I think the best example of this I can think of is my experience in various coffee shops around Nashville. Generally, most the laptops folks are using are PC's. But there are a couple (usually close to the universities) where it's not unusual to see 7 iBooks and Powerbooks and only one or two PCs.
It's similar for departments at the college I went to - most were PC-oriented, but in a few almost all the professors used Macs, and almost all the Linux-using faculty lived in the Math and CS dept. (Fancy that.)
None of this changed the fact that well over 90% of the computers on campus were running Windows.
I love my iPod and all, but what I really want you to do, Apple, is to bring back the UI research team. Don't forget what made your users so devoted in the first place, Steve-o.
For-fee wireless is going to die out very quickly. It can't survive at Starbucks and the like because free wireless is already becoming something that you can practically expect an independent coffee shop to have. It can't survive at McD's because some of its competitors are already offering free wireless at all locations, as are some restaurants. It can't survive at the park because once folks realize that they can get free wireless almost everywhere else, they'll go back to toying with their computers indoors and using the park for playing frisbee and such.
I have no clue why Borders and T-Mobile think I would be willing to sit down with a cup of crappy Borders coffee and pay anything from $6/hour to $30/mo (with contract) or $40/mo (w/o contract) for wireless access.
For one, I'm already paying $30/mo for broadband at home, so I can just make my own coffee and use my own internet access. My kitchen has a better atmosphere, anyway.
For two, they are competing with a whole slew of independent or small roaster coffee shops that offer better coffee, are much more comfortable, and offer free wireless.
It is cool to see this device come out, although I have to say I feel the design is a bit half-assed.
Action games are going to be difficult to play, especially since you can only press one button at a time. This device is definitely best for RPG's and strategy games - which is not a negative in and of itself. It does become one when you realize that this system only gives you access to 9 of the 10 buttons on a GBA. A lot of strategy games use the 'select' button, and most of them don't let you remap the controls so that you could use some other button instead.
If you say that all natural numbers (and thus all digital information) is public domain, you've created a system where software, music, movie, etc. piracy does not exist, and copyright does not apply to any works that are distributed in a digital format of some kind.
So suddenly, companies will decide that the only way that they can ensure the sale of art/secrets is to form some sort of uber-DRM system - probably one where a specific 'natural number' will only be playable using one specific hardware device, or will somehow otherwise only work for one person or household.
Once you start talking about digital artworks, it gets harder to make the argument that it exists a priori just because all digital art can be mapped onto the natural numbers. For one, a string of bits could represent a theoretically infinite number of different digital artworks, depending on how you interpret that string of bits. Is it a picture? Is it compressed audio? Are you supposed to just look at the bits and admire their sublime bit-ness?
So it would seem that the art isn't just the number, it's also in the technique for interpreting the number - which isn't in the number. (And can't be in the number, because how would you interpret the portion of the number that tells you how to interpret the number?) If you don't have this technique (and know that you need to apply it), the number is just a number, and nothing else.
So unless you can successfully find a way to mechanically generate all possible ways to interpret this data, I'm not sure you'll be all that successful in getting this stuff into the public domain.
Agreed, although I would point out that (at least in the USA), rural areas are even worse for people power than urban areas. Many of the cities I've been to are very good about setting up bike routes and lanes, and I've seen bus systems with racks so you can do a combination of bike and bus for your transportation. I think cities are starting to see what an amazing thing it can be for your traffic grid to encourage people to ride 10 blocks to the store rather than driving.
WTF!? How can a process whose "low-level" waste remains hazardous for hundreds of years possibly be called clean and safe? Risks can be mitigated, can you really make any guarantees? And the real nasty stuff like Pu-239, are you really willing to say that stuff is safe at all? On top of that, are you willing to guarantee that no nuclear reactor will ever develop any dangerous structural problems?
Besides, politics and business are a part of anything. You can't just say it's safe because only a couple groups of people make it dangerous, especially since they're the ones in charge of these things. If you're sitting in a room with a lunatic who is brandishing a gun, does it really make any sense to bother arguing that the gun is safe and it's just the guy holding it? Semantic arguments aren't going to change the situation one bit in either case.
(And to answer ahead of time: yeah, that's great, recycle it. Now we have U-233, so it's not like there's no nuclear waste, and the reprocessing process isn't exactly what I'd call clean. We were talking about clean fuel sources, right?)
