>1. lose (or break) your ipod and you lose all the data on it. lose/break your minidisc player and you've lost maximum 1Gb. >>Uh, and you MD player. Sure, But not 40Gb of songs you've spent weeks uploading.
> 2. even with DRM, you can still lend/borrow friends' discs. Without needing a computer or a network. >>Which is good, because hardly anyone has a computer with a network connection.
Tens of millions in the US alone. And many people with network connections are on dial-up. And many people, with or without network connections, might like to e.g. share disks at a coffeehouse, or at school etc without dragging their laptop along (if they have a laptop).
>>How many people own an esoteric piece of hardware like an MD yet do not own a computer?
How many people own a walkman/discman and do not own a computer? How many people with an MD player own a computer but do not have it rigged up for music? I don't know many people with MD players - because so far you're right, it is not mainstream equipment. But I know many, many people with computers who would have no idea about using them to record music. They email, they do some web surfing (for general interest, not geek sites), they word process. That's it.
> 5. Less risk when transporting data. Walking around with a $7 minidisc is a lot less worrying than carrying a $250 player. >>???? >>What is this risk? That I will get hit by a car?
No, it's the risk you lose it. Or drop it. Or get mugged.
Re:Last thing I need is to store more discs....
on
New Sony Minidisc Players
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· Score: 4, Insightful
A few advantages of this system over iPods and the like:
1. lose (or break) your ipod and you lose all the data on it. lose/break your minidisc player and you've lost maximum 1Gb.
2. even with DRM, you can still lend/borrow friends' discs. Without needing a computer or a network.
3. You don't need a computer to take advantage of Gb music storage. Believe or not, there are many people who don't own computers and even more who do own them but only use them for web browsing and email. With an MD player, you can just feed in a signal from any audio source to record tracks. My sister is a musician and uses an MD to record tracks created on an analog multitrack tape recorder.
4. More hardware choice (in the long term) and easier hardware upgrades. Buy a newer player, use the old discs.
5. Less risk when transporting data. Walking around with a $7 minidisc is a lot less worrying than carrying a $250 player.
Finally, if this thing takes off then big price drops are likely. iPods are expensive because miniature HDs are expensive, and Apple's strategy has consistently been to increase capacity rather than drop price. But for most non-musically-obsessed people, who have been using walkmans and discmans happily for years, 1-2Gb will easily fulfill all their mobile music needs. (Apple has finally figured this out, hence the mini-iPod. But theyre still going after the premium market.) 1Gb MD players have the potential to be sold in Wal-Mart in a couple of years for double-digit prices. The disks will probably come down to under a dollar. Apple, to judge by the last 20 years, will never get into the low-margin, high-volume business that is Sony's specialty.
Instead of dissing this, you should hail it as bringing Gb storage to the masses.
Now, where's the real geek argument about whether sony measures GBs as binary or decimal powers?
Actually, anyone can upload papers to the archive (the main site is now at www.arXiv.org). There's no peer review involved -- that's why it's called a _preprint_ archive -- and no respectability is conferred by simply uploading a paper to it. The fact is that there's a lot of crap on arXiv (though not as much as you might expect), and there are also a lot of people who don't use arXiv.
But apart from that, your comment is irrelevant anyway since these two do have plenty of articles on the server, as seen in a previous reply to your post.
The link between the forest fires and Kyoto is slim. What percentage of developed-world CO2 emissions do you think are accounted for by UK vehicles? Pretty small, I'd guess. For example, the US alone has over 5 times as many cars as the UK. And there are plenty of other sources of CO2. So the Java fires were still only a small proportion of worldwide CO2 emissions that year - and they don't happen every year, unlike automobile emissions.
As for the general point about El Nino resulting in increased greenhouse gas levels, let's not forget that for some reason El Nino has started to act very oddly in the last few decades. It's become much more frequent, and more severe. This behaviour fits with scientists' models of global warming. In other words, global warming is making El Nino worse. If El Nino itself contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, then it raises the worrying spectre of a positive-feedback situation -- in which case we need to do even more to reduce manmade emissions in order to counterbalance it.
Another point to ponder is that it's reasonable to suppose that the earth's climate is stable to a certain degree of perturbation, but that a larger degree of perturbation might have large effects. So in a "normal" world, the temporary increase in greenhouse gases from El Nino (or forest fires, or volcanic eruptiosn) would not have a major or long-term effect. However if as a result of global warming we've moved closer to the boundaries of stability, then it's possible that a natural event such as El Nino might be enough to push us over the limit. If that happens, who knows what the climate will bring. It's obvious that the Earth has stable lower-temperature states (witness the Ice Ages), but we don't know much about higher temperature states -- yes, it was warmer under the dinosaurs but the ecosphere has changed a lot since then. Maybe the climate will stabilise a few degrees about where it is now, maybe it will enter some chaotic phase with unpredictable temperature swings. Frankly, I'd rather not have to risk either.
and very bizarrely, the "lakh" derives from the same word as "lox" (both come from the indo-european word for fish, "*lakhs"). I guess our ancestors must have consumed a heck of a lot of bagels in their time.
