...won over music executives because it makes buying and downloading music as simple and nontechnical as buying a book from Amazon.com, one source said.
Well, Apple did pony up that "one-click" fee to Amazon, so it only makes sense.:-()
Hello? Why is Apple the only service that's not trying to force Columbia Records' 1976 purchase plan down our throats?? This is plainly what the market wants.
(On the other hand, iTunes 3.0.1 has a lot of false-positive problems for me with its burn protection for audible.com files... makes me pause.)
Having something optioned isn't a guarantee it'll get made, ever. Options are... well, they're options. The studio or producer pays for the rights to make a movie, and then they check things out to see if it'll work. Lots of options expire and get re-sold elsewhere, with no movie ever made.
The Patrick O'Brian series I love -- "Master and Commander," due this Nov, is the source of endless hope and fear among fans -- took forever, with O'Brian getting option money for years and years with no film in the works. O'Brian died before anyone went ahead on a movie.
My former brother-in-law has had the option on a book of his sold, he collected somewhere shy of a million dollars on the rights, and the book's option has bounced around between producers for a long while now. Clint Eastwood supposedly liked it at first. No signs of a movie being made.
There are no guarantees. (And as far as it going on "as long as the 007 series," take things a step at a time.)
[Nasa has] about $15 billion a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but that's compared to $385 billion for the Department of Defense. It's about the size of NIH [National Institutes of Health]...
Always kind of interesting to see numbers like that in context: NASA has roughly the budget of the NIH.
The Air Force is into space in a big way, and that's what will be a major part of the Air Force going forward. Some people say we should leave manned space flight to the Air Force. And that's an important question because once you do that, you're saying it's a military function. The vast majority of astronauts are military officers. The accident board is significantly populated by either active or retired military officers. So the military and NASA have always been together in an operational sense for a very long time, but NASA has historically had the civilian side of the space program. That was a decision made many years ago as a matter of national policy. So if you get NASA out of the human space flight business, human space flight will not go away, but it will be almost entirely military.
Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term "military industrial complex" for occasions like this. Any guesses how our current administration would resolve the tension between military and civilian purposes? Not a real tough question, is it? These are people who don't honestly sympathize with, or understand the rationale for, the separation of church and state; subtle but meaningful distinctions between the military activities and civilian mission of NASA aren't likely to come up at their meetings.
Mind you, these applications are equally commercially viable. You could charge say $1000 per game against the world champion chess program, or $100 for 30 minutes of conservation with the most intelligent bot ever, and so on.
Uh, that's "commercially viable" in a sense only dot-commers would appreciate. There may be a few people who'd pay a grand to play against a fantastic computer "player," but you'd have lots better luck selling games against Kasparov. Would you rather pay $100 to converse with the most intelligent Eliza ever, or the movie star of your choice? Stephen Hawking?
Most people can already lose handily to $10, bargain-bin Chessmaster. They're already fooled by the original Eliza when someone uses it on chat boards. I doubt there's a market for high-end versions of those experiences.
(Plus, when the most intelligent bot ever answers you with "42," how'll you take it?)
The AOL account requirement and the $18 a month mean this makes no sense for anyone who isn't already an AOL drone. And yes -- bing! -- those people are suckers -- they have AOL accounts, right? A mere $18 a month for less than one CD may appeal to the people who subscribe to AOL.
(And once they sign up, AOL will make it actually impossible to cancel the service. Naturally.)
Do these companies have no idea at all how people use Gnutella right now? Do they not do any research? Everything they offer us seems to be a business model designed around their needs, not around us as customers. We've all figured out that we don't want to subscribe to Columbia Records by now, so let's drop the stupid monthly fees: people will pay by the song, you'll make loads of money, so get it through your heads and give us what we plainly want...
Completely trivial (but also allegorical) peeve that I'm still seeing in this set of screenshots, I think: What's with the idiotic ruler behavior, particularly in Word?
Anyone who's tried to tweak the position of a table using the ruler, which changes to show you not the actual position of the table but rather the relative position of the page based on the table's position (or even an individual cell's position)... Argh! Who would want this frustrating behavior?
