You're kidding right?
A. Many people who have an iPod do not use the apple music store they download it for free.
B. iTunes interfaces with the iPod and the Apple store never directly. Therefore, without some significant changes to iTunes there is no way to tell what devices the program is sending music too.
C. This is Slashdot? Can you imagine the uproar of the Slashdot crowd if any computer manufacture produced a product that reported on it's owners whereabouts, or forget that, so much as required an internet check in every time you wanted to use the thing. It would be hacked in a week.
We should all draw our Representatives attention to this paper. I just sent the following to my senator:
Dear Senator Allard
I am writing to alert you to a recent paper published by some Harvard Professors regarding P2P file sharing. Please read it by going to http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf.
I am aware that the Congress is being lobbied to more heavily regulate P2P internet file sharing. I am a 24 year-old Colorado Citizen and I believe strongly that the fact that the internet is really all peers (i.e. any one can have a server, run a website etc) is the primary ingredient for it's success. I have discovered much of the music I listen to via P2P. My friends who play in bands deliberately share their music via P2P in order to ensure their fans buy the CD. This distribution model works only because the barriers to entry are so low.
These low barriers to entry are the foundation on which our new information superhighway is being built. Big business cartels (the RIAA and the MPAA) are pressuring the government to raise those barriers. They want to protect the old ways of doing business because they have invested so heavily in them. That is understandable, but legislation to protect their model makes no more sense than if there had been legislation in the 1920's to protect the horseshoe guild from the automobile. What's more the media cartel's claim that P2P is stealing their business is empirically false. I urge you to read this new paper on the subject.
Again, you can find the paper at http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf
Without minimizing your childhood trauma I have trouble with your interpretation of your story and if this is what you the way you are explaining yourself to yourself it is time to take a step back.
1. There is little evidence that introversion or extroversion are socialized conditions as your story suggests. We are who we are regardless of situation or upbringing as far as social proclivity. We can be taught to censor ourselves or act unnaturally in situations we would ordinarily retreat from. Do you feel like an extrovert in an introvert's body, or do you genuinely find social situations tiring? If your answer to the second situation is yes then you are probably really an introvert. Your story matches more closely with the research that suggests that personality types do not emerge until about ages 4-6 (perhaps early in your case, you are gifted after all). Before that we are all extroverted when very young with those we are close to because we do not draw a hard line between them and ourselves. If mommy is sad we are sad. If we are happy we assume mommy is. You probably were very extroverted to your family. But one wonders how you behaved with strangers.
2. As for your personal problems: Ugly, unAthletic, and Smart. I have my doubts about them. First of all we all were X, Y, and Z. Referring to the above, an awareness of the outside world is very slow in coming. We all think we are the ugliest kid, we all think everyone hates us. The extroverts don't care, the introverts find this debilitating. In second grade I sat next to a kid who had serious bowl problems and had to bring a change of clothes to school. He was very social and while everyone talked about his problems we all liked him. This kid was a quintessential extrovert (extroversion and introversion are most obvious before the onset of puberty when secondary personality traits move to the fore, at least temporarily). As to your particular problems boys are often expected to be smart and it is certainly rarely a trauma for them at least until they are middle school aged. Even then it is usually much worse for bright girls, at the same time as the cliques of nerds are developing girls find themselves alone and reviled by their peers. You may indeed have been ugly and that could have hurt. But probably not much until you were ready to date. Before that if you had been friendly and outgoing I doubt anyone would have noticed. You indicated your problems were much earlier than that. Ditto for athleticism, athleticism is very important as kids grow up. But the extreme differences in ability rarely emerge until puberty.
3. Home schooling. Many children come out of the home schooling system way ahead of their peers and uniquely prepared for the world they have to live in. These children are truly gifted and they are remarkable in that they are so unusual. Many if not most home schoolers are painfully maladjusted socially because they have been denied an opportunity to meet or integrate with their peers (not to mention they are often taught by teachers with little or no training). Your problems would, I suspect, have been much worse if you had not begun to deal with them until you were in high school or worse, college. Teachers make no attempt to construct society from scratch. We are social beings, we do not construct it put 10 of us in a room at any age and we ARE society. Spend some time in any kindergarten and you will be amazed at how faithful a reproduction of our greater world it is, often despite the teacher's best efforts.
Some recommendations: if you have a mentally gifted or challenged child make sure that he or she spends significant time with his or her age group. This will be painful for you and the child but these lessons will serve the child in good stead when he or she is away from the apron strings. This does not mean that you should not challenge the child academically. Age appropriate education is an unfortunate side effect of too few teachers for too many children. Go to any school for the gifted or challenged and you
So I called Comcast, my current provider did the math for them. I currently pay 58.02 per month (with fees) for Cable internet with 1.5Mb down. If I switch to Qwest it will be 28 for 1.5 down plus 7 for qwest.net and 3 for the modem.
