We currently have this 1.5 Million dollars and are trying to return it to its rightful owners. If you have been subjected to this evil Nigerian money scam, please send your Name, Social Security Number, Date of Birth, and the amount stolen from you along with a bank account number where we can return your funds. Our e-mail address is u.r.sucker@hotmail.com. Please help us to right this terrible wrong:)
Since you're an anonymous coward, I'll take what you say with a grain of salt, but can you please provide a reference to a study which showed a wage gap of 75 cents to the dollar for men and women without children? Or are we to take the "pretty certain" of an Anonymous Coward over the two provided references to a legitimate study which I provided. I may be misinformed, but your post is totally uninformed, and uninformative.
It turns out that most of the wage gap can be explained mostly by marriage and children. When you compare men and women who have never had children, it turns out women make 98% of what men make. The following links attempt to explain what may account for some of the remaining 2%. I though I had read that unmarried women with no children make 102% of what unmarried men without any children make. Before you dismiss the following articles as anti-femenist BS, consider this. If nationwide, women with the same work experience in the same jobs made 74 cents on the dollar, don't you think there would be a massive,bankrupting wave of lawsuits in this country?
Some references: http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.17864/ news_detail.a sp
The wage gap shrinks dramatically when multiple factors are considered. Women with similar levels of education and experience earn as much as their male counterparts. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, CBO director June O'Neill found that, among people ages twenty-seven to thirty-three who have never had a child, women's earnings are close to 98 percent of men's. Dr. O'Neill notes that "when earnings comparisons are restricted to men and women more similar in their experience and life situations, the measured earnings differentials are typically quite small."
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba392/
When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's. Women who hold positions and have skills and experience similar to those of men face wage disparities of less than 10 percent, and many are within a couple of points. Claims of unequal pay almost always involve comparing apples and oranges.
I can think on one obvious control left out of thier list of controls. I believe it is fairly well established that someone with poor health is less likely to reach thier full height potential. That means you could expect poor people to be shorter, and simply unhealthy to be shorter. I would expect that both of these groups to statistically be paid less that rich/healthy people. If it turns out that rich/healthy people are statistically not taller, or if they had accounted for the difference, this study might have some merrit. Otherwise, they missed at least one control.
I met him in a similar situation to yours, and asked a similar question (though not in quite such an accusatory tone), but I got a quite a different response. I met him in 1995, and I wonder if, perhaps he had simply refined his views since he met you, but he said something that always will stick with me and for which I have not yet found a good rebuttal:
"Knowledge is always preferable to ignorance" - Edward Teller, 1995
One of the many things which is so crazy about this whole situation is that the punishment doesn't fit the crime. As others have already replied, copyright is not theft. This is made clear in the way it is persued. If I illegally copy 500 songs, I can be sued civilly I believe for $150,000 per song, or $75 million. The RIAA can spend any amount they want on lawyers to extort a settlement out of me which I may or may not owe, and I have no right to a public defender. If I went into a cd store and stole 500 songs (about 50 CD's) I would be charged with a misdemeanor, would be entitled to a public defender, could not have my property appropriated without a warrant, and even if I was found guilty, would probably only be required to pay the cost of the songs plus perhaps 3x punitative damages (i.e. perhaps as much as a couple thousand dollars.) On rare cases, I may even serve a small amount of jail time, but this would probably be suspended or plead out. I would much rather that copyright infringement were treated as lightly as theft, since clearly (at least to me) that even if copyright infringement is wrong, it is less wrong that theft. As to your complaining about the correction of clearly misused terms, you clearly don't understand that one of the first rules of debate is that the side which is allowed to frame the question has already won the debate. Would you just let it slide if I said that since it probably took this woman several years to save $2000, that the RIAA had essentially taken away two years of her life, and had therefore partially murdered her. Of course you wouldn't let this slide, but if enough people were allowed to get away with this, eventually people might start to equate the two. That is what has happened with the copyright/theft debate. On the other hand, if you were just trying to troll, then bravo.
