since size doesn't really matter in a lot of ways.
Besides, there are a billion chinese with enough nukes to blow the world up as many times over as we have... 'only' super power? wtf do you guys smoke crack? have you not heard of the people's republic of china? admittedly they're currently a trading partner etc, and they do a lot to try an maintain peaceful relations with us, but if america ever went into some crazy maddness of interfearing with the politics of non oil producing countries that hadn't blown up buildings in one of our cities first... and open taken credit for it, well i don't think china would tolerate much of that.
sure, we 'collapsed' the soviet economy during the cold war, but let's keep a bit of a reality check here, america is not the only super power. it just happens that we're on good terms with the Other notable super power, thanks largerly to the efforts of richard nixon.
but yeah, if america and china adopted the same politcal stances and views, the world would indeed cower, but frankly china and america have such drastically different views that it's remarkable that we even trade.
Re:Still working on it? Yup, and a long way to go.
on
Napster's Learning Curve
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It is morally questionable.
no, no, It's not. Sharing information is not 'morally questionable.' if 'makign a dub' is morally questionable then 'borrowing ait for a week' is a morally questionable. if 'borrowing for a week' is morally questionable then playing it over speakers, in a non sound proof room, while people other than the 'purchaser' are present is 'morally questionable' i'm afraid not. Sharing information is not a morally questionable act. Quite clearly the information was being shared BECAUSE that Is what ONE DOES with information.
however, a person who only 'obtains' information without ever comensating anyone Is morally questionable. The process of sharing the information is not, it is the complete disreguard for recompensation that is in fact morally questionable. the fact that the information was shared is not the problem, the probme is that joe luser who obtained his information via data sharing refused to 'ever' monitarily recompensate anyone involved in marketing or producing of making that information available. But say you know this Joe Luser personally, and you know that he Is not such a morally objectional guy, but that he rather prefers to support artist by Going To Concerts. so Knowing that he's recompnosating artists, you Share Information with him, in the hopes that he will someday go to a concert by the 'band' whom you 'shared' the cd of with joe. the logic is a bit 'optimistic, and slightly dubious, but not so morally objectionable as say, knowing for a fact that Joe is a Selfish bastard who could care less, and just wants something for nothing, and will only ever spend his money benefiting himself maximally and other people to the very least possible.
But then every joe luser who chooses to shop at wal-mart instead of some other store with a slightly 'better' track record is guilty of that, so if you're gonna make that a 'morally objectional' crime you're going to have to shut down one hell of a lot of wal-marts.
thank goodness i know how to build a solar cooker, to use the same solar cooker to create ice at night time, and know how to create fire from wood for heat, how to convert virtually any vegatable oil into biodiesel, know how to build a simple electric generator, know how to build a windmill, that turns said genenrator, and know how to build batteries from mason jars, lead, a strong acid and purified water, how to distill and purify water, and/or strong alchohol, basic first aid medicine, etc etc...
and most important of all, i know how to hide from the crazy sob who doesn't know how to do any of that and who would gladly try and kill me for all that i had in a post apocyliptic world. Still I would have to agree, people seem to be seeking the 'short sighted' solutions of fossil/non renewable fuels, when 2/3rds of the earth's surface is already covered in water, and could sustain enough algae 'energy' belts to convert about a thousand times our 'current' global energy reserves every year from solar energy into renewable natural oils... that when burned provided the carbon dioxide needed by the floating tracts of algae.
What's worse of all, is that we spend triple what it would cost to build an infrastructure of 'algea' belts in a year to provide all our 'renewable' energy needs in just trying to find and exploit new 'non-renewable' energy resources.
Why? in part because the economies of scale required to 'bring' the cost of algea farming down to 'reasonable prices' would virtually require completely replacing coal electric production, and oil refining combined. but it's also because 'energy' companies are run by fools who don't 'get' it. maybe con agra will 'get' it someday, and develop practical algea farming so they can crush the fools behind fossil fuel exploitation.. seriously 'growing' the entire world's energy supply is probabbly the biggest possible market anyone could 'dream' of creating and most of the technology has been developed, but they're scattered like a jigsaw puzzle now.. no one has put them together to bring a fully realistic method of 'growing' all the enegry the world needs.
I wonder how long it will be before the population of/. realizes that the people running $industry know more about what is good and bad for $industry than they do.
now hold on, the people in charge of various recording labels, movie studios, and book publishers got there because of merits that may have nothing whatsoever to do with being able to grasp a complex situation like 'freely' available music/movies/books etc.
Also, 'giving online books away free' may work more to 'promote' a single publisher than an entire industry. since publisher a is 'providing x for free online, but noone else is, y number fo fans are flocking publisher a because they see them as 'better.' but yeah, anyone who's fond of reading doesn't really like reading books online, and there are already 'libraries' all over which promote 'free' access to works of literature (and music and movies too, at least at my local library)
what is 'best' is not always so clear and easy, but i will tell you something for certain, freely available information is a benefit to society as a whole. it may not benefit 'industries' founded on producing said materials for 'profit' but it does benefit the society as a whole.