Fair, but all power plants pollute. Hydroelectric alters waterways and damages river ecosystems. Windmills kill birds. After Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and with this whole barrlels-of-radioactive-waste-just-sitting-out-in- the-backyard problem that (at least American) nuke plants seem to have, I don't trust nuclear power (or rather, the people in charge of generating nuclear power) one bit. Solar is a net loss in energy, and tidal isn't that bad, but still alters ocean ecosystems.
All power plants pollute. Maybe not much compared to burning fossil fuels, but even the greenest power plant still pollutes orders of magnitude more than riding a bike.
These things are replacing regular bicycles, not cars. In a sense, they're like the equivalent of an SUV for folks who can't own a car for whatever reason.
A regular bicycle is greener than an electric bike in almost every way, from amount of materials consumed to the pollution involved in generating the electricity to power that bike to the horrible chemicals in the bike's batteries.
Where did everyone start getting this idea that anything that is electric is automatically the greenest alternative? Next I'm going to be hearing that it's better for the environment to paint your windows black because electric lighting is more environmentally sound than natural light.
The line of thinking isn't deep enough to get to that level. It's the same way of thinking that gets people to shop at Wal-Mart. To a limited degree, it's the same way of thinking that leads to there being so many people in America who think that the Vietnam War was the only war we shouldn't have gotten into.
This way of thinking is based on one core concept: might makes right. Granted, this concept doesn't usually present itself so bluntly - most folks have to put some lipstick and blush on it so it doesn't feel like a hopelessly crass opinion. So it becomes something like, "If they're so successful, they must be doing something right" or "They can't be that bad if so many people use their operating system."
Yeah, you can argue that "They can't be so bad if so many people use their OS, shop there, whatever" is completely different from "Might makes right," Really they're just about as different as the bin-packing problem and the map-coloring problem - that is, they look very different, but they're exactly the same in all the parts that count. (They're both NP-Complete.)
And when it all comes down to it, judging from some conversations I've had I'm pretty sure that the only reason people think about it this way is because the world is so full of shit like this that life is just easier to cope with if you think about things as little as possible. I doubt anyone even thinks hard enough to ever see the irony when they're sitting jobless on a park bench wondering how they're going to get their computer working again after that last virus and really wanting to mention to their friend that they think they figured out why their kid's education has taken a nosedive over the past few years, but afraid to do so because it's never a good idea to say you think the government might be at fault for something nowadays.
Methinks the trick is to get schools to use metric.
To me, all this transitioning seems half-hearted, since we're still raising our kids to prefer 'standard' units. If they're taught metric in schools first, then when they get to 'standard' they should immediately see it as the baneful monstrosity it is. Once they grow up, we'd finally have a public that prefers metric, and the transition would be easy.
Let's look at this from a clean air standpoint, since that's the big reason for the push for different car fuel technologies.
Aside from biodiesel, which doesn't seem to be getting any attention from auto manufacturers, our options are HEV, electric, and fuel cell. When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere. (From this standpoint, a hydrogen fuel cell isn't an energy source in itself so much as a fancy kind of battery.)
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Last I checked, coal is a hell of a lot dirtier than gasoline, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the cleaner fossil fuels we have, and probably will be for a long time.
With that in mind I ask if the fuel reformer / fuel cell combo is really cleaner, or is it just cleaner if you only need 10 feet of space surrounding your car to be cleaner and not all the air you breathe day to day.
Sure it's workable. All we have to do is quit cracking penis size jokes in public, and as a society sit down and agree that size doesn't matter because if it's really a problem, you can just go out and buy a strap-on. The result should hopefully be a huge self-esteem boost for guys who are on the edges of the bell curve, and they will no longer be so anxiety-ridden that all reason flies out the window. They will start to read their spam with skepticism, and stop believing claims about penis pills and pumps. they will then stop responding to these e-mails.
Then, and only then, will spam become unprofitable.
Where, oh where did the U.S. tax code become so fucked up in the first place?
Why do we have to tax everything under the sun, just because we can get away with taxing it? Wouldn't life be oh-so-much-easier if we had just an income tax, and maybe a value-added tax for corporations? We could sync it to income level like we do now, and we wouldn't have to feel guilty about taxing someone who is trying to support a family on $15,000 a year when they go out an buy FOOD.
Seriously, I think even Illinois could get a lot more revenue from cutting out all the loopholes and shelters in its tax code than it could from just adding more taxes.
Still, I think there's probably a better way to fingerprint an MP3 than MD5. Maybe something that can recognize two different MP3's recorded using different encoders of the same song are the same song.