The answer to your question is simple - The first amendment. The first amendment and most of the writings of the time made it clear that copyright was not meant to benefit artists and authors. It is designed to make more goods available for the public good. Copyright is a social contract in which I give up my free speech rights for a limited time, in hopes of gaining something in return. Authors have a natural right to the works they release to the public right up until the time they release them. After that they have no more natural rights to them. Copyright is designed as a means to make sure that more works are available to the public, and when that goal is not served, copyright is useless as best, and unconstutional at worst. The idea of ruining people financially, or throwing them in jail because thier kids downloaded a few songs is assinine. The problem is that corporations have warped the collective consiousness to believe that they somehow deserve to own thier own little piece of knowledge forever. This is a perversion. The real question is,
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a citized to abridge his free speech right is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
I have done something similar, using an EPIA M-6000 and a Hauppauge WinPVR 250 board. It plays back DVD's flawlessly, and since the WinPVR 250 is a hardware encoder, it encodes flawlessly as well. There are a few issues, however. Currently, there are no linux drivers (but I believe they are coming along quickly.) The second thing you should note is that if you run the CPU at full power, and run the MPEG encoder at full power, the system overheats fairly rapidly if you don't have a case fan. It makes a huge difference in heat, with a relatively minor noise difference. My Casetronic 2699R with the case fan running is about as loud as my Playstation 2, and a little louder than my laptop. It's also about the same noise level as my Directivo. If you want a totally silent case, you might try the Hush PC, but I don't know if that will solve the heat dissipation from the MPEG card.
I haven't actually tried it, but most of the reviews seem pretty good. It looks like for about $300, you can access all of your multimedia from a PS2.
QCast
I'm not sure why your comment was rated as funny. I think it was quite seriously true. It also happens to provide a great way to fund the project. Stick a couple of web cams in there, and you have JennyCam on the way to Mars. Tell me people won't pay for that. (Am I joking? I can't even tell.)
A few years ago, I read a book by Neil Postman called: Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the first chapter, he compared the books 1984, and A Brave New World. The conclusion he came to is that it is much easier to control people through what they love, rather than through what they fear. A distopia like in 1984 can never last long (on a historical time span) because people will try to destroy it, either covertly, or overtly. On the other hand, we have already accomplished 90% of the distopia presented in A Brave New World, and no one is worried about it, no one rallies against it. People openly embrace it. The funny thing is I'm not too worried about our government ruling through fear. I'm more worried about how our government currently rules: through apathy. How do you think it was that we were presented with the Hobson's choice of Al Gore, or George Bush.
You say they've reinvented the VCR, but more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
The interesting thing is that 100 hours of video tape would take up an entire shelf, you would have to fast forward and rewind to find the show you want, and you can't randomly insert and delete shows from a single tape. So quite frankly, in many ways, storing digital video is actually less awkward than a VCR. The really interesting thing, however, is that storing digital video is currently competitive with video tape. Last I figured, a 2 hour(6 hour EP) video tape cost about $1. My most recently purchased hard drives cost about $1 per GB. Assume VCD quality is about equivalent to Standard play VHS (argue on this point, but for me it's pretty close). That means a video tape costs you $0.50 per hour, and a hard drive cost you about $0.65 per hour. When I realized this, I said goodbye to video tape forever. I've built a digital VCR, and use it as such. Converting an already existing computer to this task can be done for as little as $150, and I built myself a brand new one for $500. Notice, however, that I agree with you about my system not replacing Tivo. In fact I have two of them. I use them in conjunction with my Tivo, but when I want to store anything long term, my digital VCR is the way to go. (By the way, I know I could just open up my Tivo, hack it, and do this without the digital VCR, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus my digital VCR is still useful for converting my VHS tapes to a more portable/durable/easy to access format.)
When most people say standard ram, they mean DRAM (Dynamic RAM) meaning the memory must be updated many times per second. This would require a significant current draw from the battery. I imaging these early cartridges used SRAM (Static RAM). This would mean the memory could be maintained by simply maintaining the voltage (with theoretically no current draw). I wonder if SRAM is used for much of anything any more, but at any rate, I just felt like being pedantic today. Sorry.
