Back in his day, refrigerators used gaseous ammonia as the refrigerant, which is highly toxic. He was appalled to hear of a whole family being killed by a leaky refrigerator, so he and Leo Szilard invented one that had no moving parts, and thus without the risk of leaky seals.
Leo Szilard was later instrumental in launching the US' Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It was his idea, but he got Einstein to write the letter to President Roosevelt that convinced him to fund the project.
But because of modern medicine, I have a six-page resume, the result of twenty years of software engineering achievements. I'm presently employed writing device drivers for hardware RAID cards.
But I have a profoundly debilitating and poorly understood mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It's just like being schizophrenic and manic depressive at the same time. The symptoms including depression - sometimes suicidal depression - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, paranoia and other delusions, and visual and auditory hallucinations.
If you want to know what it's like to be paranoid, if you want to know what it's like to hallucinate, then I invite you to read my essay My Deepest Fear. It's about a shadowy and secret branch of law enforcement known as The Thought Police. They are so secret that they are visible only to the clinically insane - and to the regular beat cops who are now and then unwittingly pressed into the service of The Thought Police when it comes time for a fugitive from their lethal brand of justice - a fugitive such as myself - to turn himself in:
You see, The Thought Police aren't coming to arrest me. They never have been. They never arrest anyone. The Thought Police don't have jails and there is no arraignment because you can't get out on bail. There is no judge and there is no trial because there is no evidence to present. Not only is one not entitled to a defense attorney, there is no prosecutor either. There is no jury, no sentence, no prison, no parole.
One is not set free when one has paid one's debt to society because no one ever survives paying it. The currency with which The Thought Police collect society's money is denominated in human lives.
But when one has been caught by The Thought Police, one does have a choice: there is the gallows, the chair, the firing squad. One can even ask for a certain kind of mercy known as lethal injection.
It's long been out of fashion, but a long time ago, in France, The Thought Police also offered the guillotine. I understand it's still available upon request.
I never, ever once thought they were coming to arrest me. No:
I knew they were coming to kill me.
I explain in my piece that arrests by The Thought Police are better known as "officer-assisted suicides", and that at one time I was within days of turning myself in to them. It was only out of love for my wife that I sought legal advice from a special sort of attorney. These attorneys can't see The Thought Police themselves, but they are aware of their existence and can dispense valuable legal advice.
The first such attorney I saw was a psychiatrist in a hospital emergency room.
But all it takes is ten milligrams of Zyprexa to put any fears of The Thought Police out of my mind. While I'm still a fugitive from justice, Zyprexa enables me to pass as a law-abiding citizen.
Zyprexa works by manipulating the concentrations of various neurotransmitter chemicals in the neural synapses of my brain, notably dopamine. Excessive dopamine is the immediate cause of paranoia and hallucinations.
Antipsychotic drugs have been on the market for decades, but the older ones worked poorly and had debilitating side effects, such as the seizure I once experienced from Haldol. The "atypical" antipsychotics such as the Zyprexa I take, work much better.
The first such atypical antipsychotic, clozapine, was licensed only in the late '80's. The first one I took, Risperdal, was licensed in late '93. These drugs have enabled millions of schizophrenics and schizoaffectives to get out of the hospital, to get back t
Apple was one of Adobe's first investors. Adobe Postscript, implemented in the form of the Apple Laserwriter, was key to the Macintosh's early success for desktop publishing.
But Apple designed its own font architecture for System 7, which was released in 1992. This was the now-familiar TrueType. I'm not real clear on the details, but I guess Apple and Adobe couldn't agree on font architectures, with Adobe preferring to stick with its Postscript fonts, so Apple sold its stock in Adobe. If my memory is correct, they made $69 million.
Apple had at first announced that the Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software wouldn't work on System 7, as it was an extension, or "INIT", that installed a lot of patches in the OS. But after a widespread outcry, Apple relented and worked with Adobe to enable compatibility. Apple always hated INITs, as they prevented Apple from changing low-level APIs that would have broken the INITs' binary compatibility.
... would push the button. I read an article by the spy in Time Magazine after the breakup of the Soviet Union. His job was to count lit-up windows in British Defense Ministry buildings each night; the idea was that if the war was about to start, the Defense Ministry workers would all be up late working on the planning for it.
