... then I'll start looking for analogies other than a "file" (or something bsimilar like a notebook) to use with computers.
Thin about it. The objects we use most often books, physical files, CDs, musical instruments, notecards, kitchen gadgets, etc. All have a discrete identity that makes their representation by a file on a file system quite intuitive.
Only when reality starts presenting itself as something other than individual entities with their own discrete identity will most people move to a different paradigm.
That was a meme first articulated by the Clinton campaign during the primary and then by the GOP during the general election.
But I think we're being trolled. Hugo Chavez as a prominent intellectual? Seriously? Pointing to a peace prize awarded to the likes of Fidel Castro, Louis Farakhan, and would-be assassins as some sort of mark of legitimacy?
Voodoo zombies are sadly underrepresented in the modern horror and survival genres. They share a word "zombie" but any genetic relationship is tenuous at best. The origin of the modern zombie was actually a novel about vampires, Richard Matheson's masterpiece from the fifties, I am Legend.
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) based on Richard Matheson's novel I am Legend (1954) is really the origin of the modern zombie craze.
It's putatively related to voodoo zombies, but not really. Prior to Matheson and Romero all movie zombies were voodoo zombies. The style, pacing, origin, etc. was entirely different. Little known trivia, the first film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was a voodoo zombie movie, I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
I'm not certain that there is a genetic relationship between modern zombies and voodoo zombies. Matheson's novel was actually about vampires. Romero called them zombies but his film really borrowed far more from Matheson than from the voodoo tradition. Modern treatments that borrow from voodoo are films more like The Crow than like what we expect from a zombie film.
``The vast majority of their history was one marked by the ABSENCE of debasement,''
Citation, please. If you mark the period in question as the late sixth century to the fifteenth century, it seems to me that Byzantine coins were debased more often than not.
If you map periods of decline versus periods of reconstruction, you'll find that debasement of currency in the Byzantine era generally corresponds to the beginning of a new period of growth. For example, the debasement in eighth and eleventh centuries occurs just before the expansion of the 8th to 10th centuries and the massive growth of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Alexander Hamilton argued vehemently against Jefferson (and won that argument) on whether a national bank should be created so as to use debt as mechanism in precisely the way that you claim the Fed now uses it. Where did Hamilton get that idea? He studied the Bank of England which had been doing the same thing for quite some time before those upstart colonists even thought of rebelling against the crown.
Moreover, the eastern Roman empire (the so-called Byzantine empire) funded its military and civil projects the same way. Except, instead of paper money and bonds, they used debased coins as currency and letters of credit.
And your last paragraph is just plain nonsense. The value of the dollar isn't determined by the issuer. It's determined by the people who use it for exchange. If the Fed blinked out of existence today, most buying and selling that uses US dollars would simply go on as it had before. There might be a bit of a panic. Some people might think that the US dollar is now worthless. But that's a value judgment of those who use dollars for exchange, not the fiat of the Fed.
Read any of Alexander Hamilton's letters to George Washington on the subject. It's not a new idea. It is, however, the model that national banks have been built on since before the US was even a country.
... many colleges effectively subsidize everyone they accept except for a select few. If you get into one of the ivies, or even one of the second tier schools, you won't be paying full tuition rates unless your parents are fabulously wealthy. So one reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition wouldn't be so high is that most applicants to many schools will never pay the full price of tuition. Between scholarships and grants/from the school/, they will be subsidized/by the school/.
And to go back to the point raised in the subject line. My eldest daughter just applied to 12 different schools. Some had costs (tuition + dorm) north of 50k. Others had costs in the 20k-30k range. All of the state schools she applied to had costs 20k for in-state applicants. And if one considers costs of state colleges within commuting distances so that dorm fees don't apply, the costs get down to below 10k. So another reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition would lower if it were not for federal student loans is that variation of tuition and dorm fees is higher than the amount that one can borrow straight from the feds.
So what you've got are the private for-profit colleges like DeVry and some state schools that deny in-state applicants in favor of out-of-state applicants. There may also be some mid-tier and bottom-tier colleges that exist mostly to fund the president and his associates.
Moreover, no undergrad is getting offered a 100k student loan. Even an undergrad that maxed out Stafford and Perkins loans every year for four years wouldn't get to 100k. To get to that amount at the undergrad level, you need the parents to take out a PLUS loan/or/ go into the private loan market. In either case, it isn't an 18 year old being offered apparently easy money via federal subsidies. In both the PLUS system and in the private loan market, credit scores mean everything.
