Absolutely right. One stat I heard is that it costs $100 Million to establish a brand. And that's just any brand. The biggest and best know brands have been spending tens of millions a year for decades to establish, reinforce, and spread their name recognition.
So, the undisputed winner, based on name recognition, value, reputation, etc, as opposed to actual size of the name, is:
listed at 35-40 USD... so they aren't terribly more expensive than DVDs
That's if you don't count the $1995 for the player. That's steep.
My big questions:
1) Do the players they are selling record?
2) If so, do they get around the Macrovision copy protection built in to HD hardware/signals?
Related to 2) above, have the HD content copyright owners suddenly relaxed their position on recording? I doubt it.
I've been following her music for several years. I really dig it. It's a fun fusion of funky baselines, smooth melodies, rapping from laid back to angry, and jazzy transitions. Lyrical content ranges from melancholy to nostalgic to sensual to angry "fight the oppressors" type stuff.
Independent of the merits of the parent post here, Legos are used in the lab.
I recently went to a talk by a guy (Dave Brown
of DAU and
GMU
) who got his PhD recently, and used Legos in his dissertation experiments. He showed that by "learning" a Bayesian network from actual performance data of a system you could create a model that would predict the performance of the system much more accurately than the textbook formulae it was theoretically supposed to follow.
To show this he studied battery decay patterns by running lego models around and measuring the speed they went as they ran out of juice. He also uses lego models for prototyping in the classes he teaches at Defense Acquisition University.
In short, this guy gets to play with legos at his paying job, and for his PhD project. The bastard. I'm so envious. I gotta figure out how to work that into my job.
Agreed. And Gattaca was a frightening prediction of things that now have already been realized. Here on/. and in the more general media we've seen stories of DNA based selection of embryos to exclude particular traits and to choose gender, doorways that you can walk through which will suck up the microscopic pieces of ourselves we perpetually emit and analyze your DNA, perhaps without your knowledge, widespread casual use of fingerprint identification, a national database of everyone's info, a national database of everyone's medical records, etc. Gattaca is a vision of the future that is scary because it is credible, possible, and maybe even probable.
O'Reilly, O'Reilly, O'Reilly
on
Linux Textbooks?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Learn it, live it, love it.
Let me say it one more time,
O'Reilly.
Hey, you should know better than to post bad regex around here.:-)
You'll need to escape your dots, like this::s/\.com/\.us/g Otherwise you might replace somethings you didn't want to, like "thecommons.com" -> "th.usmons.us". Also, you'll probably want to do it on every line, so something like this:%s/\.com/\.us/g
or
g/\.com/s/\.com/\.us/g would be better.
Just reading the specs on this baby, and I notice that it doesn't support its highest refresh rate at its highest resolution. I've noticed this on lots of monitors. Can anyone explain why this is so?
We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes.
Actually I am among the fortunate with good eyesight, without even having to slice and dice my eyeballs with lasers.
I just liked combination of a concise, easy to type username with visual interest and a play on words. And a dash of geek mystique. It's pretty slim pickin's these days.
MarkusQ, big kudos to you for the first correct, appropriate in context, use of "beg the question" I have ever seen on this site. It is misused *vastly* more often than it is used correctly, so it's a relief to see it right for once. Way to go.
In Other News... Mean Time Between Duplicate Slashdot Posts Shrinking!!
In a report released today (and last Friday, and the previous Tuesday) researchers claim that the mean time between duplicate posts on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) has been shrinking.
The scientists say that the average time has dropped from four days, six hours to two days, three hours in just the last two months. "At the rate they are going, the duplicate posts will start appearing before the orginals sometime in early July," said Dr. A. Nahasapeemapetalan, "The relativistic implications are quite disturbing."
The report is based on data from satelite imagery, nanotech spy cameras attached to cockroaches, a Beowulf cluster of Carnivore servers, and murmurs from the guy in the next cubicle looking at faux-Portman pr0n.
If you missed parts of this, don't worry!! This message will be posted again in 1 day, 8.23 hrs.
M16's are *great* for target shooting. The open sight on them is one of the best. I personally was able to consistently (~ 70%) hit a 10" x 6" "gopher" target at 200 yards, and that was my first time shooting an M16. Never had that kind of accuracy at that distance without a scope before.
But your point is good, it's probably not the best short range weapon.
