Sorry this isn't about Sony, but about MMORPG addiction...
Addictive machine-generated worlds are yet another accurate predicion of Arthur C. Clarke. Read "THE LION OF COMARRE," a short story by Arthur C. Clarke (1968). The plot involved a machine that people hook up to, which puts them into a tailor-made synthetic world, where they can be whatever it is they want to be. (Think THE MATRIX, but personalized and pleasant.) Users connected to this electronic Shangri-La never leave and never wake. Disconnecting someone can be devastating.
And here we are, on the road to Comarre. Everquest and others are only computer games, but look at how addictive they are. I wonder how addictive they'll be once the makers REALLY figure out how to addict people. Could we see "Comarre Houses" spring up, for junkies to cash out and live only for the game? Ha, no, we have the internet. And, of course, humans do actually interact with each other in MMORPGs, albeit to a limited extent.
One thing the author didn't mention, getting too deep into one of these games can be a reason to stay in itself. If personal and professional life have decayed or disappeared due to neglect, the player doesn't have anything to go to, outside of the game. (This was the case in Comarre.) The act of unplugging would be too traumatic, the recovery time too long... So they stay... Classic addiction behavior.
This is one of Clarke's predictions (in his stories) that I'd rather not see come to full fruit.
I found it fascinating that at only one place in the article, buried at the end of a long and complex paragraph did the author use the terms lies. He frequently used euphemisms such as "creative", but only once he did directly refer to dishonesty.
You've probably never won a proposal, I'll bet.;-P
In proposals, you have to tell a good story. And no one can tell the future. Which of these would you pick?
"An understanding of this mechanism could lead to the prevention of 20 % of all cancers within ten years."
or
"We expect to make an incremental advance in our understanding of the relation between the physico-chemical fliberty flap and the occurrence of randomonucleopyrolysistic neurophononisms."
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example.
and... Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artificial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
and...
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem.
It can often appear to be the case that enough details are not included in articles, but it really depends on the field, and upon the research group. Part of the driver for this is the "number of publications per year" metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work. What happens is that a group may be using a technique that is pretty standardized, either within their individual lab or within their field of expertise. A person "skilled in the art" can often get enough detail to duplicate the work. And, since the game is to publish every little new thing, it would be a waste of paper to fully detail the experimental technique in each and every publication. It would also eat up a lot of the space in which researchers would rather publish their hot new results. A common practice of good research groups is to occasionaly write one big paper describing the details of the technique, and to refer to that in subsequent papers.
And this is a good thing. In the end, lots of short papers tends to keep everyone at the same pace in the development of a topic. If everyone published only a magnum opus every five years, the result would be a significant amount of dispersion in research directions, possibly in directions that were not fruitful (in terms of being based on good assumptions and a of the state of the art, the current mind on the topic).
It's "two heads are better than one." With short papers, everyone must keep tabs on one another, and short papers help keep everyone focused.
I'm not saying that important information isn't intentionally withheld from the papers. It is. But, science is a race, and you don't want other groups to get the jump on you by giving away your secret. If a reader follows the publication record of a good group, s/he will find that these details eventually come out, in later publications. It's a sort of short-term trade secret approach. Optimally, one keeps a detail secret long enough to do some strong fundamental work in an area. The secret is later (a year or two) released, so anyone can expand on the ideas. If the work was good and is widely read, in the end it gains the researcher the advantage of being a heavily referenced source on the topic (another metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work).
Disclaimer: I am a materials scientist, and this is the field from which I am drawing on for these observations, although I do believe they probably apply in other fields where several groups are working in a particular area.
All of the very high K superconductors (>100 K) are (IIRC) brittle ceramic compunds that could not be easily constructed into something of commercial use.
