I am proud to announce that following the success of the X-Prize initiative, I will be rewarding a Y-Prize for the further development of space travel.
To win, you must successfully and safely trasport a person to mars and bring them back alive. Private individual entries only, please. And the prize: one HUNDRED dollars. Heck, I'll make it American dollars instead of Canadian.
This reminds me of the Magnus-Opus project.
http://www.magnus-opus.com/index1.html
Basically, they wrote a piece of music that contains every possible phone number in Austrailia. The tones made by a touch-tone phone in dialing a number are now copyrighted. When you call someone, you are performing one of their songs and must pay for a compulsory licence. It was a great idea to poke fun at the absurdity of copyright laws. (And it is a fun read too.)
Too much of the American research investment has simply been pirated by other nations (China for one) with little or nothing given in return.
How do you propose to keep it hidden? Patents? Copyrights? Patents don't have to be respected. Copyrights (the barrier that this NIH initiative would remove) have likewise proven ineffectual. You can't just lock up the knowledge and expect progress to continue apace. Secret programs only have so many eyes examining a problem. They exist unaware of related efforts.
I also think you ignore two important facts in your post. First, we import a lot of bright people from China and the rest of the world. Many of them stay here as scientists. We might give out their work for free, but the raw materials (bright kids) flock to our borders. Second, advances in research take time and talent to understand. It isn't like copying a CD. The group that made the progress can teach others about their work much faster than "freeloaders" overseas can figure it out. If the freeloaders really can extract useful information so quickly, they have almost certainly been involved in a similar problem themselves. As long as they publish, their work becomes everyone's too.
We've already given the industrialized (and wannabe-industrialized) nations of the world quite a leg up in the past century.
How? By taking their resources? By forcing them to adhere to IP treaties our own nation wouldn't have followed at it's birth? By arranging coups, fixing elections, and generally working on having friendly corrupt governments availible to us around the world? Study the history of Central America in the 20th century for good examples: Guatamala, Panama, El Salvador...
Certainly, forces in our goverment have acted with altruism, charity, and general good-will toward others. But the pattern of colonialism is writ large across history. It may not be deliberate, but neither was the beginnings of the Roman Empire. Rome never intended to have extended possessions and provinces, but after a while, they were trapped by the land-for-military-service arrangement.
Peer reviewers aren't paid. In my field (physics), journals typically require the author of the paper to submit it in LaTeX format, using a set of LaTeX macros that are defined by the journal. The journal does absolutely zero work in cleaning up the paper and getting it ready to go in the journal.
That's the way it is my my field too (math). The print journals are yesterday's way of paying organizers to setup peer review systems. Now they exist to tax research institutions with subscription costs. No one wants to photocopy articles out of a journal. They get the preprint online. There are other electronic preprint archives, such as the Stanford one.
The essential problem is to pay an administrator to parcel out reviewing assignments to researchers. These people could be effectively funded by a coalition of universities, because god knows they'll get that money from government grants anyway.
...to the open source model. Games are the ultimate commodity software. Some might have lasting appeal, but most people are looking for a new game every 3-6 months. It's not like a word processor, where the old versions are good and the newer ones questionably better. Old games can lose their sparkle. Novelty is very important.
Certainly some games are exceptions, true classics that will stay forever. But these are more like movie classics than software classics.
Parts of games could easily be designed by open-source cross-company teams. Engines are good candidates. But artwork? Dialog? Plot? No, this sort of content should be developed closed source. I'd rather be "tyranized by the author" when it comes to games. I don't want 1000 geeks tweeking the storyline. I want one person to set out a vision.
Well, as a teaching assistant at Duke, I speculatethere are three main reasons this was done. First, despite a successful recent campaign, the University is broke. Now, the Med school, the Buisness school, the Graduate school, and the Engineering school are fine, but the general fund is rumored to be dry. Publicity stunts like this might be trying to recruit more students so the school can make some extra cash on tuition. Second, I think those responsible for the technology fund this came out of are so out of touch that they thought iPods could reduce the rate of music piracy at Duke via ITMS. Concern about University liability is rising. Third, iPods are pretty good firewire drives. If the computer labs are setup properly, this could be an easy way to allow students to port data around campus.
Of course, Duke's campus is wooded and relatively dark at night. The rates of violent crimes (sexual and otherwise) against students are fairly high. Giving the freshmen "mug me" earphones won't help.