>> You sound like someone who should never see the movie version of a really good book
That's not quite true. Some great books make great movies -- e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird, All Quiet on the Western Front. Apocalypse Now shows how sometimes it's best not to stick too closely to a text (Heart of Darkness) to make a great adaptation. It's just that some books are better suited to movie adaptation than others. (And, for the record, I'm not sure I'd regard LoTR as a "really good book". It's a masterpiece of the imagination, but as literature it's let down by some truly awful prose.)
>> Btw, the Eowyn/Faramir subplot was not really excised - it was just presented totally in shorthand. My wife, who hasn't read the books, had no problems realizing that they hooked up. The Lingering Glance At The End Of The Movie Between A Potential Couple is standard Hollywood shorthand for "They lived happily ever after."
True, except that it was reduced a typical, cliched romantic ending in which at the moment when the hero kisses his bride, everyone else magically falls in love at the same time. After all, in the film there's no indication that the two had even met before exchanging their meaningful glances. Isn't it significant in the book that Faramir and Eowyn fall in love during the war, as injured soldiers and when everything still looks hopeless, which is lost by representing it as eyeing each other up in the euphoria of victory?
I love Apple products in general but please...there is no way that most consumers would ever regard having to pay $99 to replace a battery in a $400 gizmo after 18 months as being reasonable.
How many of those defending Apple would be defening, say, Archos if there was a similar problem with one of its players? How many slashdotters would be supporting Microsoft if a fault in the Xbox meant it needed even a $20 repair after 18 months?
And there's no question that it would be possible to design an iPod-sized player with an easily removable battery. Hell, you can now buy a combined phone-radio-mp3 player about the same size as an iPod, with a removable battery. OK, so you might have to say goodbye to the hermetically-sealed look - but call me old fashioned for believing form should follow function.
Anyway, I predict that within 2 years, unless Apple moves into the phone market, the iPod will be dead. It won't be long until Nokia or Sony brings out a phone with gigabyte MP3 storage, and since the number of mobile phone users massively outnumbers the number of uers of portable MP3 players, it will only take a small proportion of the former to upgrade to the new phones for them to form the dominant market.
I agree with the parent that this makes perfect rational sense, but only from a right-wing fanatical point of view. After all, since a liberal will inevitably disagree on most things with any truly patriotic, god-fearing, red-blooded American, liberals are clearly siding with the enemy.
Of course, liberals will equally regard right-wing as being anti-American. The only difference is that ever since Roosevelt left office, American politics have been dominated by what in the rest of the world is considered pretty extreme right-wingers. So it's become natural for American right-wingers to regard liberals as the "enemy within".
Actually these days (in countries with a modern infrastructure - so excluding most of the US) underground wires are run through multipurpose conduits rather than just being laid individually. You only have to dig up the road once -- to lay the conduit. After that it's a simply task simply to pull across new wires (and pull out old ones) from one manhole to the next - there are special machines for threading them through the holes.
Most of the time when the road is dug up, it's to repair services such as water, sewage and gas - not really the sort of thing you can run overhead anyway.
I'm with you there. Leafing through the book after seeing the film, I was amazed out how much serious plot and character development they'd left out in what was after all an immensely long movie. Instead, RotK, even more so than TTT, was essentially a vehicle for massive set-piece battles. Battles that in the book take up a few paragraphs formed the bulk of the film, while whole subplots that made the book such an enveloping experience - e.g. Faramir and Eowyn - were dropped.
Where Jackson got it wrong is that LoTR was never meant as a simple heroes-overcome-the-odds story. It's an attempt to create an alternative world peopled by characters at all levels of society -- fantasy's answer to Proust and Balzac.
Clearly Peter Jackson thought that the complexity of the book was too much for your average cinema-going Joe. And he was probably right - but in thinking so he abandoned the humanity of the story. The siege of Minas Tirith is a good example of this. Tolkien describes the battle from the viewpoints of the citizenry and ordinary soldiers of Gondor; he gives no unified overview of the fighting, because (as a former soldier) he knew that it had little to do with the experience of war. Instead of oliphaunt-surfing Legolas, for example, Gimli gives a terse recounting of their arrival and participation in the battle only after it was all over.
