Rather backward of me, wouldn't you say? You might be right, but I do have very good reasons.
Art is necessarily symbolic and can only be properly be judged subjectively. Those properties bring immense power and danger to art.
If the artist paints a picture of a bird, is it only a picture of a bird? Could it be a symbol of any particular religious or political movement? Could the artist be coding any messages or meanings in the painting?
When deciding how or if we should pay the artist, how do we judge the matter? do we pick the artists that can paint a bird picture that looks most like a bird? That would probably be my choice but it would leave out the cubist freaks and just about any other "school." Shall we have a nationwide moderation system with meta-moderation by a self-selected group of expert critics? How about a huge lottery where artists get 20 year positions regardless of what they do or do not do?
I'm not fundamentally against publicly funded art, but I don't see any way to preserve artistic freedom and have some kind of control and order over the whole affair. I don't think it can be done. Some of the most beautiful and technically excellent art was done for similiar reasons as some of the most offensive stuff out there. Both pieces make a religious point.
I can't say one is technically better than the other, in part because I haven't studied the two and don't care to do so. I then have only my preferences in art and social viewpoint to fall back on. That will never be completely rational and the process will be corrupt the artist eventually.
I certainly will not willingly fund art that offends my religious background like some art always will. It is also important to my religious ideals not to dictate tell the artist what they can and can't do on their own time.
Therefore the only solution I see is for people to buy the art that they like. The goodness/appropriateness/interest factors take care of themselves.
Science, on the other hand, can be objectively measured. Pons & Fleischmann were wrong. We could justifiably cut them off if they we dangling from the public teat. The guys that interpret the Hubble images do interesting but practically useless stuff, and we still gladly pay them.
The point is we can measure science objectively and THEN assign value. There is a small but rational hook we can use to make tax money spending choices. It is the opposite way with art. I know I'd get violent if I was assigned to support some idiot performance artist from New York every April 14, but do not care if you want to buy a ticket.
In reality we will always indirectly fund art, but we should at least try to make it look like arts spending is a private matter.
So you're saying that Microsoft could buy a Intel developer's kit for a few billion dollars and license "key Intel intellectual property" for another few billion annually?
A little money laundering fun? could happen. I don't think it will, but it might even be legal, even if the DOJ is wide awake. Who knows.
Yeah, I'm optimistic too. Our friend Mr. Gates has said that in the future, hardware will be free or almost free. I'm wondering how or in what world that is reasonable. You'd have to sell a lot of advertising built into the OS to pay for a dual core 6ghz machine.
Clock speed goodness has slowed down lately. About the only thing that's still going nuts is hard drive space, or so it seeems to me.
"... so we can combine our network in a sane fashion."
So, this is what the senior geeks among us call it... hmm. Well congratulations Erwos, and good luck. Pretty soon ministers and priests will start having to insist on pre-marital network consulting.
I suppose the above post is funny, but it does bring up issues. People will challenge wills for flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Sometimes they'll do it just to be an asshole and to fuck over people they don't like. That's family usually.
I have a will, and as it happens my oly real asset is my car. That goes to my parents, and if they'e not available, to my brother's family. Lucky for me my dad is a trust officer so getting the work done professionally was cheap and fast. I didn't even have to pay a notary fee as his secretary did the job for free. As simple as it was, we did it by the book. My family's non-vicious, settling my estate would probably be very easy.
But how many families fly at each other's throats, just to get some damn lamp from grandma, just so Cousin Louise who-was-always-a-bitch-and-really-didn't-like-Gran ny-we-think doesn't? Really, simple things can turn complicated, quick. If you have any assets at all, it could pay big to get professional help. If all it does is dick Uncle Sam, it's worth it.
Getting back to the "being of sound mind" bit, how will the courts know that you were of sound mind and not under any undue influence? They can't take your word for it. Get a notary and independent witnesses.
BTW, Edgar Allen Poe's will contained three words, "All to mother." It was challenged but it stood up. It isn't always that easy.