The total is 38.00 plus fees. if we imagine there are five dollars in fees that's 43 a month.
Comcast @ 1.5Mb = 58/mo
Qwest @ 1.5Mb = 43/mo
for a $15 dollar savings.
I asked the Comcast rep (Jenna, she was very nice) what they provided that was worth $15. She said that Comcast was planning on moving up to 3Mb by next quarter (March). So now the question is: Is.5mb worth $15?
I think I'm going to get both for the month of March and compare. I will make up the cost of this testing in 2 months of savings if I switch to Qwest.
I wonder if you could tell me a little more. I live in Denver and Comcast just doesn't seem that fast anymore. Help me understand the pricing. You say it costs $28 a month in your area but Qwest.net is only $7 + $3 for the modem. Is the other 18 your phone line. Are you really saying you would expect Naked DSL service to be $10/mo plus tax?
This is a classic ad Hom response. Instead of disputing a single one of the assertions these noble laureates have detailed regarding the administrations attacks against science. You urge us to consider the source. Yea, I don't like Bill Gates much either. But is he wrong when he says ""Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." No, that's a fact.
Whether Apple innovates in the hardware department is debatable. But they are pretty good fortune tellers. Let me count the tools they brought first to the home PC user.
1. 64 bit computing
2. Bluetooth
3. Firewire
4. 802.11b/g
5. USB
6. DVD/CD Writeable [got tired of linking] . . .
100,000,000. SCSI
I also differ with the differer: The 3 generation old phones are always available for free with a new service agreement. One usually has an oportunity for a new service agreement once a year. So you don't want to pay for these features? That's fine, wait 18 months and they will be free, then who cares.
"'Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac.' And this affects what system the music gets played on in what way?"
Simple, mac users are a cult. Members of this cult will, as evidenced by their behavior, prefer an Apple product for any task if at all possible. Giving these musicians an opportunity to prefer Apple in their music distribution provides an opportunity for Apple to leverage that fact for their music store.
While it is certainly true that most post industrial countries all maintaining a stable birthrate or in fact declining this has long been the case. However you completely ignore Asia (esp. China and India) where this problem is already exceeding the resources to cope with it.
Population growth is proceeding at a geometric rate (the time it takes to double is halved every cycle) and without some pretty liberal assumptions about the future of medicine, fertility and cultural changes in the next 25 years in much of the world the situation is dire. I know where you got your last predictions either from theUN or Princeton but these, very optomistic numbers indicate that we will have twice as many people on the planet in 50 years, a very serious situation.
Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. -Jacques Cousteau
You have got to be kidding, "pushing our ability to communicate with each other closer to extinction." Language is not static, and never has been certainly coming up with creative spelling layering on double or triple meaning to words or phrases is indicative of a healthy ability to communicate.
The sentiment that the internet will eradicate poverty is not only wrongheaded it can be dangerous. The internet is not a meaningful option to those who live in true poverty.
Most of the people who live in our world do not have running water, a reliable food source and have a family member who has AIDS. The solutions to these problems are equally straight forward, provide or provide the tools to: bring them food, water, and medication/prophylactics. Education is certainly a key to prosperity but there is little the internet can offer those without food much less electricity.
Now there are a limited amount of resources available to address the problems of poverty, limited at the UN, limited at OxFam, limited at MIT. What then should they invest their money in if the goal is eradicating poverty? While the answer may seem obvious there is real money being shifted from providing plumbing, etc, to providing information infrastructures in non industrialized nations (and if you think the last mile problem is bad here!) this shift takes real food, water and medicine away from real people and replaces it with an ethereal benefit that makes some people, especially in this country a bit more wealthy.
Wired readers out there will recall a recent profile of Barry Diller documenting the potential strength of Universal Music for the right investor. They might also remember a recent article about how schizophrenic Sony has become (they actually sued themselves- the music division sued an investment of the hardware division) in its CEO's quest to bring the music and hardware parts of the company together.
Sony's CEO believes that the future of that company lies in hardware (this is the company that finally set a standard for DVDs) but the only portion of the company that made any money last year was the music division. So there are no changing things at Sony right now.
Both the head of Sony and the head of Apple (two of the most innovative technology powerhouses ever) believe that bringing music and technology together is the future. I am inclined to defer to their judgment. If they are right and if Apple can score this deal before Sony can sort out its internal disputes. Soon Apple may take Sony's place in the market.
They are already selling more music players than Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent down, anyone who advocates science as a source of "truth" as oposed to simply facts is no scientist and knows nothing about truth.
