Stakeouts and trailing cars don't require a warrant. If the police want to hang out on your street all day and follow you around, they can do that. This issue was discussed when the court was ruling on whether GPS tracking required a warrant.
So the courts WOULD be sympathetic if
they posted someone in a car right outside of your door to follow you whenever you leave your property
The difference is that stakeouts/surveillance require proactive, labor intensive activity (you need 1 or more people to follow an identified target) and newer methods are wide nets that capture everybody preemptively.
I'm not pro-big brother, but in general what happens on public roads (and in view of public roads) is considered fair game. What is changing is the ability to capture and store that information on a large scale, and the impacts on personal privacy.
The nice part of eMusic was that it was like crawling through the bargain bins at a record store... you pay $5 for 20 CDs, and if 2 of them are any good, you got a good deal.
A lot of whats on eMusic is utter crap (on the site because it has no other channels of distribution), not worth the $0.04 of hard drive space it takes up. And that was OK, because there's some good stuff in there, too. With unlimited downloads and a little paitience you could download 30 albums in a month and keep the 3-10 that didn't suck.
True, it has some good back catalogs (Epitaph, Lookout!, CCR), but it also has a lot of 2nd and 3rd rate stuff by 1st rate artists, especially in the jazz section, and how do you pick which of the 15 Miles Davis records is worth keeping? You donwload them all and listen.
Now, I am guilty, as I'm sure many of you were of hammering the site from time to time (especially as my subscription was ending). And maybe limits of some kind are in order.. but 40 tracks? Thats ONE A.C. album, which I was happy to check out under the unlimited plan (funny song names, crappy songs), but would be the only thing I'd be able to get in a month under the new plan. Same goes for a lot of the spoken word stuff... You couldn't even download ONE George Carlin double CD.
Sadly, this will be the death of a once good service
When I read a video game review, what I want is the answer to the question "Is it worth playing?".
Since print media is a non-interactive experience, and the author will be writing for many readers, the answer to the question is more than yes or no. However, it is still possible to describe a subjective experience in a way that will inform me what my experience is likely to be.
The author of this article appears to think that game criticism should be deeper; it should tie together ideas from all over the cultural spectrum the way that movie, music, or literature reviews can...
The only problem with this idea is that this is not yet how video games are developed. Movies have been around for almost 100 years, and have been gone through many periods of experimentation and cycles of influence. Literature and music have been around for thousands of years, and are universal, and touch almost every person in every culture, from world leaders to the poorest peasants.
The reason video game criticism is not yet up to par with the criticism for the other media is that video games are not as advanced as these other forms of expression. 15 years ago, the idea of reading into the cultural implications of first generation Nintendo games would have been laughable (challenge: write a serious Ebert-style critique of Space Invaders).
Video games are primarily pop-culture at this point, made by large production houses for the purpose of making money. When indie games start reaching the relative level of influence of indie music, cinema, and literature, when the mainstream of video game culture is informed by the cutting-edge lunatic/geniuses of 10-20 years past, then the level of critcism will rise to match the artistic quality of the games.
Until then, just tell me how good the graphics and sound are, how much fun it is, and if its worth my $50 and time,
Here are some examples, both semi-plagiarized from various sources. Let's say you're writing a review of a piece of shit game - a veritable humor goldmine if ever there was one:
EXAMPLE ONE:
Ninja Assault's very premise is bullshit - everybody knows real ninjas don't use guns. Real ninjas run around on city streets in broad daylight making dogs explode with their swords.
EXAMPLE TWO:
Ninja Assault's graphics are nastier than the streak mark in Fran's Underoos.
Quick... wguess hich one is the "funny" one and which one is the "stupid" one?
Aren't these types of systems supposed to NOT be running Windows?
I'm pretty sure that Windows comes with a warning saying its not for air traffic control, nuclear plants, etc... so this may reach beyond "network guy incompetent - fire him" to "network guy criminally negligent - cane him"
Also, it is likely that MORE than half of the applications run on a Windows box are non-microsoft applications, that would mean that statistically MS apps crash more often than third party apps.
Ouch. Not to defend MS, but this is a horrible, horrible application of statistics and logic.
Start with the assumption that more than half of Windows apps are written by MS. You then assume that these applications are all equally likely to crash (you didn't say this step out loud, though).
You then discover, under this assumption, more crashes are caused by MS apps then other apps.