Nope. They are easily constructed into something of commercial use. I work on the technology. It is just not cheaper than copper wire for power transmission (yet). Superconducting cables are, however, currently used in various specialized applications, and in 2004, a superconducting power transmission cable will be installed in the Northeast US. The Japanese and Germans are making great advances as well as the US. Although the superconductors are "brittle" ceramics, one can wind a superconducting cable around a bottle neck, and it will still work fine. Why? It's thin. If that doesn't explain it, consult basic mechanics of materials textbook.
"Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?"
and
There have been some reports of DRM speakers that decode the sound inside the speaker. But I can't find them right now.
A bill was recently discussed (introduced and defeated, or perhaps only proposed; I don't remember the name) that would have required DRM on every analog/digital and digital/analog conversion device. That's microphones, speakers, everything. It died miserably, but it's scary that it even got as far as it did.
I hear they're going to be requiring DRM on pencils soon.
I wonder, does this "extraterrestrial" life have DNA in it? If it does shouldn't that raise a few questions? Like perhaps contamination from terrestrial sources? Attention grabbing headlines like this are rather unscientific if they are so premature as to not even do basic tests.
Of course it raises questions. These issues are probably being investigated. Scientists cannot wait until they "know everything" because we will never know everything. Note that this is something he said during a presentation. Scientists often conversationally give a glimpse of recent results, especially if they might spark interest. It's not premature at all.
Note also that this is a newspaper article, not a scientific article, thus all of the attention-grabbing language. The article's author was only reporting on one bit of a presentation. What probably happened in this case (and generally in cases where the press blows something out of proportion, though they didn't do it here) was that he said something like this: "We took great precautions to avoid contamination. The results imply that the bacteria were extraterrestrial. Studies of these bacteria will yield more information." And so on.
Be sure that you consider the source before making quick judgements. And remember that newspaper article reports of new scientific issues are often written by people who don't understand the topic. Due to space limitations, they never give you all of the details, and often get those that they include wrong. i.e. Grain of salt.
I think if they knew what it was, they would care. If you told them -- hey, can I install software that will watch your browsing habits in order to better target junk mail to your email address? -- then they would have the chance to say 'fuck off' too.
Doesn't this give them the opportunity to watch your browsing habits to better target junk/spam also to your physical address and phone number, through correlation with your modem's EA/MAC address? Yikes!
Are there prohibitions on them doing this? How about prohibitions on the third-party spyware doing this? All it would need is the number.
Anybody have any more information or links that explain how flexible this new material is?
Yup. If the nanotubes are chemically bonded to the matrix, as the article suggests, and it is comprised of 50% nanotubes, it would be extremely stiff. Far stiffer than any carbon fiber composite.
As far as flexibility of a physical shape (thread, cable) goes, anything is flexible if it is thin enough that opposite faces don't develop significant compressive/tensile stresses on bending. This is one reason why most cables are a bundle of smaller wires/threads. (Reliability is another issue, since if one goes it doesn't take the others out with it, as would happen if a cable was a solid piece of material (e.g., metal)). You can bend a multifilament line easily, whereas a solid cable of the same diameter would either be too stiff to bend easily, or would break or permanently deform as a result of the bending.
So, tethers or cables made from these nanocomposites would most likely be multifilament, making them flexible enough to be spooled easily, while still being very strong.
Conversation 2:
TM: "Hello, may I speak to to Mrs. Mole?"
Me (sobbing): "No, she died last week. Is it important?"
My mother would tell telemrketers this after my father died. Without a hitch, the scumbags would continue, "Well, then, would you be interested in...." You can't play games with them because they really don't care if it is true. All they want to do is to get a "hit." Disgusting.
And don't forget how often you have to clean those print heads! I use my $100 Epson inkjet about once a week to print a page or two. Almost without fail, the heads need several cleanings before the print will emerge without blanked lines. I waste far more ink (and time!) cleaning the stupid heads than I do actually printing. And of course, the Epson utility wastes all six colors of ink during a cleaning, even if, say, black is the only offender. Sells more ink, I know.
