Advertising, marketing, crew, hotel, catering, and so on. Yes, the record companies pay for those things, but they charge them all back to the artist. Essentially, they're a bank, but instead of letting you do with the money what you want, they have extremely specific demands on how it should be spent. So they're even worse than a bank. And, no, you can't go lend money from a bank and do it all yourself, because you can't get on mtv or clearchannel if you're not with the big five, regardless of how good you are.
Really, go there, buy their stuff. There is a lot of excellent indie music on there. Not only do you get to buy cheap and good music in whatever your musical taste is (though I admit the quality on cd baby varies), but you're boycotting the big five record companies at the same time. It's a win-win situation.
Re:I've set up a GNU/Linux machine for my kids too
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 1
I have a pII/233 with 128 megs of ram, which runs at a decent clip.
It runs a custom stripped down kernel, xfree 4.2, windowmaker, kopete, firefox and abiword.
Yes, if you do a full run-of-the-mill desktop install, with a full kde or gnome, then yes, it will be slow. But if you just switch wm's, disable any services you don't use, move the ones you do use to inetd (so they only get launched when you actually use them), and avoid the monstrosities that are the full mozilla and openoffice.
If you strip it really, really down, disabling any xfree modules you don't use, using something like pwm for window manager (less than 300k runtime size for a full wm), and opera for browser, you CAN fit a usable linux desktop on a 486 with 20 megs of ram (I've done it, it's possible).
Hmmm... First of all, the mini's hard disk does not comply with the full ide specs, and so you can't use it in anything but the ipod mini. That's why the mini costs less than the separate hd's. They're segmenting the market.
Secondly, without built-in drivers, 802.11 cards aren't going to work. Maybe if the linux firmware supports it. But how would you boot the firmware if there's no hd?
When the car in front of you suddenly slams on the brakes, I'd rather have a computer do emergency braking than do it myself. Studies have shown it takes one whole second if you're averagely distracted (listening to the radio, thinking about your day) to get your foot on the braking pedal. Then you have to actually press down on it. A computer starts breaking within a matter of milliseconds. Human reaction time (the point at which you know you should brake) is 300 milliseconds, a computer knows the same in 30 milliseconds. And it isn't hampered by having to move physical appendages. Simply put: humans are the snails compared to the rabbit that is a computer. And yes, you can find a situation where the snail wins the race, but in real life the rabbit wins most often.
Emergency maneuvering is a crazy thing to leave up to humans. We're just not designed to do it at those high speeds. Our reaction time is designed for a top speed of 25mph. Anything faster than that, and we're out of our league.
Is that "slow passing" syndrome really something to get THAT worked up about? I mean, honestly, how often do you see that on a one hour drive? Two times, maybe three? How much does it slow you down? If it lasts one minute at a 15 mph speed differential (55 instead of 70mph), that's a quarter mile you could have travelled further in that time, which at 70mph would be 20 seconds gained. 20 seconds! You've just spent 20 minutes complaining about something that at most costs you one minute during a one hour drive. Isn't that just crazy?
And then doing such a dangerous maneuver as passing to the right of someone at high speed... well, that WILL come back to haunt you one day. Most people seem to not realise that the only thing that keeps someone from crashing their car is not their reaction speed (which is horribly slow at such high speeds), but the predictability of traffic. When you add unpredictability to it, to the point of doing an illegal maneuver, you're endangering traffic far more than those slow passers are.
Despite years of effort by the industry, there has yet been a single study with a credible methodology that supported the notion that file sharing actually hurts music sales.
Sales were down for a very simple reason: recession. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one, and in this case you don't have to find a missing link between p2p and music sales, because there isn't one.
The music industry execs are just lying their asses off to get congress to hand them free money and more control over their market. And apparently, in canada they're going to get their cake and eat it too, since they'll get free money for every blank cdr sold, and not have to do a thing in exchange.
But are the people responsible for slashdot's content responsible for its bandwidth bill? I highly doubt that. So unless they get ordered to make it more frugal, I very much doubt they'd sink the effort into it.