And that's not at all far-fetched; I read once that a certain Washington DC Domino's Pizza knew the night before when the first Persian Gulf War was going to start, as they were getting orders from the Pentagon all night long.
I'd heard about the Cobalt bomb in, off all places, the Planet of the Apes movies, but I figured it was just science fiction, and not a real weapon, a single instance of which could wipe out all life on Earth.
But I was wrong.
I don't recall now who invented it, but the idea was to surround a large hydrogen bomb was a casing of non-radioactive Cobalt. The fusion reaction produces a neutron or so for each helium atom created. In a conventional hydrogen bomb, these neutrons are used directly to cause damage, by irradiating living things. But in a Cobalt bomb...
The neutrons are absorbed by the Cobalt, to become the highly radioactive gamma ray emmitter Cobalt-60. It gets vaporized by the blast, and largely blown into the upper atmosphere.
Most radioactive fallout from an H-bomb has a very short half life, which is why those who escape the blast can safely emerge from their fallout shelters in a couple weeks. Not so with Cobalt-60: it has a half-life of several years.
That's long enough to enable to vaporized Cobalt-60 to spread via air currents all over the Earth, eventually to be caught up in raindrops and thereby fallen to the Earth.
Where it will irradiate everyone with a lethal gamma dose.
It was envisioned as a spoiler, to be detonated by the loser in a nuclear war. It would need to be a pretty big bomb, on the scale of Tsar Bomba, but it wouldn't need to be delivered, just detonated in place. It will kill everyone eventually, except maybe those in deep underground shelters, who manage to stay there for decades.
It's inventions like this by my colleagues that make me ashamed to have a degree in Physics.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised the domain was available too.
I plan to add some stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis sometime soon, such as a wild bear wandering onto a US Air Force Base with the result that a fighter squadron armed with - ready for it? - nuclear air-to-air missiles was scrambled, and would have taken off had not the base commander blocked the runway with his own car.
The idea behind what one pilot described as "the dumbest weapon ever invented" was to fire a rocket armed with a nuclear bomb into the general vicinity of a soviet bomber. The blast would be big enough that the bomber would be destroyed even if the rocket didn't get very close. It's not quite clear what would become of the American or Canadian citizens on the ground beneath the detonation.
There's lots more, but I have to do it in little pieces or the I start wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
I assert that TV episodes by rights ought to be priced LESS than music tracks. By my reasoning, I'd say the average TV show should be sold for ten cents or so.
Most people listen to songs repeatedly, over a period of many years. When I load a playlist onto my MP3 player, I typically leave it there for weeks, as long as a month, before changing it. I hear each song dozens of times before I change the playlist, and eventually the playlist gets reloaded.
However, most people watch a TV episode just once. Even if it's such a good episode as to bear repeated views, I doubt any TV episode gets as many views as most songs are listened to.
Therefore, I'd say Steve Jobs ought to be charging significantly less for TV episodes than he does for music tracks.
Like many of my fellow slashdotters, I'm an unpaid sysadmin for many of my relatives.
It happens that, while my wife knows how to use a Mac, for reasons I find hard to understand, she prefers the Windows user interface, so she has an XP laptop. I have spent a great deal of time fixing problems with it, or explaining to her how to do things. It took several hours for her and one of her university's IT people to get her configured to use their wireless network for example; on Macs, you just turn the Airport on from the menu bar, select a network, and enter any necessary passwords.
I gave my Mom and Dad a Mac back in '96 that ran System 7.5.2. It served them well for many years, but eventually the video went out. Mom wanted a new Mac, and wouldn't consider a Windows box. At my recommendation, she got an iMac, and had no trouble at all picking up OS X.
Aunt Peggy (Mom's twin sister) wanted a computer, and again at my recommendation she got an iBook. She's very happy with it, and the two sisters email each other every day.
I have never had to do any IT support for either Mom or Aunt Peggy. Their Macs Just Work. Mom has asked me to upgrade her software when I visit for Thanksgiving, but even if I didn't do so, her old software would continue to work just fine.
