guys with day jobs who program in the evenings, why can't musicans get a day job and write and play/record by evening?
Even some signed and famous musicians have day jobs. A vocalist for one of my favorite artists also works as a waitress 'cause she has to pay the bills. Haha. Seems like those royalties don't add up to that much. I wonder what percent of signed musicians can make enough money to support themselves without day jobs.
I don't think that musicians should just release all their music for free unless it is their first album and no one has ever heard of them. Otherwise they can just open their own online store and sell FLAC/OGG/MP3 files along with free downloads of 30 second samples of same. If the music is good, they should have no problem making a decent living without the record company.
Remember some fans want to give the band some money for their work. I am anything but rich, but when one of my favorite artists ever put up an Amazon donation jar. I donated the max of $50. I liked the idea that they would actually be buying something (maybe lunch?) with my money! It was cool. It still wasn't much but it was the least I could do for what they had added to my life. If 90% of that had gone to the record company obviously I wouldn't have bothered. Although I own new copies of all of their CDs I still feel like I haven't paid the artist since they might get like $1 per CD. What a joke. A waitress gets a bigger tip than that.
I'm sure radio stations in the UK are a lot like they are in america: the same handful of songs played over and over, from a narrow list of genres. I'm not old enough to remember, but from what I gather, radio didn't used to be like this.
I think radio music has pretty much always sucked. Long before Clearchannel. And small (unsigned) bands never got any radio time at least as far back as I can remember (mid 1970s). If you think today's pop music is bad (and it is) just imagine hearing the Bee Gees or Barry Manilow played over and over again.
One difference is that one company now owns most of the stations in the US. Identical (computer generated?) playlists of the latest rehashed, cheap to produce, garbage is now all you hear.
But the biggest difference is that you no longer have to blindly buy music just hoping that there is something you will like. The record industry can no longer get away with printing a record with one 3 minute radio hit and another 57 minutes of filler songs that took the band all of 5 minutes each to produce. Most online music stores allow you to play 30 second samples of nearly every song. Even on some rare and old stuff. Between that and the (illegal) P2P networks you really can try before you buy. That is such a fundamental change.
In the 70s and 80s I almost never bought music because the radio was the only way to hear anything other than randomly buying albums. Occasionally I would hear an album in a record store that I liked. Sometime in the late 80s there was a CD store near me that allowed you to actually listen to an entire CD before you bought it. For the first time in my life I felt free to actually try new music. Stuff that I had never heard on the radio. It was amazing. The problem was that they charged a premium for the actual CD. So it was tempting to listen to it at the store for free and then buy it elsewhere to save a few bucks. They didn't stay in business very long.
I started to see used CD stores pop up in my area at around this time, but their selection was pretty poor by any standard and they didn't pay much for CDs. Besides, before minidisc and DAT came out in the early 90s there was no way to make a digital copy. High quality metal tapes were pretty good but they wore out.
I think it was Amazon that really changed things for me. Along with Audiogalaxy. As much as I despise Bezos for his abusive patents, I gotta give the guy credit. It was great. The large selection and that whole suggesting similar music thing (which I guess he now has a patent for) was incredible. I could listen to 30 second samples of quite a few albums. Then I would download them from Audiogalaxy (which had almost everything) to see if I really liked it. Then I would buy the album from Amazon at least partially to reward them for helping me find new music. It's still that way for me except that I use soulseek or emule and don't have a job or any money so I have to be satisfied with low quality mp3s until I find a job again.
Minimum wage laws protect your rights to earn a living that does not leave you hungry and even leaves some time to pursue happynes.
I don't know what country you're from, but here in the States min wage laws have never done a goddamn thing. They follow along with market wages always so low that they are irrelevant. If you really want to see what minimum wage laws can do, raise 'em above the market minimum wage. I mean, Duh! Never gonna happen though. Our corporacracy wouldn't allow it.
Economic theory states that, although it would indeed raise the wages of the poorest (legal) folks who already have jobs, it would also raise unemployment. You would see more downsizing at the lowest levels. That's my biggest concern actually. I'm 35 and I can't find any job. At any wage. Where I live the problem, I think, is a kind of reverse racism. Brasilians have moved here in droves (something wrong with Brasil?) and have taken all the shit jobs that I would normally qualify for. Applying for a job as a dishwasher or laborer you might as well be applying for a job as CEO of IBM. Brasilians here have risen to managerial positions and given the choice to hire someone from their own country who speaks fluent Portugeuse, who do you think they pick? Maybe they also figure that as a native I can do better than the shit jobs. I have now reached the conclusion that I am basically unhireable. Period. Not what I thought the world would be like when I was a kid. I wonder if I could find a job in Brasil...
Can you give an example of a good software patent? Software is just a bunch of instructions (machine code) to a fancy calculator. It's just a certain way of using someone else's invention. It's like trying to patent a certain method for putting toast in a toaster, or a certain way to steer a car, or a certain method for getting AIBO to beg for food. It's logic and mathematics and language. None of which the 'inventor' of the latest and greatest bubblesort algorithm created.