Depending on oil is not that big of a problem, because many oils can be grown, in crops. Depending on fossil oil or natural gas is a problem, because that is finite, and can't be replenished once we use it up.
Maybe this would be a suitable job for something like the rat things in neal stephenson's snow crash. Link a shark's brain to a spaceship, make it think orbital waste is food, release it into orbit.
Re:CSS does NOT always degrade gracefully with HTM
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 1
Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly.
That site uses tables to layout non-tabular content, which is a big css no-no. It also does not validate. Validating is part one of being standards compliant. Following the basic rules of how to appropriately use css is part two. Complying with all the tips from dive into accessibility is part three.
Correctly designed, by someone who knows what they're doing, a css-based site will always degrade gracefully. Always.
Re:Great examples as to why they SHOULD NOT use CS
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 1
Normally I wouldn't post a reply to something like this, but the whole shitty, breakable design that is so much of the web is in large part due to supporting pathetically old and broken browsers and proprietary extensions. NS 4 anyone?
Actually, there are several workarounds to completely hide your css from netscape 4. One is to link to your stylesheet using media="all". Another is to prepend any styles you want ns4 to ignore with/*/*/ (ns4 sees this as two open comments delimiters and a slash, while standards-compliant browsers interpret this as open comments, slash, close comments)
That way netscape users get a functional (albeit ugly) webpage, and you don't need to bend over backwards to make things work both in ns4 and newer browsers.
The coolest thing about css for me is that the order of items in your page becomes arbitrary. I tend to start with the content first, and the navigation elements last. That way if you save the html, or browse through lynx, you get the content right at the top of the page, but if you visit it on the website with a regular browser, the css puts the navigation first.
The way I understand it the current slash code has the table code littered through out the codebase, and it would be quite a big effort to move to css. Given that the current code works (however badly) there's a large unwillingness to go through the effort for the very miniscule pay-off that comes from it. IIRC cmdrtaco said that he would welcome code donations to bring slash into the 21st century.
Yes, the patriot act and various things the bush administration did post-9/11 must be working, since we haven't seen a new 9/11-style attack. I'd also like to mention this cool tiger-repelling rock I have...
Why do all the explanations about what this story is about sound like a conversation in engineering between data and geordi, right before the imminent threat will destroy the ship?
So, the US is just a treatybreaker and not a lawbreaker then. Not much difference imho. The message iraq sent to the world was loud and clear: "We are the US, and we do what we want, when we want, and there's nothing you can do about it." Just in case we hadn't "gotten" it with the flipflopping on all the other treaties. That's the major reason people outside the US fear the US, it has zero respect for other nations.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
We know how to create artificial gravity, No we CERTAINLY don't, and you're probably crazy.
I said artificial gravity, not real gravity. As a physicist you probably don't consider centrifugal force and gravity to be the same, but to humans in space they're pretty much identical.
Re:No point in trying to get off Earth (now)
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
All wars are caused by population pressure. People need to live close enough together to actually want to pick a fight. If there were only 200 million humans on earth, there wouldn't be wars.
Famine and poverty result from spreading finite resources over too large a populace. So again, we run into population pressure.
We know how to fix population pressure: have less kids. It's simple, effective, and we know how to do it. But it goes so directly opposite to what our genes tell us that it's unlikely to ever happen on a worldwide scale unless humans learn to override their instincts.
If technology doesn't provide radical advances, we're in for some serious trouble. Our current energy sources will not last us for another two centuries. Either we invent radical new energy sources, or we run out of energy. We have to innovate to preserve our way of life. I think it's worrying how little funding is going towards fusion power. Without fusion energy we're going towards WWIII for sure, and pretty soon too (maybe even within my lifetime). We NEED to develop it asap.
When someone says that the cost to go to space is too expensive, I have to emphasize where the money goes to build the spacecraft. It's not like we take millions of dollar bills, smelt them into vehicles or stuff bills in the fuel tanks and set them afire. That money goes to WORKERS who build the space vehicles and COMPANIES that make jobs. That's economically a Good Thing.
That's a good argument. But it applies equally to any other way of spending that money. How about funding education with the money we fund space exploration with? Is there any evidence the pay off from that would be smaller? Surely there are lots of benefits to a well-educated population.
