew up with a man landing on the Moon. Now I am middle aged, it appears that we are headed back towards the ignorant dark of the middle ages. Its a great disapointment. I hope the rats make a better job of it than we did.
Oh yes there are interesting lines of research to follow on the subject of electromagnetic radiation interaction with biological systems. Meanwhile the risks have not shown up as any measureable health hazard to people - unless the radiation is causing mass outbreaks of stupidity in the population.
Its all a question of relative risk. I live in the south west of the UK, the bedrock is granite and houses built on these rocks tend to fill up with genuine radioactive radon gas. I dont see any sign of a Parents against Radon campaign though. This is just one more example of ignorant media types finding a story to get people whipped up about. The statistics about cancer derived from living on top of granite rock is already clear and known but nothing is done about it. A slight rise in the level of electromagnetic radiation from WiFi is now being demonised as being a possible problem in 50 years time. There is no evidence that this slight rise in the existing electromagnetic background will cause any health concerns at all.
Why are people behaving in such a stupid fashion? Is it something to do with the drift towards personality cult and the death of scientific understanding in the west. A major University in the UK known for its excellent robotics research is dropping Physics as an undergraduate subject. Worldwide fundamentalist christians are poisoning peoples minds with creationism. This is all very sad at a time when the need to use scientific methodology to halt the degradation of the environment has never been greater. The need to adjust our technology to take oil out of politics before it starts more wars. The need to develop food production to feed an unsustainable population.
These idiots that are trying to ban WiFi networks will all be giving their children cell phones which transmit regularly throughout the day even when they aren't being used to make calls. The only saving grace is that more than likely the whole lot of them are going to die of H5N1 in the next few years. I hope the media barrons like Rupert Murdoch who owns 40% of the UK's newspapers is one of the first to drown in the fluid in his lungs when the pandemic strikes a population that spent its efforts banning WiFi rather than spending money on virus research. Lets hope that the politicians who have gone along with this management by style rather than substance have been mislead that their personal stashes of Tamiflu will protect them too.
Pah, human civilisation has already failed and its time for something else to have a go.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, television dosent do anything for me. I don't own one anymore because it has such a low bandwidth compared to surfing the net or reading. I can still see the odd show on someone else's box if something good comes along but I don't miss it at all.
Your right, It doesn't really matter a toss whose fault badly behaved youngsters are.
In the next few years we will have enough technology to track people and record what they do 24/7. And we will vote for it because no criminal act can be committed without it being recorded. So who cares whose fault it is? because we can send the scumbags to the electric chair without jury trial with 100% incontrovertible video proof of the crime. Just think - the jails will empty and we can execute more and more categories of criminal safe in the knowledge that innocent people are not being put to death. Brilliant Eh!!
You carry on filling the shops with violent video games and swapping snuff dvd's. Lets carry on assuming that people can breed without the slightest responsibility for raising their offspring to be useful members of society.
Just remember though that I fully expect everyone caught tailgating someone on the highway in a decade or two will be caught and brought to justice and I might even have the pleasure of watching their execution on public tv.
Yeah - we have to keep these peasants in their place, personally I dont know why we dont hang them for stealing software - after all we used to hang them for stealing sheep. On the other hand I just cant understand why london is full of teenagers shooting each other at the momment, I guess its because its not a criminal offence punishable by prison to carry a gun under age. Yup I think we have our priorities just about right - Siberia or worse for being in recipt of stolen software and a pat on the head for walking around the streets with a loaded illegal handgun.
Trade infringement is a problem that should be addressed but it is obviously being taken far more seriously by the criminal justice system than threats of injury to individuals because of the economic power of large companies. The law is falling into disrepute.
It would be cowardly not to. The problem with the ID card system and the state database is its potential for misuse not paranoia that the death squads will be on the street next week. The most likely problem comes when different departments of Government start data mining the information collected for excuses to impose penalties or deny services to individuals to save money. Government security organisations already have the ability to mine most databases for what they regard as suspicious individuals and this is unstoppable. What is most objectionable is that petty bureaucrats be allowed to pick off the tails of the normal distribution and discriminate against them. The first rule of Engineering is that if you want to control something then you have to measure it first.
If you look at the gruesome insurgent sniper videos that you can find at GUBA for example it is obvious that coalition forces are being shot in daylight. However it is also clear that they have no idea where the shots are coming from, so the location detection technology in this equipment would be very useful just to indicate which direction the threat was coming from. Its also true that the people who are being shot are mostly standing around waiting to be killed, if they were moving they wouldn't be targets. The videos are insurgent propaganda and not entertainment by the way, you are watching video of many soldiers being injured or killed.