I mention it because it's a handy little metaphor for how MS leapfrogs its products so that you're always bumping the next thing up. (Upgrading to W2k? You need Office 2k. Office '03? You need a new OS.) You can only really judge what you need relative to other MS products -- it's like that "relative" ruler, yes? Bonus: the ruler itself is a good example of one of the clumsy UI changes at the point of departure for this MS tactic -- Word 5.1a, the last version to do rulers the intelligible way, was also the last version before the whole "Office Suite" approach really took off.)
I had Newt Gingrich persuaded to do this before he found he couldn't keep the office of Speaker...
Gingrich did repeatedly suggest privatizing the space program. He wanted it to be commericalized, and he basically regarded the existing program as "high-tech socialism."
He also found time to criticize NASA for not taking more risks, saying the US space effort was being made "as boring as possible" -- this after slashing NASA's budget by a third. Let's face it -- a politician like Newt would have exactly the sort of attention span necessary to start on a plan like this and not follow through. Gingrich was full of "whiz bang" privatization ideas that had little substance or experience behind them. Whatever Pournelle thought he'd convinced Newt of some afternoon, whatever modern-day Longitude prizes they talked about, that wasn't real. Pournelle's being naive about the sort of man he was dealing with, among other things.
The first PPC Macs ran a 68k emulator which provided backwards compatability for old Mac software. Intel are trying to do the same thing...
Those Mac emulators still work, and still run the ancient software, on a modern OS X Mac. My father has a word processor from maybe 1987 (WriteNow) that's just fine, and continues to use it for day-to-day writing. Hey, whatever makes you comfy.
Maybe it isn't supported in some subtle ways, and I'm sure there's stuff that's broken -- even recent OS 9 games sometimes won't run in "Classic Mode" and require booting in OS 9 instead. But Apple's taken this seriously during every OS or chip migration they've ever had, and they're still keeping their eye on pre-PPC chip software.
Perhaps then we wouldn't continuously get ourselves into cycles of Constitution shredding/rebuilding.
You may recall that the US constitution actually includes a mechanism for its own revision... It's called an "amendment," if you remember civics class.
The people who wrote this thing knew it was a balancing act, and expected the thing to be revised and changed over time. Most of them would probably be shocked by how their "original intent" has become so pivotal for judicial "conservatives" like Bork; the one intent they all agreed on was that the document should change for the better.
The "consequences" you're talking about would be the first thing any abusive government would take advantage of. That's exactly the sort of thing that'd let Ashcroft shout "treason!" and send tanks against college campuses.
The rest of your comments show you haven't used the OS in any real way -- Option-(or right)-click on the dock to move it, big guy -- but basically you're touching on something not many/.ers seem to realize:
I can't even imagine what it would be like to use a mac if one were handicapped in any serious way. I have never had any problem using any PC OS without a mouse.
The OS X interface genuinely isn't "mature" yet, not next to the old OS, and this is one of the rough spots. Since very early on the Mac OS had been quite good for various diff't sets of handicapped users. I used to set up their systems.
Basically OS X hasn't caught up in terms of interface to the old OS; it's a joy for a lot of people to use next to the alternatives, is all.
(And if you're really saying you haven't ever had trouble with keyboard controls on "any PS OS," sorry, I'm not buying. I'm sitting at a W2k box here, and the API inconsistencies across apps alone are incredibly frustrating, leaving alone OSes. That one gets you into troll territory, I'm afraid.)
Cliches, yes, or really just fads. Crunching through business speeches of the last 20 years, you could sure see the jargon trends come and go. That'd make a fun bar graph for an all hands meeting -- not that it makes any sense as a bar graph, you understand, those are the only kind of chart we're capable of following, supposedly...
When I saw the term, I thought of Tourette's syndrome. Consider it: wouldn't it be nice if presidents did suffer from Tourettes "word bursts" in their State of the Unions? It'd be the only words they said that weren't written on the teleprompter by paid lackeys -- and we'd know more about the state of the union, no question.
Okay, enough of everyone saying "Why should we expect Hollywood to get programming right when they get cops, lawyers, and everyone else wrong?"
The answer is, in all those cases: it'd make a better dang movie.