Re:So how is it possible to watch those 3D goggles
on
Manufacturing Dreams
·
· Score: 1
That was my first question. So I read the article. They seem to be using "manufactured dreams" as an equivocal term for "digitally created video watched while awake."
In a way, I'm a bit relieved. The idea of dreams being artificially implanted in one's head is quite properly terrifying.
In another way, I'm a bit disappointed. With the ability to decipher images from the brain, it's a short leap to being able to implant images in the brain.
That is an interesting analysis. If I understand it correctly, it's basically the idea that demand alone is driving the increase in prices. But even schools that do not have incentives to maximize profits (e.g. not-for-profit schools, state schools, etc.) keep increasing their tuition out of necessity because costs keep rising. Of those costs, one of the largest is health care.
Not really, it's an equivocal use of the word "free."
Economic liberals put an emphasis on the free market in the sense of the technical, economic use of the term by economists. They describe markets where any consumer can purchase a good from any supplier. Exclusivity agreements, by their very nature, erode free markets in the economic sense.
But there are also some political liberals (specifically of the libertarian bent) that put so much emphasis on the freedom of individuals that they believe that individual consumers and producers should have the freedom to enter in exclusivity agreements regardless of their impact on free markets.
Sure. But storage density is a small part of the problem.
Imagine 100 years into the future. Which is easier to figure out how to play back: a movie stored on analog film, a movie encoded into uuencode into ASCII into binary and stored on punch cards, a movie stored in MPEG I zipped and split across single sided double density 5.25 floppy disks, a movie stored in a proprietary format on an MFM hard disk, a movie stored in WMV encrypted and stored on a HDCD?
It's not just about long life and storage density. It's about ease of access. A great example are NASA video tapes they found a few years ago. They couldn't play them back because they couldn't find a working playback device. Once they did find one, in a storage garage behind a chicken coop, they had to repair it and were quite fortunate to find technicians that/could/ repair it.
In the case of analog film, how to play it back is fairly obvious. WIth some digital media (e.g. DVDs) the formats are well enough documented that future generations ought to be able to figure it out. But there are quite a few storage choices that look like good choices that ended up being very poor choices.
Except instead of a computer virus that is trying to optimize users so that they supply a steady input of data, it's businessmen trying to optimize users so that they supply a stead input of cash. In both cases, through trial and error the would-be optimizers eventually discover the secrets to getting users to play over and over and over until they're absolutely drained.
Gosh, when I put it like that it also sounds like the golden age of video games. Pong, Space Invaders, Q*Bert, Pac-Man, etc. were just big excuses to get users to put in quarter after quarter.
`` With digital you can have multiple copies of the the media, update the format to current standards, and change the mechanical playback device that is needed. ''
Provided that you can (a) play back the media and (b) read the format used encode the files on the media. Given that, you can make a lossless copy of the digital video. But you're presuming the capability to do the very thing that's under question.
Not to mention that you can do the same with analog film. The frames in an analog film can photographed by a higher resolution analog camera and the resulting recording be superior to the original to the extent that it will clearly reveal imperfections in the original that were previously invisible.
But I do agree that is a complex situation. I'm not arguing that one is inherently better than the other. My point is that digital sources are inherently more complex compared to one particular analog source: film. Other analog source (for example, analog video tapes) can have some of the same sorts of problems as digital sources. A great example are the NASA video tapes of the lunar missions that were indecipherable because no tape player was known to exist which could play them. Then a player was found in storage behind a chicken coop and restored at great effort. But for film, building a new projector is relatively easy and straightforward. For digital media, that may or may not be the case. If your media was CD, that technology is straightforward enough and documented well enough that there is probably no real barrier to building a reader 100 years from now provided that the file format is sufficiently documented. But a sufficiently curious and intelligent person with no knowledge of the media could probably figure out how to project a film with no documentation.
With digital you've got three challenges: 1. Physical preservation of the media 2. Preservation of the format of the digital data 3. Preservation of the mechanical playback device
So even if long-term digital storage is stable, efforts have to be made to also archive the format and how to play back the media. Analog film has an advantage in this arena because playback is relatively obvious and simple.
That doesn't necessarily mean that analog is always better. It just means that digital video archives have different, and arguably more complex, technical challenges compared to analog film.
Recall the story about the NASA tapes found a few years back with footage from the moon walk. It took over a decade to find the parts to build something that could play them. And that was with analog video.