Although you cannot justify software patents merely by trying to include them in the same class as meatspace inventions due to their abstract informational nature, short term (one year) software patents may be justifiable as a way to get software producers to actually release their code into the public domain. Much of the best commercial code is kept a tightly held secret. If such a system could be devised it might be in the public interest. I'm not even sure if we should use the term 'patent' though. It tends to invite abuse.
The Commission is supposedly strictly technocratic and apolitical, and in reality very strongly ideologically molded into a free-market worshipping sorcerer apprentice that thinks Europe should be turned into the ultimate Adam Smith lab test.
With the exception of software patents of course. Unless you are thinking of the corporate bribes as an 'invisible hand'. Patents have nothing to do with (free) market economics. The fact that some libertarians are in favor of them doesn't change this fact. Without government intervention there would be no patents. Patent systems resemble fascism more than laissez faire capitalism.
There is a third option. They could simply have released the (now freed) information as work in progress. With the caveat that it has not been verified yet and is quite likely to be wrong. What you are suggesting is that CYA is the most important consideration. They could have just said something like: "This data here has led us to believe that there is an object out there that may qualify as a tenth planet, but we do not yet have any evidence that we regard as conclusive." We see press releases like this all the time on slashdot. Although they do tend to get overhyped by the media trying to sensationalize everything, I think it is still interesting and useful information.
It's nice to know they have an unlimited, infinite budget to work with. I wonder how the anti-terrorist budget compares to the pro-RIAA/MPAA budget. It would be nice if we all could have an unlimited budget. Then maybe we could all afford to buy those CDs and DVDs regardless of the price. Nice to know that the land of the 'free' also has infinite resources for jail building. Last time I checked there were something like 30 million citizen-thieves ripping off these large media conglomerates. Hopefully we can get an even higher percentage of our citizens behind bars.
When nearly every player you have supports this format, how is this a problem?
When indeed. Maybe in 2015. In this age of 400GB and even 500GB hard drives, I'm not sure I see the point of actually paying for music encoded with lossy compression. FLAC and APE can compress music down to less than half the original file size. Nowadays the only point of lossy compression is to fit more music on a portable. Just compress it yourself for that purpose.
Except that gifted kids aren't much different from regular kids! All the studies I've seen show that if you challenge a kid, they will rise to the challenge.
I have to disagree with you there. In fact that may be one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. If there is one thing I have learned in life it is that there is an immense difference among individuals in terms of intellectual abilities starting from a very young age. Part of the reason that certain children are less interested in learning is that they are just not very good at it.
I have been trying to teach my (6 year old) nephew some basic subjects: mathematics, foreign languages like Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese, vocabulary etc. But it is frustrating. His main interest is impressing me and 'being right' per se. What he does manage to learn he forgets very quickly. I was different. Learning and memorizing were much easier for me. And I was actually interested. That makes a huge difference. My nephew would much rather go ride his bike and run around. He likes physical stuff more than ideas. I was the opposite. If anything the problem with our educational systems is that they do not sufficiently accomodate such differences. What is merely a challenge to one child is quite literally impossible for another. If you teach at a pace that only the most intelligent children can learn at all the other children will learn nothing at all.
This nation does not have a history of education or academic excellence.
U.S. universities attract very smart people from all over the world even today. It is true that many of the greatest inventions credited to the U.S. were made by immigrants, but the U.S. is a country of immigrants. That is kind of the whole point. We attracted those great minds to our country with our more laissez-faire economic policies among other things. They chose to live here. Most of those great minds lived in our cities. So I'm not sure what they did with those vast tracts of land.
The U.K., Germany, and the U.S. are the three countries in the world most responsible for the modern technologies that the rest of the world benefits from today. It seems at the very least disingenuous to ignore that fact. I don't deny that there are a lot of stupid and lazy and brutish people in the U.S., but that is also true of the rest of the world. Only a small percentage of the human race is responsible for technological advancements.
And anyway, I don't think our educational system (per se) lags behind that of other countries. To the extent that there is a problem I think it is cultural. We have become lazy. It is not so much that the teachers in other countries are so much better. It's that the students tend to be more disciplined. You can't learn if you don't study. And the fact that our children so often grow up in front of the mind-numbing television cannot be helping matters.
A disadvantage is naturally that data will be more crammed on to the platters,
Increased areal density is a good thing. Not a bad thing. A drive with a higher areal density is a faster drive. It is also more secure. It is more difficult to extract data from the platters.
You are correct about the 100GB/platter though. This drive is less technologically advanced than Seagate's 7200.8. Hitachi has this habit of just piling on the platters. The deathstar had 5 platters too. This submission looks like ad copy from Hitachi. Almost total misinformation. And yes, the SATA II maximum transfer rate is irrelevant. No one is going to get near those rates even with striped drives. It certainly isn't going to make this drive any faster. And 16MB drive caches have been around for ages.