When you talk about efficiency of most energy conversion processes, you are talking about the percentage of energy which is not lost to heat. A 35% efficient gas engine, for example converts 35% of its liberated energy into work, and the other 65% into heat. In some sense, all of these processes are 100% efficient at converting energy into heat. (i.e. the work done by the afore mentioned gas motor is eventually 100% converted into heat). When we talk about the 97% efficient furnace, we are using the term efficient in a different sense. We are saying that of the chemical energy available in the gas, 97% is released, with the other 3% remaining trapped in chemical form and exhausted up the flue. Of the 97% energy released, 100% is converted into heat energy. So in the original sense of the term efficient, all furnaces are by definition 100% efficient. It can also be said that given enough time, all engines (or at least all engines on Earth) are 100% efficient at converting energy into heat.
You have redeemed yourself in my eyes. My first assumption was that you were the idiot product of a sub-standard educational process, rather than someone who wasn't really thinking about what they were saying. You're not the first to say something stupid and then regret it after you were unable to take it back. Admitting your mistake rather than trying to back it up is in my view is one sign of a first rate scientific mind. No hard feelings?
It scares me to think that someone who claims to be a chemist (and therefore supposedly educated) thinks that seasons are caused by changing distance between the Sun and the Earth. This isn't like misunderstanding the fine points of quantum mechanics. It's like telling people that on the moon things float away, or that rockets can't travel in space, because they have nothing to push against. Is it really possible that a person can get a chemistry degree without realizing what causes summer and winter?
The notion that an author has a right to a profit is a falatious notion. Copyright is purely a social contract in which I give up my natural rights of free speech to ensure that ideas are made available to the public. Creators have no right to profit, just like manufacturors have no right to profit. It's thier job to earn that profit. Copyright is not designed to ensure profit, but rather to provide an incentive. They only have an (artificial) right to control thier creations so long as they live up to thier half of the social contract. Furthermore, if less content is produced as a result of copyright violation, it is me, as a fellow member of society who has had my rights violated, not the content creator. This is a very subtle point, and I may not have expressed it well, but I guess what I'm trying to say is: Copyright is a mechanism designed to achieve the goal of wide disemmination of ideas. There is no goal of providing compensation to creators, that is simply a mechanism by which the goal is achieved.
I've never understood why we can't just plug in our hybrid cars? The biggest problem with electric cars was range and time to charge. Why can't we just throw and extra battery into our hybrids, and give me an electric range of say 10-20 miles. This would be rediculous for a fully electric car, but for a hybrid, I could use fully electric mode to get me the first 10 miles, and the gas tank for the rest. I'm guessing that this would provide nearly all of the benefit of electric cars, with none of the drawbacks (except perhaps cost). Tell people that they can get a gas powered car they can dive cross country, but as long as they remain local, they never have to fill up again. Let me plug in when I get home, and to work, and I could use a lot less fuel. Throw a small, underpowered solar panel on top to provide a little extra effeciency. I can't wait until we see the first Hybrid with these kinds of features.
For instance, I predict that this Saturday I will sleep until noon, get up, eat some lunch, watch TV most of the day and fall asleep around ten. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing this in 50 years as well. See, the key to predicting the future is: aim low.
And unlike Kennedy, he actually lived to see his vision come to fruition. One of his primary goals was to bring an end to the Cold War. Many will claim that he had nothing to do with the execution of that vision, but at any rate, he had a vision, and set about achieving it. I think he was quite successful.
The last time I remember was Fermats last Theorem.
on
Riemann Hypothesis Proved?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That was in 1994. If you read the following link, you'll notice that the first time the proof was presented, it had a fatal flaw, and it wasn't corrected until over a year later. Even if this Riemann proof eventually pans out, it is almost certain that at this point, it has some serious flaws.
