That's not a fair comparison. Cosmos was a major series production (for PBS standards) with a major budget from top to bottom with a large creative staff involved, not in the same vein as standard interview which is what your "Typical Tyson dialogs' are. If you've ever seen one of Sagan's similar off the cuff interviews, they're not that much different. Commedians and Ted Koppel used to get a lot of mileage on his pronounciation of "millions and billions".
I think if Tyson were a real scientist, he'd recognize that the fuss over the designation "planet" is too arbitrary to be worth worrying much about, and it's silly to take a strong position on one side or the other *except* for tradition's sake. His position thus makes little sense, and it's telling that this is an issue that he chooses to take a stand on. If you've listened to him speak on various occasions, he's said repeatedly that this whole thing is much more about politics than science. (the biggest push to keep Pluto's old status comes from the USA which doesn't want to lose the distinction of the only planet to be discovered by an American)
You're wrong however that he should ignore it. The American Museum is one of the most prestigous faces of science to the general public. As he and others have pointed out, the Pluto controversy is an enormous learning opportunity and the Museum would be doing it's mission a great disservice by simply ignoring it. Which means the Museum is obligated to take a stance on it. And I think he did the right thing on this. It's a hell of an insight on how science, politics, and the public interact on. And for a change it's not on an issue on which our personal health or planetary ecology is at stake.
An astrophysics degree isn't something to brush off, and neither is Columbia University. and the Rose center isn't just any planetarium if you've seen what they've done to the place. Tyson is a good presence on camera and a good storyteller. It was kind of amusing to have him show the letters he was getting from all the schoolchildren trying to convince him to bring Pluto back to planet status. I'm with him and the IAU on this one, as I have a strong suspicion that when we take a good look at the Kuiper belt we're going to find dozens of Pluto-sized objects there with a bunch of them larger than the former ninth planet. Although even Tyson agrees that Pluto is still worth looking up close.
I really hate the "failed start" term that some folks use for Jupiter.
It's a sloppy term really. Jupiter isn't even close to what you need for fusion mass is something on the order of 50-100 Jupiters, 2010 not withstanding to initiate fusion. Jupiter is a gas giant, a planet, something considerably different from even a brown dwarf which is a lot more appropriate for that label. It's not a "failure" at anything it is what it is, and it's helped clear out a lot of junk which would have hit this planet otherwise.
That's also why Cassini took a lot longer to get to Saturn as opposed to the flyby Pioneers and Voyagers. It actually had to approach Saturn slowly enough so that it could perform orbital insertion with the deltav it could manage and still have fuel remaining for orbital maneuvers.
Evolution doesn't work at a purpose. It's all a matter whether an organism with a set of parts eats, or outbreeds another in the same niche. The advantages in our set that kept us around don't automatically get rid of the appendix unless a mutation which produces an appendixless Human outbreeds the normal model.
Unlike Microsoft which has revealed that it has sent stealth software updates even to users who had opted out of auto update. If MS can get away with this. There isn't a cause to action Apple over an update which requires USER action and approval to install.
OS X was specifically not supported on the Beige Macs, if you had that much of a problem running Jaguar on it, I'm not surprised. On the otherhand I ran a functional mail system using postoffice on a Bondi iMac running Jaguar. The clock speed on that machine 233mhz was slower than your Beige but OS X had been designed to run on that generation of computers and later. And if Jaguar and Beige Macs are your most current level of Mac exposure you're definitely talking old and ancient news repectively.
The amount of ads that would be neccessary for Photoshop to pay for itself would drive most creative people insane. The point to be made here is that the two examples cited here were failures for that model. Instead of trying imagine something farfetched as this, point to some existing examples that do work
Interesting examples. As I recall the ad-funded model didn't work well for either Opera or Eudora. I'm not sure what the present buisness model for Opera is, but Eudora was recently released to open source and is now being developed as the Penelope project with the Mozilla folks.
I remember that Mozilla got rather steamed about Apple's release of Safari when the latter's Windows version was released. There was also the expected kneejerk reaction from both the anti-Maz nazis here and the "Everything must be Open source" nazis here as well.
