1. Huge vast amounts of Free Energy, courtesy of plate tectonics.
2. They are completely surrounded by all the water they could ever want.
All you have to do is drill down to the heat, use it to boil water to spin turbines, which then make electricity to crack the water to make the hydrogen. Done.
You heard it hear first. The amount of energy under Iceland and the Big Island is *insane*. Another good place to drill for heat would be the supervolcano at Yellowstone. Use the electricity generated there and you can pump in the water from most anywhere and crack it into H2. Also: by draining off some of the heat from the supervolcano, we might be able to prevent (or slow) the eventual eruption of that sucker.
In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
IIRC, AFAIK, etc. Queen Vicky was pushing daisies at that point, and the architecture that followed on and was rampant throughout was known as Edwardian, after her boy King Edward.
You note the lack of Tritium, and the long range problem of using lithium - what about Helium3? Last I heard there was like 1.1 million tons of the crap on the moon, which would last us all about 25,000 years or so.
I think that's why the Bush Junta is interested in a moonbase - to start mining the He3...
Some guy i nthe article who can't spell his name said:
Andru: The thing that I see as being the biggest issue going forward is DRM (digital rights management). iTunes has their DRM for their AAC files, while Microsoft has another for WMA. Of course, they are trying to make it easy with their PlaysForSure initiative. Sony has yet another for it's ATRAC files, and MP3 has none. Therefore, an iPod cannot play any WMA files, and nothing but an iPod can play Apple AAC files. Music purchased from Sony Connect can only be played on Sony digital audio players. Why all the confusion? Fine, we understand that the RIAA wants to protect it's property, but do they have to do it at the expense of causing mass confusion amongst casual music buyers? Even better, why can't these protected files just work across platforms? If you look at DVD's, there is one protection standard. We should have the same thing for our digital music. If there was an effective DRM solution out there, it would seem that the music stores would have no choice but to support it as it would ease the minds of the purchasers, thus bringing in more cash.
That's where it all hits the fan - DRM. If the RIAA wasn't such a greedy bunch of pigfuckers, we could all trade MP3s and get dinged for each trade (say, a dime per trade), and everyone would be happy. Napster had a system like that under works, and were ready to roll it out, then it was reduced to a smoke hole in the ground over in Redwood Shores.
Dime a Trade? I'd do it. Especially if a source got a rating (this way asshats who rip stuff at 64 mono, have clicky messy files, or are shills for the RIAA, can be avoided) like in EBay. You would have to use a specific client, and that client would be wired to your bank account. Everybody happy, and we could all use plain vanilla MP3s - no muss no fuss no chocolate mess.
With most of the layoffs coming from the Northern Virginia offices, what are their hopes for finding new jobs?
Ask the president for a job:
well mr president - it's the bees and the spiders again - they stole my food stamps and sold 'em to the rats, and I tried to get down to my car to honk the horn for help, but the snakes are guarding it for the cockroaches! I go back upstairs but the spiders have jammed the police lock - I AIN'T BEEN INSIDE FOR A WEEK!!! And I know my wife is sleeping with the bees!!!!
Could you state that as a question?
Well, SURE Mister President! WHERE CAN I GET A JOB?
Many busy executives ask me, "What about the job displacement market program in the city of the future?" Well, count on us to be there! [JIM] Because, if we're lucky, tomorrow, we'll never have to deal with questions like yours ever again.
There are several immersion programs in public schools here, and several private. In terms of French Schools, there's the French American International School, and the Lycee Laperouse. Downthe peninsula there is a German school.
this page has links to a bunch of language schools.
I completely agree with you on much of what you say. We have some rules that we keep a pretty tight lid on, and it allows us all to peacefully co-exist and spend time together as a family. (I'm typing this because she's having a bath right now, so it's "mommy time")
In most other ways, we're very liberal parents who want her to explore things that interest her. It's very likely that once broadcast goes HD, we won't upgrade - we'll get a projector, and then the only thing she can watch will be stuff she rents or borrows from school, the library, or friends. And it'll look GREAT.
But computer games are not something "we do", and frankly, she's shown very little interest in them. She'd truly rather use her imagination creating little worlds of her own, (today it was her orange froggy was going to marry Barbie, but the giant Clifford Dog came and mesed up the wedding, so the unicorns came and took them to the secret castle (aka her bedspread) so they could meet the Wonderful WItch played by another Barbie.