The stupid lowest-common-denominator version of computer hacking in movies is about on the level of Doogie Howser's computer diary at the end of each episode. How often do the HUGE letters c-r-a-w-l across the monitor as our hero manually types in the oh-so-secret password? That's not only unrealistic, it's just plain bad moviemaking.
It's a cliche: good dramatic writing is specific, it doesn't live in the world of generalities, and it sure doesn't live in the world of crappily-written generalities. The best legal thrillers have some clue: the defense gets the final closing argument, not the other way around because you thought it would play better. A good thriller would take some time to give us plausible details about whatever computer details it needs: because we're not freaking idiots, and they don't need to dumb it down completely to let us understand. These movies would be better if they made the effort to get it right, just like a horse racing movie would be better with some convincing details about horse racing. Duh.
Leaving animals alone, what will this mammoth be eating, please?
There are lots of plants that seem to be adapted for seed dissemination by "megafauna" -- the big mammoths and so on of the past. Take a look at honey locust trees -- they've got seed pods nothing in the Western Hemisphere really eats. (People don't plant the female trees nearly as often as the males, because the pods are big, plentiful, and hard to clean up after.) Or durians -- there's a fruit that's way the heck overengineered, so to speak. Turns out, where there are still elephant populations, they eat seeds similar to the honey locust's or the durian's. There are a couple of interesting pop science books that just look for plants that might be evolutionary leftovers -- based on seed type, how the populations spread, and so on.
So does Siberia really still have huge stands of those sorts of plants around? 'Cause it's going to take a heck of a lot to keep mammoths fed. Don't worry about the population-out-of-control problem; they'll die with or without big cat predators if they can't eat.
(But leave all that -- this is a sci-fi fantasy by a mad Japanese scientist. If they get out of control we'll send Mothra to clean up.)
Laptop people tend to realize much more than desktop people that a computer isn't always and end unto itself
Amazing, isn't it, how people end up on the CPU treadmill? I just bought a digital camera. Already have a film SLR -- decent enough, and certainly a better picture than any digital camera under $1800 or so. What I needed was a complement to that. The kids are nine, they're old enough to enjoy taking pictures but not old enough not to waste hundreds of worthless frames learning how on film. The SLR's big to lug around, too, so a decent little digital made sense. For what we were doing, a 3 MP model seemed fine, and small-but-not-ultra-compact -- emphasis on durable, for the kids. I narrowed the models down, read some reviews, and chose something at that sweet spot. It happened to be one of the Sony models -- because it has a nice little design that's easy to tuck in a pocket and a decent little interface. Seemed better-engineered than the comparable Canons.
Apple gets that. They understand how to pitch to different market segments. Their machines have design sense, they're meant to work with you. They're durable. The OS is pleasant -- the kids haven't given me much chance to use the new camera, but they tell me iPhoto is easy as can be...:-) And they're using it on the 17" iMac that's displaced the PCs in the household because it'll fit in a weird spot and it's better at the stuff we actually do.
But why do people not "get" the whole tradeoff idea except for portables? The hutch/shrines people set up for their computers are surreal. (Hide it in the basement, please, honey.) Or look at that/. article last week about upgrading your machine to play games -- that's technology for its own sake, for people who can only be satisfied with a shooter if they know they're getting a respectable FPS rate. For some reason people "get" it for portables, but not for desktop systems. Weird.
Somebody point me to a cost comparison of how the two approaches work:
- upgrading PC every one or two years to keep up with the latest card-crushing games.
- buying the latest and greatest console every two years.
Seems like the console's a no brainer. When you need a new box for other reasons, you'll get one that's up-to-date for the latest titles... but why go through this cost and hassle when you can get a pop-it-in-it-plays system for $200 and no labor?
I believe manga is one of the reasons that Japan has a much higher rate of literacy than the U.S.;
Frankly I found Ranma boring and juvenile -- it was inflicted on me by an arrested adolescent nephew -- and if you're wanting to suggest something better about it you've got an uphill struggle. It played like an elaborate daydream by a fourth-grader who was starting to think about girls for the first time, and that's about it.
But I'll agree with you about the literacy thing, not that we could ever prove any one thing causally about such a big societal trait. Comics are a great way for kids to start, and keep, reading. The American tradition of that is moribund; I know plenty of parents who'd be thrilled to have their kids reading Batman under the covers with a flashlight.