There is no microphone but what could be done would be to connect a headphone accessory to the dataport end of the iPod touch and then install a modified Skype to access it. Major problem in this scenario being that Apple still has not opened the gates to native software development on the iPh platform and anything installed would have the threat of a wipe from a firmeware update.
Affirmative action is NOT about racism, it's about fixing the mess that 4 centuries of racism in this country have caused. It's the recognition of the fact that women and minorities have been put into artficial ceilings on acheivement and that postive action is needed to correct an unjust situation. It does take these kind of measures to end dicrimination in the wider society.
Let's call the spade a spade okay? That "excellent example" was for the abolishment of affirmative action. Which is fine and hunky-dory if you think that all the racial disadvantage problems in the United States have been fixed. Others however might disagree with that assumption.
It's probably why I've had an easier time with Linux than most. The bulk of my Linux time has been spent with YellowDogLinux which is the dominant PowerPC distro put out by Terrasoft. It works on a variety of Power PC platforms but it's original target and probably still the bulk of it's user base was PowerPC Macintosh hardware. Was it as easy as point and click OS X installation? Not quite but pretty close. And it worked for me out of the box practically on every install.
Not if you you use a Mac. It wasn't always so. Originally the videos had a choice of Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and I think RealPlayer. Now they are only available in the current version of Windows Media, which is not supported by Microsoft's abandoned Mac client, nor by the Flip4WMV alternative plugin. And on Windows machines I've had very mixed results because I use Firefox instead of IE.
I don't scorn the efforts of the OLPC. The point I'm making is the solution they had was aimed at the wrong problem. The windup laptop project might have done some good in the extremely poor areas of the Appalachians or other areas, say, urban Bangkok or perhaps Native American reservations, which while rank poverty and hunger are present have more of the pre-existing conditions for a project like this to have a real impact. Not all poverty areas are the same, some are simply more appropriate for this kind of aid than others.
As to what I'm doing... that's an irrelevant diversionary question which has nothing to do with the question at hand? Why did the OLPC project fail and was it aimed at the right target? And trivial, whatever the experience of the Rev. Nancy Dean, in America it's the anomaly, in places like North Korea... it's the norm.
I don't have any stern words for the people who put this effort into the project. I see it more of a common trap that many of us technophiles tend to fall into, the idea that tech itself can be the solution or the primary part of one.
I do believe that aid should start with giving people fish and that the next part would be giving them the fishing pole. What I'm saying is that in many of these cases, the areas are not the places where windup laptops can serve as the "fishing pole".
Cute words now put substance to them. You tell me how a starving child with a windup laptop and no other basic resources is going to in your words, "generate electricity, a network, and an income to buy food" Those things depend upon economy and resources. When you have that answer Head over to the Gates Foundation, because you'll have proved yourself smarter than every other expert known to Humankind.
Force? people? Slavery? You've gone beyond mindless zealotry to full fledged demagougery. Maybe you've got some radical theory of economics that can overturn thousands of years of human experience, but from the reality side of the fence, you can't build the top of the pyramid without having your foundations laid first. The foundations of an economy are what's missing in the worst of the Third World areas. Try to get this straight in many of those areas that OLPC is trying to help we're talking about populations being decimated by a host of diseases, lack of sanitation, lack of a basic diet, and lack of governments (including their own) with a will to make any meaningful change in the circumstances that led up to these conditions.
Those people don't want to wind up laptops, they want to eat! they want a roof over their heads for their families, they want some assurance that their children will live to see tomorrow, a means to provide for themselves, they want all the things that are so basic to us that we can't conceive that they're missing.
I was examining the author's so-called BATNA content. The chart's pretty impressive but what are the numbers supposed to mean? Without the grounding that shows me the math and the meat behind those numbers, it's just a bunch of dots strung together to make a point. If you're going to use the scientific appearance, make sure you use scientific methods as well.
The author's explanation: "A short explanation: the graph shows all efficient contracts (those where no contract exists that is better for both parties). The x-axis shows a contract's value to Apple, the y-axis shows a contract's value to the recording studio. The vertical and horizontal bar indicate the BATNAs for Apple and the studio, respectively. Contracts that are outside the shaded area are unacceptable to at least one party."
Huh? What's that again?
