Let's say that the U.S. delayed the release of all films in Canada by several months, as they have already threatened to do. Suddenly, film release dates in Canada would no longer coincide with the hype in American media. Canadian consumers would have to endure months of temptation to download industry-insider-provided rips of screeners (not crappy camcorder copies) before films finally come out in Canada. That would certainly hurt good films, but those one-weekend-wonder stinkers that are massively promoted (and never shown to critics in advance) would flop bigtime in a fore-warned Canada. Overall, that's a lot fewer movie tickets sold. Who's going to pick up the slack? Maybe, just maybe, local Canadian film-makers. Quebec actually has a pretty good cinema going but English Canada has bugger all thanks to the abundance of american media. Anything that reduces the market share of american cinema is likely to cause a boom in Canadian film. Yes, american TV shows filming on the cheap in Canada might finally have a little competition for local talent, but who cares?
Market controls on foreign content in a nation's cinema have been shown to improve that nation's cinema. Just look at French cinema since WWII. Their government required that a certain percentage of films shown in French cinemas had to be French. U.S. production companies were financing cheap films just to boost the overall French market so they could release more films in France! Canada considered implementing similar legislation, but failed to do so, much to the detriment of our own nation's cinema. Canada's cinema could certainly benefit from market controls today, but implementing them would be political suicide for any who dared. The U.S. would cry foul over protectionism and Canadians used to american films would be very peeved about not being able to get their fix. However, if the kind americans were to do this for us...
This really is a win-win situation for Canada. The worst the U.S. can do to Canada is the best possible thing for Canada's cinema and the worst possible thing for american film makers. So *PLEASE* blacklist us. Pretty please! I freakin' double dare ya! Heck, BAN the release of american movies in Canada indefinately!
It is incorrect to say that there is no pressure at the bottom of the milk jug. There *is* pressure due to the weight of water above the holes. This is why the water will come out of the holes at a higher rate when the jug is nearly full than when it's almost empty.
The garden hose analogy is also a tad flawed. If you attach the hose to the jug the jug will wind up being at same the pressure of the hose whether there's one hole or two in it.
An analogy that is actually applicable in this case is that of a large tank with a brittle bottom that is out in a rainstorm. Say that with two holes the water flowing out equals the rain coming in, so the system is stable. Now, plug a hole. The flow rate out is cut in half and the tank starts to fill up. The pressure at the bottom of the tank increases as the weight of water above increases. If that pressure reaches a certain point, the bottom of the tank will form other holes or even catastrophically rupture.
If the scientists had presented this analogy then there would probably have been fear that plugging the volcano could result in an explosive eruption. It certainly would be something I'd be concerned about, although maybe the geophysicists involved somehow know that the pressure won't build up to the point where an eruption will be possible.
Why doesn't Apple do this? One the one hand, they risk losing a portion of a rather small chunk of the desktop market. Their laptops are already good value for the money and would probably continue to sell just as well. However, look at the install base of normal PC's out there. Then consider how many people would run MacOS if they didn't have to buy a separate machine to do so. Getting people to switch when the price is under $200 is a lot easier than it is currently, when switching requires completely new hardware. (unless you're willing to hack things a little, which the majority of people aren't.) In the end, I think Apple would win big and so would consumers. So why is Jobs hyping gadgets like the iPhone when he has a product ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft for a significant share of the global PC market? I think the iPhone will be a winner, but not on the scale that an officially sanctioned PC-version of OSX would be.
While it looks like the iPhone has all the hardware required to make a pretty slick mobile gaming platform, one gets the distinct impression that this just isn't in the cards. If users can't install software then the only games for the iPhone will have to come pre-installed, which pretty much obliterates the possibility of there ever being more than a handful of iPhone games. No third-party software means that what few games there are will all be made by Apple itself, which isn't good news. Apple is many great things, but game developer isn't one of them.
If Jobs sticks to his guns then this really is a lost opportunity for Apple. The iPhone's multiple point touch-screen and accellerometer could have made for a highly innovative portable gaming device even if the iPhone doesn't have the graphics hardware to keep up with other portable gaming devices, similar to how the Wii is highly innovative despite it's lack of cutting edge graphics. Apple could have had *FOUR* great devices in one package instead of just three. I'm sure the iPhone will be hacked and some amateur games will be produced for it, but that's not nearly enough to bring out the fourth latent "killer app" the iPhone could have had.
It's pretty clear that the author of the linked article is a mac user.
OSX is a good OS, but it's not without its problems. Apple still hasn't really figured out how to handle a mouse with more than one button despite having it thrust upon them by moving to a BSD foundation. (Seriously, how many mac users were using one-button mac mice a month after OSX came out?) Apple's about face on the "One mouse button is all anyone will ever need" issue was probably just to protect their hardware sales. The new apple mice are fairly nice. They're not those god-awful puck-mice from a couple years back at least.
OSX does do some pretty non-standard things itself. For example, try inserting a CD or other removeable media into your mac and then copying the file to your computer. Most people who have ever used a linux box, windows box, or *even* an Amiga for chrissake will drag the file off the CD and onto their hard-drive or desktop. Then they toss the CD because the data is on their machine now. If you do that in OSX and you'll find the link you just made now leads nowhere because OSX *didn't* copy the bloody file, it only linked to it. No other OS I've used does this, and it's bloody counterintuitive. What were they thinking? Don't even get me started about the OSX task-bar...