Re:They're just not saying, 'cause...
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Baked Apple
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If this was an Apple store, the employee wouldn't be in a position to say anything about the (dorked-out) customer's reasons. Apple has a danged clear set of policies about dealing with customers -- you don't ridicule and you don't bitch. I know a few employees.
So maybe we're not hearing the reasons because this person wants to keep her job.
(I know ten women like this customer, though. Think of how casual she was in saying her little "baked apple" thing. Didn't faze her much. This is a woman with serious money and no sense. She miplaces four cell phones a year, at least.)
Absolutely, though it's not all "appearance" alone. It's the whole design thing -- and design is more than just looks, it's a complicated set of stuff. My little sister and my dad both have tiBooks, and they're just a pleasure to use. It's a lot of little stuff.
The "extra" computer I bought last year was a flat panel 17" iMac... and it's displaced everything else, partly because the footprint's small enough (and the wonky look of it's appealing enough) to leave on a narrow kitchen counter. The kids play on it there, it makes a great little "look it up" machine for the Web... just kind of fits our lives. And I think they look kind of goofy, really.
So what's the cost going to be like, and how's the weight? Googling, a couple of articles specifically say it's for the space industry. Must be a cost thing? What's to keep this out of my next Swarovski spotting scope?
(Not that the return for cost will be there in consumer optics, but that never stopped those of us with $1000 phase coated, nitrogen purged roof prism binoculars before... We're too easy.)
Assuming that they knew about the damage the best way to save the ship and crew that I know of would be to abort the launch and land in Morocco.
And Morocco would only really be an option if they'd seen extensive tile damage early enough in the launch to abort. As the article states, they only saw the insulation fall off during a review of the launch's high-speed camera footage. That was after Columbia was in orbit. The extent of any tile damage isn't known now, not yet.
This is an uninformed opinion, but the choice between a)possible tile damage from insulation (which we've seen before and which didn't result in significant damage before) and b)aborting launch halfway would have to be a no-brainer, wouldn't it? The relative risk would be much higher for the aborted launch. Even if they'd seen the insulation break off at the time, they'd have gone ahead. Doesn't seem like that hard a choice.
So yeah, that "rushing another one into orbit" option seems like the only one that was there. (If they'd known, which only the conspiracy troll parent assumes.)
Which does kind of make a person think of the Titanic and its lifeboat complement... Challenger blows up on launch, and from the voice recordings we know the crew was alive for the 8.5-mile fall to the ocean. Afterward, NASA studies escape measures and determines there aren't any good options. The discussion of what-ifs about these various potential rescue scenarios, had we only known, makes you realize that we've ruled out all the obvious rescue measures. (Why not something like the Soyuz capsule on the ISS?) Pretty unsettling.
But then I guess caravels didn't have any real recourse if they went down in the open ocean, either.
Same setup earlier: soda cans with tennis balls, only back then you could use rubbing alchohol. It made a really nice flame, at dusk especially.(They've changed the concentration of alchohol in the stuff they sell now, so you can't use that any more. What is this freaking world coming to?)
My older brother and his friends exchanged tennis ball artillery shots in the street out front. Thoomp -- thoomp! He's 39 now, but he got into these potato guns a couple of years ago too. His aren't bazookas, they're more like mortars made from pvc piping.
Essentially the article is telling us that whatever happened was for the best. This, friends, is that "best of all possible worlds" Dr. Pangloss told us about in Candide, only with an explicit capitalist's twist. Trying to learn from past mistakes is a fool's errand for malcontents, because the market has already made the right choice -- it did so by definition.
The secondary arguments are risible. The thing about how technology doesn't matter comes quickly (second sentence) to:
When you choose compact cassette, you are also buying into a vast infrastructure of capabilities, services and support. These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).
You are buying the ability to stick a cassette in the post to your relatives in Australia with 100% certainty that they will be able to play it - and what's more, you won't care about never getting that tape back.
Translation: Compact Cassette was here first, and had time to saturate the market next to its competition back then, so it's a better "whole product" because it's got all the infrastructure to support it.