I routinely calculate mean and standard deviation for 100 test file results. The test file also contains comments and calibration values - I am only interested in 40 or so of the columns. Its quicker to dump the whole thing as a .csv from MySQL rather than maintain the potentially interesting column names in the query for 8 different products. Then I run some graphing macros that do trend plots and capability histograms, everything copies and pastes as resizable jpgs in Word. I could use Minitab but it has a truly grim interface. Oh and before you slag off Access, its visual query builder is great for filtering out data from odbc connected test tables.
..oh hoh oh ha ha... anyway it more or less worked after a month. And they were the good guys really, it only sacked all the planners and recreated their jobs somewhere else. The point is that it doesn't matter how much reusable object oriented C++ the bloody thing uses, if it is set up so that you have to scan every item on a pallet four times before you can get it on a lorry and there are 50 items on the pallet then you need to hire a body to scan all day long in addition to your minimum wage fork lift truck driver. Getting anal over the technology is actually a crime when we don't have a good handle on how to build applications that the users can use to get a job done. Now theres a skill that should be worth a shed load more than a perfectionist coder. And great code can be very valuable, I hope air traffic control uses some..
You can run a $50M dollar business with spreadsheets gluing vital bits of it together, you can build manufacturing capacity models in spreadsheets, you can do your shipping from a spreadsheet, you can track your rework and returns in spreadsheets. You don't go out and spend thousands of dollars on software such as a MES that will be out of date before its implemented. You do that when you get bought out and ISO9000 bogs the business down and your competitors overtake you. Who cares, its time to move on.
Of course I could use other tools, of course I will use other tools; I just dont see what point there is in hating a tool because its flexible, simple to use and has its limitations.
I do stuff in the real world, frankly I don't care what sniffy coder types think about how I do things. They are the ones sat in the back room as insignificant cogs in a large and broken machine. I work out front, mangling information and making the decisions that build the business that pays for these perfectionist parasites that have more interest in IT internal departmental metrics than producing anything usable by the rest of the business. Give me one more moron who spends the whole budget on standardizing all the applications because its going to save money in the long run and I'll show you one more business that isn't innovating and isn't going to survive the next paradigm shift. Of course I wait for the day that I will be pleasantly surprised by something instigated by the IT department that does more than moderate the amount of cash hemorrhaging into IT.
I am dying to know how Google runs its business, maybe they have finally discovered how to run a business without the inefficiencies I have seen my whole working life foisted onto end users. I laugh so much it hurts when I recall the time I worked with the team implementing a big name ERP to replace the companies home grown system. Boy it was fun at go live, oh the broken bits, the fear, the inability to ship anything for a week, the
So all quedos to Microsoft for the magnificent tin opener that is Excel. I'm just concerned that the new interface may have dumbed it down with wizards and icons and broken it. I see elsewhere in the discussion that the underlying engine has been beefed up, so lets hope not.
I think you have the analysis just about right. Its surprising how few other posts have any inkling of the political situation in Iraq. Must be that free press we place so much reliance on. It sells more papers to be gazing at our own navels rather than looking outside the playpen.
Its why dudes like Sistani have been acting so relaxed - democracy has handed Iraq to the Shia on a plate, its inevitable. The sooner things quieten down and the Americans retreat into the desert to guard the oil wells the sooner the Iraq government can normalize relationships with Iran and Syria. Not exactly an encouraging prospect given the lunatics running Iran at the moment.
Ok, I don't give a toss about the crappy ribbon interface - they finally gave Excel enough horsepower for it to be usable, I want a copy. I don't like screen filling eye candy ribbons and would gladly pay extra to get rid of them and replace them with hidden drop down menus. I guess I could buy my own 22" monitor for work so there is enough room for the dross. I don't even care that millions of dollars are going to be spent on retraining non computer savy people to use this crappy product differentiation marketing device. They finally upgraded excels core functionality, hurray! I can ditch minitab!
I would buy into the new version of office if it could actually do more for me - I need more than 256 columns, and 64k rows. This change of style over substance will doom the release to failure. - I cant even look up the words for the voice activated menues in this dogs breakfast of a marketing disaster. Death to Microsoft! and not a moment too soon. Where are the voice activated menues by the way?
Its not quite that simple though is it? Because to maintain your 1 g acceleration up near relativistic speeds the ship would start accumulating mass in an exponential fashion requiring unbelievable quantities of energy to maintain the acceleration.