Frankly, I think that's a much better use of her time than twiddling dials in someone else's imagined world, and we encourge her imagination and critical thinking skills.
both of her computers are things she inherited from me. It's an old Pismo running OSX. Her desktop is an ancient iMac. She rarely uses either of them. She'd rather play with dolls.
as for some points, they seem quite american (no tv during dinner - as if it was a shock on the same level as 'no games ever').
I know - sad - innit? But damn - you wouldn't believe how many American Family plop themselves down in front of the TV and sit and watch the friggin box all night. And when they get up from the couch, they go to bed, and watch TV in bed. It's terrifying. Our neighbours do that. They have this big ass 50 some odd inch DLP TV set and they all sit around it, every night, eating god-knows-what. Then they all go to bed, and you can see little blue glows in each room. Pathetic.
I know what you mean, but when it comes to Play: She Goes Outside and Plays With Her Friends in the Backyard. We have a platform built into the hill behind us, and it's great - it's a castle, it's a boat, it's her magic play space, and they all have a blast.
We do play board games, usually on rainy weekends when there is nothing else to do. We also play card games - she's Deadly at UNO, and often beats us at Mille Bourne. I've been teaching her seven card stud poker, too. She liked it for about a month, and then gave up on it.
She also likes to play keyboards and musical instruments, and that is also something we encourage. She picked out Auld Lang Syne on the xylophone the other day, and she's been beating out Frere Jacques and twinkle Twinkle little star for a few months now.
Mom's a programmer, and I'm almost always in front of the screen doing somethign creative, so it's not like she doesn't have a positive notion of the machines...
We send her to a French School. Her week is 80% French and 20% English.
The only way to really learn another language is through immersion. Since English has a German-like structure, we wanted her to get a Romance Language knowledge, so she could then go to other languages in Europe with ease (From French to Spanish and Italian, from English over to German or dutch).
It's really important to learn another language, especially as the Empire collapses - it'll be a distinct survival skill to be able to speak diffreent languages.
So I suggest get your kids into an immersion program. The School we have our daughter in prevents us from having significant vacations, or a bigger house, or nice cars, or much of anything, really (it's HEINOUSLY expensive - $15k a year) but she's worth it.
Actually, slashdot is a great resource for finding things out about The Industry, and Linux "Stuff". I have a SuSe project machine (i.e., it barely works, but I'm learning a lot from beating the crap out of it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ coaxing it into operation....)
So Slashdot is very good for that. Also, it is good sociological research into the groupthink of the F/OSS programming community, which is important to my research as an artist.
And, I get to deal with snide too-clever-by-half posters. But thanks for not posting as an AC. I respect that.
2. TV has to be PBS, Discovery or History Channel during the week, and no more than one hour.
3. the computer is used for schoolwork and research.
4. No TV in the bedroom.
5. No headphones indoors, no excessive volume indoors.
6. No TV during Dinner. conversation is encouraged. Dinner is served at the dining table 5 nights a week (Friday is swimming, so dinner is shortened, as we go out for a snack after swimming, and Saturday dinner is often out (and never at a fast food joint.)
7. One DVD may be rented a week.
8. books, magazines, and newspapers can be read at anytime except during meals.
9. Homework is done FIRST. Then play is permitted. Making things with paper, glue, wood, paint, ink, rubber stamps, etc. is encouraged. Puzzles, word games, and other intellectual riddles are encouraged.
10. Music is always permitted, but at reasonable volumes. Playing music and singing is especially encouraged, and preferred to listening.
That's the way the house is organised, and mommy and daddy (me) follow the same rules. No exceptions.
We have 7 computers in the house, but 2 of them (a win2k laptop and an XP laptop) are for my wife's office, three are in my studio (OSX laptop, OS9 tower, SuSe "project" machine), my daughter has a desktop (Apple OS9) and a laptop (OSX). She uses them, but not as much as she reads books. she also likes to make books - she has a good head for narrative.
She (Elizabeth Spoilsport) is 7, is bilingual in French and English, writes in cursive, and does her times tables. She can recognise 4/4, 3/4, and 5/4 time signatures. She's my little pride and joy, when she's not acting like a spoiled little snot (which only happens when she's tired or grumpy).
She also feeds the kitties, waters the kitchen herbs, (fresh basil is DIVINE), and when she gets all A's in her work, we give her a small allowance which she then divides up between a savings account, an investment account, a charity account, and a spending account.
And that's how it works in the Spoilsport household.