This pumps up the cost-per-page of an inkjet even further.
Its only quality better than a Laser is that it's small and easier to stash under my desk. Still, it's the last inkiet I'll ever buy.
Well surprise, surprise. This was prettty much our senior project in Ceramic Engineering at the University of Missouri in 1993. We didn't have the expertise to pursue commercialization, so we just left it at that. What's the number of this guy's patent?
What we made was a furnace for less than $500. That's cheap! Just an inexpensive microwave with a thermocouple and furnace controller from Omega. Plugged the microwave into 120 V AC switched by the controller's relay. Our academic department demo'd it for years at conferences.
The chamber was made from hollowed-out pieces of low-density furnace insulation bricks (think of angel food cake's consistency). We lined the inside of the chamber with silicon carbide (mixed with high-T cement). It absorbs strongly in the microwave range, and is cheap. The silicon carbide would get incredibly hot, thus heating the inside of the chamber radiatively. The heating elements self-healed. As they got hot, they would oxidize at the surface to make glass (SiO2), which protected the rest of the silicon carbide from oxidation.
Using an alumina crucible, we were melting copper and glass all over the place. I still have the old prototype, and occasionally amaze friends with some home-cast copper blobs or hand-drwan glass fibers.
BTW, the idea isn't all that new. Microwave processing of materials is widely researched.
Disclaimer: Don't even think of melting copper in your own kitchen, wearing only your bunny slippers and skivs. We were experienced with handling hot stuff. Just don't do anything I've described, okay?, because you will lose an eye.
Now you can make your very own! ...so scratch a new penny down to the shiny zinc...
Here's the easy way to do it. Make a tiny scratch in the penny, on the edge or on Lincoln's nose. Drop it into some dilute nitric acid (HNO3). 10 or 20 % should do. Nitric dissolves zinc, but not copper. Soooo, pretty soon, you have yourself a hollow penny. Makes an incredibly cheap, personalized gift if your girlfriend is named Penny. Mine was, and she loved it.:-)
It's a funny article, but I'm not sure it's a hoax. (I've heard the hoax-supporting evidence.) What many may not know, is that there really are zealots who are this foaming-at-the-mouth luney.
Long ago, as an early teen, I was taken by Mommy to church to listen to one. He preached to us about the evils of "rock" music (anything not explicitly Christian). The year was 1984, the location was the suburbs of a city of 350,000.
These guys can find "evil" in anything, and will fabricate ridiculous arguments to suport their position. This guy's arguments were so unsupportable that even at 14 I could tell he was nuts. Guys like this still occasionally get groups to have "burnings" of books, records, etc.. Somehow, though, I doubt that they would find many takers for a Tibook burning party.;-)
Just go to Apple and click on "Hardware," then "Powerbook," then "Tech Specs." It couldn't be any easier to find.
In my dream world, every manufacturer would make it this easy to find information on their products. It baffles me that they don't have an "I know what I'm doing" button, or something to allow the informed to cut through the crap. Ever try to get info on a VW? You'll endure cryptic informaiton arrangement, no-way-out slideshow-style information presentation when they do offer details, and Flash Out the Ass(TM).
Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements. They are so used to clicking next that anyone who has agreed to this deserves to give thier info to M$
OK, my ex-girlfriend is a lawyer, but I am not. She talked specifically about this sometimes. The Ex says:
(1) One thing that is always considered in legal issues is, "What would a reasonable person do?" Well, no "reasonable person" can read every EULA they get. Therefore, it is not clear that any non-standard stuff that you "agree to" can be enforced, because it has not been tested in the courts (when we discussed this).
(2) Contractual obligations cannot supersede the law, and you cannot sign away your rights. For example, "You agree to enslave yourself to Bill if he decides he wants that," would not be enforceable.
Remember, this is second hand, but it seems applicable here. Perhaps a law-talkin'-guy can expound.