It is true that film has the same problem to a certain degree. But, due to its nature, it'd be far less expensive to build an analog projector than it would be to try to reconstruct a data format on an obscure disk standard 500 years after everyone has stopped using it.
.... how many were stored in a climate controlled archive?
Some films do have problems with age. This is especially true of film reels from the early age of the motion picture. But in most cases the degradation is more a function of the film not being stored properly because no one imagined wanting to preserve them for posterity all those years ago. Just like during the studios used to just throw out animation cells, they used to can old reels after they retired them from the box office. Consider one of my favorites, Metropolis. Shortly after its debut, pretty much no one thought it was worth keeping around. The few reels still in existence were found by mistake or in the vaults of private collectors who, fascinated by the movie, bought their own copy when it first came out.
The cardinal problem we have with old film reels is not the medium's inherent instability. It's that no one had the foresight to archive the reels properly.
Properly stored and handled, film is quite stable. But if you send out all your reels on the road because each reel is expensive and they get handled by the doofuses in the projection booth that thread them backwards the first time, left in car trunks, etc. and you store your masters in a warehouse with no cooling/dehumidifying apparatus where it is subject to extremes of heat and cold, sure, you end up 50 years later with reels that are barely salvageable.
If an archivist isn't actually a data center specialist, they're certainly analogs to data center specialists.;)
More seriously, I know how archives work. Not only do I have friends/family that did stints at the national archives, I frequent archives for research on my MA thesis on an 11th century philosopher who wrote in Arabic. Archives are, in fact, data centers. It just so happens that the data isn't digital and the various physical media require different techniques for being catalogued, indexed, and searched than one might expect if you've been raised on Google. But it's really the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
... then I'll start looking for analogies other than a "file" (or something bsimilar like a notebook) to use with computers.
Thin about it. The objects we use most often books, physical files, CDs, musical instruments, notecards, kitchen gadgets, etc. All have a discrete identity that makes their representation by a file on a file system quite intuitive.
Only when reality starts presenting itself as something other than individual entities with their own discrete identity will most people move to a different paradigm.
That was a meme first articulated by the Clinton campaign during the primary and then by the GOP during the general election.
But I think we're being trolled. Hugo Chavez as a prominent intellectual? Seriously? Pointing to a peace prize awarded to the likes of Fidel Castro, Louis Farakhan, and would-be assassins as some sort of mark of legitimacy?
1. voodoo zombies
2. hollywood movie zombies
3. philosophy zombies
Any relationship between them is accidental.
The bit I find humorous is that the genesis of hollywood movie zombies lies in a novel about vampires (Matheson's I am Legend).
Voodoo zombies are sadly underrepresented in the modern horror and survival genres. They share a word "zombie" but any genetic relationship is tenuous at best. The origin of the modern zombie was actually a novel about vampires, Richard Matheson's masterpiece from the fifties, I am Legend.
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) based on Richard Matheson's novel I am Legend (1954) is really the origin of the modern zombie craze.
It's putatively related to voodoo zombies, but not really. Prior to Matheson and Romero all movie zombies were voodoo zombies. The style, pacing, origin, etc. was entirely different. Little known trivia, the first film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was a voodoo zombie movie, I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
I'm not certain that there is a genetic relationship between modern zombies and voodoo zombies. Matheson's novel was actually about vampires. Romero called them zombies but his film really borrowed far more from Matheson than from the voodoo tradition. Modern treatments that borrow from voodoo are films more like The Crow than like what we expect from a zombie film.
``The vast majority of their history was one marked by the ABSENCE of debasement,''
Citation, please. If you mark the period in question as the late sixth century to the fifteenth century, it seems to me that Byzantine coins were debased more often than not.
If you map periods of decline versus periods of reconstruction, you'll find that debasement of currency in the Byzantine era generally corresponds to the beginning of a new period of growth. For example, the debasement in eighth and eleventh centuries occurs just before the expansion of the 8th to 10th centuries and the massive growth of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Alexander Hamilton argued vehemently against Jefferson (and won that argument) on whether a national bank should be created so as to use debt as mechanism in precisely the way that you claim the Fed now uses it. Where did Hamilton get that idea? He studied the Bank of England which had been doing the same thing for quite some time before those upstart colonists even thought of rebelling against the crown.
Moreover, the eastern Roman empire (the so-called Byzantine empire) funded its military and civil projects the same way. Except, instead of paper money and bonds, they used debased coins as currency and letters of credit.