You're underestimating robot efficiency and overestimating human efficiency. You use one old study (and don't even reference it) for the moon as the entire basis for your cost argument wrt efficiency. Robot efficiency is not a constant. Each new mission is vastly more effective than the one before.
You're also underestimating the cost of manned missions and overestimating the cost of robot missions. A manned mission will always need to launch a lot more material, and it can't land as cheaply because it can't bounce around to get rid of descent inertia. That 30 billion dollar figure for manned missions is silly, it supposes that everything you do works, and that you always use the very cheapest way of doing stuff, even if it is highly unusual. The way nasa does things, it's going to cost 10 times more at least, just like with the space shuttle and the ISS.
So, getting humans to mars is only going to cost 500 billion instead of 900 billion. Big deal. The very same job using robots is still orders of magnitude cheaper.
The rest of your points are valid but also you need to remember that humans are vastly more adaptable than a robot is, therefore they can actually deal with contingencies rather than just performing a specific set of instructions, very very slowly.
Not relevant. A robot is so much cheaper that if something goes wrong, you send another one, redesigned to not run into the problem, and you're still off much better cost-wise than a manned mission. Mars isn't going anywhere. We can take our time to explore it. Never mind that the kind of money needed for manned mars missions would send dozens of robots up there before a human ever could set a foot on martian soil.
Re:Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
The point is, how can anyone say that none of this stuff has little or no economic value? I can't see why.
Because all of those things would have been developed with unmanned space flight. There aren't any people sitting inside the gps sattelites repeatedly saying into a mike "I'm here! I'm here!", we use computers for that. I'd like to see the evidence that anything manned space flight has produced that has actual use on earth wouldn't have been produced more cheaply with unmanned space flight.
I find the notion that cordless drills wouldn't exist without manned space flight laughable. They're such an obvious invention. They just happened to be done in space flight before it was profitable to do them somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertising, marketing, crew, hotel, catering, and so on. Yes, the record companies pay for those things, but they charge them all back to the artist. Essentially, they're a bank, but instead of letting you do with the money what you want, they have extremely specific demands on how it should be spent. So they're even worse than a bank. And, no, you can't go lend money from a bank and do it all yourself, because you can't get on mtv or clearchannel if you're not with the big five, regardless of how good you are.
I'd like to say one thing: cd baby.
Really, go there, buy their stuff. There is a lot of excellent indie music on there. Not only do you get to buy cheap and good music in whatever your musical taste is (though I admit the quality on cd baby varies), but you're boycotting the big five record companies at the same time. It's a win-win situation.
I have a pII/233 with 128 megs of ram, which runs at a decent clip.
It runs a custom stripped down kernel, xfree 4.2, windowmaker, kopete, firefox and abiword.
Yes, if you do a full run-of-the-mill desktop install, with a full kde or gnome, then yes, it will be slow. But if you just switch wm's, disable any services you don't use, move the ones you do use to inetd (so they only get launched when you actually use them), and avoid the monstrosities that are the full mozilla and openoffice.
If you strip it really, really down, disabling any xfree modules you don't use, using something like pwm for window manager (less than 300k runtime size for a full wm), and opera for browser, you CAN fit a usable linux desktop on a 486 with 20 megs of ram (I've done it, it's possible).
Hmmm ... First of all, the mini's hard disk does not comply with the full ide specs, and so you can't use it in anything but the ipod mini. That's why the mini costs less than the separate hd's. They're segmenting the market.
Secondly, without built-in drivers, 802.11 cards aren't going to work. Maybe if the linux firmware supports it. But how would you boot the firmware if there's no hd?
When the car in front of you suddenly slams on the brakes, I'd rather have a computer do emergency braking than do it myself. Studies have shown it takes one whole second if you're averagely distracted (listening to the radio, thinking about your day) to get your foot on the braking pedal. Then you have to actually press down on it. A computer starts breaking within a matter of milliseconds. Human reaction time (the point at which you know you should brake) is 300 milliseconds, a computer knows the same in 30 milliseconds. And it isn't hampered by having to move physical appendages. Simply put: humans are the snails compared to the rabbit that is a computer. And yes, you can find a situation where the snail wins the race, but in real life the rabbit wins most often.