A catalyst is something that lowers the energy barrier for a chemical reaction. It "helps it along" without being consumed in the process. It is not used up.
The article described a catalyst that would help sunlight to break H2O apart into H2 and O2, a chemical reaction.
(specifically, 2 H2O => 2 H2 + O2). The catalyst would help some of the radiant energy in the sunlight to be converted to chemical energy. Plants do this all the time.
In other words, it would not be a perpetual motion machine.
...profoundly disturbing about such shenanigans going on even as District Court Judge
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly allegedly mulls the proper punishment of the
Microsoft Corporation, an illegal monopoly, for violating U.S. antitrust law?
Mod me down for off-topic, but I'm wondering why this story has 3x as many posts as the "last-call for public comments" in the M$ antitrust case story?
If you've got something to say, and the time to post it here, then say it to the DoJ. They are the ones who can do something to change that behavior you're dissatisfied (satisfied?) with.
DoJ will be receiving a glut of multiple emails sent by single individuals, probably from both sides (tho prob more from M$).
Surely "they" know that a single person can have more than one email address. This may affect the weight that such comments have.
I don't know how they are going to address this issue, but to help show them that your comment is from a unique, existing US citizen, include your physical address in your email. It can't hurt.
Better yet, walk out to a blue maildox on the street and mail a letter today to
Renata B. Hesse
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Physcially-mailed voter/citizen comments have a much greater impact than those sent by other, "low effort," methods (e.g. telephone, email, grabbing a rep's collar on the street and raving madly).
...ads drip from every little pause in content, and the content itself is of very low value, targeting lowest common denominator in the society.
These days, ads drip from the content. Check out "The Chamber(TM)", on Fox(TM), prime time Sunday. Contestants in this quiz show are subjected to increasing physical stress (temperature variation, vibration, etc.) while they answer inane questions, many of which are astoundingly blatant product placements." Some examples:
"The XBox(TM) is produced by what software company?"
"Alpine Snow(TM), Glacier Freeze(TM), and Riptide Rush(TM) are all flavors of what popular sports drink?"
"Name two former U.S. presidents who are still living."
Endorsements have always been part of the programming, but these are in addition to Fox's(TM) usual glut of commercial breaks. This has to be a new low; maybe they're just feeling for the bottom.
If the blurring of the line between content and advertisiement keeps up, no one will want to record anything. Shitty content is the best piracy protection of all!
Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection? Either I've got a lot of work ahead of me before I'm iPod-ready, or some benevolent/.'er will reply with info about a tool that will automate this process...
You are not alone. Even folks who use an auto-tagger when ripping our CDs have trouble, since the CDDB isn't terribly consistent with artist names, etc..
The most effective solution for sprucing up MP3 tags is a Mac-only app, MP3 Rage. It will do such nifty things as strip "The " from band names, and create ID3 artist/title/album tags based on file-containing folders and file names (e.g. MP3s/Pop/Cake/Fashion Nugget/01-Frank Sinatra.mp3). You probably have your MP3s organized this way already, so it might take 10 miutes to tag your entire collection.
I apologize in advance for recommending a commercial, Mac-only product. If you want to write you own app, you should know that the iPod/iTunes best recognize ID3 v2.3.0 tags.
If iCab (a Mac browser) identifies itself as such, the "error" page described loads. If iCab claims to be MSIE 5.0, then the page loads just fine. I hear the same goes for Opera.
Easy to work around, but the average user won't bother.
You can firewire-enable your Mac with a PCI card for about $40. I'd recommend this in any case if you're buying any external storage, since it's the direction things are going. If you have a USB iMac, though, you're out of luck.
USB would be a nice optioin, since the interface looks both powerful and intuitive, just like most other things from Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry this isn't about Sony, but about MMORPG addiction...