So you would probably only get to 50% light speed before any conceivable stock of propulsion energy would become exhausted. you would get far less time dilation and maybe you would need significantly more than a single lifetime to get to Andromeda.
Its curious isn't it, I haven't either. On the other hand maybe the people involved in these roles are battle hardened and callous after many years of dealing with people as disposable objects.
Its common courtesy to explain what you wanted from them what you were looking for and didnt find. Given that information they can either reassess what skills they need to work on or which roles they should be applying for. You might learn something useful about the efficiency of your own hiring processes and target it better. In these days of qualification inflation the skill list in job advertisements often looks more like a supermarket stock list than a job specification.
I'm just making a guess here but it goes something like
we get the age and size from the frequency of the microwave background radiation.
The background is measured at 3.5 kelvin (degrees above absolute zero) which relates to the microwave frequency by wiens law (sorry very rusty on the details, frequency of the light given off by an object at a certain temperature is defined by the laws of thermodynamics, the hotter it is the shorter the wavelength).
when the big bang occurred particle physics can give a value for the temperature of the universe.
When you look at the oldest light it came from the glow of the universe at that temperature - and it started out with a wavelength related to that temperature.
That oldest light has been stretched by the red shift by the expansion rate of the universe and is now at a very long wavelength which we see as the microwave background radiation in every direction in space.
we can measure the rate of expansion of the universe by looking at standard candles (supernova which pop with the same brightness - so we know how far away they are by their brightness) and measure their red shift. So we know how much red shift occurs for a certain distance.
so if we look at how much red shift the oldest light has suffered from its original high frequency we can work out how far away it comes from - or how old it is - because it has traveled to us at the speed of light 3*10exp8 m/s.
The figure that comes out of this pile of logic is apparently around 13 billion years. Maybe someone can verify or correct that this is the logical linkage used in the calculation.
Comet Khoutek got me into astronomy - though I never saw the blasted thing either
:-)
Hale-Bopp was a fantastic sight here in South West England though, worth the wait I think
Theres some great copyrighted material on Utube if you ignore the current dross
How about
"A Song by Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti from 1987 made with a Commodore Amiga 500"
16 Bit - Changing Minds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FrF-JiGeuA
Yeah, plug that DRAM expansion pack in baby! It cant get much groovier than this.
Latvians have a pretty similar one too Dievturba, check it out on Wikipedia. Its my favorite one this week!
Folk in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster wouldn't have much to argue about either, bless his noodley appendages.
Even the fiercest Discordians and Slackers wouldn't kill you for those beliefs, though they might feel tempted to murder you for wearing too loud a shirt in a built up area.
On the other hand for having such radical ideas, throughout history the Christian Church would have sought you out and killed you to protect its meme.
You will be retired when your copyright expires, what do you want the money for - to feed the businesses that actually make money out of your copyrighted work? This is just stupid, half the problem with modern musical art is that its warped into appalling crap by the businesses that make money out of the genre. Do we want to put more art into their hands? I dont think so. It may be tough to make money in the music business for the artists but I dont think we are going to help them by handing yet more influence to the mega corps that the artists are forced to work for by handing out hundred year copyright for them to manage.
As for Paul Mcartney, he must be making a lot of money out of performing and I doubt that hes going to stop earning from his early work before he is dead in any case.
None of this makes any sense to me unless you regard music as a commodity like real estate - and if it has become just a commodity like real estate then I'm not surprised that nobody is buying it any more because it obviously has no meaning and is therefore pointless and dead. Maybe thats the real reason they want to extend copyright - they know that all the decent music with any value to the punters was made 50 years ago and more money is being made out of it than any of the latest big promotions?
back to the garden.
I think I'll settle for the working hypothesis that evolution has created diverse lifeforms. The scientific method uses working hypothesis and changes when a piece of evidence is available to change the model.
Meanwhile a bunch of people who are rather keen to find other people to argue with and if possible exterminate or be exterminated by invest great efforts in attacking working hypothesis where they contradict the literal words of books written a couple of thousands of years ago by semi illiterate peasants. I'm not keen on this pitchforking babies into ovens to make soap kind of stuff so I'm more than happy to consider the possibility that the author of the book that this particular bunch of fanatics follow, may have designed the whole shop - the mysterious process of bringing it into being, currently being the subject of investigation. Just so long as these old book fanatics are happy to admit that the same geezer wrote all the other books that other equally vociferous fanatics are willing to exterminate all life on earth in the service of for.
Its either that or the book people should stick to the rules on procreating, preparing food and hair cutting from the books and settle for sciences working hypothesis on describing how things get to be in the state that they are. The peasants that wrote the books are just as qualified to tell us how to procreate, prepare food and cut hair as any living authority but they didn't have 2000 years of observation to explain how all this hair and stuff came to be there in the first place.