Also, google isn't even trying to allow people to read the entire text, but rather to be able to search the entire texts, to find the books that contain said text. so thus 'obtaining' the text requires onine would require having the entire subset of the text and searching for it one paragraph at a time... publishers are just afraid that they no longer have a place in the 'digital' world. but the're just being paranoid their place is as always to Market and Promote 'select' literature to which they have obtained the rights to, and to publish just enough to meet demand, etc.. publishing online isn't as 'desireable' without a real publisher, they've just failed to see how to 'safely' integrate such technologies without 'completely destroying' their ability to 'do their job'
of all the industries it seems like the movie industy has done the best to keep up with the times, but they're still prone to running scared from the technology;) consider radio vs tv. movie and television studios have doen a better job understanding that the internet is just a natural extention of their current mediums, and they've adapted to various potential threats (video cassetes and dvds) with much fewer hicups than the music industry, who is still trying to get over 'radio' being able to broadcast music to anyone... they're still trying to fight radio and keep it in 'check' making sure that radio only plays certain songs, etc, so that people 'have' to buy the albums to get the music that they heard at so and so's concert etc... they also made it so expensive that music video channels rarely if ever run music videos... otoh movie channels have no difficulty licensing enough movies cheaply enough that they only run a few 'television' style productions simply because they want to have people coming back every week... to watch the latest instalment of 'rome' or whatever it is they have going on now;)
and book publishers are still afraid of public libraries, which have only helped to foster reading as a pastime and increased the market for books... the point is giving stuff away free will always help your market logn run as long as the 'free' giveways are always more 'inconvenient' than paid merchandise, either in terms of where you can view, them, the quality of the vewing, the time you can view them, or whatever..
well, if you're using the heat to say, keep your boiler full of hot water, and the electricity to run your PC, tv, stereo, microwave, etc etc.. i'm pretty sure the system can be prototyped to being 97-98% efficient in terms of the energy 'being' used.. and keep in mind there are huge fields of frozen natural gas at the bottom of the worlds oceans... http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,66925,00.h tml even if say, we could use a billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, the oceans are estimated to have reserves 200,000 times larger than that.
hrm.. i came into a little snag though, when looking up natural gas production for the united states it looked like about 2,000,000 cuft of the stuff is being produced monthly now. but then at the top it said (Volumes in Million Cubic Feet) which made me wonder, was that an error on the doe website? or is america Really producing 2,000,000,000,000 cuft of natural gas a month already? in which case 200,000,000,000,000 of reserves on the ocean is a hundred month supply? it's either a hundred million month supply or a 100 month supply, anything like this vehicle that increased consumption would say cut that down to say maybe a 1-200,000 year supply, or a few year, depending on if A. the DOE site is confused the hell out of what 'measured in millions of cuft' means, or we're already using 2 trillion cuft of natural gas a month...
i was confused i thought it had to do with cellular internet access but ah well, it's still FUD in the sense that a. cingular is still selling it's go phone and b. cingular seems to have a 'plan' to avoid infringing on said patents while still offering pre-paid wireless...
This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI.
Uh, no, this herlads and end to (affordable)Internet access on those. the 'go' phone is a prepaid/pay as you go cellualr phone. nothing about this patent stops cingular from continuing to offer cellular telephone access to go phone users, it only affects the cost of internet access on the phones.
the problem with this idea, is that it 'solves' the 'bandwith' issue by simply using lower power, shorter range broadcasts, and having more and more transmitters, but there is a fundamental problem with that model, the nearby 'nodes' will create interfearance zones full of ghosts and shadow transmissions and the furthter you are from a geographic center of a broadcast node the worse your service would be. i mean yeah in theory by having the transmission range reduces you exponentially increase the amount of data one can transmit, but it can create it's own problems and issues too, which is why the fcc regulates broadcasts.
Does that mean the Earth will end up like Mars in the future?
probably, because the evidence is looking towards unfiltered radiation being a highly destructive force on atmospheric gasses, soncider the 'ozone hole' at the poles, the one 'weak point' of the earth's own magnetosphere. while other than a rapid destuction of the ozone layer, the radiation given off by a fusion reactor the size of the sun is quite likely not something species that evolved without exposure to hard radiation can survive. roaches and certain basic plants will be the most suited to survival in the event that the earth's crust cooled sufficiently to cause a break down in the magnetosphere. nocturnal underground dwelling species will also cope well. but a collapse of the earth's magnetosphere would make walking around in daylight hours most certainly a life threatening event. it would also disrupt communications, and electirical transmission and basically, unless your windows are certified to block both microwave and UV radiation, just sitting in a sunbeam could cook you in minutes. eventually, the sun's energy would simply boil all the water off the planet into space, so not even the hardy cockroach would see it's dominance last. the magnetosphere is what keeps our atmosphere and our planitary water safe, any long term loss of the magentosphere would spell doom for any species incapable fo crating entirely artifical ecosystems, say in space, or on 'unliveable' planets.
terraforming mars is a complex task, colonizing it is vastly simpler. technically, the moon could be colonized, it might have been colonized already if sufficent affordable space travel technology had been developed.
well technically since 3dfx went belly up before they could fix the slew of performance and compatability and heat disipation issues... you're correct... the voodoo 5 6000 was never properly launched... however it did have 4 VSA-100 GPUs, each with 32 MB of memory (for a total of 128 MB) so it Was a single card quad GPU, it just was never widely produced or available.
Tired of all these new discoveries to be taken as fact
You know, of course that nothing is ever 'proven' in science. Science is simply the art of observing the universe around you and making your best guess at why things happened a certain way etc. a simple formal standard to document and allow others to critizise your 'discoveries.'
anyone who knows something 'for a fact' simply has stopped trying to look for better answers. take a simple test of dropping a feather and a coin, in normal atmosphere the feather will land much later than the coin, so some people mystically thought feathers would make you lighter.. but it's been shown that once the atmosphere is taken out of the picture that a coin and feather will land at exactly the same time. the feather simply has more surface area, enough to greatly slow it's descent through a 'fluid' like air.
anyways, point is science isn't about absolutes -- you want blind abolute answers to everything they make this thing called 'religion' just for you. somebody could accidently or intentionally find something that completely debunked years of sceintific 'discoveries' you just never know, because science goes ahead and Demands that you question and evaluate everthing you accept from it.
correction not the 'sea' live close 'to water' and it's 75% of the population lives within 5 miles of water (be it standing, runing fresh, salty or polluted) there are a whole lot of Other factors too, such as plate tectonics, erosion etc some areas are sinking below sea level Really fast (new orleans) others, simply aren't.