Who gets to decide what is 'worthy'? I don't think it's really the concentrated attacks against spamvertisers that will clog the internet pipes. I think it will be the combination of that and the inevitable retaliations. It happened with makelovenotspam and from their perspective it must have seemed a very effective defense. It will only encourage them for the next skirmish. Although I don't think the retaliations would last long. If it didn't have the anticipated effect of shutting down the blue frog client, I'd give them no more than a month before they grew tired of it.
I am fence sitting on this one. I joined the site and downloaded the blue frog client and may use it if only because my one computer isn't enough to make any difference in internet traffic by itself anyway. In this kind of war no one soldier makes much of a difference to the outcome.
However I am concerned about starting a large scale netwar with the spammers, effectively shutting down the internet. This is essentially what happened for me locally during the whole makelovenotspam fiasco. The spammers faught back with everything they had. It was not pretty. Also, as a rabid e-pirate complete with parrot and eye patch, I am concerned that the war could be an excuse for RIAA/MPAA sponsored attacks as well. The fact is that the internet is a very fragile system which can be easily broken. Some people are arguing that maybe it should be until our governments are willing to pass enforceable spam laws with actual teeth. But I'm not so sure I'd be willing to go that far.
I think a better long term system would be to get large groups of people to join an anti-spam organization which would accept donations and membership dues or whatever to fight against companies that advertise with spam in the real world. Something like a shady, vigilante, version of the EFF. The idea would be to hurt and put out of business companies that advertise with spam as much as possible. Moebius faxes, war dialing of 800 numbers, junk mail attacks, publishing of personal contact information for everyone in management positions including cellphone numbers, email and snail mail addresses. Maybe even opportunistic vandalism in a car-keying, sugar in the gas tank, potato in the tailpipe, spray-painting "spam sucks" onto windshields, kind of way. Presumably a professional organization could come up with even more nuisance ideas. Maybe a freesite could keep track of the exploits.
I have heard it stated many times here on slashdot that that is a myth: that most forms of nuclear fusion would still produce significant amounts of nuclear waste, just far less of it and with a shorter half life. Or something like that. So I guess a lot depends on the details of the specific implementation. That is, if we can ever get sustained fusion to work without actually building a star. Which at this point I think is open to question.
Further, Otto cycle engines are at their most efficient operating at full throttle (that's why you cruise in a high gear)
I am not a mechanic. So hopefully one will jump in here. But I do not believe that is accurate. A higher gear means a less open throttle. The whole point of higher transmission gear ratios is to save overall gas, not to increase efficiency per se. As you point out, it may in fact be slightly less efficient to run the engine at lower RPMs, but running at 6000-8000 RPM (full throttle) uses more energy. Actually I think the exact RPM that is most efficient depends on the specific engine design. Certain transmissions (i.e. hydraulic) are independent from engine RPM and this leads to higher efficiencies.
I think part of the reason your point about Otto engines in modern automobiles doesn't hold is due to the oversized engines needed to achieve reasonable acceleration and hill climbing ability. A two cycle 50 cc moped/scooter engine can run efficiently with its throttle open all the way because it is sized to be the absolute minimum necessary. Of course it achieves high mileage (100+ mpg) mainly because it is moving around something like 1/10 the mass of the average car.
I am also an SUV hater and many people may buy them for the the reason you state. However there are valid reasons for purchasing one. There aint no free lunch in physics or economics. If you want to carry more cargo you will need a larger, heavier vehicle to do it. I own a small pickup truck with a full length bed because I like to be able to carry stuff. Especially messy stuff that would damage a nice SUV interior. It is lighter than an SUV, but its typical real world 16 mpg city/highway mileage is not any better for some reason. I'm also thinking about mounting a plow on it one of these years.
I live about 20 miles outside of Boston and would like to be able to commute in affordably. So I am planning to buy some kind of a scooter with a 75-150 cc engine to save not only on ever increasing gas prices with 75-100 mpg, but also on the insanely high cost of car insurance (even on my 7 year old beaten up pickup) mostly due to the mandatory liability. Easier parking in tight spaces is also a bonus. I am planning to just cancel the insurance on the truck for the 6 warmer months each year. The biggest drawback of course is cargo space and the extreme danger of driving a two wheeled vehicle especially in the rain and/or at night. Needless to say, in this climate it is useless in the winter months.
The only time I have ever driven an SUV was one time when I rented one (a '99 Mitsubishi Montero Sport LS) to drive in a desert. Try driving off-road through a harsh desert landscape with a Prius. If I lived in any of the Mexican border states, I would probably own a vehicle like that due to its suitability for off-road desert driving.
Winning $1M back then you could retire and still splurge without blowing all of it.
Maybe in the US/UK if you plan to have a family, but there are many countries where you could live very comfortably on 1/4 of that for at least the next 40 years. And that's without any bank interest or investments. I make less than 10k a year. So even working for the next 30 years would net me less than 300,000. So that would seem more than enough to retire on. But then I don't have a family *cough*.
