"But even that requires a judge signing a subpoena. Unless you're the RIAA, which is the real crime IMO."
Under the DMCA, any copyright holder can get a subpoena issued with no judicial oversight. It's not just the RIAA (although they, and the MPAA, paid for this particular law).
Not so in this case, at least according to the DMCA. The RIAA is (although it is distasteful to say so) just executing their legal rights. The DMCA removes the need for judicial oversight. Which is frightening, but legal.
Most of that fancy stuff (no, I just can't bring myself to call it "bling-bling") you see on Cribs is bought by artists using the advance money a record company pays them. The artist now owes that money to the record company, and it is taken out of their royalties. Should the cd fail to sell, they still owe the money to the record company. A nice breakdown of how contracts work can be found here http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
But the RIAA isn't invading anyone's house or computer, they're just going through the public directories of shared files that people put up on p2p networks.
I'm not a fan of the RIAA, but this is not an invasion of privacy.
Even with Apple's system update, you still need to enter a password to get the update to run once you've accepted it. Yet another level of security lacking from Windows.
Just thought I'd take this opportunity to plug what I think is Adams' best book, one that very few people seem to have heard of: "Last Chance to See". Essentially he convinced the BBC to send him and a biologist around the world to see the most endangered species they could find. It's a hilarious travelogue, and yet a totally heartbreaking look at extinction at the same time. Highly recommended.
Remember that Apple has a long history of involvement with creative individuals and companies. Also note that Steve Jobs has a little side company called Pixar, which apparently has done okay in the movie business.
Once again, Apple comes out with something innovative, and a little later, someone from the Windows world comes up with their own version, just less elegant and less functional. Big surprise.
Apple does a good job all around in this respect, with terms like "Airport" instead of 80211.x, "FireWire" instead of IEEE394, etc. Their software works the same way--use the spiffy GUI and don't worry about the jargon. What's nice is that you can easily get under the hood, and use the command line if you so choose.
Again, no. Dark skin is found in many places besides Africa and Australia. South America, or India for example. It has more to do with latitude than it has to do with any particular continent. In the "Old World", the skin color of the indigenous people closely matches what you'd predict from the latitude. In the "New World", the skin color of long term residents is generally lighter than expected, probably because of their recent migration and factors such as diet and availability of Vitamin D.
You're highly over-rating the concept of "desirability", and for some reason you're separating it from evolution. Desirability doesn't enter into it. Any characteristic that leads to increased survivability and increased offspring will be selected for. It doesn't matter what people "think" about it. We have not "selectively bred" ourselves. There are plenty of ugly people out there having plenty of babies. In order for your supposition to be true, we would have had to strictly limit who is able to mate and reproduce.
How exactly do you propose that freshwater living Zebrafish inhabit the Great Barrier Reef?
And for that matter, think about it, these fish fluoresce. How does that make them any worse than a normal Zebrafish released into a foreign environment? Would the carp in your lake be any worse if they happened to glow under UV light?
GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) was first discovered in the early 1960's by Osamu Shimomura and Frank Johnson at Princeton. In 1994, Doug Prasher and Martie Chalfie at Columbia isolated the gene and started putting it into other organisms. It's been in use for transgenic organisms since then, so we're talking nearly 10 years.
The artist you refer to is Eduardo Kac, a total hack and a fraud as far as I'm concerned. He didn't actually do any of the work involved in making the green bunny, he just claimed it as his own after it was made, Furthermore, he continually shows faked photoshopped pictures of a green bunny glowing. In truth, the protein is in the rabbit's skin, not its hair, so it would have to be shaved to be visualized. Not quite as cute that way though.
" If an "engineered" fish escapes and breeds with a fish that's in our food chain and then we eat it, that could have important health implications."
These fish are carrying GFP (green fluorescent protein), a naturally occuring protein found in a wide variety of jellyfish (which are eaten in some cultures) and other sea creatures. It has no known toxic effects.
Furthermore, Zebrafish are tiny little bony things. We don't eat them. They are not able to mate with fish from different species (hence the definition of species), so your fears in this case are unwarranted.
"most human attributes including pigmentation were selected by sexual, not environmental selection"
No. Skin pigmentation is due to 1) the amount of UV exposure in a given environment. UV is needed to synthesize vitamin D (this comes from Farnsworth Loomis' work at Brandeis in 1967). Humans in areas with less sunlight needed less pigmentation in order to get enough Vitamin D. 2) in 2000, Nina Jablonski and George Chapliln of the California Academy of Sciences added to this the idea that melainin protects the body's stores of the B vitamin Folate. Folate deficiencies during pregnancy lead to birth defects. So humans living in high UV locations evolved higher amounts of pigmentation to protect their Folate.