There is an interesting parallel to this in Sign Language. Sign communication spans a wide spectrum. At the "low" end of the spectrum is Signed English, which basically is english communicated in sign. English can be transliterated by signing or spelling each word. On the other end of the spectrum is ASL (American Sign Language) which has a grammer and idiom of it's own (although some english words are used within that grammar). To translate from English to ASL, or vice-versa, you have to grasp the idea and context then create a new representation of it in the target language. Most real sign communication is in the middle ground, or pidgin, incorporating parts from both.
The ideas in this thread also parallel the object-oriented concepts of separating representation from view, e.g. M-V-C. Seems natural that brains work that way for some processes.
By agreeing that the global environment is a chaos system and saying global warming is a fact you contradict yourself.
Hopefully we are agreeing on terms here. I would define the currently held concept of Global Warming as the belief that: "the earth has been warming and will continue to warm, partly as a result of human activity."
The future behavior of a chaos system cannot be predicted accurately. So we don't know if the earth will continue to warm. It might, it might not, it might suddenly go into an ice age. Chaos system often undergo sudden radical changes.
A corrolary to this, which makes sense, is that since the chaos system is unpredictable, it is also unpredictable with slightly different starting conditions or influences. So, we can't know what effect our pollution is having on the system. Might be making things warmer, might be making things cooler. You are right, our effect is non-zero, but that does not imply that we are causing warming. There is no way to know.
However, as I said in the previous post, I don't think this should be used as a cover to keep from cleaning up. There are many, many good arguments in favor of cleaning up our act, including the hope of decreasing any possible effects on the global climate.
Excellent review and critique. And it sounds like a very thought provoking book.
We really don't have enough critical thinking going on in the environmental sector. It's a whole lot of bandwagon, dogma, and emotional fervor.
I think of myself as environmentally responsible, but I really don't buy in to most of the propaganda that is out there. I mean, I agree that we should clean up, stop polluting the air, water, ground, and space, and help developing nations get to where we are in a cleaner way than we did.
But many environmental activists, especially the global warming nuts, just refuse to recognize some basics of science. The global environment is a chaos system. You cannot predict its behavior, and therefore you cannot predict how it will respond to particular stimuli. It changes all the time, always has, even before mankind infested all corners of the planet.
These measurements of half degree changes in the average global temperature quoted by panic-inducing lobbyists as proof that we are destroying the world are an example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this therefore because of this".
I really believe that many of them think the ends justifies the means, and they will say anything and scare anyone just to accomplish their goals. And mostly I agree with those goals. But that kind of tactic is arrogant, non-democratic and dangerous.
Responsible people go about creating change by educating and convincing.
Those who think they know what's best for everyone and are willing to force their solution without convincing everyone of its validity should be feared, watched, and held to the standards of our open society.
This is supposed to be a review, right? He tells us some objective facts about the book, but there are no conclusions or recommendations here. Does Danny recommend the book or not? If all you have to do for a book review is give the table of contents, I need to get into that industry.
So when someone get's busted for illegal copies of mp3s, is that the value the MPAA will use to calculate damages?
No, the "damages" they'll be after will be their piece of the pie, which will be hundreds of times higher. Or more likely both. E.g., you pay $10 for a CD, and the artist gets 50 cents (or whatever). Steal the CD and the MPAA will want their $10, plus emotional damage of $30, and punitive damages, of course...
These security companies are a sham (or at least should be ashamed).
Well, I can't speak for the others, but Common Criteria is not a company. It is a body of international standards intended to give everyone a common language for definition of security requirements, testing, and evaluating results. You can find more info about it here: http://www.commoncriteria.org/
or more specifically the docs describing the Common Criteria here: http://www.commoncriteria.org/cc/cc.html
A quote from the intro to the docs might help clarify:
"This multipart standard, the Common Criteria (CC), is meant to be used as the basis
for evaluation of security properties of IT products and systems. By establishing
such a common criteria base, the results of an IT security evaluation will be
meaningful to a wider audience.
2 The CC will permit comparability between the results of independent security
evaluations. It does so by providing a common set of requirements for the security
functions of IT products and systems and for assurance measures applied to them
during a security evaluation."
That is the question. Certainly it would be a very good thing if they are making the effort, but are they? Schneier said it better than I could:
"...I hope he's right when he says that
Microsoft is committed to that challenge. I don't know for sure,
though. I can't tell if the Gates memo represents a real change in
Microsoft, or just another marketing tactic. Microsoft has made so many
empty claims about their security processes -- and the security of their
processes -- that when I hear another one I can't help believing it's more
of the same flim-flam.