Also, there is a really simple way to drastically reduce co2 levels, grow lots and lots of plant, dig deep holes, and fill them with the plants and throw many feet of top cover on top of the decaying vegitation... the carbon is locked deep inside the earth, and eventually, that carbon becoams gas, oil or coal... currently we have 'landfills' that bury some carbon waste, but clearly not nearly as much as we're using in 'fossil' fuels.
I can't believe anyone who gets the posts up in the first 10 minutes of an article being posted haasn't had time to fully fact check either;) i mean it's the INTERNET it must be true!
I've written like a journal and several journal posts and main page posts all asserting numerous facts, and even with fact checking (which i normally skip) i got loads of stuff wrong;) heck one thing i got wrong BECAUSE i Tried to fact check it int a 'hurry' and read cyanobacteria as bacteria. and didn't put it into context... which made me look like i slept through highschool biology (which i still aced and it was on a bell curve and i was threatend several times by classmates...)
X800360, but how confusing would that look? slightly more confusing than i80x86.. but you don't see intel selling less i80886 (pentium 4) parts than amd... true they changed the naming convention from the lowly penium 1 (which was still also called an i80586, mainly due to usenet groups calling it the '586' before the 'official' marketing mane of 'pentium' was known.
Your comments directly contradict the NY Times article...
The system works even when cellular calls do not because text messages are small packets of data that are easy to send, and because the companies transmit them on the high-priority channel whose main purpose is to set up cellphone calls.
Do you have a source?
Bad reporting, Yes cell phones use SMTP to contact towers, and verify the accessability of circuits, and those SMTP packets are highly flaged, and YES text messages are SMTP packets (same as ICQ and e-mail, AIM, MSN etc etc) But they are Flagged as Junk priority by the mailer dameon that negotiates these things. which means that basically even if you're trying to send 165 text messages a second the tower can tell Instantly if it's a text message or a negotiation signal, and Instantly drops the signal on the floor if it doesn't have room for the text message. and this attack is only possible of being done from the cell phone side, because if you sent it on the 'internet' side it simply creates a backlog of messages to be sent. the server will either discard or wait to transmit until it feels OK with doing one or the other.
BTW the main reason text messages work when normal calling doesn't is because the phone can legally retry sending the message say, every minute until the tower 'acknowledges' the transmission although i don't know for certain if this is done, or if it's a simple 'trust' system where the phone does it best to send it and if the tower doesn't have bandwith for it when it gets the message it's just lost forever...
we did they're called 'trains' but people made money on 'trains' and it was bad. so the government stepped in and locked down where 'trains' could be built, what price 'trains' could charge etc.. etc.. and then along came someone by the name of Henry Ford, and he started building these 'horseless wagons' that one could use on ordinary roads, instead of these 'trains' that needed special tracks and had confounding schedules...
a couple reasons... bandwith available is very limited. the entire licensed spectrum for cell phone coverage is less than the frequency a single analog TV broadcaster uses.
so yeah data is expensive, and frankly the answer to that was going to be the FCC taking all 13 channels of VHF broadcast and converting them to various products including a large subset to be licensed for cellular broadcasts... but the states is nowhere near the numbers that would allow the FCC to license off those frequencies.
if you have more frequency you can sell 'data' for less. they've already gotten to the point where voice calls are unlimited on weekends and evenings, so they can get virtually everyone paying $40 a month for service they can only realistically use during the day when it takes off plan minutes/really costs money.
Well, the key problem is that in marketing speak, x is cool, but xi is wierd and hard to pronounce. ex eye? zi? No matter how you pronounce it, it just sounds wimpy compared to x. So once you reach x, what can you do? You pretty much have to shift to a different naming/numbering scheme.
not true, look at Xbox, what do they call the sequel to make it sound cooler? the Xbox360 like add a skating term best of all they can make the sequel to the 360 the 720 and the sequel to the 720 the 1080 and then the 1440 i mean yeah everyone needs a thrashing gaming console that can shred a 1440..
and i like the X1K cauze if you are dyslexic, it really K1X...
the key word in my sentances was who _needs_ a label. The points you bring up are why someone would _want_ a label. Artists don't need labels to survive, it's the job of the labels to convince the artists that they can in fact do something worth a cut of the profits etc to be worth using them. labels on the other hand Need artists, since without the artists they have nothing to sell and market. The problem is that the major labels are run by people who they they're Entitled to having musicians slave away for there own profits etc. it's simply not the case, the relationships is supposed to be symbiotic, provide real value to the artists so that everyone makes more money/is happy etc..
the purpose of a label is, in this case, to front the money for the production costs, promotion costs, and tour costs. it's a loan with no interest, and if you default you get dropped from the label! yay!
$500 worth of computer software and hardware, $50 worth of materials from the home improvement store, and that guest bedroom becomes an in-home audio recording studio studio.
Why buy a $1,000,000 TV ad when you can buy a 1000 views on a google adwords? and instead of 'maybe' having a thousand people who saw the ad go visit the website/buy the music etc, you have 1000 go to the website to try a free 'single' torrent you have available for download, so they buy the record/see you in concert?