This is all detailed in a Scientific American article (Jablonski and Chaplin 2002. Skin Deep, Sci Am 287: 74-81) and discussed in the book DNA Science by David Micklos and Greg Freyer.
Nicely said. Also factor in that MS does not release sales figures, only "units shipped". This means they count every single unsold XP box sitting on a shelf at BestBuy as part of their marketshare. They also count redundant licenses. Buy a PC with XP on it, use it at work for a company that licenses XP, and you've just sold 2 licenses for the same copy of XP, and you get to count it twice as far as your marketshare.
There's a great tool available to make sure what you're buying is really from an independent label, RIAA Radar:
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
Basically it takes advantage of Amazon's web services. You go to the Amazon page for whatever album you're interested in, then click on your RIAA Radar bookmark and you get a rating telling you the afilliation of the album's label. Very handy, and nicely free!
Why should the RIAA worry that AAC might get cracked, since they're selling cds that can easily be ripped to mp3 format without any DRM whatsoever? If anything, the iTMS files put a small barrier in place, so if you really wanted to pirate, you're better off buying elsewhere. Oh, and the problem with $0.10 per song is that no one has been able to figure out a way to get the credit card companies on board for payments of this size.
What you need to remember, is that Apple is a HARDWARE company. Everything they do is to drive more hardware sales. Every product they make is going to come out first for the Mac to drive hardware sales. Why come out with a PC version immediately, and drive sales for your competitors?
Remember though, that it's only available to Mac users, about 25 million or so. And it's only available to those with the latest version of OSX, probably around 5 million or so. And it's only available to those in the USA, which cuts the number even smaller. 275,000 sales to a tiny fraction of the potential buying public is pretty impressive as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know which store you're going to, but I count 4 albums by X, and some bonus tracks. Plus there's "Beyond and Back", the anthology which is mostly filled tracks from other albums not yet available.
Also note that Jobs has publicly stated that they're now focusing on adding indie labels, but needed to concentrate on the majors to get the thing off the ground.
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"But even that requires a judge signing a subpoena. Unless you're the RIAA, which is the real crime IMO."
Under the DMCA, any copyright holder can get a subpoena issued with no judicial oversight. It's not just the RIAA (although they, and the MPAA, paid for this particular law).
"Subpoenas must be approved by a judge."
Not so in this case, at least according to the DMCA. The RIAA is (although it is distasteful to say so) just executing their legal rights. The DMCA removes the need for judicial oversight. Which is frightening, but legal.
Most of that fancy stuff (no, I just can't bring myself to call it "bling-bling") you see on Cribs is bought by artists using the advance money a record company pays them. The artist now owes that money to the record company, and it is taken out of their royalties. Should the cd fail to sell, they still owe the money to the record company. A nice breakdown of how contracts work can be found here http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Here's a free and easy tool that will let you know if a cd is from an RIAA affiliated company:
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
But the RIAA isn't invading anyone's house or computer, they're just going through the public directories of shared files that people put up on p2p networks. I'm not a fan of the RIAA, but this is not an invasion of privacy.
Even with Apple's system update, you still need to enter a password to get the update to run once you've accepted it. Yet another level of security lacking from Windows.
Just thought I'd take this opportunity to plug what I think is Adams' best book, one that very few people seem to have heard of: "Last Chance to See". Essentially he convinced the BBC to send him and a biologist around the world to see the most endangered species they could find. It's a hilarious travelogue, and yet a totally heartbreaking look at extinction at the same time. Highly recommended.
1) Go ahead and buy your cds, but buy them used. No money from you will go to the RIAA, they've already been paid for that copy.
2) Use RIAA Radar ( http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/ ) and buy lots of cds that aren't from RIAA companies.
Remember that Apple has a long history of involvement with creative individuals and companies. Also note that Steve Jobs has a little side company called Pixar, which apparently has done okay in the movie business.
Once again, Apple comes out with something innovative, and a little later, someone from the Windows world comes up with their own version, just less elegant and less functional. Big surprise.
Under the N.E.T. Laws, copyright infringement is also a criminal offense. This, of course, does not make it "theft".
Apple does a good job all around in this respect, with terms like "Airport" instead of 80211.x, "FireWire" instead of IEEE394, etc. Their software works the same way--use the spiffy GUI and don't worry about the jargon. What's nice is that you can easily get under the hood, and use the command line if you so choose.
My favorites were all the surge supressor/extension cords labeled "Windows 98 compatible".