You then rearrange this statement (incorrectly) to say that this means that MS apps are more likely to crash - in direct contradiction of your unstated assumption! (The correct statement would be that crashes are more likely to be caused by an MS app, which is different than what you said).
Assume for a minute that MS apps account for 90% of the apps being run, and crash 5% of the time. Now assume the other 10% of the apps crash 40% of the time (an seemingly unreasonable number... but have you tried Adobe Reader 6.0?). MS apps would be responsible for 4.5 crashes per 100 applications, and the other would be responsible for 4 crashes per 100 applications. By your logic, this would make MS apps less stable than the others, even though they are in fact 8 times more stable.
I pray your job does not involve designing anything lifes depends on (medical equipment, anything in my car) - though by your grasp of numbers, I'd guess you were in marketing.
37% of all deaths occur in hospitals and medical facilities. This means 63% of deaths occur outside these facilities. Therefore people in hospitals are less likely to die than the general population... doesn't make any sense does it?
I'd reccommend Brian Jonestown Massacre (don't let the name scare you!)... bluesy, jammy, Stonesy stuff. You can find them in the usual places online, and at emusic (50 song free trial, too).
I'd also highly reccommend Townhall. They got a sloppy/tight groove kinda sound... and Allmusic likes 'em too.
I highly reccommend it. The only reason I stopped subscribing is because I had had downloaded their back catalog and wasn't finding too much new stuff, plus I already had downloaded more music than I could listen to.
The download speed is fast (took 5-10 minutes an album over DSL), and downloads are pretty close to unlimited. You have to use their download manager, which limits you to about 75 songs in the queue, so you can't load up 30 albums and go to bed (anymore). Also, as I was doing my last minute music grab before my subscription ran out, I got an email about too many downloads... something like 2000 songs in 2 weeks.
But if there's some music on there you like, I highly reccommend it. $45 for a 3 month subscription will get you 100's of albums.
I prefer listening to full albums, too. Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Fugazi, The Beatles, Nirvana, etc. all put together some great albums. On a good album theres a common theme running through it, an interplay between the songs that makes the individual songs even stronger.
If a band can only come up with 2 or 3 good songs and 10 to 12 of filler, they should wait until they have some more good songs, or just release an EP. Its also a good way to tell if a band is good or not; if they have 2 good songs, both produced by (insert superproducer here), and the rest don't, and suck... maybe the band just sucks.
Side note: when will rock producers start jumping to the front and getting top album billling like hip-hop producers?
Many people are confused by the jargon, but is there a way around it?
There are differences in procesor speeds; there needs to be named a unit of measure to discuss it. Ditto for hard drives sizes, and most other measurables.
Similarly, technologies need to be named too. DVRs exist; how would you tell your friends you got one if it didn't have a name? Its much easier to explain a definition once than to use the expanded definition each time. ("I just got a box that records TV shows, and I just programmed my box that records TV shows to record all my favorites, and its way better than your box that records TV shows" - substitute in DVR or a brand name like TiVo, and you have a much better sentence (note: pronouns would also work, but thats not the point))
But all these words are confusing. How about just picking one word for all units of measure and even technologies. I suggest "dot" in honor of/., and it has the advantages of being short, easily abbreviated as., and it rolls off the tongue.
For example: I just got a new dot player that stores 120 dots of music, which means I can listen to music for 20 straight dots!
Sounds like some profs/grad students with too much time on their hands. Sure, its a novel and interesting idea, but academia is not neccessarily concerned with practicality; they just want to do something fun.
How about giving the pilots shotguns or tasers and making the door to the cockpit a little more secure (an obvious step, which AFAIK has not been undertaken)? Most of the time there's a low-tech, brute force solution thats much cheaper, more reliable, and at least as effective as the newest in high-tech.
It sounds like when you "rent" a list, you don't actually see the list, but your mail gets sent anyway (through the party you're renting from). So technically, the list hasn't been sold, but the third party still gets to spam you (though they have to pay for each incident, which means it will probably be a bit more legit).
Its more like Pay-per-View (on TV with no VCR/TiVo/whatever recording device) than Blockbuster... you get your one shot, but after that you have nothing.
I see the power of this convergance coming in the area of distributed/swarm intelligence.