Okay I can see arguing for B5 and maybe Firefly and maybe even Lost (although as a scripted Survivor that's a stretch), but the Gilmore Girls?! Buffy?! What have you been smoking? And do you have any for me? ST:TNG may be my favorite SciFi series but quite of few of those episodes sucked big time. It's not the actors or the directors but the writers that I hold responsible. It's not impossible to write a TV series with all great episodes, but you just don't see that on American television due to this too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth problem with the writing here. It is not necessary. Even the best American television suffers from this unevenness. I guess there's not much point in writing good episodes when the audience can't tell the difference. That's why it is the dawn of the reality show era in this country. But then television has almost always been 99.9% pure shite since it was invented. It's all about appealing to the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator).
Having lived through the 70's I can tell you with onitoligical certitude that US television at the time was a vast, vile, steaming heap of crap.
Got your back on that one. I wish my young brain had not been subjected to Charlies Angels, The Love Boat (ouch), Fantasy Island, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, or The 6 Million Dollar Man. And what was with that whole 70s Bigfoot obsession? Lots of movies and TV shows about it including an episode from The 6 Million Dollar Man and The Night Stalker. Maybe it had something to do with the 70s fascination with supernatural horror (based on Christian mythology). Remember In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy? For me that symbolizes that decades fascination with stuff like that.
Doctor Who with Tom Baker, ST:TOS, and those campy Roger Corman-esque and Japanese (Toho Studios etc.) guy-in-rubber-suit Saturday afternoon monster movies (late 70s) were the high points of that TV era for me. Even cartoons like Speed Racer and Felix the Cat seem less embarrassing than 70s network TV. And the 'good' shows like Night Gallery and Night Stalker would be considered unwatcheable by modern standards. I have heard that there is one TV movie from that era, an ABC Movie of the Week about witches called Crowhaven Farm that stands out as the best television of that era. But it is impossible to find a copy. So I can't confirm it.
I can still remember coming home from school and flipping on my old telly that took more than a minute to 'warm up'. The so called remote had big rectangular buttons that seemed to use a loud clicking sound to turn it on and change the channels. I think simulating the clicking sound could shut the TV off.
Luckily I had a friend with a DEC PDP-11 by the late 70s. So that offered some degree of entertainment in the form of early computer games like Super Star Trek and Adventure (Collosal Cave).
Perhaps the biggest mind-rape of that era was the music and the hideous clothes (which ironically young girls of the current era seem to have copied). A decade that includes the Bee Gees and Barry Manilow playing on 8-track tapes, The Hardy Boys, platform shoes, bell bottoms, velour v-neck and button down shirts with those long pointy lapels, truly is (or should be) an embarrassment for everyone who had to live through it.
Even the feathered hair, skin-tight Jordache jeans, leg warmers (remember Flash Dance?) and synth-pop of the early 80s were a huge step up the evolutionary ladder for western culture. I don't know if it was a worldwide phenomenon or just in North America and Western Europe. I have to wonder what East Asian or South American culture, for instance, was like at that time.
In other words, Enterprise was a brutal massacre of Star Trek.
And it didn't help that Mr. Quantum Leap (aka Scott Bakula) was the captain or that the theme song and intro sequence were enough to make you cover your mouth and run for the nearest toilet, hoping to avoid the (ultimately unavoidable) loss of lunch. That female vulcan was hot though. Probably the best looking character in any of the Star Treks. Too bad they can't show breasts on American TV.
Are you old enough to remember MacGyver? I just couldn't give Stargate: SG1 a chance due to picturing him as a character from a painfully bad 80s network TV show. Just seeing him makes me cringe. Ouch. I also don't tend to jump at watching TV series based on bad movies. The least the writers can do is come up with a semi-original storyline. The same is true for ST:E. I can't watch it without picturing Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, yet another painfully bad 80s TV show, alongside his ridiculous cigar-wielding sidekick (Dean Stockwell). Both series should have avoided these well known actors. There are plenty of good, unknown actors. The younger audience won't recognize them anyway and the older audience will be reaching for their vomit bags. I just couldn't get past it for either series.
After all, some of very best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was done with his assistance.
I have only seen like one episode of ST:DS9. So I can't speak to that. But I don't think he wrote the best eps of ST:TNG. He did write some very good ones however like The Chase, Yesterday's Enterprise, First Contact, Thine Own Self, and All Good Things. But he also wrote episodes like Relics, Chain of Command, and Redemption, which were not my cup of tea.
My favorite ST:TNG episodes include: 11001001, Elementary Dear Data, Time Squared, The Royale, Q Who, Remember Me, Clues, Identity Crisis, Violations, Cause and Effect, The Inner Light, Time's Arrow, Ship in a Bottle, and Frame of Mind. RDM didn't write any of those.
Still, he certainly is one of the best television SciFi writers around. He has also written a few Carnivale episodes that were pretty good (i.e. "The Day That Was the Day"). I am going to download some of his ST:DS9 episodes if I can find them.
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So that's who's to blame for mediocrity in the top 40 these past few years
You spelled 'decades' wrong.
guys with day jobs who program in the evenings, why can't musicans get a day job and write and play/record by evening?
