The article talks about the dispute between the city and the company providing the system, but what about the drivers whose cars were trapped there for three days? I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that taking someone's car and refusing to give it back is a pretty reasonable definition of property theft. If they haven't already, the people who were affected by this mess should file a class-action suit agains the company AND the city for this stupid stunt.
Giving your ears some downtime in the first place is one of the best things you can do, actually. If you're listening to loud music, taking a break for 10 minutes out of every hour will reduce your chances of suffering from hearing loss. There are cells in your ear (called outer hair cells) that are actively helping you hear. That activity produces byproducts which can build up in the cells. Taking a rest gives the cells a chance to clear out those byproducts before they build to a point where they can kill the cells. Although people are still actively looking for ways to preserve and restore hearing acuity, so far the only viable solution is "don't blast your ears out." Or be a non-mammalian vertebrate -- it's your choice.
The cochlea is a waveguide - incoming sounds launch a wave along the basilar membrane. This wave is dispersive, meaning that at a given location, low frequency energy travels more quickly than high frequency energy. For energy at a given frequency, the wave slows down as it travels until it reaches a "characteristic place". At the same time, the amplitude of vibration increases. The characteristic place is defined as the location where the amplitude of vibration peaks; for a given location, the frequency that causes the largest vibration is called the "best frequency" for that place. At the best frequency, the cochlea is locally resonant, and energy is shunted through the basilar membrane. As a result, the energy at a given frequency does not propagate significantly beyond the characteristic place (this is equivalent to saying that the wave speed decreases to zero near the characteristic place).
The cochlea is tonotopically organized, so that more basal locations (near where the stapes inserts) have high best frequencies, and the best frequency decreases systematically with position as you move apically. As a consequence, high-frequency sound energy that enters the cochlea is shunted through the basilar membrane at a basal location, and does not propagate further into the cochlea. Low frequency energy, in contrast, propagates as a wave along the basilar membrane to the apical region of the cochlea. In other words, high-frequency sounds only vibrate the most basal part of the cochlea, whereas low-frequency sounds vibrate the entire cochlea.
For more information on the cochlear traveling wave, read the classic papers by Georg von Bekesy, who won the Nobel prize for discovering it. You might also want to look at some of the early computational models by Zwislocki and/or de Boer. For a more introductory description, I recommend chapter 5 of Geisler's "From Sound To Synapse", or Patuzzi's chapter in the book "The Cochlea".
Not gonna happen. Ever hear of human studies committees? They tend to frown upon experiments with designs like "we're going to expose group A to loud sound, 24 hours a day while locking group B in a soundproof room, and compare their hearing loss after a week." Unfortunately, showing a correlation between portable music player use and hearing loss is about the best we can do.
This is just my (albeit fairly well-informed) opinion, but I think the difference is that modern systems do a better job reproducing the bass. Loud bass is the absolute WORST thing you can do for your ears - it's like launching a tsunami that travels along the entire length of your cochlea, wreaking havoc as it goes. So turn down that damn subwoofer, you young whipper-snappers!
You're absolutely right that noise-reducing headphones most likely help rather than hurt. However, your statement about hearing loss being caused by high-frequency sound is incorrect. Loud low-frequency sound is much worse than loud high-frequency sound, because the loud sound has to travel along the entire length of the cochlea to reach its intended destination, and it causes damage along the way. The reason you lose high-frequency hearing first is that the high-frequency region of the cochlea is closest to where the sound comes in, so that every loud sound that hits your ears passes by that region and causes damage.
Preventing significant hearing loss is easy - don't blast music, and give your ears a rest once in a while. It's kind of like not staring into the sun all day, but for your ears.
No, these are the people who convince university professors to spend years polishing their course notes into a textbook, get the prof to sign over the copyright to them, print a single edition of the book, refuse to print more when the prof wants to use the book for his own class the next year, and then charge $100 a student for the prof to photocopy his own copy of the book to give to the students. We have a word for people like that: middlemen. Actually we have a bunch of other words as well, but out of deference to the internet I won't say them here. So few professors actually make any kind of a profit from writing textbooks that in the long term, I expect to see more and more of them appearing online instead of in print.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but up in Boston I imagine it often happened something like this:
1. Sign up for an account at Arlington Trust Co., a local bank (1987); 2. Arlington Trust Co. merges with Shawmut (1988); 3. Shawmut merges with Fleet (1995); 4. Fleet merges with BankBoston (itself the result of serial mergers) to become FleetBoston (1999); 5. FleetBoston merges with Bank of America (2004).