I'm sorry the internet and technology has not reduced touring costs drastically, but for the vast majority of artists Touring Is the only part of the business that makes them money.
who needs a record label anyway? oh yeah no talent lip synchers and ignorant teens who 'get to be on TV' for the latest idol show. remind me again Why does apple need the big 5 labels to find talented music to feature on the iTMS?
oh yeah because america is a bunch of ignorant slobs who happily buy whatever the monopoly controlled, kick back accepting radio station force feeds them. Frankly man if the iTMS had no content from the big 5 i'd be saying 'hell yeah look at apple they have all the best indie music and The Artist actually make 95 cents to the dollar!' the question is does Apple need the iTMS to be a 'one stop shop' for the wares of the 'big 5' labels to sell ipods? I don't think so, and frankly I hope steve Jobs doesn't think so either.
the big 5 will LOOSE money if they force iTMS to stop selling big 5 music, and apple won't loose hardly any money (since they run the download buisness so near cost) and since people buy the ipod because it's such an awesome music player. if they can't buy music from iTMS and 'napster' downloads don't work with ipods, people will just 'pirate' the music, or make due with the music they already have. or gasp, go out and learn who's actually making new and innovative music, and where the real talent is going, and there money will be spent not making the big 5 billions of dollars a year, but rather into making performing artists and songwriters have better lives with more disposable income to buy on houses and cars and families etc.
frankly i don't see how apple can loose on this one, the music dinosaurs are having a hissy fit, and it's not over the pricing (that's just the face of it) they want control they want shoulder out the 'indie' music from iTMS and have just big 5 hits for sale. if they can 'force' apple to charge $1.49 a song, then they can 'force' them to 'not display indie music until after all big 5 songs' in listing relevancy...
I'm glad jobs is at the helm on this one, I'm sure he'd rather see the iTMS go away (or fade to obsurity) than become the pathetic lapdog for the big 5 labels so they can crush small independant artists who are threatening to topple the 'dinosaur' labels with the low cost, 'give the people what they want' 'wal-mart' model instead of the 'tell people what they want and how much they'll have to pay for it' department store model. After all independant artists need solid computers to do all the mixing and tracking on and what better computer than an Apple to use for that? especially if you're making tons of money selling via the iTMS?
if you look at what has happened with online music the ITMS etc etc... it all comes into play with some of the points in her followup article. the music industry couldn't destroy online music downloading. so they went about and tried to control it, but they really 'control' it completely, so they're trying to control the public, and keep people from learning about bands other than the ones being promoted by the music industry etc.
in general I'd say by the fact that p2p numbers 'keep rising' that they're losing the 'control' aspect, but they're still winning in the bottom line because people are still buying from major labels and looking for major label musicians and back catalogs etc. artists and song writeres don't really need a huge 'big 5' record label to get the word out anymore. the internet is too huge, an 'indie' label can pop up a 'torrent' of there latest 'single' legitmitately and host it from a 'cheap' cable or dsl line and the entire internet can download it, for the most part without any major bandwidth bills for the artist, and sell the 'full cd' for whatever price they want... from a simple website. and then they go out and try and post messages on the internet and slink back to the torrent, saying that they're like so and so a band (that they think they sound like) and people can go and download from the torrent, and many people might just say 'forget them' but any fans they make are fans they never would have had without a simple little 'basically free' promotion. now consider if a more established band wants to buy some google adwords for say 'metallica' because they think they sound like metallica used to, for a reasonable price they've now got quite a bit of targeted exposure, people know it's advertising, but they clicked it because it was interesting anyways, and you promised them free music in the ad;) and they downloaded via torrent and maybe made some new fans... promotion is easy in the internet era, you don't need millions of dollars to advertise during the superbowl.. so they try to scare people away from using 'p2p' because if people use bittorrent for 'legitimate' free (or pay) downloads, then the control is gone, and the legacy donosaur that was the 'record label' is extinct.
who needs a label? the more the labels fight p2p the more evil they look, and the more people who might realize that they do have options, and they don't need to 'listen' to some top 40's radio station or some bibmbo artist who is lipsynching...
the $100 laptop has 802.11 (doesn't say which one) capabilities, 4 USB ports, as well as cellular communication capabilities. it also has software to enable the laptops to talk to one another in an ad-hoc network to allow internet access to be shared. all that plus an advanced ultra low power display, 1 GB of 'memory'(ram? flash? they don't specify), a 500 mhz processor and a hand crank that can provide 10 minutes of use from 1 minute of cranking...
not bad at all, and the case is made of rubber wherever possible to make it 'immune' to being dropped, protect it from rain etc...:) very cool, a 500 mhz cpu is no powerhouse, but it can Definitely run everything a child needs for educational uses... For $100 _I_ wouldn't mind having one or two.. or a beowulf cluster..;) especially if the full wattage of the device is comperable to a cell phone.. (the hand crank power ratio seems to indicate so) they should be selling these things at wal-marts.
Honestly, what's the real difference between the gaming PC and the console now?
why the same things that have always been different.
1. resolution 1600x1200 progressive @ 90 Hz vs 'HDTV' which if i feel like spending 10 grand on a tv will actually Support 1080p instead of like 1080i(cut my eyes out 'cause i won't play interlaced) or 720p if i'm lucky.
2. flexibility i can upgrade as much as i want to with a PC a console will have roughly the same specs for all 4-6 years that it's being sold as 'mainstream'.
honestly right now the only segment of the console gaming market that is doing something solidly better than PCs it's handhelds. consider my GBA, i could chuck it across the room(screen is padded to take some shock, so it Might survive being thrown), drop it in a toilet (the entire unit is semi-water proofed, as long as it wasn't on when you dropped it in, you can just drop it in front of a fan/heater and a day later it should be dried out enough to power up.. and it STILL works. I _look_ at a laptop funny and the hinge cracks off..
Slashdot Mirror
since size doesn't really matter in a lot of ways.
