The summary is subtly but importantly wrong; the original article states that Arora makes three claims:
By 2012, iPods will be capacious enough to store a year's worth of video releases
By 2022, iPods will be capacious enough to hold all music ever produced
By 2018, iPods will be capacious enough to hold all video ever produced
I don't think that the first two of these are particularly contentious, especially as it's pretty clear that he's talking about commercial music and video production, not necessarily "all the video in the world". The third is a little more problematic; the numbers don't quite add up, but I doubt he's wrong my more than a decade or so.
I suspect that his talk was more about throwing out concepts and challenging the audience to think big rather than about making firm predictions. ICBW.
It seems to me that evolutionary problems are solved *much* faster than one has any right to expect.
Actually, the reverse is true. Given the scope for diversity within a given phenome, and the plausible rate of mutation in most genomes, evolution seems to proceed more slowly than the maximum possible - by two orders of magnitude or so. Given strong enough selection pressures, evolution can take place extraordinarily rapidly (for example, the Bull Island Mouse, although not a speciation, arose within less than ten generations) and most evolutionary "advances" take place over and over again before the "final" version appears. [Yes, I know I'm using loose language here.]
The best books on this subject, in my opinion, are Richard Dawkins'. I particularly recommend "The Ancestor's Tale".
Here is the rub: the scientists' beliefs are better.
Hear, hear! It should be mentioned more often in reply to those who holler that "Science is just another religion" that, if it's a religion, it's a religion where the miracles actually work. No religion has ever produced a real, testable, bona fide miracle, but Science (and its handmaiden Engineering) produces millions of them on a daily basis.
MSFT isn't "bad", and GOOG isn't "good" - they both only care about the money.
I don't think that this is true of either company; both are making enormous profits which leave significant room for experimentation. It should be obvious that both companies have other agenda - in MSFT's case, trying to extend Windows' reach onto every computing device in existance, and in GOOG's it's trying to index every bit of information on every medium. Sure, both of these activites could lead to a great deal of money being forthcoming, but I don't think (in either case), that money is the primary motivation.
It is the infantile wing of American anti-authoritarianism, and the charlatans that do not scruple to pander to it, which feeds this disease of faith-based doubting.
That is a beautiful phrase, which I shall treasure. I salute you.
Expect really concentrated attacks on this research by the redneck^Wcreationist brigade. "But speciation has never been observed" has been the strongest rallying cry of evolution-deniers for more than a century...
As far as I can determine, the previous projection was a spherical projection centred on Kansas, which worked pretty well for the lower 48 states, but really sucked once you got far away. This is actually one of the best projections to use when you're only dealing with the contiguous states, but wouldn't be remotely suitable for a world map - so when the map was expanded to cover the globe, the projection was changed.
Mercator has its faults (area distortion), but it does preserve direction across the entire globe, and it's easily understood. I don't think "botching" was involved anywhere.
Well, it's an amusing image, but (in defence of the EU), the European Union would be anything but a minor irritation to Microsoft. Europe is one of MS's most significant markets and production centres, and the proposed fine, while certainly not making much of a dent in Microsoft's cash pile, would be very deleterious to their revenue numbers.
It's commendable that the EU is actually able to follow through on Microsoft's monopoly conviction; compare and contrast the Department of Justice's weak efforts since the 2000 election...
This appears to be actually official policy in News Corp - many of its organs are used to cross-promote the others. This is most noticeable when it's grating, such as Sky News showing up in 20C Fox movies, but they can also be fairly subtle - such as this example.
The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a fairly regular section devoted exposing News Corp. cross-media plugs.
Yes. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all have large operations in Ireland, with a nearly insatiable appetite for engineers and administrators. There are also many second-tier IT companies, and a booming small business sector. If your skills are good and current, Dublin's a good place for IT work.
These fines are being levied by the same EU Commission that is forcing through changes in EU patent law designed to allow companies like Microsoft to profit handsomely?
You're getting your EU institutions mixed up. The "forcing through" of the Directive on Patents is apparently being done by the Presidency of the European Council, not by the Commission. However, the incredibly maladroit handling of the issue by both Council and Commission has enraged the European Parliament; they gave Commissioner McCreevy a thorough roasting at a hearing last week, and there is a very real probability that the directive in question will be rejected, or amended back to its former state (very good - basically completely outlaws software patents) by the Parliament. See here for a good summary, with links.
Er... you are Florian Müller and I claim my five Euro!