I still feel it is the best RPG released to date for the PC...
I have to disagree. While I liked the game well enough, it was no Fallout 2, or Planscape: Torment for that matter.
I rather liked playing nonpersistant worlds with two or three friends. Small party adventures and the like -- no other game I've played has had that before. The real problem with NWN was that its hard to make content for RPGs. At least if you're making a FPS mod, the difficulties are largely technical (modeling, coding). The specifics of the rules for the mod can usually be adjusted easily. For an RPG, there's lots and lots of writing to do. You need good dialog (very hard), a good story (medium hard), and a proper anticipation of the player's response (virtually impossible). Technical problems usually yield to incremental approaches, creative problems have no such strategy. Ultimately, I think this is why there were so few good player mods of NWN.
The author already pays several dollars a page to publish in most academic journals. The universities pay big dollars for subscriptions, but they all know that the researchers don't care for the whole journal, they just want the article relating to their work -- something they'll get from the online repository since photocopying out of journals sucks. Now, all of this money pays for editors (the reviewers are junior faculty working for free) and to line the pockets of the publishing firms.
Journals are buisnesses, as you say, and that's the problem. They are out for money and provide little except editorial support that could be had more cheaply through professional organization. The incentive to publish the best work will come from prestige. Online journals need it as much as anyone else.
There are other factors too. A clean keyboard, mouse, and monitor will lead me to pick one machine over another. The only thing worse than skicky keys is wondering how they got sticky in the first place.
Also chairs: Most colleges seem to buy "computer chairs" made out of stamped metal, cardboard, and good wishes. They have wheels that will break befor they roll, height adjustments that are stuck in the lowest position, and back adjustments that break so as to leave pieces of metal poking you in the back. I'd rather have one well-built wooden chair than a succession of cheap-ass "computer chairs", no matter how they are padded. And I'd pick my computer based on the chair as well.
Also tables: They aren't all level, and that really sucks. Nothing worse than seasickeness as the monitor sways too and fro as you lean over to use the mouse. You might be able to snag another chair to put in front of your favorite keyboard, but good luck switching tables. (yeah, yeah, just switch keyboards -- but the lab assistants look at you funny when you do that.)
You haven't used a modern distro, it seems. They come with stock kernels. When upgrades happen, a new stock kernel is pushed to you from yum or up2date or apt (systems for keeping software current on different distros). You should only compile your own kernel if:
1) you're running on a specialized box and want to maximize performance (server, number cruncher, etc)
2) You're a hobbiest who wants a tuned system.
Note that (1) isn't really necessary. You'll get a kernel that's specialized to your processor after install. And (2), well, just because the geeks do it doesn't mean you have to. The performance increases you get are generally modest.
If that's too hard, work is being done on drag an drop folder-based installation via "zero-install" on ROX. That's the thing with linux. The feature you want probably exists, but it exists in multiple forms and without polish everywhere. Zero-install might not be bullet proof, apt may be too obscure for you (dunno why, though), but it's all there.
I think that you might be too hung-up on that crazy windows model of software installation where you search the web for.zip files, then run an autoinstaller and pray it doesn't hose your system. At least with apt, there's a layer of smart folks who check out the packages for bugs before you use them. Really, I think that linux does the install thing better than windows. Now, Mac OS might have us beat, but we're catching up.
Really? More wars between 1991-2004 than 1945-1990? I don't see how. List them for me. Here's my list for the larger time-frame:
Cambodia Vietnam Guatamala Panama Grenada C uba (x2 if you count the Bay of Pigs) Indonesia Congo Algeria Israel (x2) Iran-Iraq Columbia (ongoing) Falkan Islands war Chinese revolution (ongoing after WWII, remember)
I'll admit to not knwoing enough South American or Subsahran African history to properly cover the wars there. But remember: just because something is a "low intensity" conflict doesn't mean you want to go vacation in that country.
The dipolar world of the cold war had its share of troubles, but they were expressed as wars between client states, revolutions funded from abroad, and other such dirty tricks. I don't think these things make the world safer.
How do you like our 192 lasers, Mr. Hydrogen Pellet? Yeah, that's one-nine-two. You better be fusing, bitch! Don't make me get the 193rd laser from my car.