I guess this isn't really a lawyer friendly board, but a few bucks spent on good estate planning could be a reason to feed the legal monster a small snack. It could keep family from humiliating themselves and spending your whole estate on the law-jackals.
Doesn't evolutionary biology say that animals will select mates that give them the best chance of passing on their genes? Or something like that?
In today's world the ability to hunt, kill, & drag it home isn't as important as the ability to earn cash. Trump has cash and will almost certainly be able to make sure his kids live thru adolescence. Evolutionarily speaking, he's a good bet.
Practically speaking, what I just said is a load of bull and everyone knows it. Oh well. I'm not bitter.
Someone will be seriously hurt if I get AOL crap embedded in my personal VR setup. There's gonna be a whupping for sure.
If the next few generations of these devices turn out to be cheap and durable, they will be built into glasses. People will wake up and unconsciously assume that the display will be there. After a few years, I think that people will nauseated and annoyed if it malfunctions.
And if it becomes so ingrained into our psyches, the spamming scume will definitely want to get to it. Bluejacking these things could lead to trouble.
Given the importance of x-ray vision technologies to our adolescent fantasy lives, I think the above poster might have been going for funny, not insightful.
Yeah, it could be. But from what i've seen a lot of Alzheimer's patients can be damn healthy old in every other respect. A couple of my grand parents lasted over 10 years with that disease. They were strong up to the end, to the point that the staff at the rest home had to be careful.
I personally have had to help transport some alzheimer's patients by ambulance and when they are panicked they have incredible physical strength.
This could be way off, but Alzheimer's doesn't really kill, at least not quickly. It just makes life a curse.
I hope this isn't terribibly crass, but finding a cure or at least a good treatment is important financially. These people are very expensive to take care of. I'd put it at a higher priority than most other "popular" diseases. If this prion research has anything to do with anything that might find a cure for Alzheimer's, we probably should fund it big time. We are doing so well at keeping old people barely alive that a great number of them will be touched by this disease.
When ever I want my head to really start hurting I get out a few of my old textbooks and start going over this stuff. Wait till you start digging up "H", "J" and all that fun. It's truly a mind bending exercise especially if you were raised Christian or Jewish.
I'm getting a headache just now, but this thread is the most beneficial off topic thread I've seen on this board in a long time.
We're probably just using different definitions for the same word, but wings flex more than "a bit," at least in my way of thinking.
This link from our German friends has some interesting pics on destructive testing. Even small wings can bend several feet and still function. Airliner size wings flex many feet, and can scare the piss out of people that aren't prepared for it.
Sometimes the discovery channel will air video of a test-to-destruction done on a wing. It's truly scary.
I think these people maybe kidding themselves if they think their technology can scale up. It's easy to make stiff moving parts when things are small. Making moving parts that are strong and flexible enough to take a beating for 30 years and still have them be light enough is no small trick. An airliner wing is a wonderful multi-million dollar beast. They can and do bend meters in normal operation. Of course I am certainly no engineer and I wish these guys luck.
I'm betting that your hypothetical situation could happen exactly once. God knows I probably wouldn't fit in in Amsterdam very well, but they are small enough and hence nible enough, to put a stop to that kind of b.s. quickly. I hope somebody has the stones to actually try this. It would make a perfect test.
Besides, isn't the sale of pot technically illegal over there?
Take a prison guard, for example. I'm sure they have institutional procedures and general street smarts to help them out, but they still get hurt. That's why they need things like this.
But, 7.5 pounds of sweaty armor just for stab protection is a lot of weight, and asking someone to wear another vest just for ballistic protection may be unrealistic. A vest that does both and is more comfortable than standard armor could be useful.
And notice that the above item is designed for protection against ice picks. Knives aren't the only things that can puncture a person's hide. I defy anyone to see and avoid an ice pick in the middle of a crowd.
We all know that clay, stone, and ceramic records can last for thousands of years in terrible conditions, but those records are kilo-bit order projects, and an entirely different animal than sound.
