The argument that's being missed or glossed over goes something like this: Apple's current iTunes store success depends heavily on it holding a commanding share of the market. As Android overtakes iOs in popularity, it will become less and less attractive for content providers to bend to Apple's demands. Why spend significant amounts of time developing your app to meet seemingly arbitrary requirements when there's a bigger platform that requires none of that? Why fork over a hefty share of your sales to Apple when you can sell for free in the bigger Android market next door?
As Apple loses market share, it will become increasingly hard for them to make any demands of anybody. They will have to charge less or nothing for app sales, movie sales, or music sales. They will not be able to restrict software capabilities nearly as much.
This can easily lead to a destructive spiral for Apple. If they don't modify their conditions, studios will take their movies out of the iTunes store. Record labels and eBook publishers will take their music and books elsewhere. App developers won't even bother. Then iPhones will be unattractive for the consumer for lack of content, leading to ever lower market share. On the other hand, if they do modify their conditions, they will lose massive profits from media sales. Their only choice will be to compensate by raising profits on the hardware sales end, but this leads to the same problem if it comes from higher prices or lower quality. Whether or not this happens of course remains to be seen. But historically companies have only been able to get away with the stuff Apple does when they've been the only game in town. It has nothing to do with how smart Steve Jobs is or how big his ego is. It has to do with the fact that Apple's business model depends on control, which others will constantly be fighting for.
Interesting. For years my computers have been telling me whenever I plug in a USB device. This little balloon in the lower right corner of the screen always pops up saying something like "Device detected." I guess the NSA has taken over my computer!
The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, they have some hooks on the SDK so that it's easy for the developer.
The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, Apple gets 40% of your revenue. They wrap this up in marketing so it looks like it's great for developers. The only real feature is that now the user can view ads and come right back to where they were in the app! Great! And in exchange for giving the iPhone this minimal level of reasonable functionality, 40% of all of your revenue. The Apple-provided hosting is not a feature, but an enforcement mechanism.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
What is with all the focus on tort reform? This is complete nonsense. Tort reform will do nothing to reduce long-term cost growth and next-to-nothing to reduce current costs.
Malpractice insurance premiums amount to less than 1% of all medical spending. Thus, there is no way that tort reform could reduce current medical spending by more than 1%. Likewise, there is no way that the costs associated with malpractice insurance are responsible for the consistently large annual increases in health insurance premiums. There's a full order of magnitude separating the two! The tort reform battle cry is a masterpiece of propaganda. It serves only to satisfy the greed of already wealthy doctors by appealing to common American sensibilities that abhor the "greed" of malpractice victims!
The principles of the health bill in congress are fairly straightforward, but for some reason nobody here seems to get them. It's a three-legged stool, and you just can't remove one leg without the plan failing:
1) Outlaw rescission practices and coverage denial for pre-existing conditions.
2) Decrease risk by increasing the risk pool through an insurance mandate, else part 1) will lead to people gaming the system by waiting until they get sick to sign up.
3) Subsidize insurance for the poorest Americans so that they can pay for insurance, otherwise part 2) falls apart.
If you have insurance, the only thing that changes is the cost to you goes down, and so you may elect to get even better coverage than you have now! If you don't have insurance, chances are that the reason you don't is because it isn't affordable, not because you don't want it. Well, this bill fixes that.
From above:
- Streamline the regulatory environments so that insurance can be bought across state lines.
If you believe that allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines will reduce costs instead of just allowing the worst insurance company behaviors to become more prevalent, well, I have some beach-front property in a state with lax consumer protection laws to sell you.
1) You have no such "right." Somewhere along the line some lawyer made this up and then guys with lots of money threatened to bring down big hammers on anyone who didn't respect it. Similarly, I don't have the right to sell you a sock and then sue you for trying to wear it in a competitor's shoe.
2) Good reasons you shouldn't have such a right: it's anti-competitive and bad for the economy when a small handful of companies are able to control how the majority of people are able to use their products to do useful things, or are able to bar competitor's from using their products in completely fair ways. "Apple isn't a monopoly" doesn't negate this fact.
3) Apple has an effective monopoly on certain industries, so the point's wrong on the facts as well.
4) Simply stating, "You were free not to buy my software," is being willfully obtuse. Forgive the hyperbole, but imagine for a moment that Monsanto suddenly decided you could only cook their food in pots they made and sold for ludicrous prices. What good reason could we possibly have to deny them this right (that they simply made up) to control how their consumer products are used after sale? After all, they're not selling food; they're selling the "experience" of eating. And we're perfectly free not to eat!
I agree. And, as another poster indicated, you also miss the more subtle aspects of the music. If you listen to the sound clips on the site, they don't sound much different from midi played through a decent sound card. They definitely don't sound like an.mp3 recording of a decent guitarist.
A large part of it involves attack--rhytm sections will play a bit ahead of the rest of the band, a piano player will strike notes with his or her left hand a bit earlier than with the right, because low notes take a bit longer to resonate than high notes. With midi, everything is triggered at the same time, and you can hear it. On guitar, the strumming motion makes up for quite a bit. Implementing down and up stroke motions might be a good next step for this project.
Further ahead, I'd really like to see a robot that's able to play by ear... err... microphone. You play it a tune, and it mimics it perfectly. Such a project would be a great synthesis of computer science, physics, and mathematics.