Who says TV is bad? I just dont have time to watch it. I agree the BBC does some good stuff, we get some entertaining American series too in the UK - I've seen a load of episodes of the West Wing on DVD and occasionaly on the network, great fun. I try and sit and watch all the TV that my girlfriends watch, saw a lot of Buffy that way. But at the end of the day there are other things you can do with your life other than watching a lot of broadcast TV.
Ho Hum, its been 25 years since I watched TV on a regular basis. I can still catch a show if I visit people.
I read, listen to music or speech, watch DVD's and have been online since 94. I dont miss Tv a bit.
Having said that Youtube has been fantastic, everything from Geriatric1927, skateboarding dogs, The Dresden Dolls, to rare videos of minor stars of yesteryear, fabulous. I don't suppose it will last much longer when copyright is finally imposed. Half the content will die and the rest will degenerate into an online version of CB radio attached to an online DVD shop and we will all move on to pastures new.
All code has bugs. How many of the bugs are important to the users?
Who cares?
Disagreeable though Putins reign may be I dont automatically think this apalling act was comissioned by him. If you take a look on Wikipedia at Polonium 210 you will see that it is used in commercial elctrostatic dissipators. If I was AlQuaida I could buy these things and dissolve the Polonium in Hydochloric acid and make a Polonium salt. This material is 5000 times more toxic than radium and totaly leathal if you can get a pin heads worth to be drunk by your victim.
The assasination would be a handy political thing for Al Quaida, to stop Russia from supplying Europe with oil and gas and force Russia to sell to China and India instead. That way you would be more likely to see a continued occupation of Iraq and a continued running sore between the West and the Moslem world - not to mention the increased likelyhood of war between the West and oil supplying Arab states. All this is grist to the mill of Al Quaida which needs continued conflict in order to exist. Remember that their winning card is that their warped religion allows them to kill as many of their own people as the enemy in order to achieve their goals - and to get away with doing this.
Putin is the obvious source of this assasination but its an increadibly stupid move if you want to increase the value of your oil and gas revenues where the more customers there are the higher a price you can charge. I dont think it was at the behest of Putin. Though its always possible it was done by a stupid Russian criminal who hoped to gain favour. My guess is that it was commissioned by a chezen cell under the direction of Al Quaida.
Have no fear, with any luck H5N1 is going to give the rats a chance at it sometime soon.
I grew up with a man landing on the Moon. Now I am middle aged, it appears that we are headed back towards the ignorant dark of the middle ages. Its a great disapointment. I hope the rats make a better job of it than we did.
Oh yes there are interesting lines of research to follow on the subject of electromagnetic radiation interaction with biological systems. Meanwhile the risks have not shown up as any measureable health hazard to people - unless the radiation is causing mass outbreaks of stupidity in the population.
Its all a question of relative risk. I live in the south west of the UK, the bedrock is granite and houses built on these rocks tend to fill up with genuine radioactive radon gas. I dont see any sign of a Parents against Radon campaign though. This is just one more example of ignorant media types finding a story to get people whipped up about. The statistics about cancer derived from living on top of granite rock is already clear and known but nothing is done about it. A slight rise in the level of electromagnetic radiation from WiFi is now being demonised as being a possible problem in 50 years time. There is no evidence that this slight rise in the existing electromagnetic background will cause any health concerns at all.
Why are people behaving in such a stupid fashion? Is it something to do with the drift towards personality cult and the death of scientific understanding in the west. A major University in the UK known for its excellent robotics research is dropping Physics as an undergraduate subject. Worldwide fundamentalist christians are poisoning peoples minds with creationism. This is all very sad at a time when the need to use scientific methodology to halt the degradation of the environment has never been greater. The need to adjust our technology to take oil out of politics before it starts more wars. The need to develop food production to feed an unsustainable population.
These idiots that are trying to ban WiFi networks will all be giving their children cell phones which transmit regularly throughout the day even when they aren't being used to make calls. The only saving grace is that more than likely the whole lot of them are going to die of H5N1 in the next few years. I hope the media barrons like Rupert Murdoch who owns 40% of the UK's newspapers is one of the first to drown in the fluid in his lungs when the pandemic strikes a population that spent its efforts banning WiFi rather than spending money on virus research. Lets hope that the politicians who have gone along with this management by style rather than substance have been mislead that their personal stashes of Tamiflu will protect them too.
Pah, human civilisation has already failed and its time for something else to have a go.