You're kidding right? A. Many people who have an iPod do not use the apple music store they download it for free. B. iTunes interfaces with the iPod and the Apple store never directly. Therefore, without some significant changes to iTunes there is no way to tell what devices the program is sending music too. C. This is Slashdot? Can you imagine the uproar of the Slashdot crowd if any computer manufacture produced a product that reported on it's owners whereabouts, or forget that, so much as required an internet check in every time you wanted to use the thing. It would be hacked in a week.
We should all draw our Representatives attention to this paper. I just sent the following to my senator: Dear Senator Allard I am writing to alert you to a recent paper published by some Harvard Professors regarding P2P file sharing. Please read it by going to http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf.
I am aware that the Congress is being lobbied to more heavily regulate P2P internet file sharing. I am a 24 year-old Colorado Citizen and I believe strongly that the fact that the internet is really all peers (i.e. any one can have a server, run a website etc) is the primary ingredient for it's success. I have discovered much of the music I listen to via P2P. My friends who play in bands deliberately share their music via P2P in order to ensure their fans buy the CD. This distribution model works only because the barriers to entry are so low.
These low barriers to entry are the foundation on which our new information superhighway is being built. Big business cartels (the RIAA and the MPAA) are pressuring the government to raise those barriers. They want to protect the old ways of doing business because they have invested so heavily in them. That is understandable, but legislation to protect their model makes no more sense than if there had been legislation in the 1920's to protect the horseshoe guild from the automobile. What's more the media cartel's claim that P2P is stealing their business is empirically false. I urge you to read this new paper on the subject.
Again, you can find the paper at http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf
Without minimizing your childhood trauma I have trouble with your interpretation of your story and if this is what you the way you are explaining yourself to yourself it is time to take a step back.
1. There is little evidence that introversion or extroversion are socialized conditions as your story suggests. We are who we are regardless of situation or upbringing as far as social proclivity. We can be taught to censor ourselves or act unnaturally in situations we would ordinarily retreat from. Do you feel like an extrovert in an introvert's body, or do you genuinely find social situations tiring? If your answer to the second situation is yes then you are probably really an introvert. Your story matches more closely with the research that suggests that personality types do not emerge until about ages 4-6 (perhaps early in your case, you are gifted after all). Before that we are all extroverted when very young with those we are close to because we do not draw a hard line between them and ourselves. If mommy is sad we are sad. If we are happy we assume mommy is. You probably were very extroverted to your family. But one wonders how you behaved with strangers.
2. As for your personal problems: Ugly, unAthletic, and Smart. I have my doubts about them. First of all we all were X, Y, and Z. Referring to the above, an awareness of the outside world is very slow in coming. We all think we are the ugliest kid, we all think everyone hates us. The extroverts don't care, the introverts find this debilitating. In second grade I sat next to a kid who had serious bowl problems and had to bring a change of clothes to school. He was very social and while everyone talked about his problems we all liked him. This kid was a quintessential extrovert (extroversion and introversion are most obvious before the onset of puberty when secondary personality traits move to the fore, at least temporarily). As to your particular problems boys are often expected to be smart and it is certainly rarely a trauma for them at least until they are middle school aged. Even then it is usually much worse for bright girls, at the same time as the cliques of nerds are developing girls find themselves alone and reviled by their peers. You may indeed have been ugly and that could have hurt. But probably not much until you were ready to date. Before that if you had been friendly and outgoing I doubt anyone would have noticed. You indicated your problems were much earlier than that. Ditto for athleticism, athleticism is very important as kids grow up. But the extreme differences in ability rarely emerge until puberty.
3. Home schooling. Many children come out of the home schooling system way ahead of their peers and uniquely prepared for the world they have to live in. These children are truly gifted and they are remarkable in that they are so unusual. Many if not most home schoolers are painfully maladjusted socially because they have been denied an opportunity to meet or integrate with their peers (not to mention they are often taught by teachers with little or no training). Your problems would, I suspect, have been much worse if you had not begun to deal with them until you were in high school or worse, college. Teachers make no attempt to construct society from scratch. We are social beings, we do not construct it put 10 of us in a room at any age and we ARE society. Spend some time in any kindergarten and you will be amazed at how faithful a reproduction of our greater world it is, often despite the teacher's best efforts.
Some recommendations: if you have a mentally gifted or challenged child make sure that he or she spends significant time with his or her age group. This will be painful for you and the child but these lessons will serve the child in good stead when he or she is away from the apron strings. This does not mean that you should not challenge the child academically. Age appropriate education is an unfortunate side effect of too few teachers for too many children. Go to any school for the gifted or challenged and you
I don't know about Napster but I find it easy to recode my AAC's from Apple's itunes music store as MP3's. Bye bye DRM.
So I called Comcast, my current provider did the math for them. I currently pay 58.02 per month (with fees) for Cable internet with 1.5Mb down. If I switch to Qwest it will be 28 for 1.5 down plus 7 for qwest.net and 3 for the modem.