In other words, these are the world's largest banks because of a series of mergers and absorptions of the world's smaller banks. And once people have their money in a particular bank, it's not always convenient to move it somewhere else. I personally have my money in a small local bank, but if they merged with a larger bank it'd take a pretty serious degradation of quality to get me to switch.
Yeah, I'm following up to my own post. But as soon as I hit "Submit", it occurred to me that I don't even know what an evolutionary psychologist IS! Someone who studies how psychological properties evolved? Someone who studies psychology using techniques that are modeled after evolution? A new kind of psychologist that's just now emerging from the primordial soup? Either way, it still seems to me that the "psychologist" tag makes the person not necessarily the best qualified individual to be talking about how testosterone levels affect sex determination in the womb. Where does the Times get their experts?
Now that it's legal to order wine from other states online, I'm sure some of you must have recommendations of good wineries. I'll start by tossing out one from Napa Valley, V. Sattui:
I find their reds, particularly their Cabernets and Zinfandels (no, not White Zinfandel, regular plain old Zinfandel), to be quite nice. Not a big fan of their whites, though. I'd love to find an exceedingly dry, oaky Chardonnay, so let's hear some suggestions!
It's easy to be dismissive of Deaf culture (they capitalize the D when referring to the culture) if you define them as "people with a birth defect or disease...." That's not how they define themselves, however. While I would be hard-pressed to pin down what does and does not constitute a culture, one feature of a culture that almost everyone can agree on is a common language. Members of the Deaf culture do share a common language - here in the U.S., it's American Sign Language (ASL). Despite the fact that it's "spoken" using the hands, it has all the properties of a language - it's got its own grammar, communicating activates the language centers of the brain, etc. It's also not just a mapping of English to gestures, any more than German is a mapping of English to other sounds. So Deaf culture is real, and not just a big deafness support group. From that standpoint (to answer your question), I think it's unlikely that blind people will establish their own culture.
As for cochlear implants destroying Deaf culture, I don't have any firsthand experience of this but I've heard that the culture's attitude toward implants is softening. Initially, the culture was worried that children with implants would learn English and not ASL, so the culture would die out (and, I suspect, many of them feared that they wouldn't be able to talk to their own children, which is a pretty scary concept). They saw implants as the ethical equivalent of performing surgery on an immigrant to make them speak English instead of their native tongue. What they're starting to realize (much as many immigrant cultures started to realize shortly after coming to America in the late 19th / early 20th centuries) is that their children will learn *both* languages, and be able to navigate both cultures equally effectively, and be better off for it.
There's a handy little package called cfg-update that does 90% of the updates automatically for you (e.g., if only comments have changed, it'll just update without prompting you), and makes it easier to do the other 10%. I'd go crazy without it. It really should be the default updater.
Sure there's room for improvement. And as you point out, Acrobat continues to improve. Hopefully this announcement from MS will prod Adobe to make Acrobat improve more and faster.
It's a mistake, however, to compare Acrobat to an idealized version of an unwritten viewer for an undeveloped file format. Even assuming that the first version of the Metro format is mature (which is unlikely - both PDF and PostScript have undergone several major revisions), the first version of the Metro viewer is likely to have bugs that are far worse than the ones you point out in Acrobat. Sure, there will be updates available, but then you run into the same problem you have when needing the latest Acrobat plugin. And if your clients won't let you install Acrobat Reader, are they likely to let you run Windows Update to get the latest Metro viewer?
So, while I agree that there's room for improvement, Microsoft's got a lot of catching-up to do before they can think about pushing Metro as a superior alternative to PDF.
Given that these guys are selling something that's also available for free, which is not the world's smartest business model, I suspect that CherryOS will go out of business, the lawyers *may* get paid for their work, and the PearPC developers will go on with life as usual.
Your analogy is flawed. Here's a more appropriate musical analogy:
Random local band finds an old tape of a Grateful Dead concert bootleg (sanctioned by the band), passes it through a graphic equalizer that boosts the high-end slightly, and re-records it.
Same band releases the recording under their own name with the title "Happy Corpses (Live)", and tries to sell it.
Some people get a little miffed.
The pattern in both examples is the same: someone allows a creation of theirs to be freely copied, under the condition that it remains free. Someone else decides to take advantage of that generosity to try to make some cash. When you put it in those terms the whole idea sounds ludicrous - charging money for something that someone else is giving away for free just isn't a viable business model, so the person trying to do this already has a big "retard" label stamped on his/her forehead (my apologies to the actual retards who read/. regularly - I meant no offense by comparing you to the CherryOS "developers").