"Destroyed the Music Business?" WTF??! OMG Ponies!
on
NBC Chief Slamming Apple
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"We know that Apple has destroyed the music business -- in terms of pricing -- and if we don't take control, they'll do the same thing on the video side," Zucker said at a breakfast hosted by Syracuse's Newhouse School of Communications.
How have they destroyed the music business? Everywhere I go, especially when I ride public transit, I see people listening to iPods. The few without iPods are mostly listening to some other brand of player. While the RIAA member companies may complain of lost revenues due to filesharing, I still don't see any former record industry execs selling apples (the edible kind) on the street. It seems to me the music business is doing just fine, thank you very much.
Apple pays the record labels for every download they sell. If they're not paying them enough, the labels have the right to take their business elsewhere but (except for NBC) they don't, so by definition they're making enough money.
The key to understanding his complaint is his phrase "in terms of pricing". What that means is that the labels can no longer monopolistically control the price of recordings any more.
And I think this is a good thing, good for the fans, and good for the people who really deserve to benefit from it: the musicians.
I think such a loss of control is the reason the labels are so opposed to Internet radio: because everyone and his dog can run a streaming radio station from their home, Internet radio takes away from the big labels the ability to decide who the big stars are going to be. Payola just doesn't work anymore when fans have a choice of thousands of streaming music stations to listen to at every computer.
The result of this is that I've noticed artists who were first made popular at places like Radio Paradise getting airplay on traditional broadcast stations. And I can't remember the last time I listened to a ClearChannel station.
I understand that if the OEMs are to sell Windows at all, they are required to provide the latest version pre-installed. So, to use your analogy, if the grocer is to sell Microsoft Coke at all, they have to sell the sewage version when it ships, even though the sugar and kola nut-flavored version tasted much better.
The sales figure I'd really like to see is how many copies were sold to end users who installed it on their own PCs themselves.
Even the Windows driver guy where I work says Vista is awful. I haven't heard one good thing about it since it shipped, and I've heard a lot of bad things. I've never tried it, but I understand that it breaks a great deal of software.
Now, some of that breakage is the result of improved security, but our Windows driver guy tells me that the disruption caused by the security causes a lot of users to just disable the security.
Also, I understand that MS provided a version to a few top-tier OEMs that didn't require product activation by end users, so as not to annoy them. This resulted in a crack being written by the w4r3z community that doesn't require activation at all! (look for it on a p2p network near you.) The product activation is very sensitive to hardware changes, more so than XP, so that legitimate users get no end of hassle from Vista, while pirates aren't inconvenienced at all.
Surely Microsoft must have had some regular people beta test Vista. And surely some - maybe all - of these people must have told MS that Vista shouldn't ship in the state it's in.
My wife is thinking about getting a new laptop. I said to her "Make sure you don't get Vista, it's really screwed up" and you know what she said? "Oh, yeah I know. Apple runs these TV ads with a young guy who's supposed to be a Mac, and a guy who looks like Bill Gates who's supposed to be a PC. And whenever they try to talk to each other, this Secret Service agent interrupts them to make sure it's OK."
Remember the Twiggy drive? Apple tried to manufacture their own floppy disk drive for the Apple II. They were never able to get it to work. There was a big shareholder lawsuit. I could really see a shareholder lawsuit coming from Vista. Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty - that means they're legally obligated - to look after shareholder interests. And Billy and Steve Balmer really screwed up.
My cat's musical career didn't last very long - the one time she ever tried to walk on my piano keyboard, the sound scared her and she would never go on it again.
... Rugby Club, at the same time as he was a marketing exec at IBM. As part of his work he had to learn to program in COBOL, FORTRAN, JCL and IBM 360 assembly code. So yeah, you're right.
It's going to be a long time, and a great many hours of practice and study, before I get to grade nine.
However, I have in mind to play the piano arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee for one of my audition songs. I'd say that's at least grade nine material. (If you don't know the piece, it's extremely fast).
To gradually build my speed and dexterity, I play just scales for about an hour every day, and am gradually learning them all - there are twelve major scales, and thirty-six minor scales (natural, harmonic and melodic), one of each for the twelve tones in the western musical scale.