The film, submitting to Hollywood logic, does away with all this. Films have heroes, and heroes - not ordinary people - win battles. The rest are reduced to orc-fodder. But this removes one of Tolkien's key themes, which is the dehumanising effect of war on an entire society. This applies especially to the scouring of the shire. The main action is over, therefore why complicate thigns? Give us a happy ending. But the point of the book was that there is no happy ending; nothing is as it was before, even in the Shire. Had Jackson merely left out the return to the Shire, I might have forgiven him a savage cut. But instead he gave it the worst sort of saccharine Hollywood ending. The final scene was the same as the book, true, but Sam's last words lost their resonance.
I know most people who saw the film won't agree with me. Many will respond that the complexity of the book had to be reduced to make it filmable. But if a book cannot be put on screen without ripping it apart, perhaps it should stay on paper. (It goes the other way, of course. Imagine the Matrix as a novel -- it could never convey the visual exhileration of the first film.)
Ironically, the rest of Tolkien's work apart from LoTR would be well suited to Jackson's approach. The Hobbit is a simple story with a small cast of characters. And the individual stories of the Silmarillion, again being fairly simple and (importantly) not fleshed out in so much detail, could actually gain from being put on screen.
>>However, thanks to this, we now have Nixon as an example of how antisemitism in the US is as bad as it has been in Europe (where French citizens quite happily turned in Jewish neighbors to their new Nazi overlords)
Do you honestly believe that, had the US been occupied by Hitler, those 40 millions Americans who lapped up anti-semitic propagande in the 1930s would not have done the same? Or that leading American industrialists who expressed Nazi sympathies and anti-semitic opinions in private would not have collaborated? It was luck and the Atlantic ocean that saved American Jews, not the inherent superiority of the US citizenry.
>> Show me one single Jewish person who has been killed (or even assaulted) as a result of Farrakhan's adolf-immitations.
Farrakhan is a symptom of widespread antisemitism in the US. Did you know that according to an Anti-Defamation League poll in 2002, 17% of Americans hold "unquestionably anti-semitic views" (up from 12% in 1998). That rises to 35% among african-americans. The NY Post reported last week that number of anti-semitic attacks in New York City TRIPLED in the last year. True, nobody has died -- yet. But remember back in 1999 there was a gun attack on a Jewish kindergarten. We're not talking about mere graffiti.
>>Funny you should mention the word "deny", as you are engaging in a variation of holocaust denial.
That is one of most insulting things ever hurled at me on slashdot. To deny the holocaust would be to deny the murder of my grandfather's entire family. Nothing I have written has denied the existence of anti-semitism in Europe. I'm just trying to point out that it's not a European disease. It affects the US just as much, and it's about time Americans realised it.
Not in the UK: you can't fire anyone without good reason. And before anyone gives me the standard "socialist/communist" crap about workers' rights being bad for the economy, we've got lower unemployment than the US and haven't been in recession since the early 1990s.
Europe this, Europe that. Please people, will you understand one thing. THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE AS EUROPE. Well, maybe that's a little extreme but what I mean is this: there is no such place as Europe to which you can make sweeping generalisations as you might be able to with a monocultural nation like the USA. Instead you have about 50 different countries with their own cultures, histories, and languages. What does the average Irishman, Romanian, Greek or Norwegian have in common with each other that they don't equally share with many other countries around the world?
So when you say "Europe just recognizes the dangers of letting Jews get too much power", who are you talking about? There is a perception in the US that because of the horrific anti-semitism seen in the past in many European countries, any anti-semitic activity in Europe is a sympton of some continental malaise. American anti-semitism, though, is some kind of aberration rather than a reflection of the national character.
Well, can I let you into a secret - the US has a long and proud tradition of antisemitism too. Many businesses, clubs and universities excluded Jews or restricted their numbers well into the late 1930s. That was a time when 40 million americans -- one third of the US population -- listened in to Father Charles' Coughlin's rabidly antisemitic radio show. Both the Bushes and the Kennedys made their fortunes by doing business with the Nazis - GWB's grandad even laundered thier money after the US declared war on them. Henry Ford was an especially active anti-semite, running a blatantly anti-semitic newspaper and writing a book called "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem." He accepted a medal from Hitler in 1938. Thomas Edison thought Jews should stick to the arts and stay out of industry: "I wish they would all stop making money", he said. And it didn't stp after WWII either. Tapes released by the National Archives show the extent of Nixon's anti-semitism ("generally speaking you can't trust the bastards"..."most Jews are disloyal"). Perhaps it's not surprising that in a country where blacks were denied civil rights until the 1960s, other ethnic groups were also discriminated against. The Klan was antisemitic as well, remember.