But this is getting off the point, which is to compare the two cases brought up in the parent post. In the CherryOS case, someone is trying to take something free and charge money for it (which, as SCO has so brilliantly demonstrated, doesn't work). In the P2P case, people are trying to take something that costs money and get it for free. The former example is certainly immoral and probably illegal, the later is certainly illegal and probably immoral. So, while it's easy to craft a moral code in which both actions are reprehensible, depending on your opinions about legality and morality it's also possible to craft moral codes in which either of the two examples is acceptable but not the other. So there's no logical inconsistency, and Slashdot is off the hook.
That being said, my moral code falls along the following lines: if I release something for free, I expect it to stay free; if I charge money for making something available, I expect people who take advantage of that availability to pay for it. But I also expect to provide added value in exchange for that money. CherryOS could make a viable business out of providing a value-added service around PearPC, but pissing off their code providers is not the best way to go about doing that.
You forgot one important fact: according to RIAA logic, one 60-watt lightbulb is equivalent to sixty one-watt bulbs. And some people are even using 100-watt bulbs, or operating multiple lightbulbs at the same time. Then they invite their friends over and share the light with them. So each person who screws in their own lightbulb is really stealing thousands of lightbulbs' worth of work from the RIAA lawyers! How long can we let this go on?
Actually, transcription isn't entirely straightforward either. Many genes contain alternative splicing sites which tell the cell where to splice the pre-mRNA to turn it into mRNA. These alternative splicings can affect the sequence of the final protein, the expression level of the protein, and probably many other things we haven't thought of yet.
You're absolutely correct. That's why we have seeing-eye cats, why cops bring cats with them on patrol, and why the Swiss have cats to help them find skiiers who get trapped in avalanches. Because dogs can't think for themselves.
Hate to break it to you, pal, but your cat is just as hard-wired as any dog (or any human, for that matter); the very fact that you're able to generalize about cat behavior proves this. And dogs are less hard-wired than you think. Every dog I know has a unique personality which is a lot more complicated than the slobbering affection you portray.
If you honestly believe that either major-party candidate will (or even has the power to) "emasculate American military and cultural influence", then you'll be deciding your vote for entirely the wrong reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe add a feature that turns off the Caps Lock key.
It's called PRESSING THE KEY. If you don't press it, it doesn't turn on! Simple as that.
Seriously, people. Learn to type, and leave my keyboard alone!
The article talks about the dispute between the city and the company providing the system, but what about the drivers whose cars were trapped there for three days? I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that taking someone's car and refusing to give it back is a pretty reasonable definition of property theft. If they haven't already, the people who were affected by this mess should file a class-action suit agains the company AND the city for this stupid stunt.
Giving your ears some downtime in the first place is one of the best things you can do, actually. If you're listening to loud music, taking a break for 10 minutes out of every hour will reduce your chances of suffering from hearing loss. There are cells in your ear (called outer hair cells) that are actively helping you hear. That activity produces byproducts which can build up in the cells. Taking a rest gives the cells a chance to clear out those byproducts before they build to a point where they can kill the cells. Although people are still actively looking for ways to preserve and restore hearing acuity, so far the only viable solution is "don't blast your ears out." Or be a non-mammalian vertebrate -- it's your choice.
I'll be surprised if this hasn't been said yet, but there's an obvious name for this:
The Chinternet.
You realize, of course, that you're going to have to marry this girl - she's never, ever going to get rid of you no matter how badly you behave.
Wrong.
The cochlea is a waveguide - incoming sounds launch a wave along the basilar membrane. This wave is dispersive, meaning that at a given location, low frequency energy travels more quickly than high frequency energy. For energy at a given frequency, the wave slows down as it travels until it reaches a "characteristic place". At the same time, the amplitude of vibration increases. The characteristic place is defined as the location where the amplitude of vibration peaks; for a given location, the frequency that causes the largest vibration is called the "best frequency" for that place. At the best frequency, the cochlea is locally resonant, and energy is shunted through the basilar membrane. As a result, the energy at a given frequency does not propagate significantly beyond the characteristic place (this is equivalent to saying that the wave speed decreases to zero near the characteristic place).
The cochlea is tonotopically organized, so that more basal locations (near where the stapes inserts) have high best frequencies, and the best frequency decreases systematically with position as you move apically. As a consequence, high-frequency sound energy that enters the cochlea is shunted through the basilar membrane at a basal location, and does not propagate further into the cochlea. Low frequency energy, in contrast, propagates as a wave along the basilar membrane to the apical region of the cochlea. In other words, high-frequency sounds only vibrate the most basal part of the cochlea, whereas low-frequency sounds vibrate the entire cochlea.