Focused laser fusion is so absurd. I hope it works, but the whole scheme seems so... unsustainable. I mean, how do you keep things fusing while you extract the energy? The answer is probably more lasers.
The biggest question in my mind, is just how much support are publishers going to give this thing? Judging from ebook platforms of the recent past, probably not much.
There are lots of.txt books floating around the p2p scene. Even if it is difficult to "rip" a book, the collective ation of the internet says that only one person has to do the work for the efforts to be availible to all. If the book-reader is so much better than the dead-tree paradigm, then the readers will make it standard. It's just like mp3's -- add value over a CD (no more heavy cd case, hours of music w/o moving a muscle) and the technology took off. With the ebook, the right device could lead to mass downloading of searchable, lightweight books. No more having to lug two novels through the airport because you're almost done with one. The publishers can either jump on board or run around screaming and suing (the RIAA strategem).
I think the textbook manufacturers have the most to fear. College kids are very sensitive to their book bills. Saving $100 on a book for a non-major class seems too good to pass up. Combine this with easy internet access and a nice device to let you take your electronic book to class, the cafe, or to a sudy group, and you have just undercut prentice hall, wiley, and thre rest of the big players.
The Adblock extension does all of this in one nice package. It adds transparent tabs to the edge of flash obejects that you can click on to block the source. In addition, the old exclamation point in the lower left of the screen (it told you about blocked popups) is replaced with the adblock button. Click on that and it pulls up a list of all blockable objects on the page with blocked ones written in red. You can write filters to eliminate objects with regular expression, so you can block some of the images from a domain instead of all. Eliminated objects are prevented from loading too, not just displaying.
These features aren't revolutionary. Your tools do all of these things. But Adblock puts them all in one nice package with a good interface.
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#adbloc k
You got me. But I've taken a history of math course or two as well. I doubt Cardan would be writing to Newton (the whole being dead when he was alive thing really makes that hard), but his solution to the cubic was a corner case in public math.
There was actually a time that math knowledge was secret. Life has since improved.
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this university in Cambridge. You came up to me and told me how the math I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is a mystical secret where people need to be inducted into a secret soceity to use it and those who divulge it are killed. Unfortunately I don't have your letter, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and - most importantly about your future.
When I was young - like you now - I was also at university and was pursing a natural philosophy degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about mathematics as a humanitarian discipline. And thought that I was the best mathematician in the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed derive some theorems that mattered and made a difference. The theory I spent some 3 years writing in algebra from when I was 18 was to solve a problem for my father's business. Because the business he's in requires a lot of interest calulations, he and my mother spent about 2-3 daily hours on average doing all of this stuff by hand. Using my theorem, that time went from 3 hours to about 15 minutes a day. That was math that absolutely improved the quality of life for the entire family! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn't sell many licenses at that time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 Brittish Pounds and that was a huge heap of money for me. Where did the money go? I can't really remember where it all went, but I guess "lot of partying" or "Girls, Drugs and Minuettes" would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that's what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1640 - let's fast forward to 1669 and you. All math that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been written. That's probably not true, but it's hard to think of something, right? Ok, the math may not be easy to understand with your notation and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing free math project you co-coordinate. I mean, really, the stuff that you and your buddies are doing with derivatives is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I'd probably do differently in terms of notation, but it works well and that's mostly what matters.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making any money out of this, because it is free and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
In the end, Newton, it's your choice. Do you want to have a horse, a house and a family when you are 30? Do you love being a Natural Philosopher at the same time? If so, you literally need to get a life. Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It's idiocy. It's bigotry. If you want to put your skills to work and you need to support a family, your work and work results can't be free. Math is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.
It looks like all of the clips have the wrong field order in their interlacing leading to jaggies around moving objects.
Anyway, I really liked the third place entry more than the second. It had a lot more information, if a bit fast paced. I found the second place entry confusing with loud lyrics and text on the screen simultaniously.
There's been some good competition in the console market with the last generation, and it's done a fine job of getting prices down and encouraging multi-platform releases. Both of these things seem good to me.
Now, I loves my gameboy, but it's time there was some serious competition in the handheld market. I mean, the SP, while nice, was incremental rather than innovative. Sony has the capital and experience to provide competition. Let's hope this raises the quality of the games and lowers the cost of the systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I am proud to announce that following the success of the X-Prize initiative, I will be rewarding a Y-Prize for the further development of space travel. To win, you must successfully and safely trasport a person to mars and bring them back alive. Private individual entries only, please. And the prize: one HUNDRED dollars. Heck, I'll make it American dollars instead of Canadian.