Imagine if we could program insects so that a swarm of ants behaved in an unnatural way that ended up being beneficial to its creators. As long as you could engineer a way for the programs to propagate to the new ants, you'd have a self-propagating supply of robots. Imagine if they were set to build structure instead of their usual hills. Or they could gather food (allright, that would be a little gross).
I think nanotech is headed in this direction anyway, and one of the main limits (for a while at least) is going to be the difficultly of making enough little critters. Self replicating silicon is a pain in the ass. Self replicating carbon is pretty much out of control, and provides an easy platform to piggyback on.
My only point is that is irrational to claim that illegal downloading does not impact on sales. It is blindingly obvious that some people will buy less music if they can get the same thing free or very cheap. And for sure there is not a counter-balancing volume of people out there who are buying more because of illegal copying.
No, its not obvious. If you run the numbers, you could make a case that major record labels are selling more... they are putting out less albums, and their sales declined at a slower rate than the number of products (See here).
The flip side of the everybody "stealing" music coin, is that people are waaay more into music. So maybe the average person used to buy 5 CDs a year and copy 5 from their friends. Now, they may copy 50 off the internet and buy 10. While this is a drop from buying 50% of their albums to 15%, their actual purchases doubled. To demand that they actually buy the other 50 will NOT result in 50 more sales; it will result in a drop of 5.
Think about it... if all you heard was the music on the radio would you buy ANY cds?
VS Ramachandran also wrote a book called "Phantoms of the Brain" which is in many ways similar to the article. What is impressive about his work is how low-tech and amazingly simple some of the experiements are. For example, the 2's and 5's experiment basically proves that this is a real phenomena, and can literally be done with things you find around the house (or even a pre-school classroom).
In "Phantoms in the Brain" he explores phantom limbs as mechanism to explore the brain, much as he synesthesia here. Incredibly, the most effective cure he found was a mirror.
Ramachandran's work is a great example of how complex systems (and I don't think there are (m)any systems more complex than the human brain) can be explored with very simple, creative approaches. By having people look at the pictures, he has found out more about the brain than years of cutting them up would ever reveal.
Actually we have leap year because the length of a day (the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis) does not go evenly into a year (the amount of time it takes the Earth to go around the sun).
A year is 365.24 days, and its convienient to have New Years at midnight every Dec. 31st, so every 4 years we add a day to account for the time we ignored the previous 3 years. The extensions of the rule exist to account for the fact that its not exactly 1/4 day off.
As for the clocks, the government tells us what time it is (See here and here). Everybody else is pretty much responsible for synchronizing to that time on their own... you adjust your personal timepieces when you start missing TV shows, being late for work, etc. For the most part, its a collective agreement (we had time/timepieces before the US government) and people adjust to an equilibrium because they have to coordinate activities.
I've signed up for an subscription service, emusic, that does it right.
Its cheaper than this AOL crap, and allows unlimited downloads and unrestricted use of the music.
The downside is that it doesn't have Top 40 type stuff, and all files are 128kB/s, but they got tons of good music if you're willing to dig a little. (It helps if you're into jazz and/or punk).
I just wanted to bring them up as an example of a site doing it right, and worth checking out. I signed up not on principle, but because they had a bunch of albums I wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
So the courts WOULD be sympathetic if
they posted someone in a car right outside of your door to follow you whenever you leave your property
The difference is that stakeouts/surveillance require proactive, labor intensive activity (you need 1 or more people to follow an identified target) and newer methods are wide nets that capture everybody preemptively.
I'm not pro-big brother, but in general what happens on public roads (and in view of public roads) is considered fair game. What is changing is the ability to capture and store that information on a large scale, and the impacts on personal privacy.
Mayor Bloomberg also announced that police would be "stop and frisk"ing individuals with a BMI over 30 to search for contraband oversized sodas.
A lot of whats on eMusic is utter crap (on the site because it has no other channels of distribution), not worth the $0.04 of hard drive space it takes up. And that was OK, because there's some good stuff in there, too. With unlimited downloads and a little paitience you could download 30 albums in a month and keep the 3-10 that didn't suck.
True, it has some good back catalogs (Epitaph, Lookout!, CCR), but it also has a lot of 2nd and 3rd rate stuff by 1st rate artists, especially in the jazz section, and how do you pick which of the 15 Miles Davis records is worth keeping? You donwload them all and listen.