Given that cornstarch and water is a shear-thickening fluid, and the vibration (at 15-25g no less) is certainly a shear force, this phenomenon is almost certainly due to the vibration causing the cornstarch and water to gain viscosity. This wouldn't necessarily give you a stable hole, though, so it's probably also helped by the cohesive forces in the fluid and some other effects, too.
I would guess that it's not that the scientists don't know why this is happening, just that their models aren't accurate/precise enough to predict it. Or maybe they left out some effect or force that is normally negligible in the models, but suddenly becomes important in this situation.
This system must be a completely different project than the one you're thinking of. It doesn't use SIRDS or anything like that; it appears to allow display through either a side-by-side stereogram or a red/blue 3d image.
The one iPaq (really a string of three of them - more later) I've had experience with was anything but rugged. In fact, the damn thing was so fault-prone the iPaq alone was all the convincing I needed to quit even thinking about switching away from Palm.
A bud of mine bought his iPaq about a year and a half ago. Twice since then, the iPaq has gone completely kaput - wouldn't turn on, couldn't be revived. He got it replaced both times, but a device that fails after 7 or 8 months of normal use isn't exactly what I call rugged. (He does take care of them, btw.) This current one isn't without problems, either - most annoying of all, it can't maintain a reliable 802.11b connection even from a few feet away from the WAP. That, and it's about due for its critical failure, too. We'll see in a month or two.
Americans have long thought they are smarter than Canadians because they have all sorts of things like numerous wars, less than five per cent of their original forest, and the Disney corporation.
Coincidentally, Canadians have long thought that they are smarter for the same reason.
Funny how the opposite is usually the case. Best example in my experience: FOSS libraries like oh, I don't know, GTK+ 1.2. The story generally goes like this: Start working with the libraries. Read the documentation. 10 minutes later, realize that the documentation is written for an old crufty 2-year-old version of the library that doesn't really work the same way as the current version, and that it wasn't even halfway complete for that version, either. Get annoyed, but start reading the source code. Realize that the people responsible for this project are huge fans of 'clever hacks' and have religious problems with commenting. Give up, go back to VisualStudio.NET.
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I think the best example of this I can think of is my experience in various coffee shops around Nashville. Generally, most the laptops folks are using are PC's. But there are a couple (usually close to the universities) where it's not unusual to see 7 iBooks and Powerbooks and only one or two PCs.
It's similar for departments at the college I went to - most were PC-oriented, but in a few almost all the professors used Macs, and almost all the Linux-using faculty lived in the Math and CS dept. (Fancy that.)
None of this changed the fact that well over 90% of the computers on campus were running Windows.
I love my iPod and all, but what I really want you to do, Apple, is to bring back the UI research team. Don't forget what made your users so devoted in the first place, Steve-o.
moof.
For-fee wireless is going to die out very quickly. It can't survive at Starbucks and the like because free wireless is already becoming something that you can practically expect an independent coffee shop to have. It can't survive at McD's because some of its competitors are already offering free wireless at all locations, as are some restaurants. It can't survive at the park because once folks realize that they can get free wireless almost everywhere else, they'll go back to toying with their computers indoors and using the park for playing frisbee and such.
I have no clue why Borders and T-Mobile think I would be willing to sit down with a cup of crappy Borders coffee and pay anything from $6/hour to $30/mo (with contract) or $40/mo (w/o contract) for wireless access.
For one, I'm already paying $30/mo for broadband at home, so I can just make my own coffee and use my own internet access. My kitchen has a better atmosphere, anyway.
For two, they are competing with a whole slew of independent or small roaster coffee shops that offer better coffee, are much more comfortable, and offer free wireless.
It is cool to see this device come out, although I have to say I feel the design is a bit half-assed.
Action games are going to be difficult to play, especially since you can only press one button at a time. This device is definitely best for RPG's and strategy games - which is not a negative in and of itself. It does become one when you realize that this system only gives you access to 9 of the 10 buttons on a GBA. A lot of strategy games use the 'select' button, and most of them don't let you remap the controls so that you could use some other button instead.
If you say that all natural numbers (and thus all digital information) is public domain, you've created a system where software, music, movie, etc. piracy does not exist, and copyright does not apply to any works that are distributed in a digital format of some kind.
So suddenly, companies will decide that the only way that they can ensure the sale of art/secrets is to form some sort of uber-DRM system - probably one where a specific 'natural number' will only be playable using one specific hardware device, or will somehow otherwise only work for one person or household.