... for the stage. I was born Michael Crawford. I usually go by "Mike", but my stage name is "Michael David Crawford" - my full name - to try to disambiguate.
Unfortunately, he's had decades to build his fame, I'm just starting on mine, so it's going to be a long time before my PageRank can crush his.
While I have been a programmer for (as of next month) twenty years, I have been taking formal piano lessons for several years with the aim of going to music school to study musical composition. I want to compose symphonies!
Most music schools require an entrance audition, which is best done live. However, if one is unable to travel to the audition, one can submit a video. The Dalhousie University music school (in Halifax, Nova Scotia) says on its website that such audition videos must show one's hands. I guess they don't want someone else to play your audition, eh?
My plan, being a prospective composer, is to also present my audition judges with hardcopies of my piano scores. There are a couple scores on my website, but I'm working on new ones which will be much more advanced than what's there now.
In Canada, the Royal Conservatory of Music publishes music score books of varying degrees of difficulty, and periodically conducts exams throughout the country. When one has learned some songs from the Grade One book, then one can take the Grade One exam and, having passed, move on to the Grade Two book.
The entrance auditions for Canadian music schools are based on the RCM exams; Dalhousie requires one to play Grade Nine material. While I have come a long way since I composed the recordings on my website (they're from 1994), I'm still a long ways from Grade Nine. But I'm very determined.
We could all stay out of trouble if we downloaded and shared music with the permission of its copyright holder. The best way to know that one has permission is to look for a Creative Commons license notice.
I placed my music under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license because I hoped that would enable more people to get to know my music. While I work as a programmer now, I've been studying piano so that, when I can pass the entrance audition, I can enroll in music school to study musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday! By sharing my music freely, there will be plenty of fans ready to buy tickets to my performances when I'm ready to play professionally.
A couple years ago, Nova Scotia established a provincial department of immigration with the aim of encouraging immigrants to settle there.
Immigration is held out as a solution to Canada's aging population - they have baby boomers just like the US, and there aren't enough young native-born workers to pay for the pensions and medical care of the elderly.
I spent a year in Vancouver, BC. It was full of immigrants from all over the world.
I recall reading, I think right here on Slashdot, that photos and videos taken by people attending the Olympics were not permitted to be posted on the Internet.
However, the Olympics has gotten special laws passed just for it by many countries. This wouldn't be the case for other copyrights or trademarks.
I should preface this by pointing out that this wasn't FEMA's fault, as far as I know:
The military offered helicopters for dropping water on the fires, but they weren't allowed to because California State Department of Forestry rules required that a CDF fire spotter ride in each aircraft. Not only did it take more than 24 hours to get the fire spotters to the choppers, but there weren't enough spotters to man all the available aircraft.
Some official allowed an exception to the rule to allow just one spotter for each squadron of three, but by the time this was all sorted out, the high winds proved to be too dangerous, and so the aircraft were grounded.
Had they been able to take off when first called upon, the winds wouldn't have been so severe and they might have been able to contain the fire.
What's worse is that the military has several C-130 transport planes on call for dropping very large amounts of water from the air. I saw one of these at the Big Bear Lake fire in 1985, and it was a truly awesome sight to behold.
However, it was determined that their tanks were unsafe, so several years ago they were taken out of service until a new tank could be designed. The first try at a new tank didn't fit in the planes - yes, you read that right - so they went back to the drawing board.
It's been four years since then and they still don't have a new tank design.
My wife is Canadian, and has a US green card. I'm American, and have applied for a Canadian landed immigrant card.
Each of us were required to have chest X-Rays. My understanding is that if they showed that either of us had tuberculosis, our visas would be denied.
However, the doctor who gave me my medical exam - which was rather thorough - told me that I should show my passport to the X-Ray technician, just to make sure someone else wasn't able to stand in for me. I offered it to her, but she didn't bother with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Leo Szilard was later instrumental in launching the US' Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It was his idea, but he got Einstein to write the letter to President Roosevelt that convinced him to fund the project.
But I have a profoundly debilitating and poorly understood mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It's just like being schizophrenic and manic depressive at the same time. The symptoms including depression - sometimes suicidal depression - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, paranoia and other delusions, and visual and auditory hallucinations.