Emergency maneuvering is a crazy thing to leave up to humans. We're just not designed to do it at those high speeds. Our reaction time is designed for a top speed of 25mph. Anything faster than that, and we're out of our league.
Is that "slow passing" syndrome really something to get THAT worked up about? I mean, honestly, how often do you see that on a one hour drive? Two times, maybe three? How much does it slow you down? If it lasts one minute at a 15 mph speed differential (55 instead of 70mph), that's a quarter mile you could have travelled further in that time, which at 70mph would be 20 seconds gained. 20 seconds! You've just spent 20 minutes complaining about something that at most costs you one minute during a one hour drive. Isn't that just crazy?
... well, that WILL come back to haunt you one day. Most people seem to not realise that the only thing that keeps someone from crashing their car is not their reaction speed (which is horribly slow at such high speeds), but the predictability of traffic. When you add unpredictability to it, to the point of doing an illegal maneuver, you're endangering traffic far more than those slow passers are.
And then doing such a dangerous maneuver as passing to the right of someone at high speed
If services like Puretracks or iTunes existed years ago we might not be in the mess we are now.
And what mess is that?
File sharing is not a threat to music sales.
Despite years of effort by the industry, there has yet been a single study with a credible methodology that supported the notion that file sharing actually hurts music sales.
Sales were down for a very simple reason: recession. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one, and in this case you don't have to find a missing link between p2p and music sales, because there isn't one.
The music industry execs are just lying their asses off to get congress to hand them free money and more control over their market. And apparently, in canada they're going to get their cake and eat it too, since they'll get free money for every blank cdr sold, and not have to do a thing in exchange.
But are the people responsible for slashdot's content responsible for its bandwidth bill? I highly doubt that. So unless they get ordered to make it more frugal, I very much doubt they'd sink the effort into it.
Depending on oil is not that big of a problem, because many oils can be grown, in crops. Depending on fossil oil or natural gas is a problem, because that is finite, and can't be replenished once we use it up.
Maybe this would be a suitable job for something like the rat things in neal stephenson's snow crash. Link a shark's brain to a spaceship, make it think orbital waste is food, release it into orbit.
Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly.
That site uses tables to layout non-tabular content, which is a big css no-no. It also does not validate. Validating is part one of being standards compliant. Following the basic rules of how to appropriately use css is part two. Complying with all the tips from dive into accessibility is part three.
Correctly designed, by someone who knows what they're doing, a css-based site will always degrade gracefully. Always.
Normally I wouldn't post a reply to something like this, but the whole shitty, breakable design that is so much of the web is in large part due to supporting pathetically old and broken browsers and proprietary extensions. NS 4 anyone?
/*/*/ (ns4 sees this as two open comments delimiters and a slash, while standards-compliant browsers interpret this as open comments, slash, close comments)
Actually, there are several workarounds to completely hide your css from netscape 4. One is to link to your stylesheet using media="all". Another is to prepend any styles you want ns4 to ignore with
That way netscape users get a functional (albeit ugly) webpage, and you don't need to bend over backwards to make things work both in ns4 and newer browsers.
The coolest thing about css for me is that the order of items in your page becomes arbitrary. I tend to start with the content first, and the navigation elements last. That way if you save the html, or browse through lynx, you get the content right at the top of the page, but if you visit it on the website with a regular browser, the css puts the navigation first.
The way I understand it the current slash code has the table code littered through out the codebase, and it would be quite a big effort to move to css. Given that the current code works (however badly) there's a large unwillingness to go through the effort for the very miniscule pay-off that comes from it. IIRC cmdrtaco said that he would welcome code donations to bring slash into the 21st century.
Would it kill you to list the article you copy/pasted from?
Yes, the patriot act and various things the bush administration did post-9/11 must be working, since we haven't seen a new 9/11-style attack. I'd also like to mention this cool tiger-repelling rock I have...
