You'd think we woulda learned from the AI and fusion power people.....
But there's an important difference between these - fusion power is actually known to be possible, and could become commercially feasible any decade now. Or should that be any century now...
I recall hearing something like that too, years ago, but of course it was just a vague promise from a marketing department and not a written contract.
It's illuninating to compare the costs. You can get actual aluminum CD's (NOT CD-R's) made for less than a dollar each in quantity 1,000 or even a lot less as I found below.
Inexpensive blank cassettes are maybe USD 0.50 in quantity and high quality blank cassettes are twice that, and that's before going through the duplicator. Here are a couple of places to get prices:
http://www.tapewarehouse.com/ for CD-R blanks and blank cassettes. ISTR they'll do duplicating of cassettes as well, you may want to look for their prices.
http://www.wisdomedia.com/regcdrom.html Prices on mass-produced CD's, USD 0.51 each for 1,000 to USD 0.35 each for 50,000. Putting them in a jewel case and shrinkwrapping each might double that, but it's still cheaper than cassette to make.
The higher retail price of CD's over cassettes is of course because of the perceived quality of CD's being higher. It obviously has nothing to do with their actual cost.
Back in the '60's through '80's, LP's cost more than prerecorded cassettes or 8-track cartridges for the same reason: The actual manufacturing may not have been more, but (with a good turntable) LP's had better sound quality, so they could command a higher retail price.
Amazingly, blank CD-R's are now substantially cheaper than blank cassettes. The percieved quality of CD-R's, in spite of their fragility compared to pressed CD's (see http://www.cdrfaq.org/), has much f the public enchanted and the big record labels running scared.
What is ironic is that at least two large companies, Sony and Philips, make and sell both commercial CD's and CD-R/W drives.
Is it possible to see any of USA or USSR equipment left there from Earth? (Using powerful telescopes, of course.)
I suspect that the Hubble telescope or the VLT in Chile might be able to see something at a landing site, probably long shadows just after sunrise or before sunset at the site, but I can't imagine either scope being put to such "frivolous" use, even if you paid for the viewing time, considering how much demand for legitimate astronomical use these things have.
It's a "corner reflector" - put three mirrors, mutually perpendicular, two on the wall and one on the floor in the corner of a room. Any light shone one one will also reflect off the other two and go straight back the direction it came. The ones put on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts are, IIRC, are a (grossly approximate) one-foot-square array of one-inch corner reflectors.
Believe it or not, how about copyright issues?... {concerning mirroring a site's pics and pointing slashdotters to the mirror so the original doesn't get slashdotted]
Good point for most commercial sites, but in this case these are US Government pictures which ISTR are handled differently, that these are (at least they should be) in the public domain.
Site metrics, robbing the remote site of advertising revenue, blah blah blah. These are all forces that could be brought to bear against Slashdot if they turned to caching stories and/or images from remote sites.
This is surely legally true (though IANAL), but practically, how do these problems compare to a site becoming slashdotted?
As a compromise that doesn't involve slashdot doing the caching, how about the people who post "first post" messages spend their time instead saving a mirror of the mentioned site(s), then if the site becomes slashdotted, put the mirror online?
Yes, the famous Earthrise pic was from Apollo 8, first manned flight around the Moon, but they also had cameras in the Command Module of Apollo 11. They weren't coming back very often and wanted as many pics as they could take (also, it gave Collins something to do while the other two were playing around on the surface).
The Apollo 8 pics were supposed to be straight down at the Moon's surface so they woul have good photographs of the surface from 60 miles up, but coming around from the far side, one of the astronauts saw the Earth rising and said "look up." The rest is photographic and cultural history.
on which posts are to be on certain topics as defined by each newsgroup. Advertising posts are off-topic on the vast majority of newsgroups, and those that do allow ads usually have specific rules that most Usenet spam violates.
Furthermore, posting any message to 20 or more newsgroups is considered abuse OF Usenet (as opposed to posting one off-topic or flame message, which is just abuse ON usenet), and this has a negative effect on the network by loading it down with useless messages.
whereas email and sms spam are targeted at individuals
They are "targeted" at MILLIONS of individuals, one at a time. Again, this is abuse OF the network, adding greatly to the volume of email or phone messages, causing providers to increase capacity just so the system doesn't crash under the increased load and legitimate messages can get through. This costs the companies money, which is paid for by increased service costs to customers. So effectivly, The customer pays for spam advertising.