If you want to know what it's like to be paranoid, if you want to know what it's like to hallucinate, then I invite you to read my essay My Deepest Fear. It's about a shadowy and secret branch of law enforcement known as The Thought Police. They are so secret that they are visible only to the clinically insane - and to the regular beat cops who are now and then unwittingly pressed into the service of The Thought Police when it comes time for a fugitive from their lethal brand of justice - a fugitive such as myself - to turn himself in:
I explain in my piece that arrests by The Thought Police are better known as "officer-assisted suicides", and that at one time I was within days of turning myself in to them. It was only out of love for my wife that I sought legal advice from a special sort of attorney. These attorneys can't see The Thought Police themselves, but they are aware of their existence and can dispense valuable legal advice.
The first such attorney I saw was a psychiatrist in a hospital emergency room.
But all it takes is ten milligrams of Zyprexa to put any fears of The Thought Police out of my mind. While I'm still a fugitive from justice, Zyprexa enables me to pass as a law-abiding citizen.
Zyprexa works by manipulating the concentrations of various neurotransmitter chemicals in the neural synapses of my brain, notably dopamine. Excessive dopamine is the immediate cause of paranoia and hallucinations.
Antipsychotic drugs have been on the market for decades, but the older ones worked poorly and had debilitating side effects, such as the seizure I once experienced from Haldol. The "atypical" antipsychotics such as the Zyprexa I take, work much better.
The first such atypical antipsychotic, clozapine, was licensed only in the late '80's. The first one I took, Risperdal, was licensed in late '93. These drugs have enabled millions of schizophrenics and schizoaffectives to get out of the hospital, to get back t
But Apple designed its own font architecture for System 7, which was released in 1992. This was the now-familiar TrueType. I'm not real clear on the details, but I guess Apple and Adobe couldn't agree on font architectures, with Adobe preferring to stick with its Postscript fonts, so Apple sold its stock in Adobe. If my memory is correct, they made $69 million.
Apple had at first announced that the Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software wouldn't work on System 7, as it was an extension, or "INIT", that installed a lot of patches in the OS. But after a widespread outcry, Apple relented and worked with Adobe to enable compatibility. Apple always hated INITs, as they prevented Apple from changing low-level APIs that would have broken the INITs' binary compatibility.
And that's not at all far-fetched; I read once that a certain Washington DC Domino's Pizza knew the night before when the first Persian Gulf War was going to start, as they were getting orders from the Pentagon all night long.
I know I'd buy one!
But I was wrong.
I don't recall now who invented it, but the idea was to surround a large hydrogen bomb was a casing of non-radioactive Cobalt. The fusion reaction produces a neutron or so for each helium atom created. In a conventional hydrogen bomb, these neutrons are used directly to cause damage, by irradiating living things. But in a Cobalt bomb...
The neutrons are absorbed by the Cobalt, to become the highly radioactive gamma ray emmitter Cobalt-60. It gets vaporized by the blast, and largely blown into the upper atmosphere.
Most radioactive fallout from an H-bomb has a very short half life, which is why those who escape the blast can safely emerge from their fallout shelters in a couple weeks. Not so with Cobalt-60: it has a half-life of several years.
That's long enough to enable to vaporized Cobalt-60 to spread via air currents all over the Earth, eventually to be caught up in raindrops and thereby fallen to the Earth.
Where it will irradiate everyone with a lethal gamma dose.
It was envisioned as a spoiler, to be detonated by the loser in a nuclear war. It would need to be a pretty big bomb, on the scale of Tsar Bomba, but it wouldn't need to be delivered, just detonated in place. It will kill everyone eventually, except maybe those in deep underground shelters, who manage to stay there for decades.
It's inventions like this by my colleagues that make me ashamed to have a degree in Physics.
- Kiss Your Sorry Ass Goodbye! The Atom Bomb Is Gonna Fly.
- Doomsday - while just a rough draft, what's there will give you nightmares. I had to stop working on it because it made me paranoid.