Seriously, this notion that Microsoft has "bought" Ireland is totally insulting to me and to a couple of million other Irish people. Sure, Commissioner McCreevy is acting in a Microsoft-friendly manner, but he's far from the only Commissioner to do so - note that the software patents directive in its current form was brought in by the Dutch commissioner who was McCreevy's predecessor. Articles like this aren't actually useful, as they make Ireland the scapegoat for corporate-friendly government policies everywhere. This is nonsense; plenty of right-wing governments support exactly the sort of corporate-friendly policies which the software patents directive represents; and Ireland's is far from alone in this.
Note also that the majority of Ireland's MEPs are opposed to the Directive as it stands - see here for details of the current campaign.
Yeah, I'm sure Google were really worried about Copernic. So worried that they designed, built, tested and released a new version of the Toolbar inside a week. Wow. What a company...
As a EU citizen I'm allowed to buy anything from any EU country paying sales tax in the country from which I purchase the goods. It's a key part of the "free movement of goods and services" idea upon which the EU is founded.
Actually, this isn't quite true. It is true for most items, however tobacco and alcohol have a "personal use" restriction - ie: you can transport only as much as is reasonable for personal use.
There are other restrictions on items such as cars, whereby local taxes come into effect based on their use rather than their sale.
The Dutch government isn't bound by motions from the Dutch parliament.
Er. Yes, it is, actually. In all EU countries, the government governs on sufferance of the parliament, and the government must adhere to any motions legally passed by the parliament.
there is apparently nothing either you, or your elected local governments, can do to stop it
Actually, the EU Council is made up of representatives of the 25 elected governments. The Parliament is directly elected by the people, the Commission is appointed by the governments, and the Council is the national governments. (ie : the Agriculture Council is made up of the Agriculture Ministers/Secretaries from each member state, and so on). The problem isn't that there are no democratic safeguards in the EU, the problem is that they're being ignored by the national governments.
At least the wars we start are contained in small regions (Vietnam, Korea, Iraq), not like those large ones Europeans start.
Look... the "large European wars" I assume you're referring to were started NINETY-ONE and SIXTY-SIX years ago respectively. Europe was (and remains) extremely grateful for the assistance of the United States in ending those wars, but they have nothing to do with the current situation. In case you haven't noticed, Western Europe hasn't been involved in any substantial wars since 1945. How many "actions" has the U.S. taken in the same period?
And I'm sure the victims of U.S. aggression in Vietnam and Iraq are deeply grateful that your wars are contained in a small area.
Ever wonder what happens when you drop a Google ad? Your sites completely disappear from the Google search results.
This is totally bogus. Google advertising per se doesn't affect the search results at all - this is stated over and over again in the AdWords terms of service and I can personally attest that it doesn't happen. It's possible that the added popularity of a site advertised in AdWords could affect a site's search ranking if other people started to refer to it, but the effect certainly wouldn't be immediate.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is subtly but importantly wrong; the original article states that Arora makes three claims:
I don't think that the first two of these are particularly contentious, especially as it's pretty clear that he's talking about commercial music and video production, not necessarily "all the video in the world". The third is a little more problematic; the numbers don't quite add up, but I doubt he's wrong my more than a decade or so.
I suspect that his talk was more about throwing out concepts and challenging the audience to think big rather than about making firm predictions. ICBW.
Actually, the reverse is true. Given the scope for diversity within a given phenome, and the plausible rate of mutation in most genomes, evolution seems to proceed more slowly than the maximum possible - by two orders of magnitude or so. Given strong enough selection pressures, evolution can take place extraordinarily rapidly (for example, the Bull Island Mouse, although not a speciation, arose within less than ten generations) and most evolutionary "advances" take place over and over again before the "final" version appears. [Yes, I know I'm using loose language here.]
The best books on this subject, in my opinion, are Richard Dawkins'. I particularly recommend "The Ancestor's Tale".
Hear, hear! It should be mentioned more often in reply to those who holler that "Science is just another religion" that, if it's a religion, it's a religion where the miracles actually work. No religion has ever produced a real, testable, bona fide miracle, but Science (and its handmaiden Engineering) produces millions of them on a daily basis.
I don't think that this is true of either company; both are making enormous profits which leave significant room for experimentation. It should be obvious that both companies have other agenda - in MSFT's case, trying to extend Windows' reach onto every computing device in existance, and in GOOG's it's trying to index every bit of information on every medium. Sure, both of these activites could lead to a great deal of money being forthcoming, but I don't think (in either case), that money is the primary motivation.
Someone's got to say it... nope, there was no year 0
It appears that the guys who devised the Common Era calendar were a bit hazy about the concept of "zero".
That is a beautiful phrase, which I shall treasure. I salute you.
Expect really concentrated attacks on this research by the redneck^Wcreationist brigade. "But speciation has never been observed" has been the strongest rallying cry of evolution-deniers for more than a century...