I use OSX when I have to, but I still prefer other OS's. The eye-candy just doesn't do enough for me and I've been using other OS's a lot longer, so I tend to prefer them. That's a personal bias, and I admit that. My point here is that OSX isn't perfection itself and mac fanatics need to accept the fact that some people have tried their chosen OS and weren't blown away by it. (Some people have even been forced to spend extended periods of time developing software on their beloved OSX without falling in love with it... Myself included) OSX was certainly a revolution for mac users, but do consider how primitive MacOS was before OSX came out. Heck, it didn't even have pre-emptive multi-tasking! OSX I can tolerate, but the old MacOS was truly wretched. That's why OSX is viewed as such a revolution. Consider that even Windows users had pre-emptive multi-tasking from windows95 on. Microsoft had their revolution about 5 years before Apple did. It's lucky for Apple that Vista isn't another one.
If you're late, they just sell you the DVD and bill your credit-card. While this DVD-kiosk idea would certainly help them cut back on retail space, staff, stocking costs, etc. it would also completely eliminate their "sales" division.
Besides, this kiosk idea is so far removed from the traditional experience of "roaming the racks" that it would leave absolutely nothing to distinguish between downloading a movie and going to the store to rent it, except that you have to leave your comfy couch to do it and, most likely, pay a bit more. Really, only the technophobes are going to be going to rental stores in the near future, so why alienate them? Of course, the shift away from brick and mortar rental stores is definitely coming. Blockbuster et al. are most likely going to find some way to carve themselves a slice of the pie, but one can't help but wonder how long there will be actual Blockbuster corner video stores in operation.
The major labels had a legitimate niche back when it took a massive distibution network to press an artists records and deliver them to record stores across the world. Today, distribution is a non-issue. It used to take massive ammounts of money to produce a good recording. Today, all the equipment that is required can be bought for less than a modest car. In fact, many major label recordings made today are of substantially lower quality than those of independants. It's not just the equipment, but the people using it. If upper-management orders the knob-jockeys to "make it louder" that's what they do, even if it means mixing tracks so hot that they clip continually. The labels remain the masters of big-budget promotion, but some bands have managed to be successful as independants with a tiny fraction of the promotion budget that a major label band gets. How do they do it? Make good music.
In all honesty, the labels aren't good for consumers. They stifle creativity and promote the stagnation of musical forms by promoting "safe" music over the innovative. This is why a top-40 music station sounds so homogenous whether it's playing pop-country, pop-rock, or pop-rap. Instead of promoting original artists, they hire 40 year old men to write songs about a teenage girl's life, hire a model who can't sing to sing those songs, and then digitally correct the tone-deaf waif's caterwallings in much the same way they air-brush away her zits and about 40 pounds. Then they promote this manufactured crap so heavily that it squeezes good music into the musical margins of life.
The labels aren't good for artists. Only a tiny percentage of artists signed to major labels ever make a profit. Most wind up in debt to the labels with no control over the rights to their own creations. Is the purpose of a record label to make money for itself or is it to make money for the artists? In the past RIAA has argued that artists provide a service, much like recording engineers or the squeegee monkeys that keep the windows of the exec's corner offices clean. They pay their lawyers better than 99.999% of their artists. Those lawyers enforce a copyright system designed to pump money into those corner offices at any cost. One of the costs happens to be the freedom of artists. Take the amen break for example. A whole musical genre grew up around a single sample made 40 years ago because the copyright on it was never enforced. What legally aborted genres might exist today were it not for the labels' lawyers?
Personally, I think RIAA and the major labels know all this. They know they have no legitimate role to play in distribution. They know they manufacture and promote crap because promoting original music carries risk. They screw the artists both financially and creatively. On some level, although they'd never admit it, they even realize that the labels are, at the most fundamental level, only there to get the music from the artist to the consumer and the money from the consumer to the artist. They're middlemen and they know it.
How do you improve any business transaction for both the consumer and the supplier? Cut out the middlemen.
A direct transfer orbit (which is nowhere near a straight line) to Mars is the fastest way to reach Mars, but it's also one of the least fuel efficient ways. For this reason, large payloads such as the orbiter, rover, etc. have been sent to Mars via gravity assisted transfer orbits instead. These usually involve multiple trips around the sun and a couple close passes with other planetary bodies. If the payload goes past a planet or moon at just the right angle it will sling-shot around, effectively stealing momentum from the body. (don't worry, planets have plenty to spare) Go watch Star Trek IV to get the hollywood version. Gravity assisted transfer orbits are more difficult to plot, far far slower, and overall just a PITA, but there isn't any other option at the moment. Even if we had the money to spare nobody makes rockets big enough to send large payloads to Mars "directly".
Unfortunately, sending humans to Mars via gravity assited transfer orbits is not as easy. It's a much longer trip, so unless we sort out that suspended animation gig soon they would need much more food, supplies, etc.. That means more mass and more fuel, so a direct transfer orbit starts to look more economical for human travellers. As an added bonus, they don't spend several years in deep space, probably much closer to the Sun for much of their journey facing who knows what kind of added health risks. Given that there's little chance we'll ever build a rocket big enough to blast off directly for mars,we'll have to assemble the ship that goes to mars in orbit or on the moon. The moon's low-gravity environment may well prove to be an easier and safer environment for assembling an interplanetary space vessel. The moon is only about 1.2% as massive as the Earth so it's not that much of a "detour".
Seriously, what is up with this HD format war? The first HD format that becomes affordable (and actually works) on the PC platform is the HD format I'll be adopting. I'm not alone. This *is* a race, but somehow it seems like both sides *want* to lose.
I don't understand the MPAA. In ways they're even more idiotic than RIAA. Let's take an example...
I'm sure most people have come across MPAA's anti-piracy adds. For example, there's that one that starts out by saying:
"YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR..."