>>"I hope your physics endeavours are more unbiased than your political thoughts."
What bias? If you mean that I am biased in that I am morally opposed to the slaughtering of poor people, then yes, I am biased. But all political viewpoints are connected to one value system or another.
This is getting off-topic, but I'll respond because you demonstrate such poor understanding of the facts.
>> "The United States happens to be located where an abundance of natural resources produced most of that wealth. An econonic and social system that rewards and encourages accomplishment and success accounts for the rest.
Not quite. Slavery accounts for most of the rest. This country was built on the backs of slaves, and it was their labor that was responsible for the VAST majority of development resulting in America's primacy in the world economy. As for "success" and "accomplishment," these are terms that should always be attached to definitions. I have no idea what you're talking about. Using my definition, one finds that America really despises success and accomplishment in any meaningful sense. What America promotes is avarice and finding the best way to shift the cost of doing business away from the individual making the profit and onto society as a whole.
>> "I don't hear Indians complaining that the US is not paying for their textiles. I don't hear the Indonesians and Thais complaining about the money US tourists spend in their countries."
Actually, you're right. You can't hear them complaining because they're dead, many of them because Thailand would not issue a warning about the Tsunami because, if it were a false alarm, it would hurt the tourism industry. The same goes for the Indians, however you certainly can hear the ones we haven't slaughtered complaining frequently about the United States telling them what are and aren't acceptable forms of business to conduct on land that was stolen from them.
>> " Admittedly, the nascent US inherited the practice and its consequences. But the US also fought a Civil War, partly to put an end to slavery. That was 145 years ago, in case you've forgotten."
And we white people still enjoy the benefits. That's the point. Apart from that, the civil war was not about slavery any more than U.S. involvement in World War II was about stopping Hitler. Lincoln had no concern for the rights of blacks, or any special regard for the Constitution for that matter (as evidenced by his willingness to suspend its provisions multiple times). He signed the emancipation proclamation, which freed only slaves in the Confederate States, as a war strategy. Keep the slaves in the north, where the economy depends on them, and try to get slaves in the south to flee to safety in the north, where they can be quickly recruited in the army. The can of worms this opened up necessitated the 13th amendment; it was not at all a reason for the war. The reason for the war was the same as the reason for every other war the U.S. enters: to maintain its power, regardless of the nature of the threat to that power (violence, economic development, democratization of poor countries). As for the time frame, the "official" end of slavery did little for blacks for a long time. The civil rights movement did far more. And still, the average minority enjoys only 3/5ths the income of the average white person. Bigots say this is because minorities are lazy.
>>"You are referring to which particular slaughters?"
See: General Suhartu, East Timor, U.S. support. Hundreds of thousands were killed for seeking a democratic form of government... all paid for by you and me.
>>"Perhaps you'd like to elaborate? Most of the "poorest people" of the world are poor because of the corruption and incompentence of their own political and social systems. Most of them would be even worse off if the United States was not the most generous country in the world."
Yes, and the bombing of these poor countries we regularly carry out has nothing to do with it. For example Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. We've bombed them. You heard it right. The richest country in the world felt so threatened by the poorest country around that it felt the need to bomb its citizens. See: Guatemala, 1954, when the U.S
You know, I would have said that we're responsible because all of our wealth has been stolen from these people, whether by enslaving peoples of Africa, or by supporting slaughters in Indonesia to aid American business interests, or one by one of the countless other ways America has used force to take the freedom from the poorest people of the world.
To the original poster: what you owe the affected nations is no less than your entire livelihood, that is if you live in the United States (or Britain, France, or a number of other countries). Your "mother shorting on a Christmas gift" analogy is wildly arrogant, misinformed, and irrelevant. If your mother had first burned your home, taken all of your land, killed your family, and then bought you the wrong book for Christmas, then yes, you would have plenty of reason to bitch. Perhaps you should amend your analogy.
Some of the criteria for ranking seem like BS to me.
For example, two of the questions they asked campuses were:
Are students required to own a computer?
Does tuition include cost for a personal computer for each student
Looking at the full list of data, you'll find that many schools have computer:student ratios that are almost 10 times as high as ranked schools, but don't fall in the top 15. It seems to me that these schools are doing a lot more to provide computers for their lower income students-- students who can't always afford to buy a computer for college.
Head counts don't work very well, and taking attendance takes a long time. More time than some people have.
Hence why somebody invented the "seating chart," whereby a teacher of slightly above average intelligence may quickly scan a room and take note of which seats are empty. Then, by cross-referencing with a "diagram" on a piece of "paper," they can quickly make note of which students are present and which are absent. Similarly, head counts are easily as accurate as the counting ability of the person doing the counting. There have been amazing advances in attendance technology recently, and none of the interesting ones involve more than somebody paying attention.
What happens to the kid whose tag gets damaged? He gets home and gets punished for going to school. The more he insists on his innocence, the more his parents distrust him: "The RFID tags don't lie."
Parents shifting their own responsibility to others and technology seems to me the best way to ruin the relationship and the child. Hell, you really want to know if your kid went to school today? Why not try asking them what they learned at the dinner table.