Whereas most European countries have tried to face up to and come to terms with their anti-semitic past, the US has airbrushed its own history of anti-Jewish discrimination right out of history. As a result, when Jews are attacked in France, the US immediately blames it on inherent European anti-semitism for which all Europeans should feel ashamed -- even though the cast majority of recent attacks have been perpetrated by recent Muslim immigrants who know nothing of pogroms and mein kampf. When Louis Farrakhan blames the holocaust on the Jews, though, America's soul remains spotless.
Which is more unhealthy, to deny that a problem exists, or to admit it and set about finding a solution?
Firstly, what's crime to do with it. It's not a crime to be a communist, but they won't let a foreigner into the US if they have been. Now they'll be able to screen out anyone who fits into their perceived profile of a threat. You're a vegetarian and a member of Greenpeace? Must be one of those anti-capitalist protesters.
Second, you don't know what's going to be a crime in the future. One day you're donating to a Pakistani religious charity, the next day you're supporting terrorism. The law ain't static.
>>2. Every country seems to have its own local flying machine inventor. Good for you,.nz and.br! Why didn't your guys start an aircraft industry there? Perhaps they did not invent a USEFUL flying machine.
I don't recall any major aircraft company called "Wright" or based in Kitty Hawk. Sure lots of people in the US (and elsewhere) made a big success of the airline industry, but it didn't make any difference to them where the airplane was invented.
>>5. The Wrights invented the science of aerodynamics.
Really? So what about that Bernoulli guy back in the 18th century?
I think you misunderstood. I meant that a massive particle travelling faster than light gives off Cherenkov radiation, not that such a particle was Cherenkov radiation. Naturally the radiation itself travels at the (local) speed of light, just like the sonic boom given off by a supersonic jet travels at the speed of sound.
>>Douglas Englebart first described hyperlinks in his seminal work in the 1960s...makes you wonder how hard they really look for prior art--i found a link to confirm my facts about DE on google in about 2 seconds...
Well go back to 1976 and try to run a google search then.
no, that's false. the universal speed limitation is the speed of light in a vacuum. Because light passing through matter moves slower than it does through a vacuum, it's perfectly possible to move faster than the "local" speed of light. Physicists have studied this by firing high-speed particles into crystals. Basically the particle creates a shockwave, a sort of optical equivalent of a sonic boom. It's called Cherenkov radiation if you want to look it up.
Decibels are a logarithmic scale: an increase of 1 decibel actually corresponds to a 30% increase in noise levels.
Actually I'm surprised it's even that accurate. Traffic levels only get you so far -- the urban environment (architecture, trees) is also extremely important. Under my apartmenet block there's a raised arcade that basically serves as a resonator, making traffic sound louder.
>> Ferraris are not IP, so you could copy it freely.
I have a feeling the above post as meant to be funny but was somehow misunderstood. Anyway, its premise is totally, completely, utterly untrue. Any work is automatically copyright to its creator (or the creator's employer) the moment it is created. The only requirements are that it take some skill to create it and that its form is not dictated by purely functional considerations (that's what patents are for). It's a myth that you need to manually "copyright" a work.
Ferrari will automatically have copyright in the design of the car, both as a whole and as parts right down to the steering wheel. Of course under fair use you might be able to reproduce parts of a ferrari, but to replicate the entire car is a clear breach of copyright.
Of course, if you then try and sell your copied Ferrari, you'd also be liable for passing off and probably trademark infringement (if you copied the ferrari logo and/or name anywhere on the car).
It's true that in the US someone who is acquitted cannot be subjected to an appeal. But also remember that in the US you need to be acquitted by all 12 jurors. A non-unanimous verdict results in a mistrial and a retrial.
Now how do you square that with the idea of "reasonable doubt". Surely if even 1 out of 12 people believes in the accused's innocent, there must be "reasonable doubt" as to his guilt.
Alos there are very good reasons to permit appeals/retrials against innocent verdicts in certain situations, for example if the jury has been bribed or threatened. In Britain, the government can also appeal on matters of law -- e.g. if the judge tells the jury "it's not murder to kill someone with a knife" and they acquit on that basis, the verdict is obviously unsafe.
You know, sometimes there are good arguments against absolutist interpretations of the US constitution. The double jeopardy rule is obviously useful to prevent persecution by the government against innocent people. But it has its limits, as in the examples above.
Slashdot Mirror
>1. lose (or break) your ipod and you lose all the data on it. lose/break your minidisc player and you've lost maximum 1Gb.