Slashdot Mirror
We currently have this 1.5 Million dollars and are trying to return it to its rightful owners. If you have been subjected to this evil Nigerian money scam, please send your Name, Social Security Number, Date of Birth, and the amount stolen from you along with a bank account number where we can return your funds. Our e-mail address is u.r.sucker@hotmail.com. Please help us to right this terrible wrong:)
Since you're an anonymous coward, I'll take what you say with a grain of salt, but can you please provide a reference to a study which showed a wage gap of 75 cents to the dollar for men and women without children? Or are we to take the "pretty certain" of an Anonymous Coward over the two provided references to a legitimate study which I provided. I may be misinformed, but your post is totally uninformed, and uninformative.
It turns out that most of the wage gap can be explained mostly by marriage and children. When you compare men and women who have never had children, it turns out women make 98% of what men make. The following links attempt to explain what may account for some of the remaining 2%. I though I had read that unmarried women with no children make 102% of what unmarried men without any children make. Before you dismiss the following articles as anti-femenist BS, consider this. If nationwide, women with the same work experience in the same jobs made 74 cents on the dollar, don't you think there would be a massive,bankrupting wave of lawsuits in this country?
/ news_detail.a sp
Some references:
http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.17864
The wage gap shrinks dramatically when multiple factors are considered. Women with similar levels of education and experience earn as much as their male counterparts. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, CBO director June O'Neill found that, among people ages twenty-seven to thirty-three who have never had a child, women's earnings are close to 98 percent of men's. Dr. O'Neill notes that "when earnings comparisons are restricted to men and women more similar in their experience and life situations, the measured earnings differentials are typically quite small."
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba392/
When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's. Women who hold positions and have skills and experience similar to those of men face wage disparities of less than 10 percent, and many are within a couple of points. Claims of unequal pay almost always involve comparing apples and oranges.
I can think on one obvious control left out of thier list of controls. I believe it is fairly well established that someone with poor health is less likely to reach thier full height potential. That means you could expect poor people to be shorter, and simply unhealthy to be shorter. I would expect that both of these groups to statistically be paid less that rich/healthy people. If it turns out that rich/healthy people are statistically not taller, or if they had accounted for the difference, this study might have some merrit. Otherwise, they missed at least one control.
I met him in a similar situation to yours, and asked a similar question (though not in quite such an accusatory tone), but I got a quite a different response. I met him in 1995, and I wonder if, perhaps he had simply refined his views since he met you, but he said something that always will stick with me and for which I have not yet found a good rebuttal:
"Knowledge is always preferable to ignorance" - Edward Teller, 1995
One of the many things which is so crazy about this whole situation is that the punishment doesn't fit the crime. As others have already replied, copyright is not theft. This is made clear in the way it is persued. If I illegally copy 500 songs, I can be sued civilly I believe for $150,000 per song, or $75 million. The RIAA can spend any amount they want on lawyers to extort a settlement out of me which I may or may not owe, and I have no right to a public defender. If I went into a cd store and stole 500 songs (about 50 CD's) I would be charged with a misdemeanor, would be entitled to a public defender, could not have my property appropriated without a warrant, and even if I was found guilty, would probably only be required to pay the cost of the songs plus perhaps 3x punitative damages (i.e. perhaps as much as a couple thousand dollars.) On rare cases, I may even serve a small amount of jail time, but this would probably be suspended or plead out. I would much rather that copyright infringement were treated as lightly as theft, since clearly (at least to me) that even if copyright infringement is wrong, it is less wrong that theft. As to your complaining about the correction of clearly misused terms, you clearly don't understand that one of the first rules of debate is that the side which is allowed to frame the question has already won the debate. Would you just let it slide if I said that since it probably took this woman several years to save $2000, that the RIAA had essentially taken away two years of her life, and had therefore partially murdered her. Of course you wouldn't let this slide, but if enough people were allowed to get away with this, eventually people might start to equate the two. That is what has happened with the copyright/theft debate. On the other hand, if you were just trying to troll, then bravo.