And as for abductions, this won't prevent that either. For one, the tag has to be near a reader to tell what's up. For two, I don't think the abductors will be wearing their own ID tags to help the police out.
I think the only real advantage this has is in discipline... as an interrogation tool when say, somebody gets in a fight. "We know you were there, now tell us who's responsible or you're suspended." Great way to teach honesty... honesty under threat of punishment.
This allows the school to track down errant kids, make sure everyone is out in case of fire, and parents to know where their kids are, as many work long hours.
They had this technology back when I was in school. Back then, they called it "taking attendance" and "head counts." The first of my two high-schools did attendance on punchcards and an auto-dialer called the specified number for all absent kids. Of course, you still had kids sneaking off the campus to eat lunch in the mall across the street rather than being packed into a crummy cafeteria with 1200 other students, having to deal with drug dogs coming through, and risking getting stabbed. If these tags can take care of that lunch skipping problem, I say, "Spread it on!"
Suppose you want to recreate an electronic circuit formed of various components. For simplicity, let's limit this to an analog circuit. Furthermore suppose that all of the components look the same, so you can't tell what's what by looking at them. However, there are various places where you can give an input, and various other places where you can measure an output. The way any scientist will go about solving this "black box" problem is by making measurements and theorizing something like Thevenin equivalents for all the components. Then he'll build his own circuit out of all these equivalent little pieces and suddenly find that, though perhaps his circuit looks entirely different, the behavior is almost exactly the same. For more complicated circuits, you have to have more components at your disposal.
The problem with the brain is that, while we know how an individual neuron operates, what's going on in the incomprehensibly complex neural network is something that will probably never be known. The way to approach the problem, then, is the same way an engineer approaches a circuit: measuring outputs from different inputs. Then you form a Thevenin equivalent brain circuit. It's not going to look like a brain, but maybe you can get it to do the same things. This is, in part, how Chomsky revolutionized linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science -- treating the brain as a "black box" that can be examined by an engineer using abstract concepts. However, so far, we don't really have equivalent components/abstract concepts to describe the brain's behavior; we know what resistors do in electronics, but we don't know what tools the brain uses, and examining them on a neuron-by neuron scale is useless. Research like this helps in finding out what they might be. Instead of "input: image of food; output: man reaching for food," we start to see a complex map: "image->retina->visual cortex->object recognition circuits->vagus nerve circuits->motor circuits." We can break down each point on the map further and further, and eventually we hope to know just about everything we need to know.
"...the pilot completely lost attitude control. According to him, "If that had happened earlier, I would never have made it and you all would be looking sad right now."
Seems like he's got a perfectly fine attitude about the situation... He's keeping himself sensitive to the feelings of others, at least.
"Many other probes have promised the same thing but we have not yet seem the information."
Actually, I believe WMAP has given extremely valuable information about the "building" of the Universe. In fact, coupled with other observations (such as those of supernovae), it's helped us narrow down to a very good degree of precision the amount of dark energy and non-baryonic dark matter in the Universe--information that is instrumental in tuning Earth-based experiments that search for neutralinos and/or their products.
I doubt a Phoebe fly-by will tell us nearly as much about the evolution of the Universe, but it very well might tell us a lot about the evolution of the solar system. But I guess it still comes down to the question of what exactly is "valuable." If you don't feel like collecting information on the origins of humanity is valuable, then I think SCO might have an opening for you.
To answer several questions at once, the short answer about how it works is a consequence of the uncertainty principle: when you observe a photon (or any particle, for that matter), you have to interact with it in some way. When you do that, you change some of its properties.
"Observing the entangled photon(s) would not change the originals..."
Not exactly true. Look into the EPR experiment and what's known as "spooky action." It turns out acting on one entangled photon instantaneously (faster than light) affects its partner. For what you're saying, though, this doesn't really matter, as no information can be transmitted this way (luckily). However, entangling photons requires letting them interact, which will disrupt the original.
Or less meat. We could keep growing ocrn, wheat, and everything else and still probably produce enough fuel for the entire country.
First off, I'd like to point out that I'm not a vegetarian.
A large amount of the food that is grown in the U.S. is fed to animals. Those animals are frequently fed to other animals (this is where Mad Cow comes from). Eventually, people eat parts of these animals. It's very wasteful and inefficient. Imagine a giant fan blowing air on a windmill that then charges a battery that heats a stove.
"Arable land," as its called, is not really "arable" in the dictionary sense of the word. "Arable land," as it is mentioned in agricultural statistics, only involves that land which is used for rotated crops (and which currently has crops on it). "Permanent land" is the land that grows long-term crops. Together, the U.S. has about 470 million acres of "arable" and "permanent" cropland. This does not include grazing land which, though not all that plentiful, could frequently be called "arable"in the dictionary sense.
There are statistics out there that indicate various amounts of land usage needed to sustain us... many of these seem like veiled right wing arguments arguing for stricter immigration controls. Whether sponsored by private companies or the USDA (essentially the same thing), these statistics are formulated by people that ignore half of the questions - they blame immigration for the problems of food shortage and refuse to address American wastefulness (because American wastefulness is their bottom line). They ignore the fact that those 470 million acres could provide food for much of the world... if Americans had diets comparable to the rest of the healthy world. In truth, Americans eat a diet so unneccessarily based on meat that it requires a ridiculous amount of land to maintain. What's more, America exports a shitload of meats (most of which is heavily subsidized by tax dollars... that's how inefficient meat production is). Take away half the cows and chickadees and you could go far in solving the starvation problem.