Addictive machine-generated worlds are yet another accurate predicion of Arthur C. Clarke. Read "THE LION OF COMARRE," a short story by Arthur C. Clarke (1968). The plot involved a machine that people hook up to, which puts them into a tailor-made synthetic world, where they can be whatever it is they want to be. (Think THE MATRIX, but personalized and pleasant.) Users connected to this electronic Shangri-La never leave and never wake. Disconnecting someone can be devastating.
And here we are, on the road to Comarre. Everquest and others are only computer games, but look at how addictive they are. I wonder how addictive they'll be once the makers REALLY figure out how to addict people. Could we see "Comarre Houses" spring up, for junkies to cash out and live only for the game? Ha, no, we have the internet. And, of course, humans do actually interact with each other in MMORPGs, albeit to a limited extent.
One thing the author didn't mention, getting too deep into one of these games can be a reason to stay in itself. If personal and professional life have decayed or disappeared due to neglect, the player doesn't have anything to go to, outside of the game. (This was the case in Comarre.) The act of unplugging would be too traumatic, the recovery time too long... So they stay... Classic addiction behavior.
This is one of Clarke's predictions (in his stories) that I'd rather not see come to full fruit.
I found it fascinating that at only one place in the article, buried at the end of a long and complex paragraph did the author use the terms lies. He frequently used euphemisms such as "creative", but only once he did directly refer to dishonesty.
;-P
You've probably never won a proposal, I'll bet.
In proposals, you have to tell a good story. And no one can tell the future. Which of these would you pick?
"An understanding of this mechanism could lead to the prevention of 20 % of all cancers within ten years."
or
"We expect to make an incremental advance in our understanding of the relation between the physico-chemical fliberty flap and the occurrence of randomonucleopyrolysistic neurophononisms."
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example.
and... Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artificial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
and...
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem.
It can often appear to be the case that enough details are not included in articles, but it really depends on the field, and upon the research group. Part of the driver for this is the "number of publications per year" metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work. What happens is that a group may be using a technique that is pretty standardized, either within their individual lab or within their field of expertise. A person "skilled in the art" can often get enough detail to duplicate the work. And, since the game is to publish every little new thing, it would be a waste of paper to fully detail the experimental technique in each and every publication. It would also eat up a lot of the space in which researchers would rather publish their hot new results. A common practice of good research groups is to occasionaly write one big paper describing the details of the technique, and to refer to that in subsequent papers.
And this is a good thing. In the end, lots of short papers tends to keep everyone at the same pace in the development of a topic. If everyone published only a magnum opus every five years, the result would be a significant amount of dispersion in research directions, possibly in directions that were not fruitful (in terms of being based on good assumptions and a of the state of the art, the current mind on the topic).
It's "two heads are better than one." With short papers, everyone must keep tabs on one another, and short papers help keep everyone focused.
I'm not saying that important information isn't intentionally withheld from the papers. It is. But, science is a race, and you don't want other groups to get the jump on you by giving away your secret. If a reader follows the publication record of a good group, s/he will find that these details eventually come out, in later publications. It's a sort of short-term trade secret approach. Optimally, one keeps a detail secret long enough to do some strong fundamental work in an area. The secret is later (a year or two) released, so anyone can expand on the ideas. If the work was good and is widely read, in the end it gains the researcher the advantage of being a heavily referenced source on the topic (another metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work).
Disclaimer: I am a materials scientist, and this is the field from which I am drawing on for these observations, although I do believe they probably apply in other fields where several groups are working in a particular area.
All of the very high K superconductors (>100 K) are (IIRC) brittle ceramic compunds that could not be easily constructed into something of commercial use.
Nope. They are easily constructed into something of commercial use. I work on the technology. It is just not cheaper than copper wire for power transmission (yet). Superconducting cables are, however, currently used in various specialized applications, and in 2004, a superconducting power transmission cable will be installed in the Northeast US. The Japanese and Germans are making great advances as well as the US. Although the superconductors are "brittle" ceramics, one can wind a superconducting cable around a bottle neck, and it will still work fine. Why? It's thin. If that doesn't explain it, consult basic mechanics of materials textbook.
"Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?"
and
There have been some reports of DRM speakers that decode the sound inside the speaker. But I can't find them right now.
A bill was recently discussed (introduced and defeated, or perhaps only proposed; I don't remember the name) that would have required DRM on every analog/digital and digital/analog conversion device. That's microphones, speakers, everything. It died miserably, but it's scary that it even got as far as it did.
I hear they're going to be requiring DRM on pencils soon.
I wonder, does this "extraterrestrial" life have DNA in it? If it does shouldn't that raise a few questions? Like perhaps contamination from terrestrial sources? Attention grabbing headlines like this are rather unscientific if they are so premature as to not even do basic tests.
Of course it raises questions. These issues are probably being investigated. Scientists cannot wait until they "know everything" because we will never know everything. Note that this is something he said during a presentation. Scientists often conversationally give a glimpse of recent results, especially if they might spark interest. It's not premature at all.
Note also that this is a newspaper article, not a scientific article, thus all of the attention-grabbing language. The article's author was only reporting on one bit of a presentation. What probably happened in this case (and generally in cases where the press blows something out of proportion, though they didn't do it here) was that he said something like this: "We took great precautions to avoid contamination. The results imply that the bacteria were extraterrestrial. Studies of these bacteria will yield more information." And so on.
Be sure that you consider the source before making quick judgements. And remember that newspaper article reports of new scientific issues are often written by people who don't understand the topic. Due to space limitations, they never give you all of the details, and often get those that they include wrong. i.e. Grain of salt.
I think if they knew what it was, they would care. If you told them -- hey, can I install software that will watch your browsing habits in order to better target junk mail to your email address? -- then they would have the chance to say 'fuck off' too.
Doesn't this give them the opportunity to watch your browsing habits to better target junk/spam also to your physical address and phone number, through correlation with your modem's EA/MAC address? Yikes!
Are there prohibitions on them doing this? How about prohibitions on the third-party spyware doing this? All it would need is the number.
Anybody have any more information or links that explain how flexible this new material is?
Yup. If the nanotubes are chemically bonded to the matrix, as the article suggests, and it is comprised of 50% nanotubes, it would be extremely stiff. Far stiffer than any carbon fiber composite.
As far as flexibility of a physical shape (thread, cable) goes, anything is flexible if it is thin enough that opposite faces don't develop significant compressive/tensile stresses on bending. This is one reason why most cables are a bundle of smaller wires/threads. (Reliability is another issue, since if one goes it doesn't take the others out with it, as would happen if a cable was a solid piece of material (e.g., metal)). You can bend a multifilament line easily, whereas a solid cable of the same diameter would either be too stiff to bend easily, or would break or permanently deform as a result of the bending.
So, tethers or cables made from these nanocomposites would most likely be multifilament, making them flexible enough to be spooled easily, while still being very strong.
Conversation 2:
TM: "Hello, may I speak to to Mrs. Mole?"
Me (sobbing): "No, she died last week. Is it important?"
My mother would tell telemrketers this after my father died. Without a hitch, the scumbags would continue, "Well, then, would you be interested in...." You can't play games with them because they really don't care if it is true. All they want to do is to get a "hit." Disgusting.
And don't forget how often you have to clean those print heads! I use my $100 Epson inkjet about once a week to print a page or two. Almost without fail, the heads need several cleanings before the print will emerge without blanked lines. I waste far more ink (and time!) cleaning the stupid heads than I do actually printing. And of course, the Epson utility wastes all six colors of ink during a cleaning, even if, say, black is the only offender. Sells more ink, I know.
This pumps up the cost-per-page of an inkjet even further.
Its only quality better than a Laser is that it's small and easier to stash under my desk. Still, it's the last inkiet I'll ever buy.