One thing this guy may want to consider is a Rosetta type of storage system. If you convert the reel-to-reel recording to a digital format, then transcode to a uuencode style format, the result could be recorded in an extremely stable human and machine readable format.
If the guy really wanted stability and long term interpretability, he could encode a 1Khz sine wave using the same method and use that as descriptive meta-data. That way future generations could have nice, simple test file to run their automated decoders on. Even if all knowledge about how the file was encoded is lost, the repetitie pattern would probably be noticed. If the archivists in 2152, common era, have any idea that the disk is a sound recording, they'll surely figure the rest out.
I work with a amateur historian that's quite looney, over all, but she is always making good points about meta-data. Recording information about the sound, how it was made, who made it, and anything you can think of might make the difference between a sad lost opportunity and a major discovery. Historian types really love it when they find an old picture with names and dates written on the back. Often they can use their other archives to cross reference and to infer information that would be impossible without the meta-data. For example, they could use a known good picture of a certain building, and a picture of a person with a part of said building to place that person in a certain town at a certain time. That's a small example, but anyone can see how important a small point can be when trying to figure out a puzzle with 90% of the pieces destroyed.
Also, the guy may want to think about getting the originals into proper storage. That may mean giving them to an institution, but it beats having them destroyed because your cat peed on them.
This guys sounds interested enough to re-record every 5 years to the latest and greatest storage technology, but what about his heirs? If fate curses him with Alzheimer's disease, will his kiddies care of have enough energy to do the job? Probably not and the chain could be broken. That's the real threat, I think.
One body shop that had to remove the lights from a new Audi A8 found they had to be sent back to the manufacturer to be reactivated; otherwise, they wouldn't work.
I don't get it. How does a light bulb need to be activated?
I mean really, straighten out the mount, install the reflector assembly, screw in the bulb, mount lens/cover deal, connect three freaking wires and test! Have car guys started putting chips in the lighting controller that talk to a chip in the light and will refuse to co-operate with non-OEM parts?
It's an obvious answer, but surely they can't be that freaking greedy and stupid. They can't possibly use the "It could damage the printer or give unsatisfactory prints" excuse like the inkjet guys use. This has me freaked out.
Of course lightning transfers current with out a wire in the conventional sense, but it doesn't go thru empty space. Once the cloud-cloud or cloud-ground potential difference is great enough, you get some ions and a nice toasty ribbon of plasma that the current can flow down. Sure, it's in the vapor state, but lighting does have "wires."
I know that this is a case of pedantic nit-picking coming from an physics ignoramus, but maybe it points ot a way to get this guy's job done. If you get the right frequency laser to shine from the power transmitting module on this guy's toy, to the receiver, hitting a copper target, a "wire" of ionized air would be formed. Then you can pump current into said beam, into the target and capacitor/battery assembly and be done with it. There are so many whopping problems with this approach, obviously.
I like lithium watch batteries, myself.
Re:The Cassandra effect and Public discourse (long
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 1
Nevertheless, I hope you will admit that I am saying something both meaningful and true when I say that the climate of Kansas City Missouri is more variable than that of Portland Oregon.
Well duh! Portland has two kinds of weather, raining and about to rain. Anywhere has more complex weather! When in Portland you pretty much have to carry an umbrella all the time. Or you can just shave your head and use a squeegee like I do, I suppose.
Portland is a good city though, it's relatively geek friendly. I can't wait to get back up there permanently.
Has anybody tried to attach the stabilisation system of a Segway to a beer glass? Do that and all you have to do is lift and swallow, no more spilling valuable Pabst.
Slashdot Mirror
You might stab the pilot with the stylus 200 times.
We're all mad.
Rather backward of me, wouldn't you say? You might be right, but I do have very good reasons.
Art is necessarily symbolic and can only be properly be judged subjectively. Those properties bring immense power and danger to art.
If the artist paints a picture of a bird, is it only a picture of a bird? Could it be a symbol of any particular religious or political movement? Could the artist be coding any messages or meanings in the painting?