>>Uh, and you MD player.
Sure, But not 40Gb of songs you've spent weeks uploading.
> 2. even with DRM, you can still lend/borrow friends' discs. Without needing a computer or a network.
>>Which is good, because hardly anyone has a computer with a network connection.
Tens of millions in the US alone. And many people with network connections are on dial-up. And many people, with or without network connections, might like to e.g. share disks at a coffeehouse, or at school etc without dragging their laptop along (if they have a laptop).
>>How many people own an esoteric piece of hardware like an MD yet do not own a computer?
How many people own a walkman/discman and do not own a computer? How many people with an MD player own a computer but do not have it rigged up for music? I don't know many people with MD players - because so far you're right, it is not mainstream equipment. But I know many, many people with computers who would have no idea about using them to record music. They email, they do some web surfing (for general interest, not geek sites), they word process. That's it.
> 5. Less risk when transporting data. Walking around with a $7 minidisc is a lot less worrying than carrying a $250 player.
>>????
>>What is this risk? That I will get hit by a car?
No, it's the risk you lose it. Or drop it. Or get mugged.
A few advantages of this system over iPods and the like:
1. lose (or break) your ipod and you lose all the data on it. lose/break your minidisc player and you've lost maximum 1Gb.
2. even with DRM, you can still lend/borrow friends' discs. Without needing a computer or a network.
3. You don't need a computer to take advantage of Gb music storage. Believe or not, there are many people who don't own computers and even more who do own them but only use them for web browsing and email. With an MD player, you can just feed in a signal from any audio source to record tracks. My sister is a musician and uses an MD to record tracks created on an analog multitrack tape recorder.
4. More hardware choice (in the long term) and easier hardware upgrades. Buy a newer player, use the old discs.
5. Less risk when transporting data. Walking around with a $7 minidisc is a lot less worrying than carrying a $250 player.
Finally, if this thing takes off then big price drops are likely. iPods are expensive because miniature HDs are expensive, and Apple's strategy has consistently been to increase capacity rather than drop price. But for most non-musically-obsessed people, who have been using walkmans and discmans happily for years, 1-2Gb will easily fulfill all their mobile music needs. (Apple has finally figured this out, hence the mini-iPod. But theyre still going after the premium market.) 1Gb MD players have the potential to be sold in Wal-Mart in a couple of years for double-digit prices. The disks will probably come down to under a dollar. Apple, to judge by the last 20 years, will never get into the low-margin, high-volume business that is Sony's specialty.
Instead of dissing this, you should hail it as bringing Gb storage to the masses.
Now, where's the real geek argument about whether sony measures GBs as binary or decimal powers?
Actually, anyone can upload papers to the archive (the main site is now at www.arXiv.org). There's no peer review involved -- that's why it's called a _preprint_ archive -- and no respectability is conferred by simply uploading a paper to it. The fact is that there's a lot of crap on arXiv (though not as much as you might expect), and there are also a lot of people who don't use arXiv.
But apart from that, your comment is irrelevant anyway since these two do have plenty of articles on the server, as seen in a previous reply to your post.
The link between the forest fires and Kyoto is slim. What percentage of developed-world CO2 emissions do you think are accounted for by UK vehicles? Pretty small, I'd guess. For example, the US alone has over 5 times as many cars as the UK. And there are plenty of other sources of CO2. So the Java fires were still only a small proportion of worldwide CO2 emissions that year - and they don't happen every year, unlike automobile emissions.
As for the general point about El Nino resulting in increased greenhouse gas levels, let's not forget that for some reason El Nino has started to act very oddly in the last few decades. It's become much more frequent, and more severe. This behaviour fits with scientists' models of global warming. In other words, global warming is making El Nino worse. If El Nino itself contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, then it raises the worrying spectre of a positive-feedback situation -- in which case we need to do even more to reduce manmade emissions in order to counterbalance it.
Another point to ponder is that it's reasonable to suppose that the earth's climate is stable to a certain degree of perturbation, but that a larger degree of perturbation might have large effects. So in a "normal" world, the temporary increase in greenhouse gases from El Nino (or forest fires, or volcanic eruptiosn) would not have a major or long-term effect. However if as a result of global warming we've moved closer to the boundaries of stability, then it's possible that a natural event such as El Nino might be enough to push us over the limit. If that happens, who knows what the climate will bring. It's obvious that the Earth has stable lower-temperature states (witness the Ice Ages), but we don't know much about higher temperature states -- yes, it was warmer under the dinosaurs but the ecosphere has changed a lot since then. Maybe the climate will stabilise a few degrees about where it is now, maybe it will enter some chaotic phase with unpredictable temperature swings. Frankly, I'd rather not have to risk either.
and very bizarrely, the "lakh" derives from the same word as "lox" (both come from the indo-european word for fish, "*lakhs"). I guess our ancestors must have consumed a heck of a lot of bagels in their time.