Those are just words, Show me the science, the methodology or do us all the favor and take the article and your charts down and come back when you have real science.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a fair comparison. Cosmos was a major series production (for PBS standards) with a major budget from top to bottom with a large creative staff involved, not in the same vein as standard interview which is what your "Typical Tyson dialogs' are. If you've ever seen one of Sagan's similar off the cuff interviews, they're not that much different. Commedians and Ted Koppel used to get a lot of mileage on his pronounciation of "millions and billions".
You're wrong however that he should ignore it. The American Museum is one of the most prestigous faces of science to the general public. As he and others have pointed out, the Pluto controversy is an enormous learning opportunity and the Museum would be doing it's mission a great disservice by simply ignoring it. Which means the Museum is obligated to take a stance on it. And I think he did the right thing on this. It's a hell of an insight on how science, politics, and the public interact on. And for a change it's not on an issue on which our personal health or planetary ecology is at stake.
An astrophysics degree isn't something to brush off, and neither is Columbia University. and the Rose center isn't just any planetarium if you've seen what they've done to the place. Tyson is a good presence on camera and a good storyteller. It was kind of amusing to have him show the letters he was getting from all the schoolchildren trying to convince him to bring Pluto back to planet status. I'm with him and the IAU on this one, as I have a strong suspicion that when we take a good look at the Kuiper belt we're going to find dozens of Pluto-sized objects there with a bunch of them larger than the former ninth planet. Although even Tyson agrees that Pluto is still worth looking up close.
I really hate the "failed start" term that some folks use for Jupiter.
It's a sloppy term really. Jupiter isn't even close to what you need for fusion mass is something on the order of 50-100 Jupiters, 2010 not withstanding to initiate fusion. Jupiter is a gas giant, a planet, something considerably different from even a brown dwarf which is a lot more appropriate for that label. It's not a "failure" at anything it is what it is, and it's helped clear out a lot of junk which would have hit this planet otherwise.
That's also why Cassini took a lot longer to get to Saturn as opposed to the flyby Pioneers and Voyagers. It actually had to approach Saturn slowly enough so that it could perform orbital insertion with the deltav it could manage and still have fuel remaining for orbital maneuvers.
Evolution doesn't work at a purpose. It's all a matter whether an organism with a set of parts eats, or outbreeds another in the same niche. The advantages in our set that kept us around don't automatically get rid of the appendix unless a mutation which produces an appendixless Human outbreeds the normal model.
I finished your quote.
Soviet Russia hasn't existed for some time save for bad jokes in a Bruce Willis movie.
Unlike Microsoft which has revealed that it has sent stealth software updates even to users who had opted out of auto update. If MS can get away with this. There isn't a cause to action Apple over an update which requires USER action and approval to install.
That largely is how SoundJam which was a third party music app became the first version of iTunes.
You wouldn't count it really. It's kind of like what CDTV was to the Amiga, it's an appliance not a workstation.
Hopefully as a product it will be more successful.
OS X was specifically not supported on the Beige Macs, if you had that much of a problem running Jaguar on it, I'm not surprised. On the otherhand I ran a functional mail system using postoffice on a Bondi iMac running Jaguar. The clock speed on that machine 233mhz was slower than your Beige but OS X had been designed to run on that generation of computers and later. And if Jaguar and Beige Macs are your most current level of Mac exposure you're definitely talking old and ancient news repectively.
The amount of ads that would be neccessary for Photoshop to pay for itself would drive most creative people insane. The point to be made here is that the two examples cited here were failures for that model. Instead of trying imagine something farfetched as this, point to some existing examples that do work
Interesting examples. As I recall the ad-funded model didn't work well for either Opera or Eudora. I'm not sure what the present buisness model for Opera is, but Eudora was recently released to open source and is now being developed as the Penelope project with the Mozilla folks.
I remember that Mozilla got rather steamed about Apple's release of Safari when the latter's Windows version was released. There was also the expected kneejerk reaction from both the anti-Maz nazis here and the "Everything must be Open source" nazis here as well.
There is no microphone but what could be done would be to connect a headphone accessory to the dataport end of the iPod touch and then install a modified Skype to access it. Major problem in this scenario being that Apple still has not opened the gates to native software development on the iPh platform and anything installed would have the threat of a wipe from a firmeware update.