- Constitutional Crisis In A Nuclear State. Happily the crisis was resolved amicably, but potential trouble is still brewing
Yeah, I was pretty surprised the domain was available too.I plan to add some stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis sometime soon, such as a wild bear wandering onto a US Air Force Base with the result that a fighter squadron armed with - ready for it? - nuclear air-to-air missiles was scrambled, and would have taken off had not the base commander blocked the runway with his own car.
The idea behind what one pilot described as "the dumbest weapon ever invented" was to fire a rocket armed with a nuclear bomb into the general vicinity of a soviet bomber. The blast would be big enough that the bomber would be destroyed even if the rocket didn't get very close. It's not quite clear what would become of the American or Canadian citizens on the ground beneath the detonation.
There's lots more, but I have to do it in little pieces or the I start wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
Most people listen to songs repeatedly, over a period of many years. When I load a playlist onto my MP3 player, I typically leave it there for weeks, as long as a month, before changing it. I hear each song dozens of times before I change the playlist, and eventually the playlist gets reloaded.
However, most people watch a TV episode just once. Even if it's such a good episode as to bear repeated views, I doubt any TV episode gets as many views as most songs are listened to.
Therefore, I'd say Steve Jobs ought to be charging significantly less for TV episodes than he does for music tracks.
It happens that, while my wife knows how to use a Mac, for reasons I find hard to understand, she prefers the Windows user interface, so she has an XP laptop. I have spent a great deal of time fixing problems with it, or explaining to her how to do things. It took several hours for her and one of her university's IT people to get her configured to use their wireless network for example; on Macs, you just turn the Airport on from the menu bar, select a network, and enter any necessary passwords.
I gave my Mom and Dad a Mac back in '96 that ran System 7.5.2. It served them well for many years, but eventually the video went out. Mom wanted a new Mac, and wouldn't consider a Windows box. At my recommendation, she got an iMac, and had no trouble at all picking up OS X.
Aunt Peggy (Mom's twin sister) wanted a computer, and again at my recommendation she got an iBook. She's very happy with it, and the two sisters email each other every day.
I have never had to do any IT support for either Mom or Aunt Peggy. Their Macs Just Work. Mom has asked me to upgrade her software when I visit for Thanksgiving, but even if I didn't do so, her old software would continue to work just fine.
Apple pays the record labels for every download they sell. If they're not paying them enough, the labels have the right to take their business elsewhere but (except for NBC) they don't, so by definition they're making enough money.
The key to understanding his complaint is his phrase "in terms of pricing". What that means is that the labels can no longer monopolistically control the price of recordings any more.
And I think this is a good thing, good for the fans, and good for the people who really deserve to benefit from it: the musicians.
I think such a loss of control is the reason the labels are so opposed to Internet radio: because everyone and his dog can run a streaming radio station from their home, Internet radio takes away from the big labels the ability to decide who the big stars are going to be. Payola just doesn't work anymore when fans have a choice of thousands of streaming music stations to listen to at every computer.
The result of this is that I've noticed artists who were first made popular at places like Radio Paradise getting airplay on traditional broadcast stations. And I can't remember the last time I listened to a ClearChannel station.
The sales figure I'd really like to see is how many copies were sold to end users who installed it on their own PCs themselves.
Now, some of that breakage is the result of improved security, but our Windows driver guy tells me that the disruption caused by the security causes a lot of users to just disable the security.
Also, I understand that MS provided a version to a few top-tier OEMs that didn't require product activation by end users, so as not to annoy them. This resulted in a crack being written by the w4r3z community that doesn't require activation at all! (look for it on a p2p network near you.) The product activation is very sensitive to hardware changes, more so than XP, so that legitimate users get no end of hassle from Vista, while pirates aren't inconvenienced at all.
Surely Microsoft must have had some regular people beta test Vista. And surely some - maybe all - of these people must have told MS that Vista shouldn't ship in the state it's in.
My wife is thinking about getting a new laptop. I said to her "Make sure you don't get Vista, it's really screwed up" and you know what she said? "Oh, yeah I know. Apple runs these TV ads with a young guy who's supposed to be a Mac, and a guy who looks like Bill Gates who's supposed to be a PC. And whenever they try to talk to each other, this Secret Service agent interrupts them to make sure it's OK."