This reminds me of the Magnus-Opus project. http://www.magnus-opus.com/index1.html
Basically, they wrote a piece of music that contains every possible phone number in Austrailia. The tones made by a touch-tone phone in dialing a number are now copyrighted. When you call someone, you are performing one of their songs and must pay for a compulsory licence. It was a great idea to poke fun at the absurdity of copyright laws. (And it is a fun read too.)
Indeed. Don't be fooled by cheap substitutes! Buy today.
Warning! Do not attempt to derive NME on your own. Blindness/Deafness/Sue-edness may occur.
How do you propose to keep it hidden? Patents? Copyrights? Patents don't have to be respected. Copyrights (the barrier that this NIH initiative would remove) have likewise proven ineffectual. You can't just lock up the knowledge and expect progress to continue apace. Secret programs only have so many eyes examining a problem. They exist unaware of related efforts.
I also think you ignore two important facts in your post. First, we import a lot of bright people from China and the rest of the world. Many of them stay here as scientists. We might give out their work for free, but the raw materials (bright kids) flock to our borders. Second, advances in research take time and talent to understand. It isn't like copying a CD. The group that made the progress can teach others about their work much faster than "freeloaders" overseas can figure it out. If the freeloaders really can extract useful information so quickly, they have almost certainly been involved in a similar problem themselves. As long as they publish, their work becomes everyone's too.
We've already given the industrialized (and wannabe-industrialized) nations of the world quite a leg up in the past century.
How? By taking their resources? By forcing them to adhere to IP treaties our own nation wouldn't have followed at it's birth? By arranging coups, fixing elections, and generally working on having friendly corrupt governments availible to us around the world? Study the history of Central America in the 20th century for good examples: Guatamala, Panama, El Salvador...
Certainly, forces in our goverment have acted with altruism, charity, and general good-will toward others. But the pattern of colonialism is writ large across history. It may not be deliberate, but neither was the beginnings of the Roman Empire. Rome never intended to have extended possessions and provinces, but after a while, they were trapped by the land-for-military-service arrangement.
That's the way it is my my field too (math). The print journals are yesterday's way of paying organizers to setup peer review systems. Now they exist to tax research institutions with subscription costs. No one wants to photocopy articles out of a journal. They get the preprint online. There are other electronic preprint archives, such as the Stanford one.
The essential problem is to pay an administrator to parcel out reviewing assignments to researchers. These people could be effectively funded by a coalition of universities, because god knows they'll get that money from government grants anyway.
...to the open source model. Games are the ultimate commodity software. Some might have lasting appeal, but most people are looking for a new game every 3-6 months. It's not like a word processor, where the old versions are good and the newer ones questionably better. Old games can lose their sparkle. Novelty is very important.
Certainly some games are exceptions, true classics that will stay forever. But these are more like movie classics than software classics.
Parts of games could easily be designed by open-source cross-company teams. Engines are good candidates. But artwork? Dialog? Plot? No, this sort of content should be developed closed source. I'd rather be "tyranized by the author" when it comes to games. I don't want 1000 geeks tweeking the storyline. I want one person to set out a vision.
Well, as a teaching assistant at Duke, I speculatethere are three main reasons this was done. First, despite a successful recent campaign, the University is broke. Now, the Med school, the Buisness school, the Graduate school, and the Engineering school are fine, but the general fund is rumored to be dry. Publicity stunts like this might be trying to recruit more students so the school can make some extra cash on tuition. Second, I think those responsible for the technology fund this came out of are so out of touch that they thought iPods could reduce the rate of music piracy at Duke via ITMS. Concern about University liability is rising. Third, iPods are pretty good firewire drives. If the computer labs are setup properly, this could be an easy way to allow students to port data around campus.
Of course, Duke's campus is wooded and relatively dark at night. The rates of violent crimes (sexual and otherwise) against students are fairly high. Giving the freshmen "mug me" earphones won't help.
Hey, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos. (Best commentary on American politics ever.)
Without a computer, how will a child sync his PDA or download new ringtones for his phone?
I have to disagree. While I liked the game well enough, it was no Fallout 2, or Planscape: Torment for that matter.