Affirmative action is NOT about racism, it's about fixing the mess that 4 centuries of racism in this country have caused. It's the recognition of the fact that women and minorities have been put into artficial ceilings on acheivement and that postive action is needed to correct an unjust situation. It does take these kind of measures to end dicrimination in the wider society.
Let's call the spade a spade okay? That "excellent example" was for the abolishment of affirmative action. Which is fine and hunky-dory if you think that all the racial disadvantage problems in the United States have been fixed. Others however might disagree with that assumption.
It's probably why I've had an easier time with Linux than most. The bulk of my Linux time has been spent with YellowDogLinux which is the dominant PowerPC distro put out by Terrasoft. It works on a variety of Power PC platforms but it's original target and probably still the bulk of it's user base was PowerPC Macintosh hardware. Was it as easy as point and click OS X installation? Not quite but pretty close. And it worked for me out of the box practically on every install.
Okay the example that was given on the site is fairly straight forward. I'd like to see a similar breakdown on how it was applied to this analysis.
Not if you you use a Mac. It wasn't always so. Originally the videos had a choice of Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and I think RealPlayer. Now they are only available in the current version of Windows Media, which is not supported by Microsoft's abandoned Mac client, nor by the Flip4WMV alternative plugin. And on Windows machines I've had very mixed results because I use Firefox instead of IE.
the obligatory "Apple Is Doomed" sentence which a requirement for any serious reportage of the folks in Cupertino.
I don't scorn the efforts of the OLPC. The point I'm making is the solution they had was aimed at the wrong problem. The windup laptop project might have done some good in the extremely poor areas of the Appalachians or other areas, say, urban Bangkok or perhaps Native American reservations, which while rank poverty and hunger are present have more of the pre-existing conditions for a project like this to have a real impact. Not all poverty areas are the same, some are simply more appropriate for this kind of aid than others.
As to what I'm doing... that's an irrelevant diversionary question which has nothing to do with the question at hand? Why did the OLPC project fail and was it aimed at the right target? And trivial, whatever the experience of the Rev. Nancy Dean, in America it's the anomaly, in places like North Korea... it's the norm.
I don't have any stern words for the people who put this effort into the project. I see it more of a common trap that many of us technophiles tend to fall into, the idea that tech itself can be the solution or the primary part of one.
I do believe that aid should start with giving people fish and that the next part would be giving them the fishing pole. What I'm saying is that in many of these cases, the areas are not the places where windup laptops can serve as the "fishing pole".
Cute words now put substance to them. You tell me how a starving child with a windup laptop and no other basic resources is going to in your words, "generate electricity, a network, and an income to buy food" Those things depend upon economy and resources. When you have that answer Head over to the Gates Foundation, because you'll have proved yourself smarter than every other expert known to Humankind.
Force? people? Slavery? You've gone beyond mindless zealotry to full fledged demagougery. Maybe you've got some radical theory of economics that can overturn thousands of years of human experience, but from the reality side of the fence, you can't build the top of the pyramid without having your foundations laid first. The foundations of an economy are what's missing in the worst of the Third World areas. Try to get this straight in many of those areas that OLPC is trying to help we're talking about populations being decimated by a host of diseases, lack of sanitation, lack of a basic diet, and lack of governments (including their own) with a will to make any meaningful change in the circumstances that led up to these conditions.
Those people don't want to wind up laptops, they want to eat! they want a roof over their heads for their families, they want some assurance that their children will live to see tomorrow, a means to provide for themselves, they want all the things that are so basic to us that we can't conceive that they're missing.
I was examining the author's so-called BATNA content. The chart's pretty impressive but what are the numbers supposed to mean? Without the grounding that shows me the math and the meat behind those numbers, it's just a bunch of dots strung together to make a point. If you're going to use the scientific appearance, make sure you use scientific methods as well.
The author's explanation: "A short explanation: the graph shows all efficient contracts (those where no contract exists that is better for both parties). The x-axis shows a contract's value to Apple, the y-axis shows a contract's value to the recording studio. The vertical and horizontal bar indicate the BATNAs for Apple and the studio, respectively. Contracts that are outside the shaded area are unacceptable to at least one party."
Huh? What's that again?
Those are just words, Show me the science, the methodology or do us all the favor and take the article and your charts down and come back when you have real science.