Remember the Twiggy drive? Apple tried to manufacture their own floppy disk drive for the Apple II. They were never able to get it to work. There was a big shareholder lawsuit. I could really see a shareholder lawsuit coming from Vista. Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty - that means they're legally obligated - to look after shareholder interests. And Billy and Steve Balmer really screwed up.
My cat's musical career didn't last very long - the one time she ever tried to walk on my piano keyboard, the sound scared her and she would never go on it again.
However, I have in mind to play the piano arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee for one of my audition songs. I'd say that's at least grade nine material. (If you don't know the piece, it's extremely fast).
To gradually build my speed and dexterity, I play just scales for about an hour every day, and am gradually learning them all - there are twelve major scales, and thirty-six minor scales (natural, harmonic and melodic), one of each for the twelve tones in the western musical scale.
Unfortunately, he's had decades to build his fame, I'm just starting on mine, so it's going to be a long time before my PageRank can crush his.
But thank you for your kind words.
Most music schools require an entrance audition, which is best done live. However, if one is unable to travel to the audition, one can submit a video. The Dalhousie University music school (in Halifax, Nova Scotia) says on its website that such audition videos must show one's hands. I guess they don't want someone else to play your audition, eh?
My plan, being a prospective composer, is to also present my audition judges with hardcopies of my piano scores. There are a couple scores on my website, but I'm working on new ones which will be much more advanced than what's there now.
In Canada, the Royal Conservatory of Music publishes music score books of varying degrees of difficulty, and periodically conducts exams throughout the country. When one has learned some songs from the Grade One book, then one can take the Grade One exam and, having passed, move on to the Grade Two book.
The entrance auditions for Canadian music schools are based on the RCM exams; Dalhousie requires one to play Grade Nine material. While I have come a long way since I composed the recordings on my website (they're from 1994), I'm still a long ways from Grade Nine. But I'm very determined.
A jock is an athlete, and therefore the bane of every Slashdotter.
Here are some resources for you:
- Creative Commons Search
- Jamendo - CC music distributed via BitTorrent and eMule
- My own piano music - you could really help me out if you shared it on the Internet
- The Mutopia Project - CC and public domain sheet music
I placed my music under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license because I hoped that would enable more people to get to know my music. While I work as a programmer now, I've been studying piano so that, when I can pass the entrance audition, I can enroll in music school to study musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday! By sharing my music freely, there will be plenty of fans ready to buy tickets to my performances when I'm ready to play professionally.Immigration is held out as a solution to Canada's aging population - they have baby boomers just like the US, and there aren't enough young native-born workers to pay for the pensions and medical care of the elderly.
I spent a year in Vancouver, BC. It was full of immigrants from all over the world.
However, the Olympics has gotten special laws passed just for it by many countries. This wouldn't be the case for other copyrights or trademarks.
The military offered helicopters for dropping water on the fires, but they weren't allowed to because California State Department of Forestry rules required that a CDF fire spotter ride in each aircraft. Not only did it take more than 24 hours to get the fire spotters to the choppers, but there weren't enough spotters to man all the available aircraft.
Some official allowed an exception to the rule to allow just one spotter for each squadron of three, but by the time this was all sorted out, the high winds proved to be too dangerous, and so the aircraft were grounded.
Had they been able to take off when first called upon, the winds wouldn't have been so severe and they might have been able to contain the fire.
What's worse is that the military has several C-130 transport planes on call for dropping very large amounts of water from the air. I saw one of these at the Big Bear Lake fire in 1985, and it was a truly awesome sight to behold.
However, it was determined that their tanks were unsafe, so several years ago they were taken out of service until a new tank could be designed. The first try at a new tank didn't fit in the planes - yes, you read that right - so they went back to the drawing board.
It's been four years since then and they still don't have a new tank design.
Let me find you a link.
Each of us were required to have chest X-Rays. My understanding is that if they showed that either of us had tuberculosis, our visas would be denied.
However, the doctor who gave me my medical exam - which was rather thorough - told me that I should show my passport to the X-Ray technician, just to make sure someone else wasn't able to stand in for me. I offered it to her, but she didn't bother with it.