Besides, there are a billion chinese with enough nukes to blow the world up as many times over as we have... 'only' super power? wtf do you guys smoke crack? have you not heard of the people's republic of china? admittedly they're currently a trading partner etc, and they do a lot to try an maintain peaceful relations with us, but if america ever went into some crazy maddness of interfearing with the politics of non oil producing countries that hadn't blown up buildings in one of our cities first... and open taken credit for it, well i don't think china would tolerate much of that.
sure, we 'collapsed' the soviet economy during the cold war, but let's keep a bit of a reality check here, america is not the only super power. it just happens that we're on good terms with the Other notable super power, thanks largerly to the efforts of richard nixon.
but yeah, if america and china adopted the same politcal stances and views, the world would indeed cower, but frankly china and america have such drastically different views that it's remarkable that we even trade.
It is morally questionable.
no, no, It's not. Sharing information is not 'morally questionable.' if 'makign a dub' is morally questionable then 'borrowing ait for a week' is a morally questionable. if 'borrowing for a week' is morally questionable then playing it over speakers, in a non sound proof room, while people other than the 'purchaser' are present is 'morally questionable' i'm afraid not. Sharing information is not a morally questionable act. Quite clearly the information was being shared BECAUSE that Is what ONE DOES with information.
however, a person who only 'obtains' information without ever comensating anyone Is morally questionable. The process of sharing the information is not, it is the complete disreguard for recompensation that is in fact morally questionable. the fact that the information was shared is not the problem, the probme is that joe luser who obtained his information via data sharing refused to 'ever' monitarily recompensate anyone involved in marketing or producing of making that information available. But say you know this Joe Luser personally, and you know that he Is not such a morally objectional guy, but that he rather prefers to support artist by Going To Concerts. so Knowing that he's recompnosating artists, you Share Information with him, in the hopes that he will someday go to a concert by the 'band' whom you 'shared' the cd of with joe. the logic is a bit 'optimistic, and slightly dubious, but not so morally objectionable as say, knowing for a fact that Joe is a Selfish bastard who could care less, and just wants something for nothing, and will only ever spend his money benefiting himself maximally and other people to the very least possible.
But then every joe luser who chooses to shop at wal-mart instead of some other store with a slightly 'better' track record is guilty of that, so if you're gonna make that a 'morally objectional' crime you're going to have to shut down one hell of a lot of wal-marts.
didn't think of that did you?
thank goodness i know how to build a solar cooker, to use the same solar cooker to create ice at night time, and know how to create fire from wood for heat, how to convert virtually any vegatable oil into biodiesel, know how to build a simple electric generator, know how to build a windmill, that turns said genenrator, and know how to build batteries from mason jars, lead, a strong acid and purified water, how to distill and purify water, and/or strong alchohol, basic first aid medicine, etc etc...
and most important of all, i know how to hide from the crazy sob who doesn't know how to do any of that and who would gladly try and kill me for all that i had in a post apocyliptic world. Still I would have to agree, people seem to be seeking the 'short sighted' solutions of fossil/non renewable fuels, when 2/3rds of the earth's surface is already covered in water, and could sustain enough algae 'energy' belts to convert about a thousand times our 'current' global energy reserves every year from solar energy into renewable natural oils... that when burned provided the carbon dioxide needed by the floating tracts of algae.
What's worse of all, is that we spend triple what it would cost to build an infrastructure of 'algea' belts in a year to provide all our 'renewable' energy needs in just trying to find and exploit new 'non-renewable' energy resources.
Why? in part because the economies of scale required to 'bring' the cost of algea farming down to 'reasonable prices' would virtually require completely replacing coal electric production, and oil refining combined. but it's also because 'energy' companies are run by fools who don't 'get' it. maybe con agra will 'get' it someday, and develop practical algea farming so they can crush the fools behind fossil fuel exploitation.. seriously 'growing' the entire world's energy supply is probabbly the biggest possible market anyone could 'dream' of creating and most of the technology has been developed, but they're scattered like a jigsaw puzzle now.. no one has put them together to bring a fully realistic method of 'growing' all the enegry the world needs.
I can't wait for zonk to dupe this article so someone can reuse that joke ;)
I wonder how long it will be before the population of /. realizes that the people running $industry know more about what is good and bad for $industry than they do.
;) consider radio vs tv. movie and television studios have doen a better job understanding that the internet is just a natural extention of their current mediums, and they've adapted to various potential threats (video cassetes and dvds) with much fewer hicups than the music industry, who is still trying to get over 'radio' being able to broadcast music to anyone... they're still trying to fight radio and keep it in 'check' making sure that radio only plays certain songs, etc, so that people 'have' to buy the albums to get the music that they heard at so and so's concert etc... they also made it so expensive that music video channels rarely if ever run music videos... otoh movie channels have no difficulty licensing enough movies cheaply enough that they only run a few 'television' style productions simply because they want to have people coming back every week... to watch the latest instalment of 'rome' or whatever it is they have going on now ;)
now hold on, the people in charge of various recording labels, movie studios, and book publishers got there because of merits that may have nothing whatsoever to do with being able to grasp a complex situation like 'freely' available music/movies/books etc.
Also, 'giving online books away free' may work more to 'promote' a single publisher than an entire industry. since publisher a is 'providing x for free online, but noone else is, y number fo fans are flocking publisher a because they see them as 'better.' but yeah, anyone who's fond of reading doesn't really like reading books online, and there are already 'libraries' all over which promote 'free' access to works of literature (and music and movies too, at least at my local library)
what is 'best' is not always so clear and easy, but i will tell you something for certain, freely available information is a benefit to society as a whole. it may not benefit 'industries' founded on producing said materials for 'profit' but it does benefit the society as a whole.