I'm sorry, but spending money on the military is one of the least efficient ways to help the economy. Anyone who claims it's a good way to do it has a distorted idea that supply-side economics wasn't a lie. The idea is this (and it works the same for space): To build a bomb, you pay a company a lot of money. The vast majority of that money goes to the higher ups of the company, who are already rich. Then, you blow up the bomb. It's gone... wasted, and you have no real investment. Highways are a bit different, as you haven't blown up the highway at the end of it. Still, you have to take into account that they largely act as a subsidy for oil companies and companies that make their money transporting things... They're definitely not intended to help the poor. Anyhow, with NASA, you just spend that money on giant rockets instead of bombs, and then waste the rockets. Same thing.
The basic point is that Bush has done nothing more than repeat Reagan thus far, whose policy was one of going out into the world and looking for conflict after conflict in order to spend billions and billions on the military... Latin America, Syria, all of these places. They call it Keynesian economics. Coupled with massive deficit spending, these policies effectively transfer huge amounts of money from the poor to the rich and make sure that the government doesn't have enough money for social programs anytime in the near future.
Again, maybe in the long-run, space expenditures will benefit the poor. However, these arguments don't seem valid. I sincerely doubt that Bush is aiming to invent the next small computer (which have in fact helped the rich much much more than they've helped the poor).
I'm surprised that Slashdot would moderate me a troll for proposing such a concept. It seems that people are taking my words to mean that I think space exploration is a bad idea... Come on, I'm a physicist. I'd really like to see this at a more responsible time (i.e. we have money to spend on education and a bunch extra............ ok, now let's go to the moon). Proposing this now, with the economy in its current state, is just a display of utter contempt for the vast majority of Americans. I love space. I don't really think that Bush is suddenly doing this because he loves space, however. That doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that he doesn't have a country to bomb at the moment, and this is the next best option to giving your money to Boeing and then blowing up the product.
What makes sense here is that money spent on space is a good short-term waste. Maybe in the long-long run, it'll turn into minute profits for the poor. That means that for the time-being, Bush can continue to divert resources from the poor to the rich. That's why this is an option, just like all the money he's wasted on the military... hugely inefficient for the economy, great for the few folks who stand to gain from it immediately.
By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet. ...
Copyright lawyers said it remains unresolved whether consumers can legally download copies of songs on a CD they purchased rather than making digital copies themselves.
So, the RIAA has been downloading illegal copies of music for years, in fact probably has a huge library of music. Simultaneously, in their broad sword efforts to completely end p2p, they're arguing that it's illegal to download songs you've already bought. So, even if the RIAA has gone through all the hoops with this library, obtaining licenses for each song they swiped off of file traders in their investigations-- which I doubt; recall Microsoft's slip ups-- they're arguing that the methods they've been using to track down illegal file traders are actually illegal themselves! In fact, the RIAA might have the largest collection of illegal music of anyone, even larger than mine! Of course, this should come as no surprise, after all of the attempts to make it legal for them to attack suspected infringers PC's, it's pretty clear that the RIAA's privilege and property makes them above the law.
I'll echo that. My first advice is to at least start looking for a new job now. I know your time is scarce, which makes even doing that difficult, but I know they can't be paying you enough to do what you say you're required to do, especially when you factor in all the stress, and general unhappiness, that it brings.
Second, before you start worrying about saying "no" to clients, I would worry about saying "no" to your boss. Tell him or her that the conditions are intolerable, and if they won't do anything about it, maybe you should start refusing to work overtime. You'd be surprised how much leverage you can have, especially being the only one in your company that can do your job.
Here's another thing I've learned in my experience: they almost certainly have the money to pay for extra staff or whatever. They know it, and they don't want you to know it. They have it because they've made a practice out of overworking people and underpaying them, and if you press them, make them realize that's not a real possibility any longer, they'll bend. I routinely convince my supervisor into paying me nearly twice what I make per hour for an overtime shift. I get away with it because I'm valuable, because they have made it a practice of stretching staffing so thin that when one person calls in sick, they are absolutely desperate to fill the place, and because they realize that even with giving me bonus pay they're paying less than they would to bring in someone from an agency.
I would guess you actually have some similar power in your job, if for no other reason than the cost of bringing someone in to replace you is probably high. I'd recommend going to your boss and telling him or her, "These are the things that need to get done, and there is no possible way for me to do all of this alone. If I can't get another 1 or 2 staff members to help me, then these things simply will not get done."
Learning to say no to your boss is, in my experience, more important than learning to say no to the people you work with. If your boss were doing his or her job, you wouldn't need to tell clients no.
In the meantime though, I agree for the most part with what's been said, especially about requiring requests to go through office supervisors. That can help immensely.
People will think that's an absurd idea, and most of them probably won't realize that such a system already works for them (and works quite well) in the form of grants for scientific research, arts, and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument that's being missed or glossed over goes something like this: Apple's current iTunes store success depends heavily on it holding a commanding share of the market. As Android overtakes iOs in popularity, it will become less and less attractive for content providers to bend to Apple's demands. Why spend significant amounts of time developing your app to meet seemingly arbitrary requirements when there's a bigger platform that requires none of that? Why fork over a hefty share of your sales to Apple when you can sell for free in the bigger Android market next door?