I've taught video (and presently looking for a similar gig as we speak) and the parent is 100% correct. SFX can - in limited circumstances - help a narrative. But I have NEVER seen SFX fix a bad story. Ever. Because a lame ass narrative will always be a lame ass narrative. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it still smells like pork.
The most important thing to do with a a work in "Motion Pictures", be they film or video, is TO HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING AND VALUABLE TO SAY. Otherwise, it's pointless eyecandy, and just as candy rots your teeth, eyecandy rots your brain.
Another reason why it's important that students work on something that has meaning and value outside of SFX etc. is they will be able to look back and say "I Did That" and that it mattered.
And Yet Another Reason is: a good story or a piece with meaning will age better. What we consider Sophisticated Special Effects this year just look cheezy as hell 3 years down the road. But a good story or a meaningful narrative lasts.
The first thing I do with people in teaching video is have them do everything in camera. They have to plan each shot, write it out, and then shoot it, in its proper sequence, in the camera, with no special effects, transitions, or anything. this helps because they don't have to have a great camera - heck they can pick up a VHS or even a PixelVision and get interesting work done.
In moderately advanced classes, I'll only permit a cross dissolve, color correction, and a few minor effects that are fairly "transparent". Only in super advanced classes would I let people mess with advanced compositing, and only if the effects matter to the meaning of the story. The important thing is to have a sense of commitment to the result: Make It Matter.
Why? Because you only live once, there is no hell (like an old hell) or Heaven, ***and your life is worth more than advertising.***
completely agree. I've railed about this before, and I just get modded down by the neo-libertarian and neocon capitalist zealots among us. It's pretty sad, really, so I don't bother with direct dialogue with them, as they always seem happy to mod me down at their convenience.
Dozens of women and children were gunned down in Colorado so we could have a 40 hour work week. And now these people, the great grand-children of that generation of labour martyrs, CHEERFULLY surrender their lives to the corporate masters and surrender every waking hour to The Company. It's a level of cluelessness that I find appalling and and all the more depressing for its pervasiveness in contemporary american society.
What might actually be happening (albeit very slowly - too slowly, IMHO) is that the white collar workers in USA are finally cottoning on to the fact that they ARE ALL MEMBERS OF THE WORKING CLASS. If you're flipping burgers or writing code or doing brain surgery, you're a worker and you're part of a system that pays you to compensate for an exchange of your waking hours, and to perform up to specifications not set by you (of course, in the case of brain surgery, this is probably a good thing). The point is: we are all employees - we are all workers - we are all wage slaves.
This is a dramatic improvement over the chattel slavery and serfdom that wage slavery replaced, but it is still slavery. It is imperitive that the IT and programming workers unite with their fellow workers in all the other walks of working life and Take Control Of Their Lives Away From The Capitalists who are exploiting them, and are themselves slaves to the same system (just enormously well compensated for their time).
You can laugh and say "Oh, how quaint - what antiquated notions..." but the fact is: Some form of Socialism is the future of freedom on this overcrowded industrial planet. Help it come into being or stand in the way and be crushed by an angry global working class.
What evidence do you have of this? MPEG-4 sure isn't backwards compatible. AAC/WMA isn't backwards compatible, yet all of them are catching on.
Huh? I have (hold on - lemme check...) 98.85 gigs - or 55.4 days - of MP3 audio, and ummm (lemme check - naaaa - I know this one-) ZERO k of AAC/WMA files. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
I have lots of friends (which is how I acquired some of the 98 gigs) and NONE of them use AAC or WMA. So, as far as I can tell, from my personal experience, AAC and WMA ain't doin' diddly. But then, I (and my friends) make a point of procuring the CDs from whence the audio originated. I myself own well over 1000 CDs that clutter up a wall in my garage (the house is wirelessed to MP3 audio via AirTunes, so CDs are the ultimate hard drive back up) and I always rip them to MP3, not WMA or AAC. I'll go to a LAN party and trade tunes with friends, and if I like it, I go and buy the CD.
AAC and WMA have no role in my life, nor are they any part of the lives of anyone I know.
All you need to do is go to MacMall and buy an external 160 HD for $130 as pictured here:
Then find a Canadian Friend, and wire them money on a regular basis to buy tunage from the iTMS. Since you're saving 16 cents a track, all you have to do is record enough tunes on the drive to cover the cost of the drive (about 900) plus the shipping (about 100 or less, depending) to break even.