Even some signed and famous musicians have day jobs. A vocalist for one of my favorite artists also works as a waitress 'cause she has to pay the bills. Haha. Seems like those royalties don't add up to that much. I wonder what percent of signed musicians can make enough money to support themselves without day jobs.
I don't think that musicians should just release all their music for free unless it is their first album and no one has ever heard of them. Otherwise they can just open their own online store and sell FLAC/OGG/MP3 files along with free downloads of 30 second samples of same. If the music is good, they should have no problem making a decent living without the record company.
Remember some fans want to give the band some money for their work. I am anything but rich, but when one of my favorite artists ever put up an Amazon donation jar. I donated the max of $50. I liked the idea that they would actually be buying something (maybe lunch?) with my money! It was cool. It still wasn't much but it was the least I could do for what they had added to my life. If 90% of that had gone to the record company obviously I wouldn't have bothered. Although I own new copies of all of their CDs I still feel like I haven't paid the artist since they might get like $1 per CD. What a joke. A waitress gets a bigger tip than that.
I'm sure radio stations in the UK are a lot like they are in america: the same handful of songs played over and over, from a narrow list of genres. I'm not old enough to remember, but from what I gather, radio didn't used to be like this.
I think radio music has pretty much always sucked. Long before Clearchannel. And small (unsigned) bands never got any radio time at least as far back as I can remember (mid 1970s). If you think today's pop music is bad (and it is) just imagine hearing the Bee Gees or Barry Manilow played over and over again.
One difference is that one company now owns most of the stations in the US. Identical (computer generated?) playlists of the latest rehashed, cheap to produce, garbage is now all you hear.
But the biggest difference is that you no longer have to blindly buy music just hoping that there is something you will like. The record industry can no longer get away with printing a record with one 3 minute radio hit and another 57 minutes of filler songs that took the band all of 5 minutes each to produce. Most online music stores allow you to play 30 second samples of nearly every song. Even on some rare and old stuff. Between that and the (illegal) P2P networks you really can try before you buy. That is such a fundamental change.
In the 70s and 80s I almost never bought music because the radio was the only way to hear anything other than randomly buying albums. Occasionally I would hear an album in a record store that I liked. Sometime in the late 80s there was a CD store near me that allowed you to actually listen to an entire CD before you bought it. For the first time in my life I felt free to actually try new music. Stuff that I had never heard on the radio. It was amazing. The problem was that they charged a premium for the actual CD. So it was tempting to listen to it at the store for free and then buy it elsewhere to save a few bucks. They didn't stay in business very long.
I started to see used CD stores pop up in my area at around this time, but their selection was pretty poor by any standard and they didn't pay much for CDs. Besides, before minidisc and DAT came out in the early 90s there was no way to make a digital copy. High quality metal tapes were pretty good but they wore out.
I think it was Amazon that really changed things for me. Along with Audiogalaxy. As much as I despise Bezos for his abusive patents, I gotta give the guy credit. It was great. The large selection and that whole suggesting similar music thing (which I guess he now has a patent for) was incredible. I could listen to 30 second samples of quite a few albums. Then I would download them from Audiogalaxy (which had almost everything) to see if I really liked it. Then I would buy the album from Amazon at least partially to reward them for helping me find new music. It's still that way for me except that I use soulseek or emule and don't have a job or any money so I have to be satisfied with low quality mp3s until I find a job again.
Minimum wage laws protect your rights to earn a living that does not leave you hungry and even leaves some time to pursue happynes.
I don't know what country you're from, but here in the States min wage laws have never done a goddamn thing. They follow along with market wages always so low that they are irrelevant. If you really want to see what minimum wage laws can do, raise 'em above the market minimum wage. I mean, Duh! Never gonna happen though. Our corporacracy wouldn't allow it.
Economic theory states that, although it would indeed raise the wages of the poorest (legal) folks who already have jobs, it would also raise unemployment. You would see more downsizing at the lowest levels. That's my biggest concern actually. I'm 35 and I can't find any job. At any wage. Where I live the problem, I think, is a kind of reverse racism. Brasilians have moved here in droves (something wrong with Brasil?) and have taken all the shit jobs that I would normally qualify for. Applying for a job as a dishwasher or laborer you might as well be applying for a job as CEO of IBM. Brasilians here have risen to managerial positions and given the choice to hire someone from their own country who speaks fluent Portugeuse, who do you think they pick? Maybe they also figure that as a native I can do better than the shit jobs. I have now reached the conclusion that I am basically unhireable. Period. Not what I thought the world would be like when I was a kid. I wonder if I could find a job in Brasil...
and also given the fact that radio is quite low-quality in the first place.
Guess you've never heard a 128kbps MP3 then.
Can you give an example of a good software patent? Software is just a bunch of instructions (machine code) to a fancy calculator. It's just a certain way of using someone else's invention. It's like trying to patent a certain method for putting toast in a toaster, or a certain way to steer a car, or a certain method for getting AIBO to beg for food. It's logic and mathematics and language. None of which the 'inventor' of the latest and greatest bubblesort algorithm created.