Now, let's just stop for a moment and consider the one segment of viewers who are 100% guaranteed to see this ad: Legitimate customers. What is the car-world equivalent of legitimate customers? Car owners. When was the last time you got into your car and saw a big sign saying "YOU WOULDN'T PIRATE A MOVIE!" spraypainted across your windshield? What about the candy equivalent? How often do you buy a Coffee Crisp only to open it up and find, drizzled onto the top of the bar in iridescent-green super-sour gummy, "YOU WOULDN'T POACH ELK OUT OF SEASON...". Does IHOP serve pancakes with motor-oil drizzled on top of them to spell out "YOU WOULDN'T EAT YOUR NEIGHBOR'S KIDNEY WITH A NICE CHIANTI AND SOME FAVA BEANS..."
Only the MPAA is insane enough to take the one thing they have to offer a customer and deliberately vandalize it in a way that only their legitimate customers are likely to see. The scary thing is that these morons have enough money to lobby the government for stuff nearly as crazy as in the linked spoof. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if people did pirate movies a little more so that the MPAA didn't have quite so much money to throw around in Washington.
a) Great-Great-Great-Great-...-Great-grandfather pelted other animals with his own turd. b) Great-Great-Great-Great-...-Great-grandfather stepped in some dino-turd, lost his balance, fell in and finally suffocated.
I'm guessing this new museum isn't going to try to depict our ancestors dealing with adversity in the pre-fall era, such as being surrounded by a herd of triceratops during Flu season... Now *that*'s a flash flood!
I, for one, have been plagued by crimethink. Historically I have been unable to bellyfeel the blackwhite of this administration. No longer! May this glorious new program free us *all* from the perils of oldthink!
In Soviet Canuckistan the Beavers eat *you*! Seriously, watchout for the little bastards. They'll smack you with their tails until you fall over and then gnaw off your limbs. You do have to be pretty drunk for them to catch you, so the real danger is when you're new to the country and only just getting used to Canadian beer, which is about 3 times stronger than kentucky bourbon. (Don't even touch Canadian whiskey. Canuckistani airlines sometimes uses the stuff as aviation fuel even though it's murder on the fuel lines.)
You'll also have to get used to keeping a continual guard up against flying hockey pucks. This skill comes naturally to native Canuckistani's who grow up dodging pucks from an early age, but newcomers to the country often suffer a few concusions before they pick up the knack of knowing when 170 grams of vulcanized rubber is rocketing towards the back of their heads at upwards of 150kph. You should also realize that global warming may soon cause a massive housing shortage in Soviet Canuckistan as temperatures rise too high for igloos to survive the summer. Truly, the country is going to become a madhouse when people's 3000sq foot 4 level split igloos with attached garages melt into ponds.
If you do still decide to emmigrate to Canada, be sure to talk to Phil from Vancouver. He can get you set up with your government issue starter snow-shovel and official toque with genuine saskatchewan sealskin bindings and special patriotic pom-pom. (very important) Be sure the pom-pom is firmly attached. If you lose it, rest assured that a mountie will spot it. (Don't even try to run. They always get their man.) Losing your pom-pom will get you exiled to newfieland, which is a fate many consdier worse than death by poutine!
...and Hard Drives were *real* hardrives, and programmers were neurotic from writing code that had to take into account the spinning of the hard-drive and time their data accesses so that operations in a loop didn't wind up waiting for 2/3 of a physical rotation on each cycle...
"Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way. 'We don't want to increase the range of contact,' he said. 'We think it's just right.'
Of course, the requirement for physical contact to transfer data means that these chips will be completely unsuitable for many of the applications RFID's seem poised to handle. For example, merchandise tags in stores. With HP's chips merchandise currently protected by security tags will still require separate security tags. With RFID tags the securty tags can be eliminated. The concept of being able to walk into a store, stuff your pockets with merchandise, and walk out and be automatically billed as you pass through the door won't work with these chips. That may appeal to some consumers, but not to the people running stores. Less shop-lifting and no cashiers is a pretty sweet deal.
I can see these chips being preferable for some applications though. Although a RFID credit card might let you walk out of that store with your stuffed pockets without slowing down, one of HP's chips may ultimately prove more secure even since physical contact is required for them to operate. (i.e. No RFID-sniffing, or whatever they wind up calling it.) Even if RFID proves perfectly secure, the requirement for physical contact will probably be perceived as more secure by most people anyways.
The storage capacity on HP's chips is impressive however, and will probably open up entirely new applications that RFID never had a hope of filling. Imagine whipping out your HP-ecosystem-ified cell-phone or other such gadget and being able to play short video clips and sounds about a product just by swiping it past your phone. This could range from movie previews from a swiping a movie poster while just outside a movie theater to instructions on how to wash your clothes from a chip inbedded in the tags. Of course, I'm willing to bet that after a while every chip you swipe will try to sell you something before it actually does anything useful...
"4. Northeastern US power grid, 1965 A single protective relay tripped in Ontario, overloading nearby circuits and causing a cascade of outages that left 30 million homes without power for up to 13 hours. A fragile, redundancy-free design ensured that it would happen eventually. After decades of repairs and upgrades, it happened again in 2003."
Although this point implies that the 2003 outage originated in Ontario as well, a joint U.S. and Canadian investigation found that it originated in Ohio due to several failures of FirstEnergy corporation, among them the failure to keep trees near high voltage power lines adequately trimmed! When the Eastlake generating plant in Ohio went offline during a period of high demand, other high voltage power lines in the area experienced increased demand to pick up the slack. The increased current across these HV lines caused them to sag and short-out when they came into contact with said trees. HV lines heat up and sag as current increases, and this is accounted for in both their design and in guidelines for keeping trees near HV power lines trimmed, which were apparently not adhered to by FirstEnergy.
This wasn't the only thing that FirstEnergy did wrong however. In total, they were found to be in violation of *seven* NERC standards. Although more reliability and redundancy could be built into the North American power grid, blaming the 2003 outage on poor engineering is not accurate. It was FirstEnergy's failure to adhere to standards that precipitated the cascade failure. As such, it would be more accurate to blame greedy corporate management that was too cheap to shell out adequate funds for operation.