Your Canadian Friend then DLs track to the Drive via the Canadian iTMS. Once the drive is full, or you feel you've spent enough, Your Canadian Friend mails back the drive with the note "Hey dummy - you left this on the desk, ya hoser - see you soon, yours truly: Your Canadian Friend".
Of course, your Canadian friend has an incentive: he gets all your songs for FREE as he copies them to his own drive or DVDR or whatever floats his little Canadian Boat.
I figure, if each tune is about 5 megs, you should be able to get about 32,000 songs on there, and at a 16 cent saving on each, you'll save USD$5120. Well Worth the Expense of the drive.
The whole "Pro-Am" deal is exactly where most artists are today. They are very good at what they do, but get precious little recognition and zero pay for their efforts.
A friend of mine even pushes it farther, saying that there is no such thing as Computer Engineering (he's a structural engineer) as for him, engineering consists of specific points of scientifically derived knowledge that is arranged to come to computable ends, likea bridge, or a house. He looks at the buggy spaghetti code spewed out in a caffeine driven programming session as something more in common with literature than engineering.
I don't agree with him - I think programming is engineering by way of the intent of the actor (engineer vs. artist) and the results of their actions (art vs. a program). But I do think there are significant degrees of overlap between them, and the boundary isn't clear cut. Also, I think that socially these two groups (OSS programmers and Artists) share a number of interests - getting a job done Really Well, doing something from a sense of inner necessity (I *must* do this - it's *important* to me, and the WORLD...), and a sense of craftsmanship in innovation that I believe is common in both worlds.
Also, there is often a good sense of mentorship - "You want to help? Cool: do Something." The crits can be harsh (when I was in Art School, some of the crits were so brutal people left crying. Of course, when you do a 6 foot portrait of Dan Fogelberg from his Nederland album cover, you're kind of asking to get slapped 'up side the head...) but the crits are necessary to refine the Work, and the results can be good.
Now, there is a lot of Art that is self involved amateurish brain drool, or is simply in service of some kind of a con game - but there is a lot of code out there that is also pretty bad, and some of that code is funded a lot better than the art, and the use of code to rip people off runs the gamut from phishing expeditions to Web based companies FedExing kitty litter and stealing their existence from VCs and investors.
So, I think the ProAm OSS programmers should look to each other much as artists would, and if they can develop software that makes the world a better place (as artists service the sublime), and help make OSS the proper paradigm for software development (much as artists draw awareness into places not previously seen in such a light), then I believe they have done well.
Also, if they start hanging out with Art Geeks, they might get laid more often. Or at least once. Or maybe go to some funky parties...
IIRC, MS had been chattering about a deep level search function for "the next OS" since Win 95, called WinFS. It was finally supposed to be in Longhorn, but it was ditched about a couple months ago (According to an article here on Slashdot).
Perhaps they dumped WinFS, previously known as 'NT Object Filing System', because this will do most of what it did with less of a hassle in programming and backward compatibility?
And - where is the role of metadata in all of this?
What is the sense in this? One extrapolation is the Skynet model. Of course, it wouldn't become sentient and send T-1000's out to kill Kill KILL!!! But it could become a dangerous tool of global nuclear terror in the hands of a neocon admin gone mad with power (stipulating that the present regime isn't...yet...).
On the other hand, the really scary deal is the 9/11 example, where massive destruction is done with $30 worth of box cutters and a score of fanatic assholes. In which case, such an expenditure (like the anti-missile defence nonsense) becomes something very much like the Maginot Line.
Only time will tell, but my personal preference would be for the US to abandon its Global Empire for a more sustainable and attainable role as a regional power similar to Orwell's Oceania, only without Big Brother fascism and oppression.
If the USA went that way (which I believe it will, just out of economic necessity) it wouldn't have to spend over time untold and useless trillions on defence and defence related items, like this Maginot Skynet deal.
And when Andromeda collides with our Galaxy, rips it to bits and turns it into an active elliptical flooded with radiation - WHAT THEN???
And when the stars go out - WHAT THEN???
And when the protons decay - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes eat everything - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes fart themselves to death - WHAT THEN???
And when the distance between two average particles (probably two neutrinos hovering just abopve absolute zero) equals some vast multiple of the size of our present universe - WHAT THEN???
Where ya gonna store all your pr0n then? Eh???
But these bits of data and the illusions of metaphysics are things we cling to like some crack addled freak stumbling about the galaxy looking for some cheap gas.
Me? I print out the text stuff and keep it in my file cabinet, the video I print to tape and have on a drive, and the audio is kept on two different drives.