When deciding how or if we should pay the artist, how do we judge the matter? do we pick the artists that can paint a bird picture that looks most like a bird? That would probably be my choice but it would leave out the cubist freaks and just about any other "school." Shall we have a nationwide moderation system with meta-moderation by a self-selected group of expert critics? How about a huge lottery where artists get 20 year positions regardless of what they do or do not do?
I'm not fundamentally against publicly funded art, but I don't see any way to preserve artistic freedom and have some kind of control and order over the whole affair. I don't think it can be done. Some of the most beautiful and technically excellent art was done for similiar reasons as some of the most offensive stuff out there. Both pieces make a religious point.
I can't say one is technically better than the other, in part because I haven't studied the two and don't care to do so. I then have only my preferences in art and social viewpoint to fall back on. That will never be completely rational and the process will be corrupt the artist eventually.
I certainly will not willingly fund art that offends my religious background like some art always will. It is also important to my religious ideals not to dictate tell the artist what they can and can't do on their own time.
Therefore the only solution I see is for people to buy the art that they like. The goodness/appropriateness/interest factors take care of themselves.
Science, on the other hand, can be objectively measured. Pons & Fleischmann were wrong. We could justifiably cut them off if they we dangling from the public teat. The guys that interpret the Hubble images do interesting but practically useless stuff, and we still gladly pay them.
The point is we can measure science objectively and THEN assign value. There is a small but rational hook we can use to make tax money spending choices. It is the opposite way with art. I know I'd get violent if I was assigned to support some idiot performance artist from New York every April 14, but do not care if you want to buy a ticket.
In reality we will always indirectly fund art, but we should at least try to make it look like arts spending is a private matter.
quits seizing, wipes the drool off of his face and writes us up another gem about this one?
Vroom Vroom....
So you're saying that Microsoft could buy a Intel developer's kit for a few billion dollars and license "key Intel intellectual property" for another few billion annually?
A little money laundering fun? could happen. I don't think it will, but it might even be legal, even if the DOJ is wide awake. Who knows.
Yeah, I'm optimistic too. Our friend Mr. Gates has said that in the future, hardware will be free or almost free. I'm wondering how or in what world that is reasonable. You'd have to sell a lot of advertising built into the OS to pay for a dual core 6ghz machine.
Clock speed goodness has slowed down lately. About the only thing that's still going nuts is hard drive space, or so it seeems to me.
So, this is what the senior geeks among us call it... hmm. Well congratulations Erwos, and good luck. Pretty soon ministers and priests will start having to insist on pre-marital network consulting.
I suppose the above post is funny, but it does bring up issues. People will challenge wills for flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Sometimes they'll do it just to be an asshole and to fuck over people they don't like. That's family usually.
n ny-we-think doesn't? Really, simple things can turn complicated, quick. If you have any assets at all, it could pay big to get professional help. If all it does is dick Uncle Sam, it's worth it.
I have a will, and as it happens my oly real asset is my car. That goes to my parents, and if they'e not available, to my brother's family. Lucky for me my dad is a trust officer so getting the work done professionally was cheap and fast. I didn't even have to pay a notary fee as his secretary did the job for free. As simple as it was, we did it by the book. My family's non-vicious, settling my estate would probably be very easy.
But how many families fly at each other's throats, just to get some damn lamp from grandma, just so Cousin Louise who-was-always-a-bitch-and-really-didn't-like-Gra
Getting back to the "being of sound mind" bit, how will the courts know that you were of sound mind and not under any undue influence? They can't take your word for it. Get a notary and independent witnesses.
BTW, Edgar Allen Poe's will contained three words, "All to mother." It was challenged but it stood up. It isn't always that easy.
I guess this isn't really a lawyer friendly board, but a few bucks spent on good estate planning could be a reason to feed the legal monster a small snack. It could keep family from humiliating themselves and spending your whole estate on the law-jackals.