Although you cannot justify software patents merely by trying to include them in the same class as meatspace inventions due to their abstract informational nature, short term (one year) software patents may be justifiable as a way to get software producers to actually release their code into the public domain. Much of the best commercial code is kept a tightly held secret. If such a system could be devised it might be in the public interest. I'm not even sure if we should use the term 'patent' though. It tends to invite abuse.
The Commission is supposedly strictly technocratic and apolitical, and in reality very strongly ideologically molded into a free-market worshipping sorcerer apprentice that thinks Europe should be turned into the ultimate Adam Smith lab test.
With the exception of software patents of course. Unless you are thinking of the corporate bribes as an 'invisible hand'. Patents have nothing to do with (free) market economics. The fact that some libertarians are in favor of them doesn't change this fact. Without government intervention there would be no patents. Patent systems resemble fascism more than laissez faire capitalism.
I had heard something like that but regarding the existence of some brown dwarf kind of object. Or maybe even an actual black hole.
There is a third option. They could simply have released the (now freed) information as work in progress. With the caveat that it has not been verified yet and is quite likely to be wrong. What you are suggesting is that CYA is the most important consideration. They could have just said something like: "This data here has led us to believe that there is an object out there that may qualify as a tenth planet, but we do not yet have any evidence that we regard as conclusive." We see press releases like this all the time on slashdot. Although they do tend to get overhyped by the media trying to sensationalize everything, I think it is still interesting and useful information.
It's nice to know they have an unlimited, infinite budget to work with. I wonder how the anti-terrorist budget compares to the pro-RIAA/MPAA budget. It would be nice if we all could have an unlimited budget. Then maybe we could all afford to buy those CDs and DVDs regardless of the price. Nice to know that the land of the 'free' also has infinite resources for jail building. Last time I checked there were something like 30 million citizen-thieves ripping off these large media conglomerates. Hopefully we can get an even higher percentage of our citizens behind bars.
When nearly every player you have supports this format, how is this a problem?
When indeed. Maybe in 2015. In this age of 400GB and even 500GB hard drives, I'm not sure I see the point of actually paying for music encoded with lossy compression. FLAC and APE can compress music down to less than half the original file size. Nowadays the only point of lossy compression is to fit more music on a portable. Just compress it yourself for that purpose.
Except that gifted kids aren't much different from regular kids! All the studies I've seen show that if you challenge a kid, they will rise to the challenge.
I have to disagree with you there. In fact that may be one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. If there is one thing I have learned in life it is that there is an immense difference among individuals in terms of intellectual abilities starting from a very young age. Part of the reason that certain children are less interested in learning is that they are just not very good at it.
I have been trying to teach my (6 year old) nephew some basic subjects: mathematics, foreign languages like Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese, vocabulary etc. But it is frustrating. His main interest is impressing me and 'being right' per se. What he does manage to learn he forgets very quickly. I was different. Learning and memorizing were much easier for me. And I was actually interested. That makes a huge difference. My nephew would much rather go ride his bike and run around. He likes physical stuff more than ideas. I was the opposite. If anything the problem with our educational systems is that they do not sufficiently accomodate such differences. What is merely a challenge to one child is quite literally impossible for another. If you teach at a pace that only the most intelligent children can learn at all the other children will learn nothing at all.
This nation does not have a history of education or academic excellence.
U.S. universities attract very smart people from all over the world even today. It is true that many of the greatest inventions credited to the U.S. were made by immigrants, but the U.S. is a country of immigrants. That is kind of the whole point. We attracted those great minds to our country with our more laissez-faire economic policies among other things. They chose to live here. Most of those great minds lived in our cities. So I'm not sure what they did with those vast tracts of land.
The U.K., Germany, and the U.S. are the three countries in the world most responsible for the modern technologies that the rest of the world benefits from today. It seems at the very least disingenuous to ignore that fact. I don't deny that there are a lot of stupid and lazy and brutish people in the U.S., but that is also true of the rest of the world. Only a small percentage of the human race is responsible for technological advancements.
And anyway, I don't think our educational system (per se) lags behind that of other countries. To the extent that there is a problem I think it is cultural. We have become lazy. It is not so much that the teachers in other countries are so much better. It's that the students tend to be more disciplined. You can't learn if you don't study. And the fact that our children so often grow up in front of the mind-numbing television cannot be helping matters.
A disadvantage is naturally that data will be more crammed on to the platters,
Increased areal density is a good thing. Not a bad thing. A drive with a higher areal density is a faster drive. It is also more secure. It is more difficult to extract data from the platters.
You are correct about the 100GB/platter though. This drive is less technologically advanced than Seagate's 7200.8. Hitachi has this habit of just piling on the platters. The deathstar had 5 platters too. This submission looks like ad copy from Hitachi. Almost total misinformation. And yes, the SATA II maximum transfer rate is irrelevant. No one is going to get near those rates even with striped drives. It certainly isn't going to make this drive any faster. And 16MB drive caches have been around for ages.
or other more worthy causes.