"
Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts, wrote that he was concerned about "the nature and extent of any transgressions of the law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised."
Slashdot Mirror
So, the undisputed winner, based on name recognition, value, reputation, etc, as opposed to actual size of the name, is:
GE
That's if you don't count the $1995 for the player. That's steep.
My big questions:
1) Do the players they are selling record?
2) If so, do they get around the Macrovision copy protection built in to HD hardware/signals?
Related to 2) above, have the HD content copyright owners suddenly relaxed their position on recording? I doubt it.
Oh, and I've also seen her live, at a street festival here in DC (she's a DC native). She and her band put on a great show.
Here's a link for her discography and info at All Music Guide
I've been following her music for several years. I really dig it. It's a fun fusion of funky baselines, smooth melodies, rapping from laid back to angry, and jazzy transitions. Lyrical content ranges from melancholy to nostalgic to sensual to angry "fight the oppressors" type stuff.
I like her first album, "Plantation Lullabies", best.
I recently went to a talk by a guy (Dave Brown of DAU and GMU ) who got his PhD recently, and used Legos in his dissertation experiments. He showed that by "learning" a Bayesian network from actual performance data of a system you could create a model that would predict the performance of the system much more accurately than the textbook formulae it was theoretically supposed to follow.
To show this he studied battery decay patterns by running lego models around and measuring the speed they went as they ran out of juice. He also uses lego models for prototyping in the classes he teaches at Defense Acquisition University.
In short, this guy gets to play with legos at his paying job, and for his PhD project. The bastard. I'm so envious. I gotta figure out how to work that into my job.
Agreed. And Gattaca was a frightening prediction of things that now have already been realized. Here on /. and in the more general media we've seen stories of DNA based selection of embryos to exclude particular traits and to choose gender, doorways that you can walk through which will suck up the microscopic pieces of ourselves we perpetually emit and analyze your DNA, perhaps without your knowledge, widespread casual use of fingerprint identification, a national database of everyone's info, a national database of everyone's medical records, etc. Gattaca is a vision of the future that is scary because it is credible, possible, and maybe even probable.
Learn it, live it, love it.
Let me say it one more time, O'Reilly.
You'll need to escape your dots, like this: :s/\.com/\.us/g Otherwise you might replace somethings you didn't want to, like "thecommons.com" -> "th.usmons.us". Also, you'll probably want to do it on every line, so something like this :%s/\.com/\.us/g
or
g/\.com/s/\.com/\.us/g would be better.
Just reading the specs on this baby, and I notice that it doesn't support its highest refresh rate at its highest resolution. I've noticed this on lots of monitors. Can anyone explain why this is so?
Here it is:
http://www.shuttleonline.com/
From their "Licences and Legal Stuff" page:
We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes.
Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter, June 1998
Shell, April 1999
Time, January 2000
National Hydrogen Association, Spring 2000
Red Herring, July 2000
Fast Company, October 2000
ENN, December 2000
BBC, December 2001
etc.
Actually I am among the fortunate with good eyesight, without even having to slice and dice my eyeballs with lasers.
I just liked combination of a concise, easy to type username with visual interest and a play on words. And a dash of geek mystique. It's pretty slim pickin's these days.
MarkusQ, big kudos to you for the first correct, appropriate in context, use of "beg the question" I have ever seen on this site. It is misused *vastly* more often than it is used correctly, so it's a relief to see it right for once. Way to go.
In a report released today (and last Friday, and the previous Tuesday) researchers claim that the mean time between duplicate posts on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) has been shrinking.
The scientists say that the average time has dropped from four days, six hours to two days, three hours in just the last two months. "At the rate they are going, the duplicate posts will start appearing before the orginals sometime in early July," said Dr. A. Nahasapeemapetalan, "The relativistic implications are quite disturbing."
The report is based on data from satelite imagery, nanotech spy cameras attached to cockroaches, a Beowulf cluster of Carnivore servers, and murmurs from the guy in the next cubicle looking at faux-Portman pr0n.
If you missed parts of this, don't worry!! This message will be posted again in 1 day, 8.23 hrs.
From the article: Expedition leader Monty Halls said...