Again, no. Dark skin is found in many places besides Africa and Australia. South America, or India for example. It has more to do with latitude than it has to do with any particular continent. In the "Old World", the skin color of the indigenous people closely matches what you'd predict from the latitude. In the "New World", the skin color of long term residents is generally lighter than expected, probably because of their recent migration and factors such as diet and availability of Vitamin D. You're highly over-rating the concept of "desirability", and for some reason you're separating it from evolution. Desirability doesn't enter into it. Any characteristic that leads to increased survivability and increased offspring will be selected for. It doesn't matter what people "think" about it. We have not "selectively bred" ourselves. There are plenty of ugly people out there having plenty of babies. In order for your supposition to be true, we would have had to strictly limit who is able to mate and reproduce.
How exactly do you propose that freshwater living Zebrafish inhabit the Great Barrier Reef? And for that matter, think about it, these fish fluoresce. How does that make them any worse than a normal Zebrafish released into a foreign environment? Would the carp in your lake be any worse if they happened to glow under UV light?
GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) was first discovered in the early 1960's by Osamu Shimomura and Frank Johnson at Princeton. In 1994, Doug Prasher and Martie Chalfie at Columbia isolated the gene and started putting it into other organisms. It's been in use for transgenic organisms since then, so we're talking nearly 10 years. The artist you refer to is Eduardo Kac, a total hack and a fraud as far as I'm concerned. He didn't actually do any of the work involved in making the green bunny, he just claimed it as his own after it was made, Furthermore, he continually shows faked photoshopped pictures of a green bunny glowing. In truth, the protein is in the rabbit's skin, not its hair, so it would have to be shaved to be visualized. Not quite as cute that way though.
" If an "engineered" fish escapes and breeds with a fish that's in our food chain and then we eat it, that could have important health implications."
These fish are carrying GFP (green fluorescent protein), a naturally occuring protein found in a wide variety of jellyfish (which are eaten in some cultures) and other sea creatures. It has no known toxic effects.
Furthermore, Zebrafish are tiny little bony things. We don't eat them. They are not able to mate with fish from different species (hence the definition of species), so your fears in this case are unwarranted.
Wow are you wrong about pigmentation.
"most human attributes including pigmentation were selected by sexual, not environmental selection"
No. Skin pigmentation is due to 1) the amount of UV exposure in a given environment. UV is needed to synthesize vitamin D (this comes from Farnsworth Loomis' work at Brandeis in 1967). Humans in areas with less sunlight needed less pigmentation in order to get enough Vitamin D. 2) in 2000, Nina Jablonski and George Chapliln of the California Academy of Sciences added to this the idea that melainin protects the body's stores of the B vitamin Folate. Folate deficiencies during pregnancy lead to birth defects. So humans living in high UV locations evolved higher amounts of pigmentation to protect their Folate.
This is all detailed in a Scientific American article (Jablonski and Chaplin 2002. Skin Deep, Sci Am 287: 74-81) and discussed in the book DNA Science by David Micklos and Greg Freyer.
Nicely said. Also factor in that MS does not release sales figures, only "units shipped". This means they count every single unsold XP box sitting on a shelf at BestBuy as part of their marketshare. They also count redundant licenses. Buy a PC with XP on it, use it at work for a company that licenses XP, and you've just sold 2 licenses for the same copy of XP, and you get to count it twice as far as your marketshare.
There's a great tool available to make sure what you're buying is really from an independent label, RIAA Radar: http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/ Basically it takes advantage of Amazon's web services. You go to the Amazon page for whatever album you're interested in, then click on your RIAA Radar bookmark and you get a rating telling you the afilliation of the album's label. Very handy, and nicely free!
Go nuts:
http://gold-exp.hp.infoseek.co.jp/collecti.htm
Why should the RIAA worry that AAC might get cracked, since they're selling cds that can easily be ripped to mp3 format without any DRM whatsoever? If anything, the iTMS files put a small barrier in place, so if you really wanted to pirate, you're better off buying elsewhere. Oh, and the problem with $0.10 per song is that no one has been able to figure out a way to get the credit card companies on board for payments of this size.
What you need to remember, is that Apple is a HARDWARE company. Everything they do is to drive more hardware sales. Every product they make is going to come out first for the Mac to drive hardware sales. Why come out with a PC version immediately, and drive sales for your competitors?
Remember though, that it's only available to Mac users, about 25 million or so. And it's only available to those with the latest version of OSX, probably around 5 million or so. And it's only available to those in the USA, which cuts the number even smaller. 275,000 sales to a tiny fraction of the potential buying public is pretty impressive as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know which store you're going to, but I count 4 albums by X, and some bonus tracks. Plus there's "Beyond and Back", the anthology which is mostly filled tracks from other albums not yet available. Also note that Jobs has publicly stated that they're now focusing on adding indie labels, but needed to concentrate on the majors to get the thing off the ground.