OooOOoh - so merely PAYING for a product isn't enough? you have to pay for it to be LOCKED? Gee- when will they decide that merely LOCKING it isn't enough and it has to be (marketing name that inspires security)-ed?
This policy fails on SO many counts of interstate trade and transfer and fraud, I can't even count.
Someone else already noticed it'll take about a week forthe first lawsuit to turn this around. I wouldn't be surprised if someone like the EFF (or the FTC - oooh - nemmind - I forgot, they're run by the people they regulate now-a-days) doesn't ask for a prelim injunction against these asshats so it never happens, period.
They used to be all lined up facing the music, now they're in four different parts of the deck, looking for a life boat. They're sunk, they're doomed. Stick a fork in AOL. They're done.
And, this isn't trolling - this is just looking at the facts of AOL's business. They're completely surrounded by superior services that cost less and don't have the "Me Too!" stigma attached. I was wondering when AOL was going to start splitting itself up. Keep an eye open for it to sell each of these divisions off to a competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Huge vast amounts of Free Energy, courtesy of plate tectonics.
2. They are completely surrounded by all the water they could ever want.
All you have to do is drill down to the heat, use it to boil water to spin turbines, which then make electricity to crack the water to make the hydrogen. Done.
You heard it hear first. The amount of energy under Iceland and the Big Island is *insane*. Another good place to drill for heat would be the supervolcano at Yellowstone. Use the electricity generated there and you can pump in the water from most anywhere and crack it into H2. Also: by draining off some of the heat from the supervolcano, we might be able to prevent (or slow) the eventual eruption of that sucker.
Problem solved. Next?
HW
In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
IIRC, AFAIK, etc. Queen Vicky was pushing daisies at that point, and the architecture that followed on and was rampant throughout was known as Edwardian, after her boy King Edward.
RS
You note the lack of Tritium, and the long range problem of using lithium - what about Helium3? Last I heard there was like 1.1 million tons of the crap on the moon, which would last us all about 25,000 years or so.
I think that's why the Bush Junta is interested in a moonbase - to start mining the He3...
RS
Andru: The thing that I see as being the biggest issue going forward is DRM (digital rights management). iTunes has their DRM for their AAC files, while Microsoft has another for WMA. Of course, they are trying to make it easy with their PlaysForSure initiative. Sony has yet another for it's ATRAC files, and MP3 has none. Therefore, an iPod cannot play any WMA files, and nothing but an iPod can play Apple AAC files. Music purchased from Sony Connect can only be played on Sony digital audio players. Why all the confusion? Fine, we understand that the RIAA wants to protect it's property, but do they have to do it at the expense of causing mass confusion amongst casual music buyers? Even better, why can't these protected files just work across platforms? If you look at DVD's, there is one protection standard. We should have the same thing for our digital music. If there was an effective DRM solution out there, it would seem that the music stores would have no choice but to support it as it would ease the minds of the purchasers, thus bringing in more cash.
That's where it all hits the fan - DRM. If the RIAA wasn't such a greedy bunch of pigfuckers, we could all trade MP3s and get dinged for each trade (say, a dime per trade), and everyone would be happy. Napster had a system like that under works, and were ready to roll it out, then it was reduced to a smoke hole in the ground over in Redwood Shores.
Dime a Trade? I'd do it. Especially if a source got a rating (this way asshats who rip stuff at 64 mono, have clicky messy files, or are shills for the RIAA, can be avoided) like in EBay. You would have to use a specific client, and that client would be wired to your bank account. Everybody happy, and we could all use plain vanilla MP3s - no muss no fuss no chocolate mess.
RS
He accepts.
Case closed. Move along.
RS
Ask the president for a job:
well mr president - it's the bees and the spiders again - they stole my food stamps and sold 'em to the rats, and I tried to get down to my car to honk the horn for help, but the snakes are guarding it for the cockroaches! I go back upstairs but the spiders have jammed the police lock - I AIN'T BEEN INSIDE FOR A WEEK!!! And I know my wife is sleeping with the bees!!!!
Could you state that as a question?
Well, SURE Mister President! WHERE CAN I GET A JOB?
Many busy executives ask me, "What about the job displacement market program in the city of the future?" Well, count on us to be there! [JIM] Because, if we're lucky, tomorrow, we'll never have to deal with questions like yours ever again.
Oh he's just jivin' me again...
SHOES FOR INDUSTRY!
SHOES FOR THE DEAD!