As Apple loses market share, it will become increasingly hard for them to make any demands of anybody. They will have to charge less or nothing for app sales, movie sales, or music sales. They will not be able to restrict software capabilities nearly as much.
This can easily lead to a destructive spiral for Apple. If they don't modify their conditions, studios will take their movies out of the iTunes store. Record labels and eBook publishers will take their music and books elsewhere. App developers won't even bother. Then iPhones will be unattractive for the consumer for lack of content, leading to ever lower market share. On the other hand, if they do modify their conditions, they will lose massive profits from media sales. Their only choice will be to compensate by raising profits on the hardware sales end, but this leads to the same problem if it comes from higher prices or lower quality. Whether or not this happens of course remains to be seen. But historically companies have only been able to get away with the stuff Apple does when they've been the only game in town. It has nothing to do with how smart Steve Jobs is or how big his ego is. It has to do with the fact that Apple's business model depends on control, which others will constantly be fighting for.
Interesting. For years my computers have been telling me whenever I plug in a USB device. This little balloon in the lower right corner of the screen always pops up saying something like "Device detected." I guess the NSA has taken over my computer!
The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, they have some hooks on the SDK so that it's easy for the developer.
The whole thing is so that if you want to include ads, Apple gets 40% of your revenue. They wrap this up in marketing so it looks like it's great for developers. The only real feature is that now the user can view ads and come right back to where they were in the app! Great! And in exchange for giving the iPhone this minimal level of reasonable functionality, 40% of all of your revenue. The Apple-provided hosting is not a feature, but an enforcement mechanism.
What is with all the focus on tort reform? This is complete nonsense. Tort reform will do nothing to reduce long-term cost growth and next-to-nothing to reduce current costs. Malpractice insurance premiums amount to less than 1% of all medical spending. Thus, there is no way that tort reform could reduce current medical spending by more than 1%. Likewise, there is no way that the costs associated with malpractice insurance are responsible for the consistently large annual increases in health insurance premiums. There's a full order of magnitude separating the two! The tort reform battle cry is a masterpiece of propaganda. It serves only to satisfy the greed of already wealthy doctors by appealing to common American sensibilities that abhor the "greed" of malpractice victims!
The principles of the health bill in congress are fairly straightforward, but for some reason nobody here seems to get them. It's a three-legged stool, and you just can't remove one leg without the plan failing:
1) Outlaw rescission practices and coverage denial for pre-existing conditions.
2) Decrease risk by increasing the risk pool through an insurance mandate, else part 1) will lead to people gaming the system by waiting until they get sick to sign up.
3) Subsidize insurance for the poorest Americans so that they can pay for insurance, otherwise part 2) falls apart.
If you have insurance, the only thing that changes is the cost to you goes down, and so you may elect to get even better coverage than you have now! If you don't have insurance, chances are that the reason you don't is because it isn't affordable, not because you don't want it. Well, this bill fixes that.
From above:
- Streamline the regulatory environments so that insurance can be bought across state lines.
If you believe that allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines will reduce costs instead of just allowing the worst insurance company behaviors to become more prevalent, well, I have some beach-front property in a state with lax consumer protection laws to sell you.
This is ridiculous nonsense.
1) You have no such "right." Somewhere along the line some lawyer made this up and then guys with lots of money threatened to bring down big hammers on anyone who didn't respect it. Similarly, I don't have the right to sell you a sock and then sue you for trying to wear it in a competitor's shoe.
2) Good reasons you shouldn't have such a right: it's anti-competitive and bad for the economy when a small handful of companies are able to control how the majority of people are able to use their products to do useful things, or are able to bar competitor's from using their products in completely fair ways. "Apple isn't a monopoly" doesn't negate this fact.
3) Apple has an effective monopoly on certain industries, so the point's wrong on the facts as well.
4) Simply stating, "You were free not to buy my software," is being willfully obtuse. Forgive the hyperbole, but imagine for a moment that Monsanto suddenly decided you could only cook their food in pots they made and sold for ludicrous prices. What good reason could we possibly have to deny them this right (that they simply made up) to control how their consumer products are used after sale? After all, they're not selling food; they're selling the "experience" of eating. And we're perfectly free not to eat!
I agree. And, as another poster indicated, you also miss the more subtle aspects of the music. If you listen to the sound clips on the site, they don't sound much different from midi played through a decent sound card. They definitely don't sound like an .mp3 recording of a decent guitarist.
A large part of it involves attack--rhytm sections will play a bit ahead of the rest of the band, a piano player will strike notes with his or her left hand a bit earlier than with the right, because low notes take a bit longer to resonate than high notes. With midi, everything is triggered at the same time, and you can hear it. On guitar, the strumming motion makes up for quite a bit. Implementing down and up stroke motions might be a good next step for this project.
Further ahead, I'd really like to see a robot that's able to play by ear... err... microphone. You play it a tune, and it mimics it perfectly. Such a project would be a great synthesis of computer science, physics, and mathematics.
>>"I hope your physics endeavours are more unbiased than your political thoughts."