By that way of thinking, gasoline is a better whole product than anything that might try to replace it, isn't it? And hey, examining how the car manufacturors crushed urban rail systems, that's not important -- the "whole product" of cars was better, so we couldn't possibly learn anything about urban planning decisions and how to prevent abuses in future, now, could we?
I'd hate to see this guy doing history. Everything happened because it was for the best... it was all just inevitable, and pay no attention to all those people who had to struggle to get things done.
The suggestion is that dinosaurs went through a gliding stage before learning to fly with two fore-limbs, says Dr Angela Milner of London's Natural History Museum.
This sort of quote assumes that evolution is going in a single direction -- "from" flightless dinos "to" modern birds. In fact traits commonly appear, and disappear, and reappear, many times. (Take a look at a "terror bird" and convince yourself birds weren't turning back into dinosaurs.)
It sounds like the world had a mess of different uses for feathers, once they developed -- insulatory, locomotion, display, and so on, just like in modern birds, and some we haven't thought of like this four-legged gliding model, if the fossil's real. Dinosaurs didn't develop "toward" flight, they bounced all over that range of feather uses just like birds do today.
Cladistics will air out that sort of thinking real fast. (Decent practical primer/pop science book: "In Search of Deep Time.")
Looking at things in "clades" also helps in practical ways by showing the evolutionary relationships between living animals more clearly. People trying to figure out ways to treat tapeworms had trouble making progress under the assumption that their on parasitism evolved only once, in a common anscestor of all modern tapeworms. Cladistics hashed out the evolutionary history of tapeworms a bit, and we realized the trait had a more patchy history -- parasitism had evolved several separate times -- and that some of the closest modern relations weren't parasitic at all. Those modern relations were easier to work with in the lab than something that required a host.
Kind of casts a new light on that Janis Ian slashdot interview a while ago -- in which she pointed out the handful of disincentives artists are given for coming out with new work rather than recording established hits.
The companies present this as a potential risk they need to mitigate by giving you a smaller cut: if you're doing a new song of your own rather than a "cover," the board can't make an informed choice about the marketability of the song, see?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Apple did pony up that "one-click" fee to Amazon, so it only makes sense. :-()
Hello? Why is Apple the only service that's not trying to force Columbia Records' 1976 purchase plan down our throats?? This is plainly what the market wants.
(On the other hand, iTunes 3.0.1 has a lot of false-positive problems for me with its burn protection for audible.com files... makes me pause.)
The Patrick O'Brian series I love -- "Master and Commander," due this Nov, is the source of endless hope and fear among fans -- took forever, with O'Brian getting option money for years and years with no film in the works. O'Brian died before anyone went ahead on a movie.
My former brother-in-law has had the option on a book of his sold, he collected somewhere shy of a million dollars on the rights, and the book's option has bounced around between producers for a long while now. Clint Eastwood supposedly liked it at first. No signs of a movie being made.
There are no guarantees. (And as far as it going on "as long as the 007 series," take things a step at a time.)
Always kind of interesting to see numbers like that in context: NASA has roughly the budget of the NIH.
Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term "military industrial complex" for occasions like this. Any guesses how our current administration would resolve the tension between military and civilian purposes? Not a real tough question, is it? These are people who don't honestly sympathize with, or understand the rationale for, the separation of church and state; subtle but meaningful distinctions between the military activities and civilian mission of NASA aren't likely to come up at their meetings.
Uh, that's "commercially viable" in a sense only dot-commers would appreciate. There may be a few people who'd pay a grand to play against a fantastic computer "player," but you'd have lots better luck selling games against Kasparov. Would you rather pay $100 to converse with the most intelligent Eliza ever, or the movie star of your choice? Stephen Hawking?
Most people can already lose handily to $10, bargain-bin Chessmaster. They're already fooled by the original Eliza when someone uses it on chat boards. I doubt there's a market for high-end versions of those experiences.
(Plus, when the most intelligent bot ever answers you with "42," how'll you take it?)
(And once they sign up, AOL will make it actually impossible to cancel the service. Naturally.)
Do these companies have no idea at all how people use Gnutella right now? Do they not do any research? Everything they offer us seems to be a business model designed around their needs, not around us as customers. We've all figured out that we don't want to subscribe to Columbia Records by now, so let's drop the stupid monthly fees: people will pay by the song, you'll make loads of money, so get it through your heads and give us what we plainly want...