Also, google isn't even trying to allow people to read the entire text, but rather to be able to search the entire texts, to find the books that contain said text. so thus 'obtaining' the text requires onine would require having the entire subset of the text and searching for it one paragraph at a time... publishers are just afraid that they no longer have a place in the 'digital' world. but the're just being paranoid their place is as always to Market and Promote 'select' literature to which they have obtained the rights to, and to publish just enough to meet demand, etc.. publishing online isn't as 'desireable' without a real publisher, they've just failed to see how to 'safely' integrate such technologies without 'completely destroying' their ability to 'do their job'
of all the industries it seems like the movie industy has done the best to keep up with the times, but they're still prone to running scared from the technology
and book publishers are still afraid of public libraries, which have only helped to foster reading as a pastime and increased the market for books... the point is giving stuff away free will always help your market logn run as long as the 'free' giveways are always more 'inconvenient' than paid merchandise, either in terms of where you can view, them, the quality of the vewing, the time you can view them, or whatever..
information deserves to be free.
well, if you're using the heat to say, keep your boiler full of hot water, and the electricity to run your PC, tv, stereo, microwave, etc etc.. i'm pretty sure the system can be prototyped to being 97-98% efficient in terms of the energy 'being' used.. and keep in mind there are huge fields of frozen natural gas at the bottom of the worlds oceans... http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,66925,00.h tml
even if say, we could use a billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, the oceans are estimated to have reserves 200,000 times larger than that.
hrm.. i came into a little snag though, when looking up natural gas production for the united states it looked like about 2,000,000 cuft of the stuff is being produced monthly now. but then at the top it said (Volumes in Million Cubic Feet) which made me wonder, was that an error on the doe website? or is america Really producing 2,000,000,000,000 cuft of natural gas a month already? in which case 200,000,000,000,000 of reserves on the ocean is a hundred month supply? it's either a hundred million month supply or a 100 month supply, anything like this vehicle that increased consumption would say cut that down to say maybe a 1-200,000 year supply, or a few year, depending on if A. the DOE site is confused the hell out of what 'measured in millions of cuft' means, or we're already using 2 trillion cuft of natural gas a month...
i was confused i thought it had to do with cellular internet access but ah well, it's still FUD in the sense that a. cingular is still selling it's go phone and b. cingular seems to have a 'plan' to avoid infringing on said patents while still offering pre-paid wireless...
This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI.
Uh, no, this herlads and end to (affordable)Internet access on those. the 'go' phone is a prepaid/pay as you go cellualr phone. nothing about this patent stops cingular from continuing to offer cellular telephone access to go phone users, it only affects the cost of internet access on the phones.
the problem with this idea, is that it 'solves' the 'bandwith' issue by simply using lower power, shorter range broadcasts, and having more and more transmitters, but there is a fundamental problem with that model, the nearby 'nodes' will create interfearance zones full of ghosts and shadow transmissions and the furthter you are from a geographic center of a broadcast node the worse your service would be. i mean yeah in theory by having the transmission range reduces you exponentially increase the amount of data one can transmit, but it can create it's own problems and issues too, which is why the fcc regulates broadcasts.
Does that mean the Earth will end up like Mars in the future?
probably, because the evidence is looking towards unfiltered radiation being a highly destructive force on atmospheric gasses, soncider the 'ozone hole' at the poles, the one 'weak point' of the earth's own magnetosphere. while other than a rapid destuction of the ozone layer, the radiation given off by a fusion reactor the size of the sun is quite likely not something species that evolved without exposure to hard radiation can survive. roaches and certain basic plants will be the most suited to survival in the event that the earth's crust cooled sufficiently to cause a break down in the magnetosphere. nocturnal underground dwelling species will also cope well. but a collapse of the earth's magnetosphere would make walking around in daylight hours most certainly a life threatening event. it would also disrupt communications, and electirical transmission and basically, unless your windows are certified to block both microwave and UV radiation, just sitting in a sunbeam could cook you in minutes. eventually, the sun's energy would simply boil all the water off the planet into space, so not even the hardy cockroach would see it's dominance last. the magnetosphere is what keeps our atmosphere and our planitary water safe, any long term loss of the magentosphere would spell doom for any species incapable fo crating entirely artifical ecosystems, say in space, or on 'unliveable' planets.
terraforming mars is a complex task, colonizing it is vastly simpler. technically, the moon could be colonized, it might have been colonized already if sufficent affordable space travel technology had been developed.
well technically since 3dfx went belly up before they could fix the slew of performance and compatability and heat disipation issues... you're correct... the voodoo 5 6000 was never properly launched... however it did have 4 VSA-100 GPUs, each with 32 MB of memory (for a total of 128 MB) so it Was a single card quad GPU, it just was never widely produced or available.
Tired of all these new discoveries to be taken as fact
You know, of course that nothing is ever 'proven' in science. Science is simply the art of observing the universe around you and making your best guess at why things happened a certain way etc. a simple formal standard to document and allow others to critizise your 'discoveries.'
anyone who knows something 'for a fact' simply has stopped trying to look for better answers. take a simple test of dropping a feather and a coin, in normal atmosphere the feather will land much later than the coin, so some people mystically thought feathers would make you lighter.. but it's been shown that once the atmosphere is taken out of the picture that a coin and feather will land at exactly the same time. the feather simply has more surface area, enough to greatly slow it's descent through a 'fluid' like air.
anyways, point is science isn't about absolutes -- you want blind abolute answers to everything they make this thing called 'religion' just for you. somebody could accidently or intentionally find something that completely debunked years of sceintific 'discoveries' you just never know, because science goes ahead and Demands that you question and evaluate everthing you accept from it.
correction not the 'sea' live close 'to water' and it's 75% of the population lives within 5 miles of water (be it standing, runing fresh, salty or polluted) there are a whole lot of Other factors too, such as plate tectonics, erosion etc some areas are sinking below sea level Really fast (new orleans) others, simply aren't.