.5mb worth $15?
The total is 38.00 plus fees. if we imagine there are five dollars in fees that's 43 a month.
Comcast @ 1.5Mb = 58/mo
Qwest @ 1.5Mb = 43/mo
for a $15 dollar savings.
I asked the Comcast rep (Jenna, she was very nice) what they provided that was worth $15. She said that Comcast was planning on moving up to 3Mb by next quarter (March). So now the question is: Is
I think I'm going to get both for the month of March and compare. I will make up the cost of this testing in 2 months of savings if I switch to Qwest.
I wonder if you could tell me a little more. I live in Denver and Comcast just doesn't seem that fast anymore. Help me understand the pricing. You say it costs $28 a month in your area but Qwest.net is only $7 + $3 for the modem. Is the other 18 your phone line. Are you really saying you would expect Naked DSL service to be $10/mo plus tax?
This is a classic ad Hom response. Instead of disputing a single one of the assertions these noble laureates have detailed regarding the administrations attacks against science. You urge us to consider the source. Yea, I don't like Bill Gates much either. But is he wrong when he says ""Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." No, that's a fact.
Whether Apple innovates in the hardware department is debatable. But they are pretty good fortune tellers. Let me count the tools they brought first to the home PC user.
.
.
.
1. 64 bit computing
2. Bluetooth
3. Firewire
4. 802.11b/g
5. USB
6. DVD/CD Writeable [got tired of linking]
100,000,000. SCSI
Why touch the mouse? I just hit backspace, or the right arrow.
I also differ with the differer: The 3 generation old phones are always available for free with a new service agreement. One usually has an oportunity for a new service agreement once a year. So you don't want to pay for these features? That's fine, wait 18 months and they will be free, then who cares.
I wonder if rule four isn't the reason why I enjoy using my mac. Ease of use and security are proportional.
"'Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac.' And this affects what system the music gets played on in what way?" Simple, mac users are a cult. Members of this cult will, as evidenced by their behavior, prefer an Apple product for any task if at all possible. Giving these musicians an opportunity to prefer Apple in their music distribution provides an opportunity for Apple to leverage that fact for their music store.
While it is certainly true that most post industrial countries all maintaining a stable birthrate or in fact declining this has long been the case. However you completely ignore Asia (esp. China and India) where this problem is already exceeding the resources to cope with it.
Population growth is proceeding at a geometric rate (the time it takes to double is halved every cycle) and without some pretty liberal assumptions about the future of medicine, fertility and cultural changes in the next 25 years in much of the world the situation is dire. I know where you got your last predictions either from theUN or Princeton but these, very optomistic numbers indicate that we will have twice as many people on the planet in 50 years, a very serious situation.
Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. -Jacques Cousteau
You have got to be kidding, "pushing our ability to communicate with each other closer to extinction." Language is not static, and never has been certainly coming up with creative spelling layering on double or triple meaning to words or phrases is indicative of a healthy ability to communicate.
Note that the educational discount is not available on any software in a phisical apple store. Guess I'm going to have to go online.
The sentiment that the internet will eradicate poverty is not only wrongheaded it can be dangerous. The internet is not a meaningful option to those who live in true poverty. Most of the people who live in our world do not have running water, a reliable food source and have a family member who has AIDS. The solutions to these problems are equally straight forward, provide or provide the tools to: bring them food, water, and medication/prophylactics. Education is certainly a key to prosperity but there is little the internet can offer those without food much less electricity. Now there are a limited amount of resources available to address the problems of poverty, limited at the UN, limited at OxFam, limited at MIT. What then should they invest their money in if the goal is eradicating poverty? While the answer may seem obvious there is real money being shifted from providing plumbing, etc, to providing information infrastructures in non industrialized nations (and if you think the last mile problem is bad here!) this shift takes real food, water and medicine away from real people and replaces it with an ethereal benefit that makes some people, especially in this country a bit more wealthy.
Wired readers out there will recall a recent profile of Barry Diller documenting the potential strength of Universal Music for the right investor. They might also remember a recent article about how schizophrenic Sony has become (they actually sued themselves- the music division sued an investment of the hardware division) in its CEO's quest to bring the music and hardware parts of the company together. Sony's CEO believes that the future of that company lies in hardware (this is the company that finally set a standard for DVDs) but the only portion of the company that made any money last year was the music division. So there are no changing things at Sony right now. Both the head of Sony and the head of Apple (two of the most innovative technology powerhouses ever) believe that bringing music and technology together is the future. I am inclined to defer to their judgment. If they are right and if Apple can score this deal before Sony can sort out its internal disputes. Soon Apple may take Sony's place in the market. They are already selling more music players than Sony.