For more information on the cochlear traveling wave, read the classic papers by Georg von Bekesy, who won the Nobel prize for discovering it. You might also want to look at some of the early computational models by Zwislocki and/or de Boer. For a more introductory description, I recommend chapter 5 of Geisler's "From Sound To Synapse", or Patuzzi's chapter in the book "The Cochlea".
Not gonna happen. Ever hear of human studies committees? They tend to frown upon experiments with designs like "we're going to expose group A to loud sound, 24 hours a day while locking group B in a soundproof room, and compare their hearing loss after a week." Unfortunately, showing a correlation between portable music player use and hearing loss is about the best we can do.
This is just my (albeit fairly well-informed) opinion, but I think the difference is that modern systems do a better job reproducing the bass. Loud bass is the absolute WORST thing you can do for your ears - it's like launching a tsunami that travels along the entire length of your cochlea, wreaking havoc as it goes. So turn down that damn subwoofer, you young whipper-snappers!
You're absolutely right that noise-reducing headphones most likely help rather than hurt. However, your statement about hearing loss being caused by high-frequency sound is incorrect. Loud low-frequency sound is much worse than loud high-frequency sound, because the loud sound has to travel along the entire length of the cochlea to reach its intended destination, and it causes damage along the way. The reason you lose high-frequency hearing first is that the high-frequency region of the cochlea is closest to where the sound comes in, so that every loud sound that hits your ears passes by that region and causes damage.
Preventing significant hearing loss is easy - don't blast music, and give your ears a rest once in a while. It's kind of like not staring into the sun all day, but for your ears.
No, these are the people who convince university professors to spend years polishing their course notes into a textbook, get the prof to sign over the copyright to them, print a single edition of the book, refuse to print more when the prof wants to use the book for his own class the next year, and then charge $100 a student for the prof to photocopy his own copy of the book to give to the students. We have a word for people like that: middlemen. Actually we have a bunch of other words as well, but out of deference to the internet I won't say them here. So few professors actually make any kind of a profit from writing textbooks that in the long term, I expect to see more and more of them appearing online instead of in print.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but up in Boston I imagine it often happened something like this:
1. Sign up for an account at Arlington Trust Co., a local bank (1987);
2. Arlington Trust Co. merges with Shawmut (1988);
3. Shawmut merges with Fleet (1995);
4. Fleet merges with BankBoston (itself the result of serial mergers) to become FleetBoston (1999);
5. FleetBoston merges with Bank of America (2004).
In other words, these are the world's largest banks because of a series of mergers and absorptions of the world's smaller banks. And once people have their money in a particular bank, it's not always convenient to move it somewhere else. I personally have my money in a small local bank, but if they merged with a larger bank it'd take a pretty serious degradation of quality to get me to switch.
Yeah, I'm following up to my own post. But as soon as I hit "Submit", it occurred to me that I don't even know what an evolutionary psychologist IS! Someone who studies how psychological properties evolved? Someone who studies psychology using techniques that are modeled after evolution? A new kind of psychologist that's just now emerging from the primordial soup? Either way, it still seems to me that the "psychologist" tag makes the person not necessarily the best qualified individual to be talking about how testosterone levels affect sex determination in the womb. Where does the Times get their experts?
More importantly, why should we trust the word of an evolutionary psychologist about this particular topic?
Now that it's legal to order wine from other states online, I'm sure some of you must have recommendations of good wineries. I'll start by tossing out one from Napa Valley, V. Sattui:
http://www.vsattui.com/
I find their reds, particularly their Cabernets and Zinfandels (no, not White Zinfandel, regular plain old Zinfandel), to be quite nice. Not a big fan of their whites, though. I'd love to find an exceedingly dry, oaky Chardonnay, so let's hear some suggestions!
It's easy to be dismissive of Deaf culture (they capitalize the D when referring to the culture) if you define them as "people with a birth defect or disease...." That's not how they define themselves, however. While I would be hard-pressed to pin down what does and does not constitute a culture, one feature of a culture that almost everyone can agree on is a common language. Members of the Deaf culture do share a common language - here in the U.S., it's American Sign Language (ASL). Despite the fact that it's "spoken" using the hands, it has all the properties of a language - it's got its own grammar, communicating activates the language centers of the brain, etc. It's also not just a mapping of English to gestures, any more than German is a mapping of English to other sounds. So Deaf culture is real, and not just a big deafness support group. From that standpoint (to answer your question), I think it's unlikely that blind people will establish their own culture.