RS
There are several immersion programs in public schools here, and several private. In terms of French Schools, there's the French American International School, and the Lycee Laperouse. Downthe peninsula there is a German school.
this page has links to a bunch of language schools.
RS
In most other ways, we're very liberal parents who want her to explore things that interest her. It's very likely that once broadcast goes HD, we won't upgrade - we'll get a projector, and then the only thing she can watch will be stuff she rents or borrows from school, the library, or friends. And it'll look GREAT.
But computer games are not something "we do", and frankly, she's shown very little interest in them. She'd truly rather use her imagination creating little worlds of her own, (today it was her orange froggy was going to marry Barbie, but the giant Clifford Dog came and mesed up the wedding, so the unicorns came and took them to the secret castle (aka her bedspread) so they could meet the Wonderful WItch played by another Barbie.
Frankly, I think that's a much better use of her time than twiddling dials in someone else's imagined world, and we encourge her imagination and critical thinking skills.
RS
but seriously, she's seven and has a laptop?
both of her computers are things she inherited from me. It's an old Pismo running OSX. Her desktop is an ancient iMac. She rarely uses either of them. She'd rather play with dolls.
as for some points, they seem quite american (no tv during dinner - as if it was a shock on the same level as 'no games ever').
I know - sad - innit? But damn - you wouldn't believe how many American Family plop themselves down in front of the TV and sit and watch the friggin box all night. And when they get up from the couch, they go to bed, and watch TV in bed. It's terrifying. Our neighbours do that. They have this big ass 50 some odd inch DLP TV set and they all sit around it, every night, eating god-knows-what. Then they all go to bed, and you can see little blue glows in each room. Pathetic.
RS
We do play board games, usually on rainy weekends when there is nothing else to do. We also play card games - she's Deadly at UNO, and often beats us at Mille Bourne. I've been teaching her seven card stud poker, too. She liked it for about a month, and then gave up on it.
She also likes to play keyboards and musical instruments, and that is also something we encourage. She picked out Auld Lang Syne on the xylophone the other day, and she's been beating out Frere Jacques and twinkle Twinkle little star for a few months now.
Mom's a programmer, and I'm almost always in front of the screen doing somethign creative, so it's not like she doesn't have a positive notion of the machines...
RS
The only way to really learn another language is through immersion. Since English has a German-like structure, we wanted her to get a Romance Language knowledge, so she could then go to other languages in Europe with ease (From French to Spanish and Italian, from English over to German or dutch).
It's really important to learn another language, especially as the Empire collapses - it'll be a distinct survival skill to be able to speak diffreent languages.
So I suggest get your kids into an immersion program. The School we have our daughter in prevents us from having significant vacations, or a bigger house, or nice cars, or much of anything, really (it's HEINOUSLY expensive - $15k a year) but she's worth it.
RS
So Slashdot is very good for that. Also, it is good sociological research into the groupthink of the F/OSS programming community, which is important to my research as an artist.
And, I get to deal with snide too-clever-by-half posters. But thanks for not posting as an AC. I respect that.
best,
RS
best,
RS
1. No computer games. Yup. None.
2. TV has to be PBS, Discovery or History Channel during the week, and no more than one hour.
3. the computer is used for schoolwork and research.
4. No TV in the bedroom.
5. No headphones indoors, no excessive volume indoors.
6. No TV during Dinner. conversation is encouraged. Dinner is served at the dining table 5 nights a week (Friday is swimming, so dinner is shortened, as we go out for a snack after swimming, and Saturday dinner is often out (and never at a fast food joint.)
7. One DVD may be rented a week.
8. books, magazines, and newspapers can be read at anytime except during meals.
9. Homework is done FIRST. Then play is permitted. Making things with paper, glue, wood, paint, ink, rubber stamps, etc. is encouraged. Puzzles, word games, and other intellectual riddles are encouraged.
10. Music is always permitted, but at reasonable volumes. Playing music and singing is especially encouraged, and preferred to listening.
That's the way the house is organised, and mommy and daddy (me) follow the same rules. No exceptions.
We have 7 computers in the house, but 2 of them (a win2k laptop and an XP laptop) are for my wife's office, three are in my studio (OSX laptop, OS9 tower, SuSe "project" machine), my daughter has a desktop (Apple OS9) and a laptop (OSX). She uses them, but not as much as she reads books. she also likes to make books - she has a good head for narrative.