Also, there is a really simple way to drastically reduce co2 levels, grow lots and lots of plant, dig deep holes, and fill them with the plants and throw many feet of top cover on top of the decaying vegitation... the carbon is locked deep inside the earth, and eventually, that carbon becoams gas, oil or coal... currently we have 'landfills' that bury some carbon waste, but clearly not nearly as much as we're using in 'fossil' fuels.
I can't believe anyone who gets the posts up in the first 10 minutes of an article being posted haasn't had time to fully fact check either ;) i mean it's the INTERNET it must be true!
;) heck one thing i got wrong BECAUSE i Tried to fact check it int a 'hurry' and read cyanobacteria as bacteria. and didn't put it into context... which made me look like i slept through highschool biology (which i still aced and it was on a bell curve and i was threatend several times by classmates...)
I've written like a journal and several journal posts and main page posts all asserting numerous facts, and even with fact checking (which i normally skip) i got loads of stuff wrong
X800360, but how confusing would that look?
slightly more confusing than i80x86..
but you don't see intel selling less i80886 (pentium 4) parts than amd...
true they changed the naming convention from the lowly penium 1 (which was still also called an i80586, mainly due to usenet groups calling it the '586' before the 'official' marketing mane of 'pentium' was known.
Your comments directly contradict the NY Times article...
The system works even when cellular calls do not because text messages are small packets of data that are easy to send, and because the companies transmit them on the high-priority channel whose main purpose is to set up cellphone calls.
Do you have a source?
Bad reporting, Yes cell phones use SMTP to contact towers, and verify the accessability of circuits, and those SMTP packets are highly flaged, and YES text messages are SMTP packets (same as ICQ and e-mail, AIM, MSN etc etc) But they are Flagged as Junk priority by the mailer dameon that negotiates these things. which means that basically even if you're trying to send 165 text messages a second the tower can tell Instantly if it's a text message or a negotiation signal, and Instantly drops the signal on the floor if it doesn't have room for the text message. and this attack is only possible of being done from the cell phone side, because if you sent it on the 'internet' side it simply creates a backlog of messages to be sent. the server will either discard or wait to transmit until it feels OK with doing one or the other.
BTW the main reason text messages work when normal calling doesn't is because the phone can legally retry sending the message say, every minute until the tower 'acknowledges' the transmission although i don't know for certain if this is done, or if it's a simple 'trust' system where the phone does it best to send it and if the tower doesn't have bandwith for it when it gets the message it's just lost forever...
we did they're called 'trains' but people made money on 'trains' and it was bad. so the government stepped in and locked down where 'trains' could be built, what price 'trains' could charge etc.. etc.. and then along came someone by the name of Henry Ford, and he started building these 'horseless wagons' that one could use on ordinary roads, instead of these 'trains' that needed special tracks and had confounding schedules...
a couple reasons... bandwith available is very limited. the entire licensed spectrum for cell phone coverage is less than the frequency a single analog TV broadcaster uses.
so yeah data is expensive, and frankly the answer to that was going to be the FCC taking all 13 channels of VHF broadcast and converting them to various products including a large subset to be licensed for cellular broadcasts... but the states is nowhere near the numbers that would allow the FCC to license off those frequencies.
if you have more frequency you can sell 'data' for less. they've already gotten to the point where voice calls are unlimited on weekends and evenings, so they can get virtually everyone paying $40 a month for service they can only realistically use during the day when it takes off plan minutes/really costs money.
Well, the key problem is that in marketing speak, x is cool, but xi is wierd and hard to pronounce. ex eye? zi? No matter how you pronounce it, it just sounds wimpy compared to x. So once you reach x, what can you do? You pretty much have to shift to a different naming/numbering scheme.
not true, look at Xbox, what do they call the sequel to make it sound cooler? the Xbox360 like add a skating term best of all they can make the sequel to the 360 the 720 and the sequel to the 720 the 1080 and then the 1440 i mean yeah everyone needs a thrashing gaming console that can shred a 1440..
and i like the X1K cauze if you are dyslexic, it really K1X...
the key word in my sentances was who _needs_ a label. The points you bring up are why someone would _want_ a label. Artists don't need labels to survive, it's the job of the labels to convince the artists that they can in fact do something worth a cut of the profits etc to be worth using them. labels on the other hand Need artists, since without the artists they have nothing to sell and market. The problem is that the major labels are run by people who they they're Entitled to having musicians slave away for there own profits etc. it's simply not the case, the relationships is supposed to be symbiotic, provide real value to the artists so that everyone makes more money/is happy etc..
the purpose of a label is, in this case, to front the money for the production costs, promotion costs, and tour costs. it's a loan with no interest, and if you default you get dropped from the label! yay!
$500 worth of computer software and hardware, $50 worth of materials from the home improvement store, and that guest bedroom becomes an in-home audio recording studio studio.
Why buy a $1,000,000 TV ad when you can buy a 1000 views on a google adwords? and instead of 'maybe' having a thousand people who saw the ad go visit the website/buy the music etc, you have 1000 go to the website to try a free 'single' torrent you have available for download, so they buy the record/see you in concert?
