I don't use tabs. Nothing against them, but I grew so used to using the taskbar to switch between browser windows that I just never got into tabs.
But as for your real point, yes, my assertion is that channel surfing takes far less concentration and attention than web surfing. Besides, if you're paying enough attention to the sound of a web-based TV ad to know when your show is back on, you're paying more attention to the ad than you would be on conventional TV, which is what this whole topic was about.
I hope you aren't blaming Spike for pop-ups. No, but I remember (almost with nostalgia, at least in comparison to the crap they plaster all over our shows now) when TNN (i.e., before Spike became Spike) would run a tiny little text-height bar at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds during the daily TNG marathons indicating that yet another episode of TNG would be on next. I don't get why that's not enough, unless the networks want to piss off their viewers.
So do you really think that the number of articles published is any real indicator of the productivity of NIH funded research? Actually, if peer review functioned properly as a gatekeeper to ensure the quality of published journal articles, then yes.
Obviously, the one defining difference between normal TV and web-based TV is the remote control, and the ease with which you can change the channel. Commercial comes on? Flip flip flip flip flip. You get to ignore commercials, zone out, and satisfy your OCD all at once. Eventually, your show comes back on, and you flip back.
There's no channel to change with web-based TV shows. Sure, you can alt-tab to another browser window, but once the ad is done, you'd have to task-switch your brain back away from whatever it was you were doing to distract yourself from the ad. It just doesn't have the same feel-good feeling of repeatedly pounding a dinky little worn-down button on the remote.
On a side note, could overlay ads on TV possibly get more annoying? Sometimes they take up 50% of the screen and include loud obtrusive noises. Fox and TBS are especially annoying in this respect. What happened to the good old days, before Spike became Spike, when they'd just take a tiny strip of the screen at the bottom and tell you what was going to be on next? Do people really watch more Sex and the City just because they plaster Sarah Jessica Parker's old and tired face on top of whatever it is you're actually trying to watch?
Over the past century, the content companies have learned from experience that they can control and dominate all aspects of their industry. They force-feed the public with crap music from acts that they browbeat into submission, taking tremendous chunks of the revenues through their position as middleman. They convince the public (or at least themselves) that they can dictate the terms of use for their products, even when the public has already paid a more-than-fair price for those products. They take for granted their position as arbiters of what's cool, and now that their position of dominance is under real threat, they're panicking.
There are already solutions - numerous ones - for getting fair payment to artists, technicians, promoters, etc., without fighting the masses who are interested in a wider variety of content and the ability to use that content in novel ways. The problem (for the content industry, anyway) is that those solutions in some way involve giving up control. They fear that losing that control means obsolescence, when in truth, it's the effort to cling to that control that will result in them being so far behind the times that they can't catch up.
There can be a place for the content executives in the future of the industry, but they have to be willing to let go of the total control they've grown addicted to, and be content with making money hand over fist while giving the customers what they want.
I heard a story while I was working at a drive system design/assembly firm about a fellow who, back in the early days of digital drive systems, took a tape recorder, hooked its output up to an analog input on the drive, and used the signal of his voice on the tape to modulate the torque command to the motor, thus resulting in the motor vibrating out the sound of his voice.
Of course, the better stories I heard while I was there involved runaway motors tumbling across the shop floor (they're supposed to be bolted to the floor) or rotors breaking off through the motor housing and lodging in the shop roof. Fortunately, a greater understanding of digital drive systems and better safety practices made the union grievance the only scary thing on the shop floor while I was there.
It's like it was in MUD times. Every MUD I know contained at the very least one maze. Wizards just loved to make them. Players just hated to play them. Every "new wizard guide" I read contained at the very least the "do not create mazes, for people loathe them" clause. And yet, we still get them. That's because everyone remembers with great fondness being in "a series of twisty little passages, all alike".
The important thing isn't whether Chavez could be confident of the vote count handed to him, but whether Venezuelans could be confident of the vote count handed to them by Chavez.
I've heard that Venezuela's military commanders promised a coup d'etat if Chavez tried to ramrod his wildly unpopular socialist reforms down the nation's throat, but you'll notice that the vote count released to the public indicated that the margin of defeat was under 1%. That's what's called in the political industry "saving face".
Note that we really don't yet have any idea who made the edits (not that that stops The Inquirer from declaring j'accuse with aplomb). It could be a Republican staffer wanting to bolster his or her boss, or it could be a Democratic staffer wanting to manufacture a fiasco. It could be done with or without approval from one's boss. For that matter, it could be done through a zombified machine in a Capitol building office with a proxy server surreptitiously installed. Who knows? And in the end, does it really matter?