And your last paragraph is just plain nonsense. The value of the dollar isn't determined by the issuer. It's determined by the people who use it for exchange. If the Fed blinked out of existence today, most buying and selling that uses US dollars would simply go on as it had before. There might be a bit of a panic. Some people might think that the US dollar is now worthless. But that's a value judgment of those who use dollars for exchange, not the fiat of the Fed.
Read any of Alexander Hamilton's letters to George Washington on the subject. It's not a new idea. It is, however, the model that national banks have been built on since before the US was even a country.
But what do they know about the English language?
Chaucer: Comaunded hire massangerys for to go The same day with outyn any fayle.
Shakespeare: How grounded hee his Title to the Crowne Vpon our faile.
Coincidentally, the Oxford English Dictionary agrees with Chaucer and Shakespeare.
But, depending on the circumstance, a lawsuit might compel the FCC to take action.
... many colleges effectively subsidize everyone they accept except for a select few. If you get into one of the ivies, or even one of the second tier schools, you won't be paying full tuition rates unless your parents are fabulously wealthy. So one reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition wouldn't be so high is that most applicants to many schools will never pay the full price of tuition. Between scholarships and grants /from the school/, they will be subsidized /by the school/.
And to go back to the point raised in the subject line. My eldest daughter just applied to 12 different schools. Some had costs (tuition + dorm) north of 50k. Others had costs in the 20k-30k range. All of the state schools she applied to had costs 20k for in-state applicants. And if one considers costs of state colleges within commuting distances so that dorm fees don't apply, the costs get down to below 10k. So another reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition would lower if it were not for federal student loans is that variation of tuition and dorm fees is higher than the amount that one can borrow straight from the feds.
So what you've got are the private for-profit colleges like DeVry and some state schools that deny in-state applicants in favor of out-of-state applicants. There may also be some mid-tier and bottom-tier colleges that exist mostly to fund the president and his associates.
Moreover, no undergrad is getting offered a 100k student loan. Even an undergrad that maxed out Stafford and Perkins loans every year for four years wouldn't get to 100k. To get to that amount at the undergrad level, you need the parents to take out a PLUS loan /or/ go into the private loan market. In either case, it isn't an 18 year old being offered apparently easy money via federal subsidies. In both the PLUS system and in the private loan market, credit scores mean everything.
That was my first question. So I read the article. They seem to be using "manufactured dreams" as an equivocal term for "digitally created video watched while awake."
In a way, I'm a bit relieved. The idea of dreams being artificially implanted in one's head is quite properly terrifying.
In another way, I'm a bit disappointed. With the ability to decipher images from the brain, it's a short leap to being able to implant images in the brain.
That is an interesting analysis. If I understand it correctly, it's basically the idea that demand alone is driving the increase in prices. But even schools that do not have incentives to maximize profits (e.g. not-for-profit schools, state schools, etc.) keep increasing their tuition out of necessity because costs keep rising. Of those costs, one of the largest is health care.
Not really, it's an equivocal use of the word "free."
Economic liberals put an emphasis on the free market in the sense of the technical, economic use of the term by economists. They describe markets where any consumer can purchase a good from any supplier. Exclusivity agreements, by their very nature, erode free markets in the economic sense.
But there are also some political liberals (specifically of the libertarian bent) that put so much emphasis on the freedom of individuals that they believe that individual consumers and producers should have the freedom to enter in exclusivity agreements regardless of their impact on free markets.
I wouldn't worry. It's micro and soft. About as offensive as Ken doll with no clothes.
Sure. But storage density is a small part of the problem.
Imagine 100 years into the future. Which is easier to figure out how to play back: a movie stored on analog film, a movie encoded into uuencode into ASCII into binary and stored on punch cards, a movie stored in MPEG I zipped and split across single sided double density 5.25 floppy disks, a movie stored in a proprietary format on an MFM hard disk, a movie stored in WMV encrypted and stored on a HDCD?
It's not just about long life and storage density. It's about ease of access. A great example are NASA video tapes they found a few years ago. They couldn't play them back because they couldn't find a working playback device. Once they did find one, in a storage garage behind a chicken coop, they had to repair it and were quite fortunate to find technicians that /could/ repair it.
In the case of analog film, how to play it back is fairly obvious. WIth some digital media (e.g. DVDs) the formats are well enough documented that future generations ought to be able to figure it out. But there are quite a few storage choices that look like good choices that ended up being very poor choices.
Except instead of a computer virus that is trying to optimize users so that they supply a steady input of data, it's businessmen trying to optimize users so that they supply a stead input of cash. In both cases, through trial and error the would-be optimizers eventually discover the secrets to getting users to play over and over and over until they're absolutely drained.