As for cochlear implants destroying Deaf culture, I don't have any firsthand experience of this but I've heard that the culture's attitude toward implants is softening. Initially, the culture was worried that children with implants would learn English and not ASL, so the culture would die out (and, I suspect, many of them feared that they wouldn't be able to talk to their own children, which is a pretty scary concept). They saw implants as the ethical equivalent of performing surgery on an immigrant to make them speak English instead of their native tongue. What they're starting to realize (much as many immigrant cultures started to realize shortly after coming to America in the late 19th / early 20th centuries) is that their children will learn *both* languages, and be able to navigate both cultures equally effectively, and be better off for it.
There's a handy little package called cfg-update that does 90% of the updates automatically for you (e.g., if only comments have changed, it'll just update without prompting you), and makes it easier to do the other 10%. I'd go crazy without it. It really should be the default updater.
Sure there's room for improvement. And as you point out, Acrobat continues to improve. Hopefully this announcement from MS will prod Adobe to make Acrobat improve more and faster.
It's a mistake, however, to compare Acrobat to an idealized version of an unwritten viewer for an undeveloped file format. Even assuming that the first version of the Metro format is mature (which is unlikely - both PDF and PostScript have undergone several major revisions), the first version of the Metro viewer is likely to have bugs that are far worse than the ones you point out in Acrobat. Sure, there will be updates available, but then you run into the same problem you have when needing the latest Acrobat plugin. And if your clients won't let you install Acrobat Reader, are they likely to let you run Windows Update to get the latest Metro viewer?
So, while I agree that there's room for improvement, Microsoft's got a lot of catching-up to do before they can think about pushing Metro as a superior alternative to PDF.
Given that these guys are selling something that's also available for free, which is not the world's smartest business model, I suspect that CherryOS will go out of business, the lawyers *may* get paid for their work, and the PearPC developers will go on with life as usual.
Your analogy is flawed. Here's a more appropriate musical analogy:
The pattern in both examples is the same: someone allows a creation of theirs to be freely copied, under the condition that it remains free. Someone else decides to take advantage of that generosity to try to make some cash. When you put it in those terms the whole idea sounds ludicrous - charging money for something that someone else is giving away for free just isn't a viable business model, so the person trying to do this already has a big "retard" label stamped on his/her forehead (my apologies to the actual retards who read /. regularly - I meant no offense by comparing you to the CherryOS "developers").
But this is getting off the point, which is to compare the two cases brought up in the parent post. In the CherryOS case, someone is trying to take something free and charge money for it (which, as SCO has so brilliantly demonstrated, doesn't work). In the P2P case, people are trying to take something that costs money and get it for free. The former example is certainly immoral and probably illegal, the later is certainly illegal and probably immoral. So, while it's easy to craft a moral code in which both actions are reprehensible, depending on your opinions about legality and morality it's also possible to craft moral codes in which either of the two examples is acceptable but not the other. So there's no logical inconsistency, and Slashdot is off the hook.
That being said, my moral code falls along the following lines: if I release something for free, I expect it to stay free; if I charge money for making something available, I expect people who take advantage of that availability to pay for it. But I also expect to provide added value in exchange for that money. CherryOS could make a viable business out of providing a value-added service around PearPC, but pissing off their code providers is not the best way to go about doing that.
You forgot one important fact: according to RIAA logic, one 60-watt lightbulb is equivalent to sixty one-watt bulbs. And some people are even using 100-watt bulbs, or operating multiple lightbulbs at the same time. Then they invite their friends over and share the light with them. So each person who screws in their own lightbulb is really stealing thousands of lightbulbs' worth of work from the RIAA lawyers! How long can we let this go on?
Actually, transcription isn't entirely straightforward either. Many genes contain alternative splicing sites which tell the cell where to splice the pre-mRNA to turn it into mRNA. These alternative splicings can affect the sequence of the final protein, the expression level of the protein, and probably many other things we haven't thought of yet.
You're absolutely right. The Kerry/Edwards campaign really ought to explain their plan in detail somewhere....
Yeah, but who wants to come straight down to "land"?
You're absolutely correct. That's why we have seeing-eye cats, why cops bring cats with them on patrol, and why the Swiss have cats to help them find skiiers who get trapped in avalanches. Because dogs can't think for themselves.
Hate to break it to you, pal, but your cat is just as hard-wired as any dog (or any human, for that matter); the very fact that you're able to generalize about cat behavior proves this. And dogs are less hard-wired than you think. Every dog I know has a unique personality which is a lot more complicated than the slobbering affection you portray.
If you honestly believe that either major-party candidate will (or even has the power to) "emasculate American military and cultural influence", then you'll be deciding your vote for entirely the wrong reasons.