IANAL-or-a-TO. duh!
Doesn't evolutionary biology say that animals will select mates that give them the best chance of passing on their genes? Or something like that?
In today's world the ability to hunt, kill, & drag it home isn't as important as the ability to earn cash. Trump has cash and will almost certainly be able to make sure his kids live thru adolescence. Evolutionarily speaking, he's a good bet.
Practically speaking, what I just said is a load of bull and everyone knows it. Oh well. I'm not bitter.
Someone will be seriously hurt if I get AOL crap embedded in my personal VR setup. There's gonna be a whupping for sure.
If the next few generations of these devices turn out to be cheap and durable, they will be built into glasses. People will wake up and unconsciously assume that the display will be there. After a few years, I think that people will nauseated and annoyed if it malfunctions.
And if it becomes so ingrained into our psyches, the spamming scume will definitely want to get to it. Bluejacking these things could lead to trouble.
Given the importance of x-ray vision technologies to our adolescent fantasy lives, I think the above poster might have been going for funny, not insightful.
Yeah, it could be. But from what i've seen a lot of Alzheimer's patients can be damn healthy old in every other respect. A couple of my grand parents lasted over 10 years with that disease. They were strong up to the end, to the point that the staff at the rest home had to be careful.
I personally have had to help transport some alzheimer's patients by ambulance and when they are panicked they have incredible physical strength.
This could be way off, but Alzheimer's doesn't really kill, at least not quickly. It just makes life a curse.
I hope this isn't terribibly crass, but finding a cure or at least a good treatment is important financially. These people are very expensive to take care of. I'd put it at a higher priority than most other "popular" diseases. If this prion research has anything to do with anything that might find a cure for Alzheimer's, we probably should fund it big time. We are doing so well at keeping old people barely alive that a great number of them will be touched by this disease.
Yes, that's a reasonable thing to say. There is a long and glorious tradition of liars and hacks searching for the Ark and other relics.
Surely they could find some well known and well financed skeptics that have outdoor skills. It would be good quality control.
When ever I want my head to really start hurting I get out a few of my old textbooks and start going over this stuff. Wait till you start digging up "H", "J" and all that fun. It's truly a mind bending exercise especially if you were raised Christian or Jewish.
I'm getting a headache just now, but this thread is the most beneficial off topic thread I've seen on this board in a long time.
We're probably just using different definitions for the same word, but wings flex more than "a bit," at least in my way of thinking.
This link from our German friends has some interesting pics on destructive testing. Even small wings can bend several feet and still function. Airliner size wings flex many feet, and can scare the piss out of people that aren't prepared for it.
Sometimes the discovery channel will air video of a test-to-destruction done on a wing. It's truly scary.
I think these people maybe kidding themselves if they think their technology can scale up. It's easy to make stiff moving parts when things are small. Making moving parts that are strong and flexible enough to take a beating for 30 years and still have them be light enough is no small trick. An airliner wing is a wonderful multi-million dollar beast. They can and do bend meters in normal operation. Of course I am certainly no engineer and I wish these guys luck.
I'm betting that your hypothetical situation could happen exactly once. God knows I probably wouldn't fit in in Amsterdam very well, but they are small enough and hence nible enough, to put a stop to that kind of b.s. quickly. I hope somebody has the stones to actually try this. It would make a perfect test.
Besides, isn't the sale of pot technically illegal over there?
Think unlawful interception of communications, not entrapment. I know, it's stupid, but that's the legal theory. IANAL and all that...
Sorry folks, the below link will get you to the vest i was talking about.
o rt =general_catalog
http://www.galls.com/style.html?style=BP086&ass
Don't know what's wrong with my html today...
Sure, you're right, but is that realistic?
Take a prison guard, for example. I'm sure they have institutional procedures and general street smarts to help them out, but they still get hurt. That's why they need things like this.
But, 7.5 pounds of sweaty armor just for stab protection is a lot of weight, and asking someone to wear another vest just for ballistic protection may be unrealistic. A vest that does both and is more comfortable than standard armor could be useful.