It's the difference between putting up a billboard and handing out flyers.
Neither of those is an applicable analogy - both billboards and flyers cost significant money to put up, print and deliver, causing them to to be self-limiting (else we would have dozens or even hundreds of flyers on our windshields when we came back to our cars from the mall). (Actually, highway billboard aren't quite self-limiting, over the years advertisers would put up more and more of them, so there are laws that limit their number). Most importantly, all these costs are borne by the advertiser, which makes them fair to consumers as well as self-limiting.
BTW (Obligatory On-Topic Comment), I don't have a cell phone, and after reading about how much text-messaging spam is out there, I'm even more glad I don't.
THe standard procedure for scanning a book is to cut the spine off and feed the resulting loose pages into a scanner with a sheet-feeder. If it's not fast enough for you, put 1/2 or 1/4 of the pages into two or four such scanners.
21st Century Technology allows piracy in net.time.
I wonder how the machine "enforces" paying the publisher and/or author for each copy printed. There's very little that prevent a current book from being scanned and printed as page images or OCR'ed and printed as text. Presuming it's affordable for a small businessman, one could set up his own book piracy shop.
Patents ARE Government-granted monopolies, though the USPO will pass most any patent (using the words "perpetual motion" in the description disqualifies a patent, but apparently not much else), so it's pretty easy to get a ridiculous patent passed that covers a lot more IP than a patent reasonably should. Brocco-Sprouts got a patent for "A Method For Growing Broccoli" which happeneed to be the same method all broccoli growers have used for years (prior art and all that), so the other growers got together and successfully challenged the patent.
If you don't want to promote companies with patents, you have to not promote all but the smallest companies.
Imagine doing research or a book report and having to cite your sources. Do you cite that it was published a couple of days ago at the back of someone's tour bus?
No, that's just the printing location. Publication is the FIRST printing. But if the first printing was indeed in the back of a tour bus, then yes, that's where it was published.
But interestingly, the machine COULD put the exact printing date and time on the copyright page (the appropriate page for such info) along with the location in both text and latitude/longitude, along with the printing number of the book, and not just "third printing" but presuming it's networked (and why would it NOT be in this day and age?) it could authoritatively say "This is the 47,513rd printed copy of this book."
What they do is get YOUR bank info (from victims who email it to them) wher they will alledgedly deposit money, but apparently it's as easy to query the balance and withdraw that amount as it is do deposit. It appears to be a loophole in the US banking system. Clark Howard has talked about this on his radio show. Here's an artice about the latest Iraq variation on Clark's website
I don't use tabs because I'm so used to the Windoze interface for switching tasks. I do a lot of right-click/open-in-new-window, and alt-tab to navigate between windows/tasks. I hold alt and repeatedly press tab to go through browser windows and other apps. Yes, it's a little less than ideal with eight apps and ten browser windows, but it's the interface I'm used to. I guess I'm an old fart and refuse to learn a new interface to get to half my 'tasks'. If each new tab would [optionally, so the rest of you guys won't complain] start a task that opens it, that would be ideal for me.
But I'm quite selfish (and actually interested in primes abd or at least know more about them than I do about protiens), and there are entities offering big prize money for big primes, and if one of my machines finds one, I'll get big bucks:
How did I mess that up...I doubled the 100 in my writing but not my calculation... 8200*3.1416=25761 25761/(*90*60)= 4.77 miles/sec.
Oh, well, the exact speed doesn't matter unless you're actually sending something up, or riding on it yourself. I suppose NASA won't hire me now...;(
Re:Speed for Escaping Earth's Gravity?
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And how does that 2 miles per second size up compared to the speed required in order to escape the Earths Gravity and reach orbit?
The Earth is about 8,000 miles diameter, so LEO (about 100 miles above the surface) is 8,200 miles diameter, or 8100*3.1416=25447 miles around. Something in LEO orbits approximately every 90 minutes, it goes 25447/(90*60)=4.7 miles per second. So this 2 miles per second is a little less than half the speed needed to be in orbit.
So while getting into outer space (as SpaceShipOne recently did) is a big achievement, getting enough speed to be in orbit is much more so, requiring even more acceleration.
It's simple enough. Have two shuttle flights go to the higher HST orbit, with them timewise overlapping (the second goes up while the first is still in orbit). This way, if either has a "problem" that keeps it from re-entry, they can dock and all crowd into the other to return to Earth.