What bias? If you mean that I am biased in that I am morally opposed to the slaughtering of poor people, then yes, I am biased. But all political viewpoints are connected to one value system or another.
This is getting off-topic, but I'll respond because you demonstrate such poor understanding of the facts.
>> "The United States happens to be located where an abundance of natural resources produced most of that wealth. An econonic and social system that rewards and encourages accomplishment and success accounts for the rest.
Not quite. Slavery accounts for most of the rest. This country was built on the backs of slaves, and it was their labor that was responsible for the VAST majority of development resulting in America's primacy in the world economy. As for "success" and "accomplishment," these are terms that should always be attached to definitions. I have no idea what you're talking about. Using my definition, one finds that America really despises success and accomplishment in any meaningful sense. What America promotes is avarice and finding the best way to shift the cost of doing business away from the individual making the profit and onto society as a whole.
>> "I don't hear Indians complaining that the US is not paying for their textiles. I don't hear the Indonesians and Thais complaining about the money US tourists spend in their countries."
Actually, you're right. You can't hear them complaining because they're dead, many of them because Thailand would not issue a warning about the Tsunami because, if it were a false alarm, it would hurt the tourism industry. The same goes for the Indians, however you certainly can hear the ones we haven't slaughtered complaining frequently about the United States telling them what are and aren't acceptable forms of business to conduct on land that was stolen from them.
>> " Admittedly, the nascent US inherited the practice and its consequences. But the US also fought a Civil War, partly to put an end to slavery. That was 145 years ago, in case you've forgotten."
And we white people still enjoy the benefits. That's the point. Apart from that, the civil war was not about slavery any more than U.S. involvement in World War II was about stopping Hitler. Lincoln had no concern for the rights of blacks, or any special regard for the Constitution for that matter (as evidenced by his willingness to suspend its provisions multiple times). He signed the emancipation proclamation, which freed only slaves in the Confederate States, as a war strategy. Keep the slaves in the north, where the economy depends on them, and try to get slaves in the south to flee to safety in the north, where they can be quickly recruited in the army. The can of worms this opened up necessitated the 13th amendment; it was not at all a reason for the war. The reason for the war was the same as the reason for every other war the U.S. enters: to maintain its power, regardless of the nature of the threat to that power (violence, economic development, democratization of poor countries). As for the time frame, the "official" end of slavery did little for blacks for a long time. The civil rights movement did far more. And still, the average minority enjoys only 3/5ths the income of the average white person. Bigots say this is because minorities are lazy.
>>"You are referring to which particular slaughters?"
See: General Suhartu, East Timor, U.S. support. Hundreds of thousands were killed for seeking a democratic form of government... all paid for by you and me.
>>"Perhaps you'd like to elaborate? Most of the "poorest people" of the world are poor because of the corruption and incompentence of their own political and social systems. Most of them would be even worse off if the United States was not the most generous country in the world."
Yes, and the bombing of these poor countries we regularly carry out has nothing to do with it. For example Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. We've bombed them. You heard it right. The richest country in the world felt so threatened by the poorest country around that it felt the need to bomb its citizens. See: Guatemala, 1954, when the U.S
You know, I would have said that we're responsible because all of our wealth has been stolen from these people, whether by enslaving peoples of Africa, or by supporting slaughters in Indonesia to aid American business interests, or one by one of the countless other ways America has used force to take the freedom from the poorest people of the world.
To the original poster: what you owe the affected nations is no less than your entire livelihood, that is if you live in the United States (or Britain, France, or a number of other countries). Your "mother shorting on a Christmas gift" analogy is wildly arrogant, misinformed, and irrelevant. If your mother had first burned your home, taken all of your land, killed your family, and then bought you the wrong book for Christmas, then yes, you would have plenty of reason to bitch. Perhaps you should amend your analogy.
Some of the criteria for ranking seem like BS to me.
For example, two of the questions they asked campuses were:
Are students required to own a computer?
Does tuition include cost for a personal computer for each student
Looking at the full list of data, you'll find that many schools have computer:student ratios that are almost 10 times as high as ranked schools, but don't fall in the top 15. It seems to me that these schools are doing a lot more to provide computers for their lower income students-- students who can't always afford to buy a computer for college.
Head counts don't work very well, and taking attendance takes a long time. More time than some people have.
Hence why somebody invented the "seating chart," whereby a teacher of slightly above average intelligence may quickly scan a room and take note of which seats are empty. Then, by cross-referencing with a "diagram" on a piece of "paper," they can quickly make note of which students are present and which are absent. Similarly, head counts are easily as accurate as the counting ability of the person doing the counting. There have been amazing advances in attendance technology recently, and none of the interesting ones involve more than somebody paying attention.
What happens to the kid whose tag gets damaged? He gets home and gets punished for going to school. The more he insists on his innocence, the more his parents distrust him: "The RFID tags don't lie."
Parents shifting their own responsibility to others and technology seems to me the best way to ruin the relationship and the child. Hell, you really want to know if your kid went to school today? Why not try asking them what they learned at the dinner table.
And as for abductions, this won't prevent that either. For one, the tag has to be near a reader to tell what's up. For two, I don't think the abductors will be wearing their own ID tags to help the police out.