From a time issue along. Left turns usually require red light wait, whereas many right turns just a stop, count 3 and go. I suppose in the case of a UPS truck, the truck will probably win most of the time, but the rest of us usually make sure nobody's coming instead of counting to 3.
An interesting result to be sure, and not far-fetched at all, considering things like Belyaev's silver fox research from the mid-20th century, where artificial selection was shown to greatly accelerate the evolutionary process in terms of behavior.
My question, though, concerns the time scale of accelerated human evolution over the past 10,000 years versus the apparently much faster rate of "evolution" of technology. Some have argued that technological advancements stunt evolutionary change by reducing the severity of natural selection pressures such as the ability to provide food for oneself or to make contact with a mate. (For example, my vision, while corrected to normal levels through the technology of lenses, would have made my chances of reproduction several hundred years ago even lower than they are now.)
Since technology progression has increased to such a fast rate in the past 100 to 200 years, has the rate of technological improvement outstripped the capability of evolutionary processes to keep up? Will we see a decrease in the rate of evolution during very recent history (and, er, future history) due to this increasing difference in time scales, i.e., was the accelerated evolution rate during the past 10,000 years due in part to technological advancement reaching a sort of "sweet spot" that has since been (or will be) surpassed?
Not that any of this will matter once our new robotic overlords take over the planet, but it's still academically interesting.
In other words, you invest two or three times as much money (not to mention other resources like land area) in wind, solar, or geothermal power, when you can build nuclear power plants instead.
I'm not saying that the environment isn't worth the extra money, but I am saying that business interests have to go along with the plan in order to make things happen. If new forms of power generation aren't profitable - or if the costs would drive up prices too much for other people doing business - it won't get adopted. That's why nuclear power will have to be a part of short- to medium-range solutions, to accommodate base load power requirements. Eventually, you can start replacing those plants with pollution-free sources of power as the nuclear plants are decommissioned, but that's the long-range part of the solution, and we'll never get that far if we don't approach the problem realistically in the short term.
Would someone care to explain the significance of the/. article and the blog linked therein? I initially expected that the quote was from one of the leaked e-mails, but no, it's from some guy I've never heard of doing some very basic and inconclusive analysis of some data he doesn't actually link to.
While I suspect that his suspicions are correct, pretty much anybody could say the same thing and post it to their weblog. Why is it notable in this context? Could someone tell me how the last five minutes of my life weren't wasted by reading this article?
Slashdot Mirror
No thanks. I'll wait for the standard form factor combo drives.
...How do I set my ringtone to the title screen music from E.T. for the Atari 2600?
I don't use tabs. Nothing against them, but I grew so used to using the taskbar to switch between browser windows that I just never got into tabs.
But as for your real point, yes, my assertion is that channel surfing takes far less concentration and attention than web surfing. Besides, if you're paying enough attention to the sound of a web-based TV ad to know when your show is back on, you're paying more attention to the ad than you would be on conventional TV, which is what this whole topic was about.
Leela: Zoidberg owned 51% of the company?
Hermes: The shares were worthless, and he kept asking for toilet paper!
Obviously, the one defining difference between normal TV and web-based TV is the remote control, and the ease with which you can change the channel. Commercial comes on? Flip flip flip flip flip. You get to ignore commercials, zone out, and satisfy your OCD all at once. Eventually, your show comes back on, and you flip back.
There's no channel to change with web-based TV shows. Sure, you can alt-tab to another browser window, but once the ad is done, you'd have to task-switch your brain back away from whatever it was you were doing to distract yourself from the ad. It just doesn't have the same feel-good feeling of repeatedly pounding a dinky little worn-down button on the remote.
On a side note, could overlay ads on TV possibly get more annoying? Sometimes they take up 50% of the screen and include loud obtrusive noises. Fox and TBS are especially annoying in this respect. What happened to the good old days, before Spike became Spike, when they'd just take a tiny strip of the screen at the bottom and tell you what was going to be on next? Do people really watch more Sex and the City just because they plaster Sarah Jessica Parker's old and tired face on top of whatever it is you're actually trying to watch?
Over the past century, the content companies have learned from experience that they can control and dominate all aspects of their industry. They force-feed the public with crap music from acts that they browbeat into submission, taking tremendous chunks of the revenues through their position as middleman. They convince the public (or at least themselves) that they can dictate the terms of use for their products, even when the public has already paid a more-than-fair price for those products. They take for granted their position as arbiters of what's cool, and now that their position of dominance is under real threat, they're panicking.
There are already solutions - numerous ones - for getting fair payment to artists, technicians, promoters, etc., without fighting the masses who are interested in a wider variety of content and the ability to use that content in novel ways. The problem (for the content industry, anyway) is that those solutions in some way involve giving up control. They fear that losing that control means obsolescence, when in truth, it's the effort to cling to that control that will result in them being so far behind the times that they can't catch up.