I rather liked playing nonpersistant worlds with two or three friends. Small party adventures and the like -- no other game I've played has had that before. The real problem with NWN was that its hard to make content for RPGs. At least if you're making a FPS mod, the difficulties are largely technical (modeling, coding). The specifics of the rules for the mod can usually be adjusted easily. For an RPG, there's lots and lots of writing to do. You need good dialog (very hard), a good story (medium hard), and a proper anticipation of the player's response (virtually impossible). Technical problems usually yield to incremental approaches, creative problems have no such strategy. Ultimately, I think this is why there were so few good player mods of NWN.
The author already pays several dollars a page to publish in most academic journals. The universities pay big dollars for subscriptions, but they all know that the researchers don't care for the whole journal, they just want the article relating to their work -- something they'll get from the online repository since photocopying out of journals sucks. Now, all of this money pays for editors (the reviewers are junior faculty working for free) and to line the pockets of the publishing firms.
Journals are buisnesses, as you say, and that's the problem. They are out for money and provide little except editorial support that could be had more cheaply through professional organization. The incentive to publish the best work will come from prestige. Online journals need it as much as anyone else.
Wake me when they make a rendering pipeline that corrects for bad story writing on the fly. That'd be useful.
There are other factors too. A clean keyboard, mouse, and monitor will lead me to pick one machine over another. The only thing worse than skicky keys is wondering how they got sticky in the first place.
Also chairs: Most colleges seem to buy "computer chairs" made out of stamped metal, cardboard, and good wishes. They have wheels that will break befor they roll, height adjustments that are stuck in the lowest position, and back adjustments that break so as to leave pieces of metal poking you in the back. I'd rather have one well-built wooden chair than a succession of cheap-ass "computer chairs", no matter how they are padded. And I'd pick my computer based on the chair as well.
Also tables: They aren't all level, and that really sucks. Nothing worse than seasickeness as the monitor sways too and fro as you lean over to use the mouse. You might be able to snag another chair to put in front of your favorite keyboard, but good luck switching tables. (yeah, yeah, just switch keyboards -- but the lab assistants look at you funny when you do that.)
You haven't used a modern distro, it seems. They come with stock kernels. When upgrades happen, a new stock kernel is pushed to you from yum or up2date or apt (systems for keeping software current on different distros). You should only compile your own kernel if: 1) you're running on a specialized box and want to maximize performance (server, number cruncher, etc) 2) You're a hobbiest who wants a tuned system. Note that (1) isn't really necessary. You'll get a kernel that's specialized to your processor after install. And (2), well, just because the geeks do it doesn't mean you have to. The performance increases you get are generally modest.
The apt solution:
.zip files, then run an autoinstaller and pray it doesn't hose your system. At least with apt, there's a layer of smart folks who check out the packages for bugs before you use them. Really, I think that linux does the install thing better than windows. Now, Mac OS might have us beat, but we're catching up.
apt-get remove [thingy]
If that's too hard, work is being done on drag an drop folder-based installation via "zero-install" on ROX. That's the thing with linux. The feature you want probably exists, but it exists in multiple forms and without polish everywhere. Zero-install might not be bullet proof, apt may be too obscure for you (dunno why, though), but it's all there.
I think that you might be too hung-up on that crazy windows model of software installation where you search the web for
Really? More wars between 1991-2004 than 1945-1990? I don't see how. List them for me. Here's my list for the larger time-frame:
C uba (x2 if you count the Bay of Pigs)
Cambodia
Vietnam
Guatamala
Panama
Grenada
Indonesia
Congo
Algeria
Israel (x2)
Iran-Iraq
Columbia (ongoing)
Falkan Islands war
Chinese revolution (ongoing after WWII, remember)
I'll admit to not knwoing enough South American or Subsahran African history to properly cover the wars there. But remember: just because something is a "low intensity" conflict doesn't mean you want to go vacation in that country.
The dipolar world of the cold war had its share of troubles, but they were expressed as wars between client states, revolutions funded from abroad, and other such dirty tricks. I don't think these things make the world safer.
How do you like our 192 lasers, Mr. Hydrogen Pellet? Yeah, that's one-nine-two. You better be fusing, bitch! Don't make me get the 193rd laser from my car.
... unsustainable. I mean, how do you keep things fusing while you extract the energy? The answer is probably more lasers.