M16's are *great* for target shooting. The open sight on them is one of the best. I personally was able to consistently (~ 70%) hit a 10" x 6" "gopher" target at 200 yards, and that was my first time shooting an M16. Never had that kind of accuracy at that distance without a scope before.
But your point is good, it's probably not the best short range weapon.
The ideas in this thread also parallel the object-oriented concepts of separating representation from view, e.g. M-V-C. Seems natural that brains work that way for some processes.
Hopefully we are agreeing on terms here. I would define the currently held concept of Global Warming as the belief that: "the earth has been warming and will continue to warm, partly as a result of human activity."
The future behavior of a chaos system cannot be predicted accurately. So we don't know if the earth will continue to warm. It might, it might not, it might suddenly go into an ice age. Chaos system often undergo sudden radical changes.
A corrolary to this, which makes sense, is that since the chaos system is unpredictable, it is also unpredictable with slightly different starting conditions or influences. So, we can't know what effect our pollution is having on the system. Might be making things warmer, might be making things cooler. You are right, our effect is non-zero, but that does not imply that we are causing warming. There is no way to know.
However, as I said in the previous post, I don't think this should be used as a cover to keep from cleaning up. There are many, many good arguments in favor of cleaning up our act, including the hope of decreasing any possible effects on the global climate.
We really don't have enough critical thinking going on in the environmental sector. It's a whole lot of bandwagon, dogma, and emotional fervor.
I think of myself as environmentally responsible, but I really don't buy in to most of the propaganda that is out there. I mean, I agree that we should clean up, stop polluting the air, water, ground, and space, and help developing nations get to where we are in a cleaner way than we did.
But many environmental activists, especially the global warming nuts, just refuse to recognize some basics of science. The global environment is a chaos system. You cannot predict its behavior, and therefore you cannot predict how it will respond to particular stimuli. It changes all the time, always has, even before mankind infested all corners of the planet.
These measurements of half degree changes in the average global temperature quoted by panic-inducing lobbyists as proof that we are destroying the world are an example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this therefore because of this".
I really believe that many of them think the ends justifies the means, and they will say anything and scare anyone just to accomplish their goals. And mostly I agree with those goals. But that kind of tactic is arrogant, non-democratic and dangerous. Responsible people go about creating change by educating and convincing. Those who think they know what's best for everyone and are willing to force their solution without convincing everyone of its validity should be feared, watched, and held to the standards of our open society.
This is supposed to be a review, right? He tells us some objective facts about the book, but there are no conclusions or recommendations here. Does Danny recommend the book or not? If all you have to do for a book review is give the table of contents, I need to get into that industry.
No, the "damages" they'll be after will be their piece of the pie, which will be hundreds of times higher. Or more likely both. E.g., you pay $10 for a CD, and the artist gets 50 cents (or whatever). Steal the CD and the MPAA will want their $10, plus emotional damage of $30, and punitive damages, of course...
Well, I can't speak for the others, but Common Criteria is not a company. It is a body of international standards intended to give everyone a common language for definition of security requirements, testing, and evaluating results. You can find more info about it here:
http://www.commoncriteria.org/
or more specifically the docs describing the Common Criteria here:
http://www.commoncriteria.org/cc/cc.html
A quote from the intro to the docs might help clarify:
"This multipart standard, the Common Criteria (CC), is meant to be used as the basis for evaluation of security properties of IT products and systems. By establishing such a common criteria base, the results of an IT security evaluation will be meaningful to a wider audience. 2 The CC will permit comparability between the results of independent security evaluations. It does so by providing a common set of requirements for the security functions of IT products and systems and for assurance measures applied to them during a security evaluation."
That is the question. Certainly it would be a very good thing if they are making the effort, but are they? Schneier said it better than I could:
"...I hope he's right when he says that Microsoft is committed to that challenge. I don't know for sure, though. I can't tell if the Gates memo represents a real change in Microsoft, or just another marketing tactic. Microsoft has made so many empty claims about their security processes -- and the security of their processes -- that when I hear another one I can't help believing it's more of the same flim-flam. "
The Washington Post has this article about how Rep. Ed Markey is looking into Comcast's collection of personal internet usage info. Hey, this guy must read SlashDot!!
Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts, wrote that he was concerned about "the nature and extent of any transgressions of the law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised."
Also, Comcast has a new press release in response to the fracas.