For more on this, check out the report found here:
This software was probably one of the easiest parts to this whole missile defense debacle. What's worse is that there has been evel less success with the hard parts. i.e. Actually hitting incomming missiles, or even getting permission from governments such as Canada to even try to hit them over their airspace. Perhaps even harder yet is justifying the need for missile defense at all when the only likely source of a nuclear attack is from terrorists who would most likely smuggle a bomb in through the U.S.'s patchy port security and detonate it from the ground.
I tell you, this is all George Lucas' fault! The missile defense program was once called Star Wars, back when Star Wars was cool. Now the idea of shooting incomming missiles out of the sky is subconciously linked with Jar Jar Binks in the minds of the nation. Whoopsie!
Tesla originally worked for Edison, but they had a bit of a falling out, which is possibly why the AC/DC competition was so heated. Edison embarked on a pretty ruthless and gruesome campaign to discredit AC power, at least by modern standards. He electrocuted stray dogs and cats with AC current in public demonstrations intended to show how dangerous AC power was.
In one instance, he even electrocuted an elephant...
During the construction of Luna Park on Coney island, an elephant used as a beast of burden went out of control and killed a couple of people. Topsy, as she was called, was condemned to death. However, there was a wee bit of a problem. Elephants aren't the easiest critters to kill. What happens if you walk up and fire a shotgun at it's head, only just to piss if off? They do have rather thick hides, and we are talking about a homicidal elephant the size of a couple SUV's here. There weren't any cliffs handy to stampede poor Topsy off of, and I doubt dynamite was ever seriously considered. Edison, being the generous person he was, gladly volunteered to execute the elephant with AC current and filmed the whole thing. He showed the resulting film, "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903) publically on many occasions. It is quite probable that many a cat and dog escaped a crispy fate thanks to this film. If you decide to track down a copy of "Electrocuting an Elephant" today, please be warned that it's a rather gruesome little piece of history, and is not for the faint of heart, or SPCA members.
Seriously, a film version of Ender's Game is going to require some serious acting on the part of leads who haven't even hit puberty yet. The film doesn't need just one child prodigy to pull it off, but several. They were almost ready to film once before with Jake Lloyd (Anakin from The Phantom Menace and Card's personal choice) in the title role. The project fell apart because, with only his performance in The Phantom Menace to recommend him, Lloyd didn't appear to be a good enough actor. (Let's face it, even excellent actors like Liam Neeson, Ewan Macgregor, Natalie Portman all gave wooden and unconvincing performances under Lucas's direction, so maybe it's not all Lloyd's fault.) Even once they agree on a treatment for the book they're going to have to find the actors fast and film it fast. A delay of a year or two in pre-production is fine for most movies, but for Ender's Game the entire cast would literally outgrow their roles!
As a result of all this, I think live-action would involve too many compromises. This is one film that really would be better done as a cartoon or CG feature. Unfortunately, adult-oriented cartoons have not fared well with U.S. audiences, who seem to expect cute little anthropomorphic Disney sidekicks and musical numbers from anything drawn or rendered. Japan does not have this problem. If I were Orson Scott Card and I wanted to see Ender's Game done right, I'd flip Hollywood the bird and hop on a plane to the land of the rising sun.
Those don't-steal-me tags, were you to take some home, wouldn't jump up in the middle of the night, unlock all your windows and doors, and then sit around waiting for criminals to rob you blind or even worse. That's about what those Sony rootkits are doing to your computer if you're dumb enough to actually buy the CD and let it have a crack at your computer. The only difference is you don't have to break the law to fall victim to the CD rootkits.
You know what the real problem is here? With Sony's latest antic's, it is now *safer* to pirate some music than it is to purchase it legitimately. To heck with annoyance and the perceived greed of RIAA. If customers have to worry about legitimate purchases messing up their windows boxes then the case for piracy is pretty damned clear. It's a sad state of affairs when dealing with pirates is safer than dealing with legitimate buisnessmen!
Star Wars itself lifted concepts and even entire scenes, right down to the wipes, from "The Hidden Fortress" as well as numerous other sources. You'd be surprised at just how good Lucas was at ripping things off. Go watch some old republic serials sometime. In any case, who cares? Star Wars combined what it ripped off in new ways and it was good. Damned good.
If you want to draw parallel's between Han Solo and Firefly's captain, who both happen to wear remarkably similar pants, might I point out that's a friggin' good thing. Firefly's captain isn't the digitally sanitized Han Solo of today, or any of the revoltingly bland characters from the new Star Wars series. He's not some up-tight stick in the mud like every Star Trek Captain since Picard. (Kirk was perhaps a little too loose I admit... He had serious issues keeping it in his pants!) We're talking about a died-in-the-wool loveable scoundrel. Sci-Fi hasn't had one in ages!
I found out that my Bank Visa card is vulnerable to this sort of crap because they've outsourced data management to an american firm. Guess what card just got the scissor treatment?
If enough Canadians who value their privacy take similar action we might see some amendments to the patriot act introduced. Fighting terrorism, etc. has been, and always will, be of secondary importance to the american government. It's business that really matters to them, and we're one of the few nations on Earth that do enough trade with the U.S. to place an effective ammount of pressure on them to do away with laws that compromise the privacy of citizens from other countries. At the very least we can pressure them into modifying the patriot act so that it only effects U.S. citizens. After all, did we elect Bush?
Okay okay... We don't really know who or *if* Bush was elected, but we damned well know it wasn't us who did it!
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Blacklisting Canada... What an excellent idea!