Well, given that the moon's light source is the sun, yes, looking at the moon is looking at fusion power.
Why do all the explanations about what this story is about sound like a conversation in engineering between data and geordi, right before the imminent threat will destroy the ship?
The full naming history goes
m/b (mozilla/browser) -> phoenix -> firebird -> firefox
So three changes.
So, the US is just a treatybreaker and not a lawbreaker then. Not much difference imho. The message iraq sent to the world was loud and clear: "We are the US, and we do what we want, when we want, and there's nothing you can do about it." Just in case we hadn't "gotten" it with the flipflopping on all the other treaties. That's the major reason people outside the US fear the US, it has zero respect for other nations.
We know how to create artificial gravity,
No we CERTAINLY don't, and you're probably crazy.
I said artificial gravity, not real gravity. As a physicist you probably don't consider centrifugal force and gravity to be the same, but to humans in space they're pretty much identical.
Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
All wars are caused by population pressure. People need to live close enough together to actually want to pick a fight. If there were only 200 million humans on earth, there wouldn't be wars.
Famine and poverty result from spreading finite resources over too large a populace. So again, we run into population pressure.
We know how to fix population pressure: have less kids. It's simple, effective, and we know how to do it. But it goes so directly opposite to what our genes tell us that it's unlikely to ever happen on a worldwide scale unless humans learn to override their instincts.
If technology doesn't provide radical advances, we're in for some serious trouble. Our current energy sources will not last us for another two centuries. Either we invent radical new energy sources, or we run out of energy. We have to innovate to preserve our way of life. I think it's worrying how little funding is going towards fusion power. Without fusion energy we're going towards WWIII for sure, and pretty soon too (maybe even within my lifetime). We NEED to develop it asap.
When someone says that the cost to go to space is too expensive, I have to emphasize where the money goes to build the spacecraft. It's not like we take millions of dollar bills, smelt them into vehicles or stuff bills in the fuel tanks and set them afire. That money goes to WORKERS who build the space vehicles and COMPANIES that make jobs. That's economically a Good Thing.
That's a good argument. But it applies equally to any other way of spending that money. How about funding education with the money we fund space exploration with? Is there any evidence the pay off from that would be smaller? Surely there are lots of benefits to a well-educated population.
A few comments:
You're underestimating robot efficiency and overestimating human efficiency. You use one old study (and don't even reference it) for the moon as the entire basis for your cost argument wrt efficiency. Robot efficiency is not a constant. Each new mission is vastly more effective than the one before.
You're also underestimating the cost of manned missions and overestimating the cost of robot missions. A manned mission will always need to launch a lot more material, and it can't land as cheaply because it can't bounce around to get rid of descent inertia. That 30 billion dollar figure for manned missions is silly, it supposes that everything you do works, and that you always use the very cheapest way of doing stuff, even if it is highly unusual. The way nasa does things, it's going to cost 10 times more at least, just like with the space shuttle and the ISS.
So, getting humans to mars is only going to cost 500 billion instead of 900 billion. Big deal. The very same job using robots is still orders of magnitude cheaper.
The rest of your points are valid but also you need to remember that humans are vastly more adaptable than a robot is, therefore they can actually deal with contingencies rather than just performing a specific set of instructions, very very slowly.
Not relevant. A robot is so much cheaper that if something goes wrong, you send another one, redesigned to not run into the problem, and you're still off much better cost-wise than a manned mission. Mars isn't going anywhere. We can take our time to explore it. Never mind that the kind of money needed for manned mars missions would send dozens of robots up there before a human ever could set a foot on martian soil.
The point is, how can anyone say that none of this stuff has little or no economic value? I can't see why.
Because all of those things would have been developed with unmanned space flight. There aren't any people sitting inside the gps sattelites repeatedly saying into a mike "I'm here! I'm here!", we use computers for that. I'd like to see the evidence that anything manned space flight has produced that has actual use on earth wouldn't have been produced more cheaply with unmanned space flight.
I find the notion that cordless drills wouldn't exist without manned space flight laughable. They're such an obvious invention. They just happened to be done in space flight before it was profitable to do them somewhere else.