The answer to your question is simple - The first amendment. The first amendment and most of the writings of the time made it clear that copyright was not meant to benefit artists and authors. It is designed to make more goods available for the public good. Copyright is a social contract in which I give up my free speech rights for a limited time, in hopes of gaining something in return. Authors have a natural right to the works they release to the public right up until the time they release them. After that they have no more natural rights to them. Copyright is designed as a means to make sure that more works are available to the public, and when that goal is not served, copyright is useless as best, and unconstutional at worst. The idea of ruining people financially, or throwing them in jail because thier kids downloaded a few songs is assinine. The problem is that corporations have warped the collective consiousness to believe that they somehow deserve to own thier own little piece of knowledge forever. This is a perversion. The real question is,
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a citized to abridge his free speech right is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
Lisa: It's one of those campy 70's throwbacks that appeal to Generation X'ers.
Bart: We need another Vietnam to thin out thier ranks a little.
Check out where the fan is located on this model. Doll PC This can only lead to bad things.
I have done something similar, using an EPIA M-6000 and a Hauppauge WinPVR 250 board. It plays back DVD's flawlessly, and since the WinPVR 250 is a hardware encoder, it encodes flawlessly as well. There are a few issues, however. Currently, there are no linux drivers (but I believe they are coming along quickly.) The second thing you should note is that if you run the CPU at full power, and run the MPEG encoder at full power, the system overheats fairly rapidly if you don't have a case fan. It makes a huge difference in heat, with a relatively minor noise difference. My Casetronic 2699R with the case fan running is about as loud as my Playstation 2, and a little louder than my laptop. It's also about the same noise level as my Directivo. If you want a totally silent case, you might try the Hush PC, but I don't know if that will solve the heat dissipation from the MPEG card.
I haven't actually tried it, but most of the reviews seem pretty good. It looks like for about $300, you can access all of your multimedia from a PS2. QCast
I'm not sure why your comment was rated as funny. I think it was quite seriously true. It also happens to provide a great way to fund the project. Stick a couple of web cams in there, and you have JennyCam on the way to Mars. Tell me people won't pay for that. (Am I joking? I can't even tell.)
A few years ago, I read a book by Neil Postman called: Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the first chapter, he compared the books 1984, and A Brave New World. The conclusion he came to is that it is much easier to control people through what they love, rather than through what they fear. A distopia like in 1984 can never last long (on a historical time span) because people will try to destroy it, either covertly, or overtly. On the other hand, we have already accomplished 90% of the distopia presented in A Brave New World, and no one is worried about it, no one rallies against it. People openly embrace it. The funny thing is I'm not too worried about our government ruling through fear. I'm more worried about how our government currently rules: through apathy. How do you think it was that we were presented with the Hobson's choice of Al Gore, or George Bush.
Greed doesn't always do the winning. The bursting of the tech bubble shows that greed often does the loosing.
You say they've reinvented the VCR, but more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
The interesting thing is that 100 hours of video tape would take up an entire shelf, you would have to fast forward and rewind to find the show you want, and you can't randomly insert and delete shows from a single tape. So quite frankly, in many ways, storing digital video is actually less awkward than a VCR. The really interesting thing, however, is that storing digital video is currently competitive with video tape. Last I figured, a 2 hour(6 hour EP) video tape cost about $1. My most recently purchased hard drives cost about $1 per GB. Assume VCD quality is about equivalent to Standard play VHS (argue on this point, but for me it's pretty close). That means a video tape costs you $0.50 per hour, and a hard drive cost you about $0.65 per hour. When I realized this, I said goodbye to video tape forever. I've built a digital VCR, and use it as such. Converting an already existing computer to this task can be done for as little as $150, and I built myself a brand new one for $500. Notice, however, that I agree with you about my system not replacing Tivo. In fact I have two of them. I use them in conjunction with my Tivo, but when I want to store anything long term, my digital VCR is the way to go. (By the way, I know I could just open up my Tivo, hack it, and do this without the digital VCR, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus my digital VCR is still useful for converting my VHS tapes to a more portable/durable/easy to access format.)