Let's say that the U.S. delayed the release of all films in Canada by several months, as they have already threatened to do. Suddenly, film release dates in Canada would no longer coincide with the hype in American media. Canadian consumers would have to endure months of temptation to download industry-insider-provided rips of screeners (not crappy camcorder copies) before films finally come out in Canada. That would certainly hurt good films, but those one-weekend-wonder stinkers that are massively promoted (and never shown to critics in advance) would flop bigtime in a fore-warned Canada. Overall, that's a lot fewer movie tickets sold. Who's going to pick up the slack? Maybe, just maybe, local Canadian film-makers. Quebec actually has a pretty good cinema going but English Canada has bugger all thanks to the abundance of american media. Anything that reduces the market share of american cinema is likely to cause a boom in Canadian film. Yes, american TV shows filming on the cheap in Canada might finally have a little competition for local talent, but who cares?
Market controls on foreign content in a nation's cinema have been shown to improve that nation's cinema. Just look at French cinema since WWII. Their government required that a certain percentage of films shown in French cinemas had to be French. U.S. production companies were financing cheap films just to boost the overall French market so they could release more films in France! Canada considered implementing similar legislation, but failed to do so, much to the detriment of our own nation's cinema. Canada's cinema could certainly benefit from market controls today, but implementing them would be political suicide for any who dared. The U.S. would cry foul over protectionism and Canadians used to american films would be very peeved about not being able to get their fix. However, if the kind americans were to do this for us...
This really is a win-win situation for Canada. The worst the U.S. can do to Canada is the best possible thing for Canada's cinema and the worst possible thing for american film makers. So *PLEASE* blacklist us. Pretty please! I freakin' double dare ya! Heck, BAN the release of american movies in Canada indefinately!
It is incorrect to say that there is no pressure at the bottom of the milk jug. There *is* pressure due to the weight of water above the holes. This is why the water will come out of the holes at a higher rate when the jug is nearly full than when it's almost empty.
The garden hose analogy is also a tad flawed. If you attach the hose to the jug the jug will wind up being at same the pressure of the hose whether there's one hole or two in it.
An analogy that is actually applicable in this case is that of a large tank with a brittle bottom that is out in a rainstorm. Say that with two holes the water flowing out equals the rain coming in, so the system is stable. Now, plug a hole. The flow rate out is cut in half and the tank starts to fill up. The pressure at the bottom of the tank increases as the weight of water above increases. If that pressure reaches a certain point, the bottom of the tank will form other holes or even catastrophically rupture.
If the scientists had presented this analogy then there would probably have been fear that plugging the volcano could result in an explosive eruption. It certainly would be something I'd be concerned about, although maybe the geophysicists involved somehow know that the pressure won't build up to the point where an eruption will be possible.
Why doesn't Apple do this? One the one hand, they risk losing a portion of a rather small chunk of the desktop market. Their laptops are already good value for the money and would probably continue to sell just as well. However, look at the install base of normal PC's out there. Then consider how many people would run MacOS if they didn't have to buy a separate machine to do so. Getting people to switch when the price is under $200 is a lot easier than it is currently, when switching requires completely new hardware. (unless you're willing to hack things a little, which the majority of people aren't.) In the end, I think Apple would win big and so would consumers. So why is Jobs hyping gadgets like the iPhone when he has a product ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft for a significant share of the global PC market? I think the iPhone will be a winner, but not on the scale that an officially sanctioned PC-version of OSX would be.
While it looks like the iPhone has all the hardware required to make a pretty slick mobile gaming platform, one gets the distinct impression that this just isn't in the cards. If users can't install software then the only games for the iPhone will have to come pre-installed, which pretty much obliterates the possibility of there ever being more than a handful of iPhone games. No third-party software means that what few games there are will all be made by Apple itself, which isn't good news. Apple is many great things, but game developer isn't one of them.
If Jobs sticks to his guns then this really is a lost opportunity for Apple. The iPhone's multiple point touch-screen and accellerometer could have made for a highly innovative portable gaming device even if the iPhone doesn't have the graphics hardware to keep up with other portable gaming devices, similar to how the Wii is highly innovative despite it's lack of cutting edge graphics. Apple could have had *FOUR* great devices in one package instead of just three. I'm sure the iPhone will be hacked and some amateur games will be produced for it, but that's not nearly enough to bring out the fourth latent "killer app" the iPhone could have had.
It's pretty clear that the author of the linked article is a mac user.
OSX is a good OS, but it's not without its problems. Apple still hasn't really figured out how to handle a mouse with more than one button despite having it thrust upon them by moving to a BSD foundation. (Seriously, how many mac users were using one-button mac mice a month after OSX came out?) Apple's about face on the "One mouse button is all anyone will ever need" issue was probably just to protect their hardware sales. The new apple mice are fairly nice. They're not those god-awful puck-mice from a couple years back at least.
OSX does do some pretty non-standard things itself. For example, try inserting a CD or other removeable media into your mac and then copying the file to your computer. Most people who have ever used a linux box, windows box, or *even* an Amiga for chrissake will drag the file off the CD and onto their hard-drive or desktop. Then they toss the CD because the data is on their machine now. If you do that in OSX and you'll find the link you just made now leads nowhere because OSX *didn't* copy the bloody file, it only linked to it. No other OS I've used does this, and it's bloody counterintuitive. What were they thinking? Don't even get me started about the OSX task-bar...
I use OSX when I have to, but I still prefer other OS's. The eye-candy just doesn't do enough for me and I've been using other OS's a lot longer, so I tend to prefer them. That's a personal bias, and I admit that. My point here is that OSX isn't perfection itself and mac fanatics need to accept the fact that some people have tried their chosen OS and weren't blown away by it. (Some people have even been forced to spend extended periods of time developing software on their beloved OSX without falling in love with it... Myself included) OSX was certainly a revolution for mac users, but do consider how primitive MacOS was before OSX came out. Heck, it didn't even have pre-emptive multi-tasking! OSX I can tolerate, but the old MacOS was truly wretched. That's why OSX is viewed as such a revolution. Consider that even Windows users had pre-emptive multi-tasking from windows95 on. Microsoft had their revolution about 5 years before Apple did. It's lucky for Apple that Vista isn't another one.