>> You sound like someone who should never see the movie version of a really good book
That's not quite true. Some great books make great movies -- e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird, All Quiet on the Western Front. Apocalypse Now shows how sometimes it's best not to stick too closely to a text (Heart of Darkness) to make a great adaptation. It's just that some books are better suited to movie adaptation than others. (And, for the record, I'm not sure I'd regard LoTR as a "really good book". It's a masterpiece of the imagination, but as literature it's let down by some truly awful prose.)
>> Btw, the Eowyn/Faramir subplot was not really excised - it was just presented totally in shorthand. My wife, who hasn't read the books, had no problems realizing that they hooked up. The Lingering Glance At The End Of The Movie Between A Potential Couple is standard Hollywood shorthand for "They lived happily ever after."
True, except that it was reduced a typical, cliched romantic ending in which at the moment when the hero kisses his bride, everyone else magically falls in love at the same time. After all, in the film there's no indication that the two had even met before exchanging their meaningful glances. Isn't it significant in the book that Faramir and Eowyn fall in love during the war, as injured soldiers and when everything still looks hopeless, which is lost by representing it as eyeing each other up in the euphoria of victory?
I love Apple products in general but please...there is no way that most consumers would ever regard having to pay $99 to replace a battery in a $400 gizmo after 18 months as being reasonable.
How many of those defending Apple would be defening, say, Archos if there was a similar problem with one of its players? How many slashdotters would be supporting Microsoft if a fault in the Xbox meant it needed even a $20 repair after 18 months?
And there's no question that it would be possible to design an iPod-sized player with an easily removable battery. Hell, you can now buy a combined phone-radio-mp3 player about the same size as an iPod, with a removable battery. OK, so you might have to say goodbye to the hermetically-sealed look - but call me old fashioned for believing form should follow function.
Anyway, I predict that within 2 years, unless Apple moves into the phone market, the iPod will be dead. It won't be long until Nokia or Sony brings out a phone with gigabyte MP3 storage, and since the number of mobile phone users massively outnumbers the number of uers of portable MP3 players, it will only take a small proportion of the former to upgrade to the new phones for them to form the dominant market.
I agree with the parent that this makes perfect rational sense, but only from a right-wing fanatical point of view. After all, since a liberal will inevitably disagree on most things with any truly patriotic, god-fearing, red-blooded American, liberals are clearly siding with the enemy.
Of course, liberals will equally regard right-wing as being anti-American. The only difference is that ever since Roosevelt left office, American politics have been dominated by what in the rest of the world is considered pretty extreme right-wingers. So it's become natural for American right-wingers to regard liberals as the "enemy within".
Actually these days (in countries with a modern infrastructure - so excluding most of the US) underground wires are run through multipurpose conduits rather than just being laid individually. You only have to dig up the road once -- to lay the conduit. After that it's a simply task simply to pull across new wires (and pull out old ones) from one manhole to the next - there are special machines for threading them through the holes.
Most of the time when the road is dug up, it's to repair services such as water, sewage and gas - not really the sort of thing you can run overhead anyway.
I'm with you there. Leafing through the book after seeing the film, I was amazed out how much serious plot and character development they'd left out in what was after all an immensely long movie. Instead, RotK, even more so than TTT, was essentially a vehicle for massive set-piece battles. Battles that in the book take up a few paragraphs formed the bulk of the film, while whole subplots that made the book such an enveloping experience - e.g. Faramir and Eowyn - were dropped.
Where Jackson got it wrong is that LoTR was never meant as a simple heroes-overcome-the-odds story. It's an attempt to create an alternative world peopled by characters at all levels of society -- fantasy's answer to Proust and Balzac.
Clearly Peter Jackson thought that the complexity of the book was too much for your average cinema-going Joe. And he was probably right - but in thinking so he abandoned the humanity of the story. The siege of Minas Tirith is a good example of this. Tolkien describes the battle from the viewpoints of the citizenry and ordinary soldiers of Gondor; he gives no unified overview of the fighting, because (as a former soldier) he knew that it had little to do with the experience of war. Instead of oliphaunt-surfing Legolas, for example, Gimli gives a terse recounting of their arrival and participation in the battle only after it was all over.