Well surprise, surprise. This was prettty much our senior project in Ceramic Engineering at the University of Missouri in 1993. We didn't have the expertise to pursue commercialization, so we just left it at that. What's the number of this guy's patent?
What we made was a furnace for less than $500. That's cheap! Just an inexpensive microwave with a thermocouple and furnace controller from Omega. Plugged the microwave into 120 V AC switched by the controller's relay. Our academic department demo'd it for years at conferences.
The chamber was made from hollowed-out pieces of low-density furnace insulation bricks (think of angel food cake's consistency). We lined the inside of the chamber with silicon carbide (mixed with high-T cement). It absorbs strongly in the microwave range, and is cheap. The silicon carbide would get incredibly hot, thus heating the inside of the chamber radiatively. The heating elements self-healed. As they got hot, they would oxidize at the surface to make glass (SiO2), which protected the rest of the silicon carbide from oxidation.
Using an alumina crucible, we were melting copper and glass all over the place. I still have the old prototype, and occasionally amaze friends with some home-cast copper blobs or hand-drwan glass fibers.
BTW, the idea isn't all that new. Microwave processing of materials is widely researched.
Disclaimer: Don't even think of melting copper in your own kitchen, wearing only your bunny slippers and skivs. We were experienced with handling hot stuff. Just don't do anything I've described, okay?, because you will lose an eye.
Now you can make your very own!
...so scratch a new penny down to the shiny zinc...
:-)
Here's the easy way to do it. Make a tiny scratch in the penny, on the edge or on Lincoln's nose. Drop it into some dilute nitric acid (HNO3). 10 or 20 % should do. Nitric dissolves zinc, but not copper. Soooo, pretty soon, you have yourself a hollow penny. Makes an incredibly cheap, personalized gift if your girlfriend is named Penny. Mine was, and she loved it.
It's a funny article, but I'm not sure it's a hoax. (I've heard the hoax-supporting evidence.) What many may not know, is that there really are zealots who are this foaming-at-the-mouth luney.
;-)
Long ago, as an early teen, I was taken by Mommy to church to listen to one. He preached to us about the evils of "rock" music (anything not explicitly Christian). The year was 1984, the location was the suburbs of a city of 350,000.
These guys can find "evil" in anything, and will fabricate ridiculous arguments to suport their position. This guy's arguments were so unsupportable that even at 14 I could tell he was nuts. Guys like this still occasionally get groups to have "burnings" of books, records, etc.. Somehow, though, I doubt that they would find many takers for a Tibook burning party.
Just go to Apple and click on "Hardware," then "Powerbook," then "Tech Specs." It couldn't be any easier to find.
In my dream world, every manufacturer would make it this easy to find information on their products. It baffles me that they don't have an "I know what I'm doing" button, or something to allow the informed to cut through the crap. Ever try to get info on a VW? You'll endure cryptic informaiton arrangement, no-way-out slideshow-style information presentation when they do offer details, and Flash Out the Ass(TM).
Guess I'll go buy a Nissan to stick my TiBook in.
Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements. They are so used to clicking next that anyone who has agreed to this deserves to give thier info to M$
OK, my ex-girlfriend is a lawyer, but I am not. She talked specifically about this sometimes. The Ex says:
(1) One thing that is always considered in legal issues is, "What would a reasonable person do?" Well, no "reasonable person" can read every EULA they get. Therefore, it is not clear that any non-standard stuff that you "agree to" can be enforced, because it has not been tested in the courts (when we discussed this).
(2) Contractual obligations cannot supersede the law, and you cannot sign away your rights. For example, "You agree to enslave yourself to Bill if he decides he wants that," would not be enforceable.
Remember, this is second hand, but it seems applicable here. Perhaps a law-talkin'-guy can expound.
A catalyst is something that lowers the energy barrier for a chemical reaction. It "helps it along" without being consumed in the process. It is not used up.