If you're late, they just sell you the DVD and bill your credit-card. While this DVD-kiosk idea would certainly help them cut back on retail space, staff, stocking costs, etc. it would also completely eliminate their "sales" division.
Besides, this kiosk idea is so far removed from the traditional experience of "roaming the racks" that it would leave absolutely nothing to distinguish between downloading a movie and going to the store to rent it, except that you have to leave your comfy couch to do it and, most likely, pay a bit more. Really, only the technophobes are going to be going to rental stores in the near future, so why alienate them? Of course, the shift away from brick and mortar rental stores is definitely coming. Blockbuster et al. are most likely going to find some way to carve themselves a slice of the pie, but one can't help but wonder how long there will be actual Blockbuster corner video stores in operation.
Well, somebody had to say it.
The major labels had a legitimate niche back when it took a massive distibution network to press an artists records and deliver them to record stores across the world. Today, distribution is a non-issue. It used to take massive ammounts of money to produce a good recording. Today, all the equipment that is required can be bought for less than a modest car. In fact, many major label recordings made today are of substantially lower quality than those of independants. It's not just the equipment, but the people using it. If upper-management orders the knob-jockeys to "make it louder" that's what they do, even if it means mixing tracks so hot that they clip continually. The labels remain the masters of big-budget promotion, but some bands have managed to be successful as independants with a tiny fraction of the promotion budget that a major label band gets. How do they do it? Make good music.
In all honesty, the labels aren't good for consumers. They stifle creativity and promote the stagnation of musical forms by promoting "safe" music over the innovative. This is why a top-40 music station sounds so homogenous whether it's playing pop-country, pop-rock, or pop-rap. Instead of promoting original artists, they hire 40 year old men to write songs about a teenage girl's life, hire a model who can't sing to sing those songs, and then digitally correct the tone-deaf waif's caterwallings in much the same way they air-brush away her zits and about 40 pounds. Then they promote this manufactured crap so heavily that it squeezes good music into the musical margins of life.
The labels aren't good for artists. Only a tiny percentage of artists signed to major labels ever make a profit. Most wind up in debt to the labels with no control over the rights to their own creations. Is the purpose of a record label to make money for itself or is it to make money for the artists? In the past RIAA has argued that artists provide a service, much like recording engineers or the squeegee monkeys that keep the windows of the exec's corner offices clean. They pay their lawyers better than 99.999% of their artists. Those lawyers enforce a copyright system designed to pump money into those corner offices at any cost. One of the costs happens to be the freedom of artists. Take the amen break for example. A whole musical genre grew up around a single sample made 40 years ago because the copyright on it was never enforced. What legally aborted genres might exist today were it not for the labels' lawyers?
Personally, I think RIAA and the major labels know all this. They know they have no legitimate role to play in distribution. They know they manufacture and promote crap because promoting original music carries risk. They screw the artists both financially and creatively. On some level, although they'd never admit it, they even realize that the labels are, at the most fundamental level, only there to get the music from the artist to the consumer and the money from the consumer to the artist. They're middlemen and they know it.
How do you improve any business transaction for both the consumer and the supplier? Cut out the middlemen.
A direct transfer orbit (which is nowhere near a straight line) to Mars is the fastest way to reach Mars, but it's also one of the least fuel efficient ways. For this reason, large payloads such as the orbiter, rover, etc. have been sent to Mars via gravity assisted transfer orbits instead. These usually involve multiple trips around the sun and a couple close passes with other planetary bodies. If the payload goes past a planet or moon at just the right angle it will sling-shot around, effectively stealing momentum from the body. (don't worry, planets have plenty to spare) Go watch Star Trek IV to get the hollywood version. Gravity assisted transfer orbits are more difficult to plot, far far slower, and overall just a PITA, but there isn't any other option at the moment. Even if we had the money to spare nobody makes rockets big enough to send large payloads to Mars "directly".
Unfortunately, sending humans to Mars via gravity assited transfer orbits is not as easy. It's a much longer trip, so unless we sort out that suspended animation gig soon they would need much more food, supplies, etc.. That means more mass and more fuel, so a direct transfer orbit starts to look more economical for human travellers. As an added bonus, they don't spend several years in deep space, probably much closer to the Sun for much of their journey facing who knows what kind of added health risks. Given that there's little chance we'll ever build a rocket big enough to blast off directly for mars,we'll have to assemble the ship that goes to mars in orbit or on the moon. The moon's low-gravity environment may well prove to be an easier and safer environment for assembling an interplanetary space vessel. The moon is only about 1.2% as massive as the Earth so it's not that much of a "detour".
Where are the PC Bluray drives that go for $200?
Seriously, what is up with this HD format war? The first HD format that becomes affordable (and actually works) on the PC platform is the HD format I'll be adopting. I'm not alone. This *is* a race, but somehow it seems like both sides *want* to lose.
I don't understand the MPAA. In ways they're even more idiotic than RIAA. Let's take an example...
I'm sure most people have come across MPAA's anti-piracy adds. For example, there's that one that starts out by saying:
"YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR..."