And of course the second Shuttle wouldn't be on a thumb-twiddling mission. While one Shuttle services Hubble, the other could laumch sattelites, do science experiments, or whatever else a shuttle could do in the HST orbit.
If they're really that afraid of unfixable Shuttle tile/re-entry problems, they could/should do all future Shuttle missions as overlapping two-at-a-time in dockable orbits. I don't know if NASA has the resources to do two missions at once, but if they're ever going to do a "rescue mission" (as was specuated might have been done had the Columbia been found unsafe for re-entry while still in orbit), they better get the resources and get some practice doing it.
You realize, of course, that the whole Florda election thing was PAPER BALLOTS.
Technology had nothing to do with it.
I consider not only punching machines but paper itself to be technology.
You could name off candidates while people stand around raising their hands to vote and someone counts the votes for each candidate, but even counting was at one time a newfangled technology.
... of any retail outlet of any company that sends intrusive advertising. This could nip in the bud any use of spam by otherwise-legitimate entities (businesses, churches, politicians...).
... and CD's made more than a decade ago, the old stuff wasn't mastered with all the hypercompression and clipping that almost all modern pop CD's have to have to be contenders in the "VOLUME WARS."
You can make both tubes and transistors sound clean or dirty (distorted), and they do sound quite different when dirty and each is "appropriate" in different contexts, but having whole albums sounding dirty causes ear fatigue and it just sucks.
Does anyone else find it ironic that LP's were recorded with a substantially greater dynamic range than is used on current CD's?
Slashdot Mirror
ALIENTP://hello.world/comments.pl?threshold=-1&ban dwidth=FULL&power=1e24
You'd think we woulda learned from the AI and fusion power people.....
But there's an important difference between these - fusion power is actually known to be possible, and could become commercially feasible any decade now. Or should that be any century now...
I recall hearing something like that too, years ago, but of course it was just a vague promise from a marketing department and not a written contract.
It's illuninating to compare the costs. You can get actual aluminum CD's (NOT CD-R's) made for less than a dollar each in quantity 1,000 or even a lot less as I found below.
Inexpensive blank cassettes are maybe USD 0.50 in quantity and high quality blank cassettes are twice that, and that's before going through the duplicator.
Here are a couple of places to get prices:
http://www.tapewarehouse.com/ for CD-R blanks and blank cassettes. ISTR they'll do duplicating of cassettes as well, you may want to look for their prices.
http://www.wisdomedia.com/regcdrom.html Prices on mass-produced CD's, USD 0.51 each for 1,000 to USD 0.35 each for 50,000. Putting them in a jewel case and shrinkwrapping each might double that, but it's still cheaper than cassette to make.
The higher retail price of CD's over cassettes is of course because of the perceived quality of CD's being higher. It obviously has nothing to do with their actual cost.
Back in the '60's through '80's, LP's cost more than prerecorded cassettes or 8-track cartridges for the same reason: The actual manufacturing may not have been more, but (with a good turntable) LP's had better sound quality, so they could command a higher retail price.
Amazingly, blank CD-R's are now substantially cheaper than blank cassettes. The percieved quality of CD-R's, in spite of their fragility compared to pressed CD's (see http://www.cdrfaq.org/), has much f the public enchanted and the big record labels running scared.
What is ironic is that at least two large companies, Sony and Philips, make and sell both commercial CD's and CD-R/W drives.
Is it possible to see any of USA or USSR equipment left there from Earth? (Using powerful telescopes, of course.)
I suspect that the Hubble telescope or the VLT in Chile might be able to see something at a landing site, probably long shadows just after sunrise or before sunset at the site, but I can't imagine either scope being put to such "frivolous" use, even if you paid for the viewing time, considering how much demand for legitimate astronomical use these things have.
It's a "corner reflector" - put three mirrors, mutually perpendicular, two on the wall and one on the floor in the corner of a room. Any light shone one one will also reflect off the other two and go straight back the direction it came. The ones put on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts are, IIRC, are a (grossly approximate) one-foot-square array of one-inch corner reflectors.
? sc=1971-008C&ex=9
d emosl2/l2-44.htm
Google finds some relevant links:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog
http://www.physics.umd.edu/lecdem/services/demos/
Believe it or not, how about copyright issues? ... {concerning mirroring a site's pics and pointing slashdotters to the mirror so the original doesn't get slashdotted]
Good point for most commercial sites, but in this case these are US Government pictures which ISTR are handled differently, that these are (at least they should be) in the public domain.