Who gets to decide what is 'worthy'? I don't think it's really the concentrated attacks against spamvertisers that will clog the internet pipes. I think it will be the combination of that and the inevitable retaliations. It happened with makelovenotspam and from their perspective it must have seemed a very effective defense. It will only encourage them for the next skirmish. Although I don't think the retaliations would last long. If it didn't have the anticipated effect of shutting down the blue frog client, I'd give them no more than a month before they grew tired of it.
I am fence sitting on this one. I joined the site and downloaded the blue frog client and may use it if only because my one computer isn't enough to make any difference in internet traffic by itself anyway. In this kind of war no one soldier makes much of a difference to the outcome.
However I am concerned about starting a large scale netwar with the spammers, effectively shutting down the internet. This is essentially what happened for me locally during the whole makelovenotspam fiasco. The spammers faught back with everything they had. It was not pretty. Also, as a rabid e-pirate complete with parrot and eye patch, I am concerned that the war could be an excuse for RIAA/MPAA sponsored attacks as well. The fact is that the internet is a very fragile system which can be easily broken. Some people are arguing that maybe it should be until our governments are willing to pass enforceable spam laws with actual teeth. But I'm not so sure I'd be willing to go that far.
I think a better long term system would be to get large groups of people to join an anti-spam organization which would accept donations and membership dues or whatever to fight against companies that advertise with spam in the real world. Something like a shady, vigilante, version of the EFF. The idea would be to hurt and put out of business companies that advertise with spam as much as possible. Moebius faxes, war dialing of 800 numbers, junk mail attacks, publishing of personal contact information for everyone in management positions including cellphone numbers, email and snail mail addresses. Maybe even opportunistic vandalism in a car-keying, sugar in the gas tank, potato in the tailpipe, spray-painting "spam sucks" onto windshields, kind of way. Presumably a professional organization could come up with even more nuisance ideas. Maybe a freesite could keep track of the exploits.
without any radioactive waste.
I have heard it stated many times here on slashdot that that is a myth: that most forms of nuclear fusion would still produce significant amounts of nuclear waste, just far less of it and with a shorter half life. Or something like that. So I guess a lot depends on the details of the specific implementation. That is, if we can ever get sustained fusion to work without actually building a star. Which at this point I think is open to question.
Further, Otto cycle engines are at their most efficient operating at full throttle (that's why you cruise in a high gear)
I am not a mechanic. So hopefully one will jump in here. But I do not believe that is accurate. A higher gear means a less open throttle. The whole point of higher transmission gear ratios is to save overall gas, not to increase efficiency per se. As you point out, it may in fact be slightly less efficient to run the engine at lower RPMs, but running at 6000-8000 RPM (full throttle) uses more energy. Actually I think the exact RPM that is most efficient depends on the specific engine design. Certain transmissions (i.e. hydraulic) are independent from engine RPM and this leads to higher efficiencies.
I think part of the reason your point about Otto engines in modern automobiles doesn't hold is due to the oversized engines needed to achieve reasonable acceleration and hill climbing ability. A two cycle 50 cc moped/scooter engine can run efficiently with its throttle open all the way because it is sized to be the absolute minimum necessary. Of course it achieves high mileage (100+ mpg) mainly because it is moving around something like 1/10 the mass of the average car.
I am also an SUV hater and many people may buy them for the the reason you state. However there are valid reasons for purchasing one. There aint no free lunch in physics or economics. If you want to carry more cargo you will need a larger, heavier vehicle to do it. I own a small pickup truck with a full length bed because I like to be able to carry stuff. Especially messy stuff that would damage a nice SUV interior. It is lighter than an SUV, but its typical real world 16 mpg city/highway mileage is not any better for some reason. I'm also thinking about mounting a plow on it one of these years.
I live about 20 miles outside of Boston and would like to be able to commute in affordably. So I am planning to buy some kind of a scooter with a 75-150 cc engine to save not only on ever increasing gas prices with 75-100 mpg, but also on the insanely high cost of car insurance (even on my 7 year old beaten up pickup) mostly due to the mandatory liability. Easier parking in tight spaces is also a bonus. I am planning to just cancel the insurance on the truck for the 6 warmer months each year. The biggest drawback of course is cargo space and the extreme danger of driving a two wheeled vehicle especially in the rain and/or at night. Needless to say, in this climate it is useless in the winter months.
The only time I have ever driven an SUV was one time when I rented one (a '99 Mitsubishi Montero Sport LS) to drive in a desert. Try driving off-road through a harsh desert landscape with a Prius. If I lived in any of the Mexican border states, I would probably own a vehicle like that due to its suitability for off-road desert driving.
Winning $1M back then you could retire and still splurge without blowing all of it.
Maybe in the US/UK if you plan to have a family, but there are many countries where you could live very comfortably on 1/4 of that for at least the next 40 years. And that's without any bank interest or investments. I make less than 10k a year. So even working for the next 30 years would net me less than 300,000. So that would seem more than enough to retire on. But then I don't have a family *cough*.