Now, let's just stop for a moment and consider the one segment of viewers who are 100% guaranteed to see this ad: Legitimate customers. What is the car-world equivalent of legitimate customers? Car owners. When was the last time you got into your car and saw a big sign saying "YOU WOULDN'T PIRATE A MOVIE!" spraypainted across your windshield? What about the candy equivalent? How often do you buy a Coffee Crisp only to open it up and find, drizzled onto the top of the bar in iridescent-green super-sour gummy, "YOU WOULDN'T POACH ELK OUT OF SEASON...". Does IHOP serve pancakes with motor-oil drizzled on top of them to spell out "YOU WOULDN'T EAT YOUR NEIGHBOR'S KIDNEY WITH A NICE CHIANTI AND SOME FAVA BEANS..."
Only the MPAA is insane enough to take the one thing they have to offer a customer and deliberately vandalize it in a way that only their legitimate customers are likely to see. The scary thing is that these morons have enough money to lobby the government for stuff nearly as crazy as in the linked spoof. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if people did pirate movies a little more so that the MPAA didn't have quite so much money to throw around in Washington.
a) Great-Great-Great-Great-...-Great-grandfather pelted other animals with his own turd.
b) Great-Great-Great-Great-...-Great-grandfather stepped in some dino-turd, lost his balance, fell in and finally suffocated.
I'm guessing this new museum isn't going to try to depict our ancestors dealing with adversity in the pre-fall era, such as being surrounded by a herd of triceratops during Flu season... Now *that*'s a flash flood!
I, for one, have been plagued by crimethink. Historically I have been unable to bellyfeel the blackwhite of this administration. No longer! May this glorious new program free us *all* from the perils of oldthink!
In Soviet Canuckistan the Beavers eat *you*! Seriously, watchout for the little bastards. They'll smack you with their tails until you fall over and then gnaw off your limbs. You do have to be pretty drunk for them to catch you, so the real danger is when you're new to the country and only just getting used to Canadian beer, which is about 3 times stronger than kentucky bourbon. (Don't even touch Canadian whiskey. Canuckistani airlines sometimes uses the stuff as aviation fuel even though it's murder on the fuel lines.)
You'll also have to get used to keeping a continual guard up against flying hockey pucks. This skill comes naturally to native Canuckistani's who grow up dodging pucks from an early age, but newcomers to the country often suffer a few concusions before they pick up the knack of knowing when 170 grams of vulcanized rubber is rocketing towards the back of their heads at upwards of 150kph. You should also realize that global warming may soon cause a massive housing shortage in Soviet Canuckistan as temperatures rise too high for igloos to survive the summer. Truly, the country is going to become a madhouse when people's 3000sq foot 4 level split igloos with attached garages melt into ponds.
If you do still decide to emmigrate to Canada, be sure to talk to Phil from Vancouver. He can get you set up with your government issue starter snow-shovel and official toque with genuine saskatchewan sealskin bindings and special patriotic pom-pom. (very important) Be sure the pom-pom is firmly attached. If you lose it, rest assured that a mountie will spot it. (Don't even try to run. They always get their man.) Losing your pom-pom will get you exiled to newfieland, which is a fate many consdier worse than death by poutine!
...and Hard Drives were *real* hardrives, and programmers were neurotic from writing code that had to take into account the spinning of the hard-drive and time their data accesses so that operations in a loop didn't wind up waiting for 2/3 of a physical rotation on each cycle...
Actually, no.
From the article:
"Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way. 'We don't want to increase the range of contact,' he said. 'We think it's just right.'
Of course, the requirement for physical contact to transfer data means that these chips will be completely unsuitable for many of the applications RFID's seem poised to handle. For example, merchandise tags in stores. With HP's chips merchandise currently protected by security tags will still require separate security tags. With RFID tags the securty tags can be eliminated. The concept of being able to walk into a store, stuff your pockets with merchandise, and walk out and be automatically billed as you pass through the door won't work with these chips. That may appeal to some consumers, but not to the people running stores. Less shop-lifting and no cashiers is a pretty sweet deal.
I can see these chips being preferable for some applications though. Although a RFID credit card might let you walk out of that store with your stuffed pockets without slowing down, one of HP's chips may ultimately prove more secure even since physical contact is required for them to operate. (i.e. No RFID-sniffing, or whatever they wind up calling it.) Even if RFID proves perfectly secure, the requirement for physical contact will probably be perceived as more secure by most people anyways.
The storage capacity on HP's chips is impressive however, and will probably open up entirely new applications that RFID never had a hope of filling. Imagine whipping out your HP-ecosystem-ified cell-phone or other such gadget and being able to play short video clips and sounds about a product just by swiping it past your phone. This could range from movie previews from a swiping a movie poster while just outside a movie theater to instructions on how to wash your clothes from a chip inbedded in the tags. Of course, I'm willing to bet that after a while every chip you swipe will try to sell you something before it actually does anything useful...
Obligatory Starship Troopers Quote.
"4. Northeastern US power grid, 1965
A single protective relay tripped in Ontario, overloading nearby circuits and causing a cascade of outages that left 30 million homes without power for up to 13 hours. A fragile, redundancy-free design ensured that it would happen eventually. After decades of repairs and upgrades, it happened again in 2003."
Although this point implies that the 2003 outage originated in Ontario as well, a joint U.S. and Canadian investigation found that it originated in Ohio due to several failures of FirstEnergy corporation, among them the failure to keep trees near high voltage power lines adequately trimmed! When the Eastlake generating plant in Ohio went offline during a period of high demand, other high voltage power lines in the area experienced increased demand to pick up the slack. The increased current across these HV lines caused them to sag and short-out when they came into contact with said trees. HV lines heat up and sag as current increases, and this is accounted for in both their design and in guidelines for keeping trees near HV power lines trimmed, which were apparently not adhered to by FirstEnergy.