Site metrics, robbing the remote site of advertising revenue, blah blah blah. These are all forces that could be brought to bear against Slashdot if they turned to caching stories and/or images from remote sites.
This is surely legally true (though IANAL), but practically, how do these problems compare to a site becoming slashdotted?
As a compromise that doesn't involve slashdot doing the caching, how about the people who post "first post" messages spend their time instead saving a mirror of the mentioned site(s), then if the site becomes slashdotted, put the mirror online?
Yes, the famous Earthrise pic was from Apollo 8, first manned flight around the Moon, but they also had cameras in the Command Module of Apollo 11. They weren't coming back very often and wanted as many pics as they could take (also, it gave Collins something to do while the other two were playing around on the surface).
The Apollo 8 pics were supposed to be straight down at the Moon's surface so they woul have good photographs of the surface from 60 miles up, but coming around from the far side, one of the astronauts saw the Earth rising and said "look up." The rest is photographic and cultural history.
usenet is a public forum...
on which posts are to be on certain topics as defined by each newsgroup. Advertising posts are off-topic on the vast majority of newsgroups, and those that do allow ads usually have specific rules that most Usenet spam violates.
Furthermore, posting any message to 20 or more newsgroups is considered abuse OF Usenet (as opposed to posting one off-topic or flame message, which is just abuse ON usenet), and this has a negative effect on the network by loading it down with useless messages.
whereas email and sms spam are targeted at individuals
They are "targeted" at MILLIONS of individuals, one at a time. Again, this is abuse OF the network, adding greatly to the volume of email or phone messages, causing providers to increase capacity just so the system doesn't crash under the increased load and legitimate messages can get through. This costs the companies money, which is paid for by increased service costs to customers. So effectivly, The customer pays for spam advertising.
It's the difference between putting up a billboard and handing out flyers.
Neither of those is an applicable analogy - both billboards and flyers cost significant money to put up, print and deliver, causing them to to be self-limiting (else we would have dozens or even hundreds of flyers on our windshields when we came back to our cars from the mall). (Actually, highway billboard aren't quite self-limiting, over the years advertisers would put up more and more of them, so there are laws that limit their number). Most importantly, all these costs are borne by the advertiser, which makes them fair to consumers as well as self-limiting.
BTW (Obligatory On-Topic Comment), I don't have a cell phone, and after reading about how much text-messaging spam is out there, I'm even more glad I don't.
THe standard procedure for scanning a book is to cut the spine off and feed the resulting loose pages into a scanner with a sheet-feeder. If it's not fast enough for you, put 1/2 or 1/4 of the pages into two or four such scanners.
21st Century Technology allows piracy in net.time.
I wonder how the machine "enforces" paying the publisher and/or author for each copy printed. There's very little that prevent a current book from being scanned and printed as page images or OCR'ed and printed as text. Presuming it's affordable for a small businessman, one could set up his own book piracy shop.
Patents ARE Government-granted monopolies, though the USPO will pass most any patent (using the words "perpetual motion" in the description disqualifies a patent, but apparently not much else), so it's pretty easy to get a ridiculous patent passed that covers a lot more IP than a patent reasonably should. Brocco-Sprouts got a patent for "A Method For Growing Broccoli" which happeneed to be the same method all broccoli growers have used for years (prior art and all that), so the other growers got together and successfully challenged the patent.
If you don't want to promote companies with patents, you have to not promote all but the smallest companies.
Will stores such as Barns & Nobels or Borders addopt these machines, or try to prevent them?
:-/
They would only try to stop such machines if they were member companies of the RIAA.
Modern companies know they should adopt new technologies so they can profit from them.
2) So, when are they making one for CD-ROM's?
... dare I suggest it ... there's almost surely an alt.binaries group on Usenet.
You should update your computer to late-90's technology. I just bought a new CD-RW drive for less than $50 USD.
Getting out-of-print books is a nightmare,
It's gotten a bit easier since this Internet and Web thing started. Check out Bookfinder.com
but so it getting out-of-print computer games (read Core Contingency). I'd use one, a lot.