Now, I am guilty, as I'm sure many of you were of hammering the site from time to time (especially as my subscription was ending). And maybe limits of some kind are in order.. but 40 tracks? Thats ONE A.C. album, which I was happy to check out under the unlimited plan (funny song names, crappy songs), but would be the only thing I'd be able to get in a month under the new plan. Same goes for a lot of the spoken word stuff... You couldn't even download ONE George Carlin double CD.
Sadly, this will be the death of a once good service
Since print media is a non-interactive experience, and the author will be writing for many readers, the answer to the question is more than yes or no. However, it is still possible to describe a subjective experience in a way that will inform me what my experience is likely to be.
The author of this article appears to think that game criticism should be deeper; it should tie together ideas from all over the cultural spectrum the way that movie, music, or literature reviews can...
The only problem with this idea is that this is not yet how video games are developed. Movies have been around for almost 100 years, and have been gone through many periods of experimentation and cycles of influence. Literature and music have been around for thousands of years, and are universal, and touch almost every person in every culture, from world leaders to the poorest peasants.
The reason video game criticism is not yet up to par with the criticism for the other media is that video games are not as advanced as these other forms of expression. 15 years ago, the idea of reading into the cultural implications of first generation Nintendo games would have been laughable (challenge: write a serious Ebert-style critique of Space Invaders).
Video games are primarily pop-culture at this point, made by large production houses for the purpose of making money. When indie games start reaching the relative level of influence of indie music, cinema, and literature, when the mainstream of video game culture is informed by the cutting-edge lunatic/geniuses of 10-20 years past, then the level of critcism will rise to match the artistic quality of the games.
Until then, just tell me how good the graphics and sound are, how much fun it is, and if its worth my $50 and time,
EXAMPLE ONE:
Ninja Assault's very premise is bullshit - everybody knows real ninjas don't use guns. Real ninjas run around on city streets in broad daylight making dogs explode with their swords.
EXAMPLE TWO:
Ninja Assault's graphics are nastier than the streak mark in Fran's Underoos.
Quick... wguess hich one is the "funny" one and which one is the "stupid" one?
(I got it wrong)
I'm pretty sure that Windows comes with a warning saying its not for air traffic control, nuclear plants, etc... so this may reach beyond "network guy incompetent - fire him" to "network guy criminally negligent - cane him"
Ouch. Not to defend MS, but this is a horrible, horrible application of statistics and logic.
Start with the assumption that more than half of Windows apps are written by MS. You then assume that these applications are all equally likely to crash (you didn't say this step out loud, though).
You then discover, under this assumption, more crashes are caused by MS apps then other apps.
You then rearrange this statement (incorrectly) to say that this means that MS apps are more likely to crash - in direct contradiction of your unstated assumption! (The correct statement would be that crashes are more likely to be caused by an MS app, which is different than what you said).
Assume for a minute that MS apps account for 90% of the apps being run, and crash 5% of the time. Now assume the other 10% of the apps crash 40% of the time (an seemingly unreasonable number... but have you tried Adobe Reader 6.0?). MS apps would be responsible for 4.5 crashes per 100 applications, and the other would be responsible for 4 crashes per 100 applications. By your logic, this would make MS apps less stable than the others, even though they are in fact 8 times more stable.
I pray your job does not involve designing anything lifes depends on (medical equipment, anything in my car) - though by your grasp of numbers, I'd guess you were in marketing.
37% of all deaths occur in hospitals and medical facilities. This means 63% of deaths occur outside these facilities. Therefore people in hospitals are less likely to die than the general population... doesn't make any sense does it?
I'd also highly reccommend Townhall. They got a sloppy/tight groove kinda sound... and Allmusic likes 'em too.
I highly reccommend it. The only reason I stopped subscribing is because I had had downloaded their back catalog and wasn't finding too much new stuff, plus I already had downloaded more music than I could listen to.
The download speed is fast (took 5-10 minutes an album over DSL), and downloads are pretty close to unlimited. You have to use their download manager, which limits you to about 75 songs in the queue, so you can't load up 30 albums and go to bed (anymore). Also, as I was doing my last minute music grab before my subscription ran out, I got an email about too many downloads... something like 2000 songs in 2 weeks.
But if there's some music on there you like, I highly reccommend it. $45 for a 3 month subscription will get you 100's of albums.
I prefer listening to full albums, too. Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Fugazi, The Beatles, Nirvana, etc. all put together some great albums. On a good album theres a common theme running through it, an interplay between the songs that makes the individual songs even stronger.