Once you start talking about digital artworks, it gets harder to make the argument that it exists a priori just because all digital art can be mapped onto the natural numbers. For one, a string of bits could represent a theoretically infinite number of different digital artworks, depending on how you interpret that string of bits. Is it a picture? Is it compressed audio? Are you supposed to just look at the bits and admire their sublime bit-ness?
So it would seem that the art isn't just the number, it's also in the technique for interpreting the number - which isn't in the number. (And can't be in the number, because how would you interpret the portion of the number that tells you how to interpret the number?) If you don't have this technique (and know that you need to apply it), the number is just a number, and nothing else.
So unless you can successfully find a way to mechanically generate all possible ways to interpret this data, I'm not sure you'll be all that successful in getting this stuff into the public domain.
Agreed, although I would point out that (at least in the USA), rural areas are even worse for people power than urban areas. Many of the cities I've been to are very good about setting up bike routes and lanes, and I've seen bus systems with racks so you can do a combination of bike and bus for your transportation. I think cities are starting to see what an amazing thing it can be for your traffic grid to encourage people to ride 10 blocks to the store rather than driving.
WTF!? How can a process whose "low-level" waste remains hazardous for hundreds of years possibly be called clean and safe? Risks can be mitigated, can you really make any guarantees? And the real nasty stuff like Pu-239, are you really willing to say that stuff is safe at all? On top of that, are you willing to guarantee that no nuclear reactor will ever develop any dangerous structural problems?
Besides, politics and business are a part of anything. You can't just say it's safe because only a couple groups of people make it dangerous, especially since they're the ones in charge of these things. If you're sitting in a room with a lunatic who is brandishing a gun, does it really make any sense to bother arguing that the gun is safe and it's just the guy holding it? Semantic arguments aren't going to change the situation one bit in either case.
(And to answer ahead of time: yeah, that's great, recycle it. Now we have U-233, so it's not like there's no nuclear waste, and the reprocessing process isn't exactly what I'd call clean. We were talking about clean fuel sources, right?)
Fair, but all power plants pollute. Hydroelectric alters waterways and damages river ecosystems. Windmills kill birds. After Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and with this whole barrlels-of-radioactive-waste-just-sitting-out-in- the-backyard problem that (at least American) nuke plants seem to have, I don't trust nuclear power (or rather, the people in charge of generating nuclear power) one bit. Solar is a net loss in energy, and tidal isn't that bad, but still alters ocean ecosystems.
All power plants pollute. Maybe not much compared to burning fossil fuels, but even the greenest power plant still pollutes orders of magnitude more than riding a bike.
These things are replacing regular bicycles, not cars. In a sense, they're like the equivalent of an SUV for folks who can't own a car for whatever reason.
A regular bicycle is greener than an electric bike in almost every way, from amount of materials consumed to the pollution involved in generating the electricity to power that bike to the horrible chemicals in the bike's batteries.
Where did everyone start getting this idea that anything that is electric is automatically the greenest alternative? Next I'm going to be hearing that it's better for the environment to paint your windows black because electric lighting is more environmentally sound than natural light.
The line of thinking isn't deep enough to get to that level. It's the same way of thinking that gets people to shop at Wal-Mart. To a limited degree, it's the same way of thinking that leads to there being so many people in America who think that the Vietnam War was the only war we shouldn't have gotten into.
This way of thinking is based on one core concept: might makes right. Granted, this concept doesn't usually present itself so bluntly - most folks have to put some lipstick and blush on it so it doesn't feel like a hopelessly crass opinion. So it becomes something like, "If they're so successful, they must be doing something right" or "They can't be that bad if so many people use their operating system."
Yeah, you can argue that "They can't be so bad if so many people use their OS, shop there, whatever" is completely different from "Might makes right," Really they're just about as different as the bin-packing problem and the map-coloring problem - that is, they look very different, but they're exactly the same in all the parts that count. (They're both NP-Complete.)
And when it all comes down to it, judging from some conversations I've had I'm pretty sure that the only reason people think about it this way is because the world is so full of shit like this that life is just easier to cope with if you think about things as little as possible. I doubt anyone even thinks hard enough to ever see the irony when they're sitting jobless on a park bench wondering how they're going to get their computer working again after that last virus and really wanting to mention to their friend that they think they figured out why their kid's education has taken a nosedive over the past few years, but afraid to do so because it's never a good idea to say you think the government might be at fault for something nowadays.
you got me there. Screw 33cl; they can pry the pints out of my cold, dead hands.
Granted, that shouldn't take too long with how many pints I drink on a given night. . .
Methinks the trick is to get schools to use metric.