As far as I can determine, the previous projection was a spherical projection centred on Kansas, which worked pretty well for the lower 48 states, but really sucked once you got far away. This is actually one of the best projections to use when you're only dealing with the contiguous states, but wouldn't be remotely suitable for a world map - so when the map was expanded to cover the globe, the projection was changed.
Mercator has its faults (area distortion), but it does preserve direction across the entire globe, and it's easily understood. I don't think "botching" was involved anywhere.
Well, it's an amusing image, but (in defence of the EU), the European Union would be anything but a minor irritation to Microsoft. Europe is one of MS's most significant markets and production centres, and the proposed fine, while certainly not making much of a dent in Microsoft's cash pile, would be very deleterious to their revenue numbers.
It's commendable that the EU is actually able to follow through on Microsoft's monopoly conviction; compare and contrast the Department of Justice's weak efforts since the 2000 election...
This appears to be actually official policy in News Corp - many of its organs are used to cross-promote the others. This is most noticeable when it's grating, such as Sky News showing up in 20C Fox movies, but they can also be fairly subtle - such as this example.
The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a fairly regular section devoted exposing News Corp. cross-media plugs.
Yes. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all have large operations in Ireland, with a nearly insatiable appetite for engineers and administrators. There are also many second-tier IT companies, and a booming small business sector. If your skills are good and current, Dublin's a good place for IT work.
Don't forget Poland!
Oh, wait...
You're getting your EU institutions mixed up. The "forcing through" of the Directive on Patents is apparently being done by the Presidency of the European Council, not by the Commission. However, the incredibly maladroit handling of the issue by both Council and Commission has enraged the European Parliament; they gave Commissioner McCreevy a thorough roasting at a hearing last week, and there is a very real probability that the directive in question will be rejected, or amended back to its former state (very good - basically completely outlaws software patents) by the Parliament. See here for a good summary, with links.
Er... you are Florian Müller and I claim my five Euro!
Seriously, this notion that Microsoft has "bought" Ireland is totally insulting to me and to a couple of million other Irish people. Sure, Commissioner McCreevy is acting in a Microsoft-friendly manner, but he's far from the only Commissioner to do so - note that the software patents directive in its current form was brought in by the Dutch commissioner who was McCreevy's predecessor. Articles like this aren't actually useful, as they make Ireland the scapegoat for corporate-friendly government policies everywhere. This is nonsense; plenty of right-wing governments support exactly the sort of corporate-friendly policies which the software patents directive represents; and Ireland's is far from alone in this.
Note also that the majority of Ireland's MEPs are opposed to the Directive as it stands - see here for details of the current campaign.
Yeah, I'm sure Google were really worried about Copernic. So worried that they designed, built, tested and released a new version of the Toolbar inside a week. Wow. What a company...
Actually, this isn't quite true. It is true for most items, however tobacco and alcohol have a "personal use" restriction - ie: you can transport only as much as is reasonable for personal use.
There are other restrictions on items such as cars, whereby local taxes come into effect based on their use rather than their sale.
They're about the same, actually - the GDP of each is roughly eleven trillion dollars.
Er. Yes, it is, actually. In all EU countries, the government governs on sufferance of the parliament, and the government must adhere to any motions legally passed by the parliament.
The EU directly employs about 30,000 people. The U.S. Federal Government directly employs about 1,900,000 people. Work it out.
Actually, the EU Council is made up of representatives of the 25 elected governments. The Parliament is directly elected by the people, the Commission is appointed by the governments, and the Council is the national governments. (ie : the Agriculture Council is made up of the Agriculture Ministers/Secretaries from each member state, and so on). The problem isn't that there are no democratic safeguards in the EU, the problem is that they're being ignored by the national governments.
Look... the "large European wars" I assume you're referring to were started NINETY-ONE and SIXTY-SIX years ago respectively. Europe was (and remains) extremely grateful for the assistance of the United States in ending those wars, but they have nothing to do with the current situation. In case you haven't noticed, Western Europe hasn't been involved in any substantial wars since 1945. How many "actions" has the U.S. taken in the same period?
And I'm sure the victims of U.S. aggression in Vietnam and Iraq are deeply grateful that your wars are contained in a small area.
This is totally bogus. Google advertising per se doesn't affect the search results at all - this is stated over and over again in the AdWords terms of service and I can personally attest that it doesn't happen. It's possible that the added popularity of a site advertised in AdWords could affect a site's search ranking if other people started to refer to it, but the effect certainly wouldn't be immediate.
"FUD" I name thee!
Aah, don't you just love it when people say "literally" when they mean "metaphorically"...