The film, submitting to Hollywood logic, does away with all this. Films have heroes, and heroes - not ordinary people - win battles. The rest are reduced to orc-fodder. But this removes one of Tolkien's key themes, which is the dehumanising effect of war on an entire society. This applies especially to the scouring of the shire. The main action is over, therefore why complicate thigns? Give us a happy ending. But the point of the book was that there is no happy ending; nothing is as it was before, even in the Shire. Had Jackson merely left out the return to the Shire, I might have forgiven him a savage cut. But instead he gave it the worst sort of saccharine Hollywood ending. The final scene was the same as the book, true, but Sam's last words lost their resonance.
I know most people who saw the film won't agree with me. Many will respond that the complexity of the book had to be reduced to make it filmable. But if a book cannot be put on screen without ripping it apart, perhaps it should stay on paper. (It goes the other way, of course. Imagine the Matrix as a novel -- it could never convey the visual exhileration of the first film.)
Ironically, the rest of Tolkien's work apart from LoTR would be well suited to Jackson's approach. The Hobbit is a simple story with a small cast of characters. And the individual stories of the Silmarillion, again being fairly simple and (importantly) not fleshed out in so much detail, could actually gain from being put on screen.
>>However, thanks to this, we now have Nixon as an example of how antisemitism in the US is as bad as it has been in Europe (where French citizens quite happily turned in Jewish neighbors to their new Nazi overlords)
Do you honestly believe that, had the US been occupied by Hitler, those 40 millions Americans who lapped up anti-semitic propagande in the 1930s would not have done the same? Or that leading American industrialists who expressed Nazi sympathies and anti-semitic opinions in private would not have collaborated? It was luck and the Atlantic ocean that saved American Jews, not the inherent superiority of the US citizenry.
>> Show me one single Jewish person who has been killed (or even assaulted) as a result of Farrakhan's adolf-immitations.
Farrakhan is a symptom of widespread antisemitism in the US. Did you know that according to an Anti-Defamation League poll in 2002, 17% of Americans hold "unquestionably anti-semitic views" (up from 12% in 1998). That rises to 35% among african-americans. The NY Post reported last week that number of anti-semitic attacks in New York City TRIPLED in the last year. True, nobody has died -- yet. But remember back in 1999 there was a gun attack on a Jewish kindergarten. We're not talking about mere graffiti.
>>Funny you should mention the word "deny", as you are engaging in a variation of holocaust denial.
That is one of most insulting things ever hurled at me on slashdot. To deny the holocaust would be to deny the murder of my grandfather's entire family. Nothing I have written has denied the existence of anti-semitism in Europe. I'm just trying to point out that it's not a European disease. It affects the US just as much, and it's about time Americans realised it.
Not in the UK: you can't fire anyone without good reason. And before anyone gives me the standard "socialist/communist" crap about workers' rights being bad for the economy, we've got lower unemployment than the US and haven't been in recession since the early 1990s.
Europe this, Europe that. Please people, will you understand one thing. THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE AS EUROPE. Well, maybe that's a little extreme but what I mean is this: there is no such place as Europe to which you can make sweeping generalisations as you might be able to with a monocultural nation like the USA. Instead you have about 50 different countries with their own cultures, histories, and languages. What does the average Irishman, Romanian, Greek or Norwegian have in common with each other that they don't equally share with many other countries around the world?
So when you say "Europe just recognizes the dangers of letting Jews get too much power", who are you talking about? There is a perception in the US that because of the horrific anti-semitism seen in the past in many European countries, any anti-semitic activity in Europe is a sympton of some continental malaise. American anti-semitism, though, is some kind of aberration rather than a reflection of the national character.
Well, can I let you into a secret - the US has a long and proud tradition of antisemitism too. Many businesses, clubs and universities excluded Jews or restricted their numbers well into the late 1930s. That was a time when 40 million americans -- one third of the US population -- listened in to Father Charles' Coughlin's rabidly antisemitic radio show. Both the Bushes and the Kennedys made their fortunes by doing business with the Nazis - GWB's grandad even laundered thier money after the US declared war on them. Henry Ford was an especially active anti-semite, running a blatantly anti-semitic newspaper and writing a book called "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem." He accepted a medal from Hitler in 1938. Thomas Edison thought Jews should stick to the arts and stay out of industry: "I wish they would all stop making money", he said. And it didn't stp after WWII either. Tapes released by the National Archives show the extent of Nixon's anti-semitism ("generally speaking you can't trust the bastards"..."most Jews are disloyal"). Perhaps it's not surprising that in a country where blacks were denied civil rights until the 1960s, other ethnic groups were also discriminated against. The Klan was antisemitic as well, remember.