Anyone who's tried to tweak the position of a table using the ruler, which changes to show you not the actual position of the table but rather the relative position of the page based on the table's position (or even an individual cell's position)... Argh! Who would want this frustrating behavior?
I mention it because it's a handy little metaphor for how MS leapfrogs its products so that you're always bumping the next thing up. (Upgrading to W2k? You need Office 2k. Office '03? You need a new OS.) You can only really judge what you need relative to other MS products -- it's like that "relative" ruler, yes? Bonus: the ruler itself is a good example of one of the clumsy UI changes at the point of departure for this MS tactic -- Word 5.1a, the last version to do rulers the intelligible way, was also the last version before the whole "Office Suite" approach really took off.)
Gingrich did repeatedly suggest privatizing the space program. He wanted it to be commericalized, and he basically regarded the existing program as "high-tech socialism."
He also found time to criticize NASA for not taking more risks, saying the US space effort was being made "as boring as possible" -- this after slashing NASA's budget by a third. Let's face it -- a politician like Newt would have exactly the sort of attention span necessary to start on a plan like this and not follow through. Gingrich was full of "whiz bang" privatization ideas that had little substance or experience behind them. Whatever Pournelle thought he'd convinced Newt of some afternoon, whatever modern-day Longitude prizes they talked about, that wasn't real. Pournelle's being naive about the sort of man he was dealing with, among other things.
Those Mac emulators still work, and still run the ancient software, on a modern OS X Mac. My father has a word processor from maybe 1987 (WriteNow) that's just fine, and continues to use it for day-to-day writing. Hey, whatever makes you comfy.
Maybe it isn't supported in some subtle ways, and I'm sure there's stuff that's broken -- even recent OS 9 games sometimes won't run in "Classic Mode" and require booting in OS 9 instead. But Apple's taken this seriously during every OS or chip migration they've ever had, and they're still keeping their eye on pre-PPC chip software.
Perhaps then we wouldn't continuously get ourselves into cycles of Constitution shredding/rebuilding.
You may recall that the US constitution actually includes a mechanism for its own revision... It's called an "amendment," if you remember civics class.
The people who wrote this thing knew it was a balancing act, and expected the thing to be revised and changed over time. Most of them would probably be shocked by how their "original intent" has become so pivotal for judicial "conservatives" like Bork; the one intent they all agreed on was that the document should change for the better.
The "consequences" you're talking about would be the first thing any abusive government would take advantage of. That's exactly the sort of thing that'd let Ashcroft shout "treason!" and send tanks against college campuses.
The rest of your comments show you haven't used the OS in any real way -- Option-(or right)-click on the dock to move it, big guy -- but basically you're touching on something not many /.ers seem to realize:
The OS X interface genuinely isn't "mature" yet, not next to the old OS, and this is one of the rough spots. Since very early on the Mac OS had been quite good for various diff't sets of handicapped users. I used to set up their systems.
Basically OS X hasn't caught up in terms of interface to the old OS; it's a joy for a lot of people to use next to the alternatives, is all.
(And if you're really saying you haven't ever had trouble with keyboard controls on "any PS OS," sorry, I'm not buying. I'm sitting at a W2k box here, and the API inconsistencies across apps alone are incredibly frustrating, leaving alone OSes. That one gets you into troll territory, I'm afraid.)
When I saw the term, I thought of Tourette's syndrome. Consider it: wouldn't it be nice if presidents did suffer from Tourettes "word bursts" in their State of the Unions? It'd be the only words they said that weren't written on the teleprompter by paid lackeys -- and we'd know more about the state of the union, no question.
The answer is, in all those cases: it'd make a better dang movie.
The stupid lowest-common-denominator version of computer hacking in movies is about on the level of Doogie Howser's computer diary at the end of each episode. How often do the HUGE letters c-r-a-w-l across the monitor as our hero manually types in the oh-so-secret password? That's not only unrealistic, it's just plain bad moviemaking.