I think the only real advantage this has is in discipline... as an interrogation tool when say, somebody gets in a fight. "We know you were there, now tell us who's responsible or you're suspended." Great way to teach honesty... honesty under threat of punishment.
This allows the school to track down errant kids, make sure everyone is out in case of fire, and parents to know where their kids are, as many work long hours.
They had this technology back when I was in school. Back then, they called it "taking attendance" and "head counts." The first of my two high-schools did attendance on punchcards and an auto-dialer called the specified number for all absent kids. Of course, you still had kids sneaking off the campus to eat lunch in the mall across the street rather than being packed into a crummy cafeteria with 1200 other students, having to deal with drug dogs coming through, and risking getting stabbed. If these tags can take care of that lunch skipping problem, I say, "Spread it on!"
Well, not quite.
Suppose you want to recreate an electronic circuit formed of various components. For simplicity, let's limit this to an analog circuit. Furthermore suppose that all of the components look the same, so you can't tell what's what by looking at them. However, there are various places where you can give an input, and various other places where you can measure an output. The way any scientist will go about solving this "black box" problem is by making measurements and theorizing something like Thevenin equivalents for all the components. Then he'll build his own circuit out of all these equivalent little pieces and suddenly find that, though perhaps his circuit looks entirely different, the behavior is almost exactly the same. For more complicated circuits, you have to have more components at your disposal.
The problem with the brain is that, while we know how an individual neuron operates, what's going on in the incomprehensibly complex neural network is something that will probably never be known. The way to approach the problem, then, is the same way an engineer approaches a circuit: measuring outputs from different inputs. Then you form a Thevenin equivalent brain circuit. It's not going to look like a brain, but maybe you can get it to do the same things. This is, in part, how Chomsky revolutionized linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science -- treating the brain as a "black box" that can be examined by an engineer using abstract concepts. However, so far, we don't really have equivalent components/abstract concepts to describe the brain's behavior; we know what resistors do in electronics, but we don't know what tools the brain uses, and examining them on a neuron-by neuron scale is useless. Research like this helps in finding out what they might be. Instead of "input: image of food; output: man reaching for food," we start to see a complex map: "image->retina->visual cortex->object recognition circuits->vagus nerve circuits->motor circuits." We can break down each point on the map further and further, and eventually we hope to know just about everything we need to know.
"...the pilot completely lost attitude control. According to him, "If that had happened earlier, I would never have made it and you all would be looking sad right now."
Seems like he's got a perfectly fine attitude about the situation... He's keeping himself sensitive to the feelings of others, at least.
"Many other probes have promised the same thing but we have not yet seem the information."
Actually, I believe WMAP has given extremely valuable information about the "building" of the Universe. In fact, coupled with other observations (such as those of supernovae), it's helped us narrow down to a very good degree of precision the amount of dark energy and non-baryonic dark matter in the Universe--information that is instrumental in tuning Earth-based experiments that search for neutralinos and/or their products.
I doubt a Phoebe fly-by will tell us nearly as much about the evolution of the Universe, but it very well might tell us a lot about the evolution of the solar system. But I guess it still comes down to the question of what exactly is "valuable." If you don't feel like collecting information on the origins of humanity is valuable, then I think SCO might have an opening for you.
Apparently nobody's heard of arXiv. It works, quite well.
To answer several questions at once, the short answer about how it works is a consequence of the uncertainty principle: when you observe a photon (or any particle, for that matter), you have to interact with it in some way. When you do that, you change some of its properties.
"Observing the entangled photon(s) would not change the originals..."
Not exactly true. Look into the EPR experiment and what's known as "spooky action." It turns out acting on one entangled photon instantaneously (faster than light) affects its partner. For what you're saying, though, this doesn't really matter, as no information can be transmitted this way (luckily). However, entangling photons requires letting them interact, which will disrupt the original.
Or less meat. We could keep growing ocrn, wheat, and everything else and still probably produce enough fuel for the entire country.
First off, I'd like to point out that I'm not a vegetarian.
A large amount of the food that is grown in the U.S. is fed to animals. Those animals are frequently fed to other animals (this is where Mad Cow comes from). Eventually, people eat parts of these animals. It's very wasteful and inefficient. Imagine a giant fan blowing air on a windmill that then charges a battery that heats a stove.
"Arable land," as its called, is not really "arable" in the dictionary sense of the word. "Arable land," as it is mentioned in agricultural statistics, only involves that land which is used for rotated crops (and which currently has crops on it). "Permanent land" is the land that grows long-term crops. Together, the U.S. has about 470 million acres of "arable" and "permanent" cropland. This does not include grazing land which, though not all that plentiful, could frequently be called "arable"in the dictionary sense.
There are statistics out there that indicate various amounts of land usage needed to sustain us... many of these seem like veiled right wing arguments arguing for stricter immigration controls. Whether sponsored by private companies or the USDA (essentially the same thing), these statistics are formulated by people that ignore half of the questions - they blame immigration for the problems of food shortage and refuse to address American wastefulness (because American wastefulness is their bottom line). They ignore the fact that those 470 million acres could provide food for much of the world... if Americans had diets comparable to the rest of the healthy world. In truth, Americans eat a diet so unneccessarily based on meat that it requires a ridiculous amount of land to maintain. What's more, America exports a shitload of meats (most of which is heavily subsidized by tax dollars... that's how inefficient meat production is). Take away half the cows and chickadees and you could go far in solving the starvation problem.