She (Elizabeth Spoilsport) is 7, is bilingual in French and English, writes in cursive, and does her times tables. She can recognise 4/4, 3/4, and 5/4 time signatures. She's my little pride and joy, when she's not acting like a spoiled little snot (which only happens when she's tired or grumpy).
She also feeds the kitties, waters the kitchen herbs, (fresh basil is DIVINE), and when she gets all A's in her work, we give her a small allowance which she then divides up between a savings account, an investment account, a charity account, and a spending account.
And that's how it works in the Spoilsport household.
RS
The most important thing to do with a a work in "Motion Pictures", be they film or video, is TO HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING AND VALUABLE TO SAY. Otherwise, it's pointless eyecandy, and just as candy rots your teeth, eyecandy rots your brain.
Another reason why it's important that students work on something that has meaning and value outside of SFX etc. is they will be able to look back and say "I Did That" and that it mattered.
And Yet Another Reason is: a good story or a piece with meaning will age better. What we consider Sophisticated Special Effects this year just look cheezy as hell 3 years down the road. But a good story or a meaningful narrative lasts.
The first thing I do with people in teaching video is have them do everything in camera. They have to plan each shot, write it out, and then shoot it, in its proper sequence, in the camera, with no special effects, transitions, or anything. this helps because they don't have to have a great camera - heck they can pick up a VHS or even a PixelVision and get interesting work done.
In moderately advanced classes, I'll only permit a cross dissolve, color correction, and a few minor effects that are fairly "transparent". Only in super advanced classes would I let people mess with advanced compositing, and only if the effects matter to the meaning of the story. The important thing is to have a sense of commitment to the result: Make It Matter.
Why? Because you only live once, there is no hell (like an old hell) or Heaven, ***and your life is worth more than advertising.***
RS
completely agree. I've railed about this before, and I just get modded down by the neo-libertarian and neocon capitalist zealots among us. It's pretty sad, really, so I don't bother with direct dialogue with them, as they always seem happy to mod me down at their convenience.
Dozens of women and children were gunned down in Colorado so we could have a 40 hour work week. And now these people, the great grand-children of that generation of labour martyrs, CHEERFULLY surrender their lives to the corporate masters and surrender every waking hour to The Company. It's a level of cluelessness that I find appalling and and all the more depressing for its pervasiveness in contemporary american society.
What might actually be happening (albeit very slowly - too slowly, IMHO) is that the white collar workers in USA are finally cottoning on to the fact that they ARE ALL MEMBERS OF THE WORKING CLASS. If you're flipping burgers or writing code or doing brain surgery, you're a worker and you're part of a system that pays you to compensate for an exchange of your waking hours, and to perform up to specifications not set by you (of course, in the case of brain surgery, this is probably a good thing). The point is: we are all employees - we are all workers - we are all wage slaves.
This is a dramatic improvement over the chattel slavery and serfdom that wage slavery replaced, but it is still slavery. It is imperitive that the IT and programming workers unite with their fellow workers in all the other walks of working life and Take Control Of Their Lives Away From The Capitalists who are exploiting them, and are themselves slaves to the same system (just enormously well compensated for their time).
You can laugh and say "Oh, how quaint - what antiquated notions..." but the fact is: Some form of Socialism is the future of freedom on this overcrowded industrial planet. Help it come into being or stand in the way and be crushed by an angry global working class.
RS
Huh? I have (hold on - lemme check...) 98.85 gigs - or 55.4 days - of MP3 audio, and ummm (lemme check - naaaa - I know this one-) ZERO k of AAC/WMA files. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
I have lots of friends (which is how I acquired some of the 98 gigs) and NONE of them use AAC or WMA. So, as far as I can tell, from my personal experience, AAC and WMA ain't doin' diddly. But then, I (and my friends) make a point of procuring the CDs from whence the audio originated. I myself own well over 1000 CDs that clutter up a wall in my garage (the house is wirelessed to MP3 audio via AirTunes, so CDs are the ultimate hard drive back up) and I always rip them to MP3, not WMA or AAC. I'll go to a LAN party and trade tunes with friends, and if I like it, I go and buy the CD.
AAC and WMA have no role in my life, nor are they any part of the lives of anyone I know.
So, I don't see WMA / AAC "Catching On" at all.
RS
Then find a Canadian Friend, and wire them money on a regular basis to buy tunage from the iTMS. Since you're saving 16 cents a track, all you have to do is record enough tunes on the drive to cover the cost of the drive (about 900) plus the shipping (about 100 or less, depending) to break even.