When most people say standard ram, they mean DRAM (Dynamic RAM) meaning the memory must be updated many times per second. This would require a significant current draw from the battery. I imaging these early cartridges used SRAM (Static RAM). This would mean the memory could be maintained by simply maintaining the voltage (with theoretically no current draw). I wonder if SRAM is used for much of anything any more, but at any rate, I just felt like being pedantic today. Sorry.
When you talk about efficiency of most energy conversion processes, you are talking about the percentage of energy which is not lost to heat. A 35% efficient gas engine, for example converts 35% of its liberated energy into work, and the other 65% into heat. In some sense, all of these processes are 100% efficient at converting energy into heat. (i.e. the work done by the afore mentioned gas motor is eventually 100% converted into heat). When we talk about the 97% efficient furnace, we are using the term efficient in a different sense. We are saying that of the chemical energy available in the gas, 97% is released, with the other 3% remaining trapped in chemical form and exhausted up the flue. Of the 97% energy released, 100% is converted into heat energy. So in the original sense of the term efficient, all furnaces are by definition 100% efficient. It can also be said that given enough time, all engines (or at least all engines on Earth) are 100% efficient at converting energy into heat.
You have redeemed yourself in my eyes. My first assumption was that you were the idiot product of a sub-standard educational process, rather than someone who wasn't really thinking about what they were saying. You're not the first to say something stupid and then regret it after you were unable to take it back. Admitting your mistake rather than trying to back it up is in my view is one sign of a first rate scientific mind. No hard feelings?
It scares me to think that someone who claims to be a chemist (and therefore supposedly educated) thinks that seasons are caused by changing distance between the Sun and the Earth. This isn't like misunderstanding the fine points of quantum mechanics. It's like telling people that on the moon things float away, or that rockets can't travel in space, because they have nothing to push against. Is it really possible that a person can get a chemistry degree without realizing what causes summer and winter?
The notion that an author has a right to a profit is a falatious notion. Copyright is purely a social contract in which I give up my natural rights of free speech to ensure that ideas are made available to the public. Creators have no right to profit, just like manufacturors have no right to profit. It's thier job to earn that profit. Copyright is not designed to ensure profit, but rather to provide an incentive. They only have an (artificial) right to control thier creations so long as they live up to thier half of the social contract. Furthermore, if less content is produced as a result of copyright violation, it is me, as a fellow member of society who has had my rights violated, not the content creator. This is a very subtle point, and I may not have expressed it well, but I guess what I'm trying to say is: Copyright is a mechanism designed to achieve the goal of wide disemmination of ideas. There is no goal of providing compensation to creators, that is simply a mechanism by which the goal is achieved.
I've never understood why we can't just plug in our hybrid cars? The biggest problem with electric cars was range and time to charge. Why can't we just throw and extra battery into our hybrids, and give me an electric range of say 10-20 miles. This would be rediculous for a fully electric car, but for a hybrid, I could use fully electric mode to get me the first 10 miles, and the gas tank for the rest. I'm guessing that this would provide nearly all of the benefit of electric cars, with none of the drawbacks (except perhaps cost). Tell people that they can get a gas powered car they can dive cross country, but as long as they remain local, they never have to fill up again. Let me plug in when I get home, and to work, and I could use a lot less fuel. Throw a small, underpowered solar panel on top to provide a little extra effeciency. I can't wait until we see the first Hybrid with these kinds of features.
For instance, I predict that this Saturday I will sleep until noon, get up, eat some lunch, watch TV most of the day and fall asleep around ten. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing this in 50 years as well. See, the key to predicting the future is: aim low.
And unlike Kennedy, he actually lived to see his vision come to fruition. One of his primary goals was to bring an end to the Cold War. Many will claim that he had nothing to do with the execution of that vision, but at any rate, he had a vision, and set about achieving it. I think he was quite successful.
Awww Crap.
That was in 1994. If you read the following link, you'll notice that the first time the proof was presented, it had a fatal flaw, and it wasn't corrected until over a year later. Even if this Riemann proof eventually pans out, it is almost certain that at this point, it has some serious flaws.
/ th eorem.htm
http://www.missouri.edu/~cst398/fermat/contents