To me, all this transitioning seems half-hearted, since we're still raising our kids to prefer 'standard' units. If they're taught metric in schools first, then when they get to 'standard' they should immediately see it as the baneful monstrosity it is. Once they grow up, we'd finally have a public that prefers metric, and the transition would be easy.
I do D.O.T. contract work, and for me it means that everything I do is in this weird mix of Metric and English Standard.
Not that things have to be in both - that would be easy. Instead, some things are in one, others are in the other.
Let's look at this from a clean air standpoint, since that's the big reason for the push for different car fuel technologies.
Aside from biodiesel, which doesn't seem to be getting any attention from auto manufacturers, our options are HEV, electric, and fuel cell. When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere. (From this standpoint, a hydrogen fuel cell isn't an energy source in itself so much as a fancy kind of battery.)
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Last I checked, coal is a hell of a lot dirtier than gasoline, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the cleaner fossil fuels we have, and probably will be for a long time.
With that in mind I ask if the fuel reformer / fuel cell combo is really cleaner, or is it just cleaner if you only need 10 feet of space surrounding your car to be cleaner and not all the air you breathe day to day.
Sure it's workable. All we have to do is quit cracking penis size jokes in public, and as a society sit down and agree that size doesn't matter because if it's really a problem, you can just go out and buy a strap-on. The result should hopefully be a huge self-esteem boost for guys who are on the edges of the bell curve, and they will no longer be so anxiety-ridden that all reason flies out the window. They will start to read their spam with skepticism, and stop believing claims about penis pills and pumps. they will then stop responding to these e-mails.
Then, and only then, will spam become unprofitable.
Where, oh where did the U.S. tax code become so fucked up in the first place?
Why do we have to tax everything under the sun, just because we can get away with taxing it? Wouldn't life be oh-so-much-easier if we had just an income tax, and maybe a value-added tax for corporations? We could sync it to income level like we do now, and we wouldn't have to feel guilty about taxing someone who is trying to support a family on $15,000 a year when they go out an buy FOOD.
Seriously, I think even Illinois could get a lot more revenue from cutting out all the loopholes and shelters in its tax code than it could from just adding more taxes.
So don't checksum the ID3 tags.
Still, I think there's probably a better way to fingerprint an MP3 than MD5. Maybe something that can recognize two different MP3's recorded using different encoders of the same song are the same song.
Given that cornstarch and water is a shear-thickening fluid, and the vibration (at 15-25g no less) is certainly a shear force, this phenomenon is almost certainly due to the vibration causing the cornstarch and water to gain viscosity. This wouldn't necessarily give you a stable hole, though, so it's probably also helped by the cohesive forces in the fluid and some other effects, too.
I would guess that it's not that the scientists don't know why this is happening, just that their models aren't accurate/precise enough to predict it. Or maybe they left out some effect or force that is normally negligible in the models, but suddenly becomes important in this situation.
This system must be a completely different project than the one you're thinking of. It doesn't use SIRDS or anything like that; it appears to allow display through either a side-by-side stereogram or a red/blue 3d image.
The one iPaq (really a string of three of them - more later) I've had experience with was anything but rugged. In fact, the damn thing was so fault-prone the iPaq alone was all the convincing I needed to quit even thinking about switching away from Palm.
A bud of mine bought his iPaq about a year and a half ago. Twice since then, the iPaq has gone completely kaput - wouldn't turn on, couldn't be revived. He got it replaced both times, but a device that fails after 7 or 8 months of normal use isn't exactly what I call rugged. (He does take care of them, btw.) This current one isn't without problems, either - most annoying of all, it can't maintain a reliable 802.11b connection even from a few feet away from the WAP. That, and it's about due for its critical failure, too. We'll see in a month or two.
Americans have long thought they are smarter than Canadians because they have all sorts of things like numerous wars, less than five per cent of their original forest, and the Disney corporation.
Coincidentally, Canadians have long thought that they are smarter for the same reason.
(Apologies to Douglas Adams.)
Of course, this isn't really the opposite so much as further support for the argument. Qt is commercial software.
Funny how the opposite is usually the case. Best example in my experience: FOSS libraries like oh, I don't know, GTK+ 1.2. The story generally goes like this: Start working with the libraries. Read the documentation. 10 minutes later, realize that the documentation is written for an old crufty 2-year-old version of the library that doesn't really work the same way as the current version, and that it wasn't even halfway complete for that version, either. Get annoyed, but start reading the source code. Realize that the people responsible for this project are huge fans of 'clever hacks' and have religious problems with commenting. Give up, go back to VisualStudio.NET.