Gosh, when I put it like that it also sounds like the golden age of video games. Pong, Space Invaders, Q*Bert, Pac-Man, etc. were just big excuses to get users to put in quarter after quarter.
`` With digital you can have multiple copies of the the media, update the format to current standards, and change the mechanical playback device that is needed. ''
Provided that you can (a) play back the media and (b) read the format used encode the files on the media. Given that, you can make a lossless copy of the digital video. But you're presuming the capability to do the very thing that's under question.
Not to mention that you can do the same with analog film. The frames in an analog film can photographed by a higher resolution analog camera and the resulting recording be superior to the original to the extent that it will clearly reveal imperfections in the original that were previously invisible.
But I do agree that is a complex situation. I'm not arguing that one is inherently better than the other. My point is that digital sources are inherently more complex compared to one particular analog source: film. Other analog source (for example, analog video tapes) can have some of the same sorts of problems as digital sources. A great example are the NASA video tapes of the lunar missions that were indecipherable because no tape player was known to exist which could play them. Then a player was found in storage behind a chicken coop and restored at great effort. But for film, building a new projector is relatively easy and straightforward. For digital media, that may or may not be the case. If your media was CD, that technology is straightforward enough and documented well enough that there is probably no real barrier to building a reader 100 years from now provided that the file format is sufficiently documented. But a sufficiently curious and intelligent person with no knowledge of the media could probably figure out how to project a film with no documentation.
Maybe, maybe not.
See my other comment in this thread, digital video archives have a different set of challenges than analog film archives.
Compressed/uncompressed makes little difference.
With digital you've got three challenges:
1. Physical preservation of the media
2. Preservation of the format of the digital data
3. Preservation of the mechanical playback device
With analog film, only 1 and 3 apply and 3 is arguably much simpler. That 3 is simpler isn't something inherent to being analog. For example, recall NASA's lunar tapes that couldn't be played back until a specific model of Ampex tape player was rebuil. The technology to build a projector for analog film is much more simple than for most digital media.
Yes.
An often overlooked fact is that with media that is reliant on mechanical playback, not only do we need to archive the media but also the machines that play them back. Even for analog data, this is sometimes difficult. Remember NASA's moon tapes that could not be played back until a player was reconstructed?
So even if long-term digital storage is stable, efforts have to be made to also archive the format and how to play back the media. Analog film has an advantage in this arena because playback is relatively obvious and simple.
That doesn't necessarily mean that analog is always better. It just means that digital video archives have different, and arguably more complex, technical challenges compared to analog film.
Recall the story about the NASA tapes found a few years back with footage from the moon walk. It took over a decade to find the parts to build something that could play them. And that was with analog video.
It is true that film has the same problem to a certain degree. But, due to its nature, it'd be far less expensive to build an analog projector than it would be to try to reconstruct a data format on an obscure disk standard 500 years after everyone has stopped using it.
.... how many were stored in a climate controlled archive?
Some films do have problems with age. This is especially true of film reels from the early age of the motion picture. But in most cases the degradation is more a function of the film not being stored properly because no one imagined wanting to preserve them for posterity all those years ago. Just like during the studios used to just throw out animation cells, they used to can old reels after they retired them from the box office. Consider one of my favorites, Metropolis. Shortly after its debut, pretty much no one thought it was worth keeping around. The few reels still in existence were found by mistake or in the vaults of private collectors who, fascinated by the movie, bought their own copy when it first came out.
The cardinal problem we have with old film reels is not the medium's inherent instability. It's that no one had the foresight to archive the reels properly.
Properly stored and handled, film is quite stable. But if you send out all your reels on the road because each reel is expensive and they get handled by the doofuses in the projection booth that thread them backwards the first time, left in car trunks, etc. and you store your masters in a warehouse with no cooling/dehumidifying apparatus where it is subject to extremes of heat and cold, sure, you end up 50 years later with reels that are barely salvageable.
If an archivist isn't actually a data center specialist, they're certainly analogs to data center specialists. ;)
More seriously, I know how archives work. Not only do I have friends/family that did stints at the national archives, I frequent archives for research on my MA thesis on an 11th century philosopher who wrote in Arabic. Archives are, in fact, data centers. It just so happens that the data isn't digital and the various physical media require different techniques for being catalogued, indexed, and searched than one might expect if you've been raised on Google. But it's really the same thing.