Whereas most European countries have tried to face up to and come to terms with their anti-semitic past, the US has airbrushed its own history of anti-Jewish discrimination right out of history. As a result, when Jews are attacked in France, the US immediately blames it on inherent European anti-semitism for which all Europeans should feel ashamed -- even though the cast majority of recent attacks have been perpetrated by recent Muslim immigrants who know nothing of pogroms and mein kampf. When Louis Farrakhan blames the holocaust on the Jews, though, America's soul remains spotless.
Which is more unhealthy, to deny that a problem exists, or to admit it and set about finding a solution?
What's a windmill if not a propellor in reverse?
Firstly, what's crime to do with it. It's not a crime to be a communist, but they won't let a foreigner into the US if they have been. Now they'll be able to screen out anyone who fits into their perceived profile of a threat. You're a vegetarian and a member of Greenpeace? Must be one of those anti-capitalist protesters.
Second, you don't know what's going to be a crime in the future. One day you're donating to a Pakistani religious charity, the next day you're supporting terrorism. The law ain't static.
I'm not anti-Wright but you go too far.
.nz and .br! Why didn't your guys start an aircraft industry there? Perhaps they did not invent a USEFUL flying machine.
>>2. Every country seems to have its own local flying machine inventor. Good for you,
I don't recall any major aircraft company called "Wright" or based in Kitty Hawk. Sure lots of people in the US (and elsewhere) made a big success of the airline industry, but it didn't make any difference to them where the airplane was invented.
>>5. The Wrights invented the science of aerodynamics.
Really? So what about that Bernoulli guy back in the 18th century?
I think you misunderstood. I meant that a massive particle travelling faster than light gives off Cherenkov radiation, not that such a particle was Cherenkov radiation. Naturally the radiation itself travels at the (local) speed of light, just like the sonic boom given off by a supersonic jet travels at the speed of sound.
>>Douglas Englebart first described hyperlinks in his seminal work in the 1960s...makes you wonder how hard they really look for prior art--i found a link to confirm my facts about DE on google in about 2 seconds...
Well go back to 1976 and try to run a google search then.
no, that's false. the universal speed limitation is the speed of light in a vacuum. Because light passing through matter moves slower than it does through a vacuum, it's perfectly possible to move faster than the "local" speed of light. Physicists have studied this by firing high-speed particles into crystals. Basically the particle creates a shockwave, a sort of optical equivalent of a sonic boom. It's called Cherenkov radiation if you want to look it up.
Given that this story was released December 10th, why was this modded offtopic? someone with a brain and a sense of humour mod it as funny, please.
Decibels are a logarithmic scale: an increase of 1 decibel actually corresponds to a 30% increase in noise levels.
Actually I'm surprised it's even that accurate. Traffic levels only get you so far -- the urban environment (architecture, trees) is also extremely important. Under my apartmenet block there's a raised arcade that basically serves as a resonator, making traffic sound louder.
>> Ferraris are not IP, so you could copy it freely.
I have a feeling the above post as meant to be funny but was somehow misunderstood. Anyway, its premise is totally, completely, utterly untrue. Any work is automatically copyright to its creator (or the creator's employer) the moment it is created. The only requirements are that it take some skill to create it and that its form is not dictated by purely functional considerations (that's what patents are for). It's a myth that you need to manually "copyright" a work.
Ferrari will automatically have copyright in the design of the car, both as a whole and as parts right down to the steering wheel. Of course under fair use you might be able to reproduce parts of a ferrari, but to replicate the entire car is a clear breach of copyright.
Of course, if you then try and sell your copied Ferrari, you'd also be liable for passing off and probably trademark infringement (if you copied the ferrari logo and/or name anywhere on the car).
You can already be arrested for making a copy of your friend's ferrari -- they've got copyright in the design of the car, after all.
It's true that in the US someone who is acquitted cannot be subjected to an appeal. But also remember that in the US you need to be acquitted by all 12 jurors. A non-unanimous verdict results in a mistrial and a retrial.
Now how do you square that with the idea of "reasonable doubt". Surely if even 1 out of 12 people believes in the accused's innocent, there must be "reasonable doubt" as to his guilt.
Alos there are very good reasons to permit appeals/retrials against innocent verdicts in certain situations, for example if the jury has been bribed or threatened. In Britain, the government can also appeal on matters of law -- e.g. if the judge tells the jury "it's not murder to kill someone with a knife" and they acquit on that basis, the verdict is obviously unsafe.
You know, sometimes there are good arguments against absolutist interpretations of the US constitution. The double jeopardy rule is obviously useful to prevent persecution by the government against innocent people. But it has its limits, as in the examples above.
This was all dealt with way back when