The article described a catalyst that would help sunlight to break H2O apart into H2 and O2, a chemical reaction.
(specifically, 2 H2O => 2 H2 + O2). The catalyst would help some of the radiant energy in the sunlight to be converted to chemical energy. Plants do this all the time.
In other words, it would not be a perpetual motion machine.
> You still need to recharge your laptop with Hydrogen, and it will polute just as
>much as batteries do today(very little).
To get the electricity to recharge your laptop's batteries, someone, somewhere, is burning coal or oil. Dirty, dirty, dirty.
The "recharge" of energy provided by sunlight-cracked water would not produce any pollution. Squeaky clean.
...profoundly disturbing about such shenanigans going on even as District Court Judge
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly allegedly mulls the proper punishment of the
Microsoft Corporation, an illegal monopoly, for violating U.S. antitrust law?
Mod me down for off-topic, but I'm wondering why this story has 3x as many posts as the "last-call for public comments" in the M$ antitrust case story?
If you've got something to say, and the time to post it here, then say it to the DoJ. They are the ones who can do something to change that behavior you're dissatisfied (satisfied?) with.
http://www.codeweavers.com/~jwhite/tunney.html
DoJ will be receiving a glut of multiple emails sent by single individuals, probably from both sides (tho prob more from M$).
Surely "they" know that a single person can have more than one email address. This may affect the weight that such comments have.
I don't know how they are going to address this issue, but to help show them that your comment is from a unique, existing US citizen, include your physical address in your email. It can't hurt.
Better yet, walk out to a blue maildox on the street and mail a letter today to
Renata B. Hesse
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Physcially-mailed voter/citizen comments have a much greater impact than those sent by other, "low effort," methods (e.g. telephone, email, grabbing a rep's collar on the street and raving madly).
These days, ads drip from the content. Check out "The Chamber(TM)", on Fox(TM), prime time Sunday. Contestants in this quiz show are subjected to increasing physical stress (temperature variation, vibration, etc.) while they answer inane questions, many of which are astoundingly blatant product placements." Some examples:
"The XBox(TM) is produced by what software company?"
"Alpine Snow(TM), Glacier Freeze(TM), and Riptide Rush(TM) are all flavors of what popular sports drink?"
"Name two former U.S. presidents who are still living."
Endorsements have always been part of the programming, but these are in addition to Fox's(TM) usual glut of commercial breaks. This has to be a new low; maybe they're just feeling for the bottom.
If the blurring of the line between content and advertisiement keeps up, no one will want to record anything. Shitty content is the best piracy protection of all!
---------------
Support NPR and PBS.
Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection? Either I've got a lot of work ahead of me before I'm iPod-ready, or some benevolent /.'er will reply with info about a tool that will automate this process...
/iTunes best recognize ID3 v2.3.0 tags.
You are not alone. Even folks who use an auto-tagger when ripping our CDs have trouble, since the CDDB isn't terribly consistent with artist names, etc..
The most effective solution for sprucing up MP3 tags is a Mac-only app, MP3 Rage. It will do such nifty things as strip "The " from band names, and create ID3 artist/title/album tags based on file-containing folders and file names (e.g. MP3s/Pop/Cake/Fashion Nugget/01-Frank Sinatra.mp3). You probably have your MP3s organized this way already, so it might take 10 miutes to tag your entire collection.
I apologize in advance for recommending a commercial, Mac-only product. If you want to write you own app, you should know that the iPod
If iCab (a Mac browser) identifies itself as such, the "error" page described loads. If iCab claims to be MSIE 5.0, then the page loads just fine. I hear the same goes for Opera. Easy to work around, but the average user won't bother.
You can firewire-enable your Mac with a PCI card for about $40. I'd recommend this in any case if you're buying any external storage, since it's the direction things are going. If you have a USB iMac, though, you're out of luck.
USB would be a nice optioin, since the interface looks both powerful and intuitive, just like most other things from Apple.