I'm sorry the internet and technology has not reduced touring costs drastically, but for the vast majority of artists Touring Is the only part of the business that makes them money.
who needs a record label anyway? oh yeah no talent lip synchers and ignorant teens who 'get to be on TV' for the latest idol show. remind me again Why does apple need the big 5 labels to find talented music to feature on the iTMS?
oh yeah because america is a bunch of ignorant slobs who happily buy whatever the monopoly controlled, kick back accepting radio station force feeds them. Frankly man if the iTMS had no content from the big 5 i'd be saying 'hell yeah look at apple they have all the best indie music and The Artist actually make 95 cents to the dollar!' the question is does Apple need the iTMS to be a 'one stop shop' for the wares of the 'big 5' labels to sell ipods? I don't think so, and frankly I hope steve Jobs doesn't think so either.
the big 5 will LOOSE money if they force iTMS to stop selling big 5 music, and apple won't loose hardly any money (since they run the download buisness so near cost) and since people buy the ipod because it's such an awesome music player. if they can't buy music from iTMS and 'napster' downloads don't work with ipods, people will just 'pirate' the music, or make due with the music they already have. or gasp, go out and learn who's actually making new and innovative music, and where the real talent is going, and there money will be spent not making the big 5 billions of dollars a year, but rather into making performing artists and songwriters have better lives with more disposable income to buy on houses and cars and families etc.
frankly i don't see how apple can loose on this one, the music dinosaurs are having a hissy fit, and it's not over the pricing (that's just the face of it) they want control they want shoulder out the 'indie' music from iTMS and have just big 5 hits for sale. if they can 'force' apple to charge $1.49 a song, then they can 'force' them to 'not display indie music until after all big 5 songs' in listing relevancy...
I'm glad jobs is at the helm on this one, I'm sure he'd rather see the iTMS go away (or fade to obsurity) than become the pathetic lapdog for the big 5 labels so they can crush small independant artists who are threatening to topple the 'dinosaur' labels with the low cost, 'give the people what they want' 'wal-mart' model instead of the 'tell people what they want and how much they'll have to pay for it' department store model. After all independant artists need solid computers to do all the mixing and tracking on and what better computer than an Apple to use for that? especially if you're making tons of money selling via the iTMS?
Also, this brings us one step closer to humanities highest achievement to be... the robot barkeep, R2 style.
...
Step 1. Buy beer keg
Step 2. Paint beer keg as R2D2
step 3. patent 'robotic barkeep'
step 4.
step 5. Profit!
ah yes, i like her followup article too :)
;) and they downloaded via torrent and maybe made some new fans... promotion is easy in the internet era, you don't need millions of dollars to advertise during the superbowl.. so they try to scare people away from using 'p2p' because if people use bittorrent for 'legitimate' free (or pay) downloads, then the control is gone, and the legacy donosaur that was the 'record label' is extinct.
if you look at what has happened with online music the ITMS etc etc... it all comes into play with some of the points in her followup article. the music industry couldn't destroy online music downloading. so they went about and tried to control it, but they really 'control' it completely, so they're trying to control the public, and keep people from learning about bands other than the ones being promoted by the music industry etc.
in general I'd say by the fact that p2p numbers 'keep rising' that they're losing the 'control' aspect, but they're still winning in the bottom line because people are still buying from major labels and looking for major label musicians and back catalogs etc. artists and song writeres don't really need a huge 'big 5' record label to get the word out anymore. the internet is too huge, an 'indie' label can pop up a 'torrent' of there latest 'single' legitmitately and host it from a 'cheap' cable or dsl line and the entire internet can download it, for the most part without any major bandwidth bills for the artist, and sell the 'full cd' for whatever price they want... from a simple website. and then they go out and try and post messages on the internet and slink back to the torrent, saying that they're like so and so a band (that they think they sound like) and people can go and download from the torrent, and many people might just say 'forget them' but any fans they make are fans they never would have had without a simple little 'basically free' promotion. now consider if a more established band wants to buy some google adwords for say 'metallica' because they think they sound like metallica used to, for a reasonable price they've now got quite a bit of targeted exposure, people know it's advertising, but they clicked it because it was interesting anyways, and you promised them free music in the ad
who needs a label? the more the labels fight p2p the more evil they look, and the more people who might realize that they do have options, and they don't need to 'listen' to some top 40's radio station or some bibmbo artist who is lipsynching...
Add a USB port so I can install wifi or Ethernet
:) very cool, a 500 mhz cpu is no powerhouse, but it can Definitely run everything a child needs for educational uses... For $100 _I_ wouldn't mind having one or two.. or a beowulf cluster.. ;) especially if the full wattage of the device is comperable to a cell phone.. (the hand crank power ratio seems to indicate so)
the $100 laptop has 802.11 (doesn't say which one) capabilities, 4 USB ports, as well as cellular communication capabilities. it also has software to enable the laptops to talk to one another in an ad-hoc network to allow internet access to be shared. all that plus an advanced ultra low power display, 1 GB of 'memory'(ram? flash? they don't specify), a 500 mhz processor and a hand crank that can provide 10 minutes of use from 1 minute of cranking...
not bad at all, and the case is made of rubber wherever possible to make it 'immune' to being dropped, protect it from rain etc...
they should be selling these things at wal-marts.
Honestly, what's the real difference between the gaming PC and the console now?
why the same things that have always been different.
1. resolution 1600x1200 progressive @ 90 Hz vs 'HDTV' which if i feel like spending 10 grand on a tv will actually Support 1080p instead of like 1080i(cut my eyes out 'cause i won't play interlaced) or 720p if i'm lucky.
2. flexibility i can upgrade as much as i want to with a PC a console will have roughly the same specs for all 4-6 years that it's being sold as 'mainstream'.
honestly right now the only segment of the console gaming market that is doing something solidly better than PCs it's handhelds. consider my GBA, i could chuck it across the room(screen is padded to take some shock, so it Might survive being thrown), drop it in a toilet (the entire unit is semi-water proofed, as long as it wasn't on when you dropped it in, you can just drop it in front of a fan/heater and a day later it should be dried out enough to power up.. and it STILL works. I _look_ at a laptop funny and the hinge cracks off..