I'm sorry, but spending money on the military is one of the least efficient ways to help the economy. Anyone who claims it's a good way to do it has a distorted idea that supply-side economics wasn't a lie. The idea is this (and it works the same for space): To build a bomb, you pay a company a lot of money. The vast majority of that money goes to the higher ups of the company, who are already rich. Then, you blow up the bomb. It's gone... wasted, and you have no real investment. Highways are a bit different, as you haven't blown up the highway at the end of it. Still, you have to take into account that they largely act as a subsidy for oil companies and companies that make their money transporting things... They're definitely not intended to help the poor. Anyhow, with NASA, you just spend that money on giant rockets instead of bombs, and then waste the rockets. Same thing.
The basic point is that Bush has done nothing more than repeat Reagan thus far, whose policy was one of going out into the world and looking for conflict after conflict in order to spend billions and billions on the military... Latin America, Syria, all of these places. They call it Keynesian economics. Coupled with massive deficit spending, these policies effectively transfer huge amounts of money from the poor to the rich and make sure that the government doesn't have enough money for social programs anytime in the near future.
Again, maybe in the long-run, space expenditures will benefit the poor. However, these arguments don't seem valid. I sincerely doubt that Bush is aiming to invent the next small computer (which have in fact helped the rich much much more than they've helped the poor).
I'm surprised that Slashdot would moderate me a troll for proposing such a concept. It seems that people are taking my words to mean that I think space exploration is a bad idea... Come on, I'm a physicist. I'd really like to see this at a more responsible time (i.e. we have money to spend on education and a bunch extra............ ok, now let's go to the moon). Proposing this now, with the economy in its current state, is just a display of utter contempt for the vast majority of Americans. I love space. I don't really think that Bush is suddenly doing this because he loves space, however. That doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that he doesn't have a country to bomb at the moment, and this is the next best option to giving your money to Boeing and then blowing up the product.
What makes sense here is that money spent on space is a good short-term waste. Maybe in the long-long run, it'll turn into minute profits for the poor. That means that for the time-being, Bush can continue to divert resources from the poor to the rich. That's why this is an option, just like all the money he's wasted on the military... hugely inefficient for the economy, great for the few folks who stand to gain from it immediately.
I just found out that Kobe Bryant moved into my neighborhood! Time to go get an autograph!
Sorry, for those of you that are thoroughly confused, here's the link to the Microsoft story I was referencing:
Microsoft Pirating Their Own Software?
From the article:
...
Copyright lawyers said it remains unresolved whether consumers can legally download copies of songs on a CD they purchased rather than making digital copies themselves.
By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.
So, the RIAA has been downloading illegal copies of music for years, in fact probably has a huge library of music. Simultaneously, in their broad sword efforts to completely end p2p, they're arguing that it's illegal to download songs you've already bought. So, even if the RIAA has gone through all the hoops with this library, obtaining licenses for each song they swiped off of file traders in their investigations-- which I doubt; recall Microsoft's slip ups-- they're arguing that the methods they've been using to track down illegal file traders are actually illegal themselves! In fact, the RIAA might have the largest collection of illegal music of anyone, even larger than mine! Of course, this should come as no surprise, after all of the attempts to make it legal for them to attack suspected infringers PC's, it's pretty clear that the RIAA's privilege and property makes them above the law.
I'll echo that. My first advice is to at least start looking for a new job now. I know your time is scarce, which makes even doing that difficult, but I know they can't be paying you enough to do what you say you're required to do, especially when you factor in all the stress, and general unhappiness, that it brings.
Second, before you start worrying about saying "no" to clients, I would worry about saying "no" to your boss. Tell him or her that the conditions are intolerable, and if they won't do anything about it, maybe you should start refusing to work overtime. You'd be surprised how much leverage you can have, especially being the only one in your company that can do your job.
Here's another thing I've learned in my experience: they almost certainly have the money to pay for extra staff or whatever. They know it, and they don't want you to know it. They have it because they've made a practice out of overworking people and underpaying them, and if you press them, make them realize that's not a real possibility any longer, they'll bend. I routinely convince my supervisor into paying me nearly twice what I make per hour for an overtime shift. I get away with it because I'm valuable, because they have made it a practice of stretching staffing so thin that when one person calls in sick, they are absolutely desperate to fill the place, and because they realize that even with giving me bonus pay they're paying less than they would to bring in someone from an agency.
I would guess you actually have some similar power in your job, if for no other reason than the cost of bringing someone in to replace you is probably high. I'd recommend going to your boss and telling him or her, "These are the things that need to get done, and there is no possible way for me to do all of this alone. If I can't get another 1 or 2 staff members to help me, then these things simply will not get done."
Learning to say no to your boss is, in my experience, more important than learning to say no to the people you work with. If your boss were doing his or her job, you wouldn't need to tell clients no.
In the meantime though, I agree for the most part with what's been said, especially about requiring requests to go through office supervisors. That can help immensely.
People will think that's an absurd idea, and most of them probably won't realize that such a system already works for them (and works quite well) in the form of grants for scientific research, arts, and the like.