If a band can only come up with 2 or 3 good songs and 10 to 12 of filler, they should wait until they have some more good songs, or just release an EP. Its also a good way to tell if a band is good or not; if they have 2 good songs, both produced by (insert superproducer here), and the rest don't, and suck... maybe the band just sucks.
Side note: when will rock producers start jumping to the front and getting top album billling like hip-hop producers?
There are differences in procesor speeds; there needs to be named a unit of measure to discuss it. Ditto for hard drives sizes, and most other measurables.
Similarly, technologies need to be named too. DVRs exist; how would you tell your friends you got one if it didn't have a name? Its much easier to explain a definition once than to use the expanded definition each time. ("I just got a box that records TV shows, and I just programmed my box that records TV shows to record all my favorites, and its way better than your box that records TV shows" - substitute in DVR or a brand name like TiVo, and you have a much better sentence (note: pronouns would also work, but thats not the point))
But all these words are confusing. How about just picking one word for all units of measure and even technologies. I suggest "dot" in honor of /., and it has the advantages of being short, easily abbreviated as ., and it rolls off the tongue.
For example: I just got a new dot player that stores 120 dots of music, which means I can listen to music for 20 straight dots!
How about giving the pilots shotguns or tasers and making the door to the cockpit a little more secure (an obvious step, which AFAIK has not been undertaken)? Most of the time there's a low-tech, brute force solution thats much cheaper, more reliable, and at least as effective as the newest in high-tech.
Its more like Pay-per-View (on TV with no VCR/TiVo/whatever recording device) than Blockbuster... you get your one shot, but after that you have nothing.
If you "rent" my list from me, it means that I don't give you my list, but instead send the mail on your behalf.
This means that you don't get to keep, or even see my data, but every one on my list still gets spammed.
Imagine if we could program insects so that a swarm of ants behaved in an unnatural way that ended up being beneficial to its creators. As long as you could engineer a way for the programs to propagate to the new ants, you'd have a self-propagating supply of robots. Imagine if they were set to build structure instead of their usual hills. Or they could gather food (allright, that would be a little gross).
I think nanotech is headed in this direction anyway, and one of the main limits (for a while at least) is going to be the difficultly of making enough little critters. Self replicating silicon is a pain in the ass. Self replicating carbon is pretty much out of control, and provides an easy platform to piggyback on.
No, its not obvious. If you run the numbers, you could make a case that major record labels are selling more... they are putting out less albums, and their sales declined at a slower rate than the number of products (See here).
The flip side of the everybody "stealing" music coin, is that people are waaay more into music. So maybe the average person used to buy 5 CDs a year and copy 5 from their friends. Now, they may copy 50 off the internet and buy 10. While this is a drop from buying 50% of their albums to 15%, their actual purchases doubled. To demand that they actually buy the other 50 will NOT result in 50 more sales; it will result in a drop of 5.
Think about it... if all you heard was the music on the radio would you buy ANY cds?
It means that they aren't making any money off of it.
In "Phantoms in the Brain" he explores phantom limbs as mechanism to explore the brain, much as he synesthesia here. Incredibly, the most effective cure he found was a mirror.
Ramachandran's work is a great example of how complex systems (and I don't think there are (m)any systems more complex than the human brain) can be explored with very simple, creative approaches. By having people look at the pictures, he has found out more about the brain than years of cutting them up would ever reveal.
A year is 365.24 days, and its convienient to have New Years at midnight every Dec. 31st, so every 4 years we add a day to account for the time we ignored the previous 3 years. The extensions of the rule exist to account for the fact that its not exactly 1/4 day off.
As for the clocks, the government tells us what time it is (See here and here). Everybody else is pretty much responsible for synchronizing to that time on their own... you adjust your personal timepieces when you start missing TV shows, being late for work, etc. For the most part, its a collective agreement (we had time/timepieces before the US government) and people adjust to an equilibrium because they have to coordinate activities.
Its cheaper than this AOL crap, and allows unlimited downloads and unrestricted use of the music.
The downside is that it doesn't have Top 40 type stuff, and all files are 128kB/s, but they got tons of good music if you're willing to dig a little. (It helps if you're into jazz and/or punk).
I just wanted to bring them up as an example of a site doing it right, and worth checking out. I signed up not on principle, but because they had a bunch of albums I wanted.