There can be a place for the content executives in the future of the industry, but they have to be willing to let go of the total control they've grown addicted to, and be content with making money hand over fist while giving the customers what they want.
How about an industrial motor?
I heard a story while I was working at a drive system design/assembly firm about a fellow who, back in the early days of digital drive systems, took a tape recorder, hooked its output up to an analog input on the drive, and used the signal of his voice on the tape to modulate the torque command to the motor, thus resulting in the motor vibrating out the sound of his voice.
Of course, the better stories I heard while I was there involved runaway motors tumbling across the shop floor (they're supposed to be bolted to the floor) or rotors breaking off through the motor housing and lodging in the shop roof. Fortunately, a greater understanding of digital drive systems and better safety practices made the union grievance the only scary thing on the shop floor while I was there.
DoD is all about buzzword bingo. Think of it as being run by PHBs who can kill a man a dozen different ways.
Because it's not really about money. Money's for shareholders. In the end, it's all about control.
Besides, the ability to blast an entire neighboring galaxy with a gamma ray beam is insignificant compared to the power of the Force.
Hmmm... believe Newsweek or believe the state-run media of megalomaniacal dictator Hugo Chavez? Somehow this is a tough choice for you, isn't it?
The important thing isn't whether Chavez could be confident of the vote count handed to him, but whether Venezuelans could be confident of the vote count handed to them by Chavez.
I've heard that Venezuela's military commanders promised a coup d'etat if Chavez tried to ramrod his wildly unpopular socialist reforms down the nation's throat, but you'll notice that the vote count released to the public indicated that the margin of defeat was under 1%. That's what's called in the political industry "saving face".
http://www.newsweek.com/id/74230
Apparently, George Lucas sends the same card every year. He just adds more special effects.
We're gonna regret active SETI once the aliens show up and raise the temperature of Earth a million degrees a day for five days.
Note that we really don't yet have any idea who made the edits (not that that stops The Inquirer from declaring j'accuse with aplomb). It could be a Republican staffer wanting to bolster his or her boss, or it could be a Democratic staffer wanting to manufacture a fiasco. It could be done with or without approval from one's boss. For that matter, it could be done through a zombified machine in a Capitol building office with a proxy server surreptitiously installed. Who knows? And in the end, does it really matter?
That's what the side of the desk is for!
kaV#29v@a: the d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e of it all!
A question for Professor Hawks:
An interesting result to be sure, and not far-fetched at all, considering things like Belyaev's silver fox research from the mid-20th century, where artificial selection was shown to greatly accelerate the evolutionary process in terms of behavior.
My question, though, concerns the time scale of accelerated human evolution over the past 10,000 years versus the apparently much faster rate of "evolution" of technology. Some have argued that technological advancements stunt evolutionary change by reducing the severity of natural selection pressures such as the ability to provide food for oneself or to make contact with a mate. (For example, my vision, while corrected to normal levels through the technology of lenses, would have made my chances of reproduction several hundred years ago even lower than they are now.)
Since technology progression has increased to such a fast rate in the past 100 to 200 years, has the rate of technological improvement outstripped the capability of evolutionary processes to keep up? Will we see a decrease in the rate of evolution during very recent history (and, er, future history) due to this increasing difference in time scales, i.e., was the accelerated evolution rate during the past 10,000 years due in part to technological advancement reaching a sort of "sweet spot" that has since been (or will be) surpassed?
Not that any of this will matter once our new robotic overlords take over the planet, but it's still academically interesting.
In other words, you invest two or three times as much money (not to mention other resources like land area) in wind, solar, or geothermal power, when you can build nuclear power plants instead.
I'm not saying that the environment isn't worth the extra money, but I am saying that business interests have to go along with the plan in order to make things happen. If new forms of power generation aren't profitable - or if the costs would drive up prices too much for other people doing business - it won't get adopted. That's why nuclear power will have to be a part of short- to medium-range solutions, to accommodate base load power requirements. Eventually, you can start replacing those plants with pollution-free sources of power as the nuclear plants are decommissioned, but that's the long-range part of the solution, and we'll never get that far if we don't approach the problem realistically in the short term.
Would someone care to explain the significance of the /. article and the blog linked therein? I initially expected that the quote was from one of the leaked e-mails, but no, it's from some guy I've never heard of doing some very basic and inconclusive analysis of some data he doesn't actually link to.
While I suspect that his suspicions are correct, pretty much anybody could say the same thing and post it to their weblog. Why is it notable in this context? Could someone tell me how the last five minutes of my life weren't wasted by reading this article?