It's a cliche: good dramatic writing is specific, it doesn't live in the world of generalities, and it sure doesn't live in the world of crappily-written generalities. The best legal thrillers have some clue: the defense gets the final closing argument, not the other way around because you thought it would play better. A good thriller would take some time to give us plausible details about whatever computer details it needs: because we're not freaking idiots, and they don't need to dumb it down completely to let us understand. These movies would be better if they made the effort to get it right, just like a horse racing movie would be better with some convincing details about horse racing. Duh.
Maybe we just don't want to watch ourselves.on TV. You think?
There are lots of plants that seem to be adapted for seed dissemination by "megafauna" -- the big mammoths and so on of the past. Take a look at honey locust trees -- they've got seed pods nothing in the Western Hemisphere really eats. (People don't plant the female trees nearly as often as the males, because the pods are big, plentiful, and hard to clean up after.) Or durians -- there's a fruit that's way the heck overengineered, so to speak. Turns out, where there are still elephant populations, they eat seeds similar to the honey locust's or the durian's. There are a couple of interesting pop science books that just look for plants that might be evolutionary leftovers -- based on seed type, how the populations spread, and so on.
So does Siberia really still have huge stands of those sorts of plants around? 'Cause it's going to take a heck of a lot to keep mammoths fed. Don't worry about the population-out-of-control problem; they'll die with or without big cat predators if they can't eat.
(But leave all that -- this is a sci-fi fantasy by a mad Japanese scientist. If they get out of control we'll send Mothra to clean up.)
Amazing, isn't it, how people end up on the CPU treadmill? I just bought a digital camera. Already have a film SLR -- decent enough, and certainly a better picture than any digital camera under $1800 or so. What I needed was a complement to that. The kids are nine, they're old enough to enjoy taking pictures but not old enough not to waste hundreds of worthless frames learning how on film. The SLR's big to lug around, too, so a decent little digital made sense. For what we were doing, a 3 MP model seemed fine, and small-but-not-ultra-compact -- emphasis on durable, for the kids. I narrowed the models down, read some reviews, and chose something at that sweet spot. It happened to be one of the Sony models -- because it has a nice little design that's easy to tuck in a pocket and a decent little interface. Seemed better-engineered than the comparable Canons.
Apple gets that. They understand how to pitch to different market segments. Their machines have design sense, they're meant to work with you. They're durable. The OS is pleasant -- the kids haven't given me much chance to use the new camera, but they tell me iPhoto is easy as can be... :-) And they're using it on the 17" iMac that's displaced the PCs in the household because it'll fit in a weird spot and it's better at the stuff we actually do.
But why do people not "get" the whole tradeoff idea except for portables? The hutch/shrines people set up for their computers are surreal. (Hide it in the basement, please, honey.) Or look at that /. article last week about upgrading your machine to play games -- that's technology for its own sake, for people who can only be satisfied with a shooter if they know they're getting a respectable FPS rate. For some reason people "get" it for portables, but not for desktop systems. Weird.
Seems like the console's a no brainer. When you need a new box for other reasons, you'll get one that's up-to-date for the latest titles... but why go through this cost and hassle when you can get a pop-it-in-it-plays system for $200 and no labor?
I believe manga is one of the reasons that Japan has a much higher rate of literacy than the U.S.;
Frankly I found Ranma boring and juvenile -- it was inflicted on me by an arrested adolescent nephew -- and if you're wanting to suggest something better about it you've got an uphill struggle. It played like an elaborate daydream by a fourth-grader who was starting to think about girls for the first time, and that's about it.
But I'll agree with you about the literacy thing, not that we could ever prove any one thing causally about such a big societal trait. Comics are a great way for kids to start, and keep, reading. The American tradition of that is moribund; I know plenty of parents who'd be thrilled to have their kids reading Batman under the covers with a flashlight.
So maybe we're not hearing the reasons because this person wants to keep her job.
(I know ten women like this customer, though. Think of how casual she was in saying her little "baked apple" thing. Didn't faze her much. This is a woman with serious money and no sense. She miplaces four cell phones a year, at least.)
Absolutely, though it's not all "appearance" alone. It's the whole design thing -- and design is more than just looks, it's a complicated set of stuff. My little sister and my dad both have tiBooks, and they're just a pleasure to use. It's a lot of little stuff.