This wasn't the only thing that FirstEnergy did wrong however. In total, they were found to be in violation of *seven* NERC standards. Although more reliability and redundancy could be built into the North American power grid, blaming the 2003 outage on poor engineering is not accurate. It was FirstEnergy's failure to adhere to standards that precipitated the cascade failure. As such, it would be more accurate to blame greedy corporate management that was too cheap to shell out adequate funds for operation.
For more on this, check out the report found here:
https://reports.energy.gov/BlackoutFinal-Web.pdf
Laaaaaag!
This software was probably one of the easiest parts to this whole missile defense debacle. What's worse is that there has been evel less success with the hard parts. i.e. Actually hitting incomming missiles, or even getting permission from governments such as Canada to even try to hit them over their airspace. Perhaps even harder yet is justifying the need for missile defense at all when the only likely source of a nuclear attack is from terrorists who would most likely smuggle a bomb in through the U.S.'s patchy port security and detonate it from the ground.
I tell you, this is all George Lucas' fault! The missile defense program was once called Star Wars, back when Star Wars was cool. Now the idea of shooting incomming missiles out of the sky is subconciously linked with Jar Jar Binks in the minds of the nation. Whoopsie!
Tesla originally worked for Edison, but they had a bit of a falling out, which is possibly why the AC/DC competition was so heated. Edison embarked on a pretty ruthless and gruesome campaign to discredit AC power, at least by modern standards. He electrocuted stray dogs and cats with AC current in public demonstrations intended to show how dangerous AC power was.
In one instance, he even electrocuted an elephant...
During the construction of Luna Park on Coney island, an elephant used as a beast of burden went out of control and killed a couple of people. Topsy, as she was called, was condemned to death. However, there was a wee bit of a problem. Elephants aren't the easiest critters to kill. What happens if you walk up and fire a shotgun at it's head, only just to piss if off? They do have rather thick hides, and we are talking about a homicidal elephant the size of a couple SUV's here. There weren't any cliffs handy to stampede poor Topsy off of, and I doubt dynamite was ever seriously considered. Edison, being the generous person he was, gladly volunteered to execute the elephant with AC current and filmed the whole thing. He showed the resulting film, "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903) publically on many occasions. It is quite probable that many a cat and dog escaped a crispy fate thanks to this film. If you decide to track down a copy of "Electrocuting an Elephant" today, please be warned that it's a rather gruesome little piece of history, and is not for the faint of heart, or SPCA members.
Seriously, a film version of Ender's Game is going to require some serious acting on the part of leads who haven't even hit puberty yet. The film doesn't need just one child prodigy to pull it off, but several. They were almost ready to film once before with Jake Lloyd (Anakin from The Phantom Menace and Card's personal choice) in the title role. The project fell apart because, with only his performance in The Phantom Menace to recommend him, Lloyd didn't appear to be a good enough actor. (Let's face it, even excellent actors like Liam Neeson, Ewan Macgregor, Natalie Portman all gave wooden and unconvincing performances under Lucas's direction, so maybe it's not all Lloyd's fault.) Even once they agree on a treatment for the book they're going to have to find the actors fast and film it fast. A delay of a year or two in pre-production is fine for most movies, but for Ender's Game the entire cast would literally outgrow their roles!
As a result of all this, I think live-action would involve too many compromises. This is one film that really would be better done as a cartoon or CG feature. Unfortunately, adult-oriented cartoons have not fared well with U.S. audiences, who seem to expect cute little anthropomorphic Disney sidekicks and musical numbers from anything drawn or rendered. Japan does not have this problem. If I were Orson Scott Card and I wanted to see Ender's Game done right, I'd flip Hollywood the bird and hop on a plane to the land of the rising sun.
Those don't-steal-me tags, were you to take some home, wouldn't jump up in the middle of the night, unlock all your windows and doors, and then sit around waiting for criminals to rob you blind or even worse. That's about what those Sony rootkits are doing to your computer if you're dumb enough to actually buy the CD and let it have a crack at your computer. The only difference is you don't have to break the law to fall victim to the CD rootkits.
You know what the real problem is here? With Sony's latest antic's, it is now *safer* to pirate some music than it is to purchase it legitimately. To heck with annoyance and the perceived greed of RIAA. If customers have to worry about legitimate purchases messing up their windows boxes then the case for piracy is pretty damned clear. It's a sad state of affairs when dealing with pirates is safer than dealing with legitimate buisnessmen!
Star Wars itself lifted concepts and even entire scenes, right down to the wipes, from "The Hidden Fortress" as well as numerous other sources. You'd be surprised at just how good Lucas was at ripping things off. Go watch some old republic serials sometime. In any case, who cares? Star Wars combined what it ripped off in new ways and it was good. Damned good.
If you want to draw parallel's between Han Solo and Firefly's captain, who both happen to wear remarkably similar pants, might I point out that's a friggin' good thing. Firefly's captain isn't the digitally sanitized Han Solo of today, or any of the revoltingly bland characters from the new Star Wars series. He's not some up-tight stick in the mud like every Star Trek Captain since Picard. (Kirk was perhaps a little too loose I admit... He had serious issues keeping it in his pants!) We're talking about a died-in-the-wool loveable scoundrel. Sci-Fi hasn't had one in ages!
I found out that my Bank Visa card is vulnerable to this sort of crap because they've outsourced data management to an american firm. Guess what card just got the scissor treatment?
If enough Canadians who value their privacy take similar action we might see some amendments to the patriot act introduced. Fighting terrorism, etc. has been, and always will, be of secondary importance to the american government. It's business that really matters to them, and we're one of the few nations on Earth that do enough trade with the U.S. to place an effective ammount of pressure on them to do away with laws that compromise the privacy of citizens from other countries. At the very least we can pressure them into modifying the patriot act so that it only effects U.S. citizens. After all, did we elect Bush?
Okay okay... We don't really know who or *if* Bush was elected, but we damned well know it wasn't us who did it!