I've never tried to look for such, but if I did
Imagine doing research or a book report and having to cite your sources. Do you cite that it was published a couple of days ago at the back of someone's tour bus? No, that's just the printing location. Publication is the FIRST printing. But if the first printing was indeed in the back of a tour bus, then yes, that's where it was published. But interestingly, the machine COULD put the exact printing date and time on the copyright page (the appropriate page for such info) along with the location in both text and latitude/longitude, along with the printing number of the book, and not just "third printing" but presuming it's networked (and why would it NOT be in this day and age?) it could authoritatively say "This is the 47,513rd printed copy of this book."
What they do is get YOUR bank info (from victims who email it to them) wher they will alledgedly deposit money, but apparently it's as easy to query the balance and withdraw that amount as it is do deposit. It appears to be a loophole in the US banking system. Clark Howard has talked about this on his radio show. Here's an artice about the latest Iraq variation on Clark's website
I don't use tabs because I'm so used to the Windoze interface for switching tasks. I do a lot of right-click/open-in-new-window, and alt-tab to navigate between windows/tasks. I hold alt and repeatedly press tab to go through browser windows and other apps. Yes, it's a little less than ideal with eight apps and ten browser windows, but it's the interface I'm used to. I guess I'm an old fart and refuse to learn a new interface to get to half my 'tasks'. If each new tab would [optionally, so the rest of you guys won't complain] start a task that opens it, that would be ideal for me.
Actually Mr Mod, its not Offtopic, Redundant maybe but Offtopic no.
Unfair! Let's all do some Distributed Metamoderating!
There's this one, it's probably what you want:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
But I'm quite selfish (and actually interested in primes abd or at least know more about them than I do about protiens), and there are entities offering big prize money for big primes, and if one of my machines finds one, I'll get big bucks:
http://mersenne.org
And my synthesizer really has a MIDI interface, and the saddest part, I really heard my sig quote or something substantially like it on CNN.
How did I mess that up...I doubled the 100 in my writing but not my calculation...= 4.77 miles/sec.
;(
8200*3.1416=25761
25761/(*90*60)
Oh, well, the exact speed doesn't matter unless you're actually sending something up, or riding on it yourself. I suppose NASA won't hire me now...
And how does that 2 miles per second size up compared to the speed required in order to escape the Earths Gravity and reach orbit?
The Earth is about 8,000 miles diameter, so LEO (about 100 miles above the surface) is 8,200 miles diameter, or 8100*3.1416=25447 miles around. Something in LEO orbits approximately every 90 minutes, it goes 25447/(90*60)=4.7 miles per second. So this 2 miles per second is a little less than half the speed needed to be in orbit.
So while getting into outer space (as SpaceShipOne recently did) is a big achievement, getting enough speed to be in orbit is much more so, requiring even more acceleration.
It's simple enough. Have two shuttle flights go to the higher HST orbit, with them timewise overlapping (the second goes up while the first is still in orbit). This way, if either has a "problem" that keeps it from re-entry, they can dock and all crowd into the other to return to Earth.
And of course the second Shuttle wouldn't be on a thumb-twiddling mission. While one Shuttle services Hubble, the other could laumch sattelites, do science experiments, or whatever else a shuttle could do in the HST orbit.
If they're really that afraid of unfixable Shuttle tile/re-entry problems, they could/should do all future Shuttle missions as overlapping two-at-a-time in dockable orbits. I don't know if NASA has the resources to do two missions at once, but if they're ever going to do a "rescue mission" (as was specuated might have been done had the Columbia been found unsafe for re-entry while still in orbit), they better get the resources and get some practice doing it.
You realize, of course, that the whole Florda election thing was PAPER BALLOTS.
Technology had nothing to do with it.
I consider not only punching machines but paper itself to be technology.
You could name off candidates while people stand around raising their hands to vote and someone counts the votes for each candidate, but even counting was at one time a newfangled technology.
... of any retail outlet of any company that sends intrusive advertising. This could nip in the bud any use of spam by otherwise-legitimate entities (businesses, churches, politicians...).
... and CD's made more than a decade ago, the old stuff wasn't mastered with all the hypercompression and clipping that almost all modern pop CD's have to have to be contenders in the "VOLUME WARS."
You can make both tubes and transistors sound clean or dirty (distorted), and they do sound quite different when dirty and each is "appropriate" in different contexts, but having whole albums sounding dirty causes ear fatigue and it just sucks.
Does anyone else find it ironic that LP's were recorded with a substantially greater dynamic range than is used on current CD's?