The "extra" computer I bought last year was a flat panel 17" iMac... and it's displaced everything else, partly because the footprint's small enough (and the wonky look of it's appealing enough) to leave on a narrow kitchen counter. The kids play on it there, it makes a great little "look it up" machine for the Web... just kind of fits our lives. And I think they look kind of goofy, really.
(Not that the return for cost will be there in consumer optics, but that never stopped those of us with $1000 phase coated, nitrogen purged roof prism binoculars before... We're too easy.)
And Morocco would only really be an option if they'd seen extensive tile damage early enough in the launch to abort. As the article states, they only saw the insulation fall off during a review of the launch's high-speed camera footage. That was after Columbia was in orbit. The extent of any tile damage isn't known now, not yet.
This is an uninformed opinion, but the choice between a)possible tile damage from insulation (which we've seen before and which didn't result in significant damage before) and b)aborting launch halfway would have to be a no-brainer, wouldn't it? The relative risk would be much higher for the aborted launch. Even if they'd seen the insulation break off at the time, they'd have gone ahead. Doesn't seem like that hard a choice.
So yeah, that "rushing another one into orbit" option seems like the only one that was there. (If they'd known, which only the conspiracy troll parent assumes.)
Which does kind of make a person think of the Titanic and its lifeboat complement... Challenger blows up on launch, and from the voice recordings we know the crew was alive for the 8.5-mile fall to the ocean. Afterward, NASA studies escape measures and determines there aren't any good options. The discussion of what-ifs about these various potential rescue scenarios, had we only known, makes you realize that we've ruled out all the obvious rescue measures. (Why not something like the Soyuz capsule on the ISS?) Pretty unsettling.
But then I guess caravels didn't have any real recourse if they went down in the open ocean, either.
My older brother and his friends exchanged tennis ball artillery shots in the street out front. Thoomp -- thoomp! He's 39 now, but he got into these potato guns a couple of years ago too. His aren't bazookas, they're more like mortars made from pvc piping.
The secondary arguments are risible. The thing about how technology doesn't matter comes quickly (second sentence) to:
Translation: Compact Cassette was here first, and had time to saturate the market next to its competition back then, so it's a better "whole product" because it's got all the infrastructure to support it.
By that way of thinking, gasoline is a better whole product than anything that might try to replace it, isn't it? And hey, examining how the car manufacturors crushed urban rail systems, that's not important -- the "whole product" of cars was better, so we couldn't possibly learn anything about urban planning decisions and how to prevent abuses in future, now, could we?
I'd hate to see this guy doing history. Everything happened because it was for the best... it was all just inevitable, and pay no attention to all those people who had to struggle to get things done.
The suggestion is that dinosaurs went through a gliding stage before learning to fly with two fore-limbs, says Dr Angela Milner of London's Natural History Museum.
This sort of quote assumes that evolution is going in a single direction -- "from" flightless dinos "to" modern birds. In fact traits commonly appear, and disappear, and reappear, many times. (Take a look at a "terror bird" and convince yourself birds weren't turning back into dinosaurs.)
It sounds like the world had a mess of different uses for feathers, once they developed -- insulatory, locomotion, display, and so on, just like in modern birds, and some we haven't thought of like this four-legged gliding model, if the fossil's real. Dinosaurs didn't develop "toward" flight, they bounced all over that range of feather uses just like birds do today.
Cladistics will air out that sort of thinking real fast. (Decent practical primer/pop science book: "In Search of Deep Time.")
Looking at things in "clades" also helps in practical ways by showing the evolutionary relationships between living animals more clearly. People trying to figure out ways to treat tapeworms had trouble making progress under the assumption that their on parasitism evolved only once, in a common anscestor of all modern tapeworms. Cladistics hashed out the evolutionary history of tapeworms a bit, and we realized the trait had a more patchy history -- parasitism had evolved several separate times -- and that some of the closest modern relations weren't parasitic at all. Those modern relations were easier to work with in the lab than something that required a host.
The companies present this as a potential risk they need to mitigate by giving you a smaller cut: if you're doing a new song of your own rather than a "cover," the board can't make an informed choice about the marketability of the song, see?