Okay I can see arguing for B5 and maybe Firefly and maybe even Lost (although as a scripted Survivor that's a stretch), but the Gilmore Girls?! Buffy?! What have you been smoking? And do you have any for me? ST:TNG may be my favorite SciFi series but quite of few of those episodes sucked big time. It's not the actors or the directors but the writers that I hold responsible. It's not impossible to write a TV series with all great episodes, but you just don't see that on American television due to this too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth problem with the writing here. It is not necessary. Even the best American television suffers from this unevenness. I guess there's not much point in writing good episodes when the audience can't tell the difference. That's why it is the dawn of the reality show era in this country. But then television has almost always been 99.9% pure shite since it was invented. It's all about appealing to the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator).
Having lived through the 70's I can tell you with onitoligical certitude that US television at the time was a vast, vile, steaming heap of crap.
Got your back on that one. I wish my young brain had not been subjected to Charlies Angels, The Love Boat (ouch), Fantasy Island, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, or The 6 Million Dollar Man. And what was with that whole 70s Bigfoot obsession? Lots of movies and TV shows about it including an episode from The 6 Million Dollar Man and The Night Stalker. Maybe it had something to do with the 70s fascination with supernatural horror (based on Christian mythology). Remember In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy? For me that symbolizes that decades fascination with stuff like that.
Doctor Who with Tom Baker, ST:TOS, and those campy Roger Corman-esque and Japanese (Toho Studios etc.) guy-in-rubber-suit Saturday afternoon monster movies (late 70s) were the high points of that TV era for me. Even cartoons like Speed Racer and Felix the Cat seem less embarrassing than 70s network TV. And the 'good' shows like Night Gallery and Night Stalker would be considered unwatcheable by modern standards. I have heard that there is one TV movie from that era, an ABC Movie of the Week about witches called Crowhaven Farm that stands out as the best television of that era. But it is impossible to find a copy. So I can't confirm it.
I can still remember coming home from school and flipping on my old telly that took more than a minute to 'warm up'. The so called remote had big rectangular buttons that seemed to use a loud clicking sound to turn it on and change the channels. I think simulating the clicking sound could shut the TV off.
Luckily I had a friend with a DEC PDP-11 by the late 70s. So that offered some degree of entertainment in the form of early computer games like Super Star Trek and Adventure (Collosal Cave).
Perhaps the biggest mind-rape of that era was the music and the hideous clothes (which ironically young girls of the current era seem to have copied). A decade that includes the Bee Gees and Barry Manilow playing on 8-track tapes, The Hardy Boys, platform shoes, bell bottoms, velour v-neck and button down shirts with those long pointy lapels, truly is (or should be) an embarrassment for everyone who had to live through it.
Even the feathered hair, skin-tight Jordache jeans, leg warmers (remember Flash Dance?) and synth-pop of the early 80s were a huge step up the evolutionary ladder for western culture. I don't know if it was a worldwide phenomenon or just in North America and Western Europe. I have to wonder what East Asian or South American culture, for instance, was like at that time.
In other words, Enterprise was a brutal massacre of Star Trek.
And it didn't help that Mr. Quantum Leap (aka Scott Bakula) was the captain or that the theme song and intro sequence were enough to make you cover your mouth and run for the nearest toilet, hoping to avoid the (ultimately unavoidable) loss of lunch. That female vulcan was hot though. Probably the best looking character in any of the Star Treks. Too bad they can't show breasts on American TV.
I loved Richard Dean Anderson in Star Gate.
Are you old enough to remember MacGyver? I just couldn't give Stargate: SG1 a chance due to picturing him as a character from a painfully bad 80s network TV show. Just seeing him makes me cringe. Ouch. I also don't tend to jump at watching TV series based on bad movies. The least the writers can do is come up with a semi-original storyline. The same is true for ST:E. I can't watch it without picturing Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, yet another painfully bad 80s TV show, alongside his ridiculous cigar-wielding sidekick (Dean Stockwell). Both series should have avoided these well known actors. There are plenty of good, unknown actors. The younger audience won't recognize them anyway and the older audience will be reaching for their vomit bags. I just couldn't get past it for either series.
After all, some of very best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was done with his assistance.
I have only seen like one episode of ST:DS9. So I can't speak to that. But I don't think he wrote the best eps of ST:TNG. He did write some very good ones however like The Chase, Yesterday's Enterprise, First Contact, Thine Own Self, and All Good Things. But he also wrote episodes like Relics, Chain of Command, and Redemption, which were not my cup of tea.
My favorite ST:TNG episodes include: 11001001, Elementary Dear Data, Time Squared, The Royale, Q Who, Remember Me, Clues, Identity Crisis, Violations, Cause and Effect, The Inner Light, Time's Arrow, Ship in a Bottle, and Frame of Mind. RDM didn't write any of those.
Still, he certainly is one of the best television SciFi writers around. He has also written a few Carnivale episodes that were pretty good (i.e. "The Day That Was the Day"). I am going to download some of his ST:DS9 episodes if I can find them.