Focused laser fusion is so absurd. I hope it works, but the whole scheme seems so
The biggest question in my mind, is just how much support are publishers going to give this thing? Judging from ebook platforms of the recent past, probably not much.
.txt books floating around the p2p scene. Even if it is difficult to "rip" a book, the collective ation of the internet says that only one person has to do the work for the efforts to be availible to all. If the book-reader is so much better than the dead-tree paradigm, then the readers will make it standard. It's just like mp3's -- add value over a CD (no more heavy cd case, hours of music w/o moving a muscle) and the technology took off. With the ebook, the right device could lead to mass downloading of searchable, lightweight books. No more having to lug two novels through the airport because you're almost done with one. The publishers can either jump on board or run around screaming and suing (the RIAA strategem).
There are lots of
I think the textbook manufacturers have the most to fear. College kids are very sensitive to their book bills. Saving $100 on a book for a non-major class seems too good to pass up. Combine this with easy internet access and a nice device to let you take your electronic book to class, the cafe, or to a sudy group, and you have just undercut prentice hall, wiley, and thre rest of the big players.
Hey! The BIOS and I have something in common!
SCO banks with First National Matress (FNM). They have a "Queen" sized account.
The Adblock extension does all of this in one nice package. It adds transparent tabs to the edge of flash obejects that you can click on to block the source. In addition, the old exclamation point in the lower left of the screen (it told you about blocked popups) is replaced with the adblock button. Click on that and it pulls up a list of all blockable objects on the page with blocked ones written in red. You can write filters to eliminate objects with regular expression, so you can block some of the images from a domain instead of all. Eliminated objects are prevented from loading too, not just displaying.
c k
These features aren't revolutionary. Your tools do all of these things. But Adblock puts them all in one nice package with a good interface.
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#adblo
You got me. But I've taken a history of math course or two as well. I doubt Cardan would be writing to Newton (the whole being dead when he was alive thing really makes that hard), but his solution to the cubic was a corner case in public math. There was actually a time that math knowledge was secret. Life has since improved.
Dear Newton,
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this university in Cambridge. You came up to me and told me how the math I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is a mystical secret where people need to be inducted into a secret soceity to use it and those who divulge it are killed. Unfortunately I don't have your letter, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and - most importantly about your future.
When I was young - like you now - I was also at university and was pursing a natural philosophy degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about mathematics as a humanitarian discipline. And thought that I was the best mathematician in the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed derive some theorems that mattered and made a difference. The theory I spent some 3 years writing in algebra from when I was 18 was to solve a problem for my father's business. Because the business he's in requires a lot of interest calulations, he and my mother spent about 2-3 daily hours on average doing all of this stuff by hand. Using my theorem, that time went from 3 hours to about 15 minutes a day. That was math that absolutely improved the quality of life for the entire family! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn't sell many licenses at that time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 Brittish Pounds and that was a huge heap of money for me. Where did the money go? I can't really remember where it all went, but I guess "lot of partying" or "Girls, Drugs and Minuettes" would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that's what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1640 - let's fast forward to 1669 and you. All math that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been written. That's probably not true, but it's hard to think of something, right? Ok, the math may not be easy to understand with your notation and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing free math project you co-coordinate. I mean, really, the stuff that you and your buddies are doing with derivatives is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I'd probably do differently in terms of notation, but it works well and that's mostly what matters.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making any money out of this, because it is free and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
In the end, Newton, it's your choice. Do you want to have a horse, a house and a family when you are 30? Do you love being a Natural Philosopher at the same time? If so, you literally need to get a life. Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It's idiocy. It's bigotry. If you want to put your skills to work and you need to support a family, your work and work results can't be free. Math is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.
With best wishes for your future
Cardan
It looks like all of the clips have the wrong field order in their interlacing leading to jaggies around moving objects.
Anyway, I really liked the third place entry more than the second. It had a lot more information, if a bit fast paced. I found the second place entry confusing with loud lyrics and text on the screen simultaniously.
There's been some good competition in the console market with the last generation, and it's done a fine job of getting prices down and encouraging multi-platform releases. Both of these things seem good to me.
Now, I loves my gameboy, but it's time there was some serious competition in the handheld market. I mean, the SP, while nice, was incremental rather than innovative. Sony has the capital and experience to provide competition. Let's hope this raises the quality of the games and lowers the cost of the systems.