And notice that the above item is designed for protection against ice picks. Knives aren't the only things that can puncture a person's hide. I defy anyone to see and avoid an ice pick in the middle of a crowd.
make these jokes go away. And while you are at it, can you send the Florida election people to hell for making all these jokes possible?
Damn pregnant chads...
We all know that clay, stone, and ceramic records can last for thousands of years in terrible conditions, but those records are kilo-bit order projects, and an entirely different animal than sound.
One thing this guy may want to consider is a Rosetta type of storage system. If you convert the reel-to-reel recording to a digital format, then transcode to a uuencode style format, the result could be recorded in an extremely stable human and machine readable format.
If the guy really wanted stability and long term interpretability, he could encode a 1Khz sine wave using the same method and use that as descriptive meta-data. That way future generations could have nice, simple test file to run their automated decoders on. Even if all knowledge about how the file was encoded is lost, the repetitie pattern would probably be noticed. If the archivists in 2152, common era, have any idea that the disk is a sound recording, they'll surely figure the rest out.
I work with a amateur historian that's quite looney, over all, but she is always making good points about meta-data. Recording information about the sound, how it was made, who made it, and anything you can think of might make the difference between a sad lost opportunity and a major discovery. Historian types really love it when they find an old picture with names and dates written on the back. Often they can use their other archives to cross reference and to infer information that would be impossible without the meta-data. For example, they could use a known good picture of a certain building, and a picture of a person with a part of said building to place that person in a certain town at a certain time. That's a small example, but anyone can see how important a small point can be when trying to figure out a puzzle with 90% of the pieces destroyed.
Also, the guy may want to think about getting the originals into proper storage. That may mean giving them to an institution, but it beats having them destroyed because your cat peed on them.
People are spending big bucks to recover wax cylinder recordings of opera singers. Surely they'll do it for actual historical records put down by eye witnesses!
This guys sounds interested enough to re-record every 5 years to the latest and greatest storage technology, but what about his heirs? If fate curses him with Alzheimer's disease, will his kiddies care of have enough energy to do the job? Probably not and the chain could be broken. That's the real threat, I think.
Well, we've either run out of Mountain Dew or we're approaching the bottom of the dialectic barrel. Oh well.
Says the article:
I don't get it. How does a light bulb need to be activated?I mean really, straighten out the mount, install the reflector assembly, screw in the bulb, mount lens/cover deal, connect three freaking wires and test! Have car guys started putting chips in the lighting controller that talk to a chip in the light and will refuse to co-operate with non-OEM parts?
It's an obvious answer, but surely they can't be that freaking greedy and stupid. They can't possibly use the "It could damage the printer or give unsatisfactory prints" excuse like the inkjet guys use. This has me freaked out.
Of course lightning transfers current with out a wire in the conventional sense, but it doesn't go thru empty space. Once the cloud-cloud or cloud-ground potential difference is great enough, you get some ions and a nice toasty ribbon of plasma that the current can flow down. Sure, it's in the vapor state, but lighting does have "wires."
I know that this is a case of pedantic nit-picking coming from an physics ignoramus, but maybe it points ot a way to get this guy's job done. If you get the right frequency laser to shine from the power transmitting module on this guy's toy, to the receiver, hitting a copper target, a "wire" of ionized air would be formed. Then you can pump current into said beam, into the target and capacitor/battery assembly and be done with it. There are so many whopping problems with this approach, obviously.
I like lithium watch batteries, myself.
Well duh! Portland has two kinds of weather, raining and about to rain. Anywhere has more complex weather! When in Portland you pretty much have to carry an umbrella all the time. Or you can just shave your head and use a squeegee like I do, I suppose.
Portland is a good city though, it's relatively geek friendly. I can't wait to get back up there permanently.
Has anybody tried to attach the stabilisation system of a Segway to a beer glass? Do that and all you have to do is lift and swallow, no more spilling valuable Pabst.