Your Canadian Friend then DLs track to the Drive via the Canadian iTMS. Once the drive is full, or you feel you've spent enough, Your Canadian Friend mails back the drive with the note "Hey dummy - you left this on the desk, ya hoser - see you soon, yours truly: Your Canadian Friend".
Of course, your Canadian friend has an incentive: he gets all your songs for FREE as he copies them to his own drive or DVDR or whatever floats his little Canadian Boat.
I figure, if each tune is about 5 megs, you should be able to get about 32,000 songs on there, and at a 16 cent saving on each, you'll save USD$5120. Well Worth the Expense of the drive.
RS
FUCK DA POLICE!
A friend of mine even pushes it farther, saying that there is no such thing as Computer Engineering (he's a structural engineer) as for him, engineering consists of specific points of scientifically derived knowledge that is arranged to come to computable ends, likea bridge, or a house. He looks at the buggy spaghetti code spewed out in a caffeine driven programming session as something more in common with literature than engineering.
I don't agree with him - I think programming is engineering by way of the intent of the actor (engineer vs. artist) and the results of their actions (art vs. a program). But I do think there are significant degrees of overlap between them, and the boundary isn't clear cut. Also, I think that socially these two groups (OSS programmers and Artists) share a number of interests - getting a job done Really Well, doing something from a sense of inner necessity (I *must* do this - it's *important* to me, and the WORLD...), and a sense of craftsmanship in innovation that I believe is common in both worlds.
Also, there is often a good sense of mentorship - "You want to help? Cool: do Something." The crits can be harsh (when I was in Art School, some of the crits were so brutal people left crying. Of course, when you do a 6 foot portrait of Dan Fogelberg from his Nederland album cover, you're kind of asking to get slapped 'up side the head...) but the crits are necessary to refine the Work, and the results can be good.
Now, there is a lot of Art that is self involved amateurish brain drool, or is simply in service of some kind of a con game - but there is a lot of code out there that is also pretty bad, and some of that code is funded a lot better than the art, and the use of code to rip people off runs the gamut from phishing expeditions to Web based companies FedExing kitty litter and stealing their existence from VCs and investors.
So, I think the ProAm OSS programmers should look to each other much as artists would, and if they can develop software that makes the world a better place (as artists service the sublime), and help make OSS the proper paradigm for software development (much as artists draw awareness into places not previously seen in such a light), then I believe they have done well.
Also, if they start hanging out with Art Geeks, they might get laid more often. Or at least once. Or maybe go to some funky parties...
RS
If I buy something that has an RFID tag in it, I will rip the RFID out at my earilest convenience.
RFID is not to be trusted. It's not tinfoil hat-ness - just simple prudence and privacy.
RS
Perhaps they dumped WinFS, previously known as 'NT Object Filing System', because this will do most of what it did with less of a hassle in programming and backward compatibility?
And - where is the role of metadata in all of this?
RS
What is the sense in this? One extrapolation is the Skynet model. Of course, it wouldn't become sentient and send T-1000's out to kill Kill KILL!!! But it could become a dangerous tool of global nuclear terror in the hands of a neocon admin gone mad with power (stipulating that the present regime isn't...yet...).
On the other hand, the really scary deal is the 9/11 example, where massive destruction is done with $30 worth of box cutters and a score of fanatic assholes. In which case, such an expenditure (like the anti-missile defence nonsense) becomes something very much like the Maginot Line.
Only time will tell, but my personal preference would be for the US to abandon its Global Empire for a more sustainable and attainable role as a regional power similar to Orwell's Oceania, only without Big Brother fascism and oppression.
If the USA went that way (which I believe it will, just out of economic necessity) it wouldn't have to spend over time untold and useless trillions on defence and defence related items, like this Maginot Skynet deal.
RS
And when Andromeda collides with our Galaxy, rips it to bits and turns it into an active elliptical flooded with radiation - WHAT THEN???
And when the stars go out - WHAT THEN???
And when the protons decay - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes eat everything - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes fart themselves to death - WHAT THEN???
And when the distance between two average particles (probably two neutrinos hovering just abopve absolute zero) equals some vast multiple of the size of our present universe - WHAT THEN???
Where ya gonna store all your pr0n then? Eh???
But these bits of data and the illusions of metaphysics are things we cling to like some crack addled freak stumbling about the galaxy looking for some cheap gas.
Me? I print out the text stuff and keep it in my file cabinet, the video I print to tape and have on a drive, and the audio is kept on two different drives.
RS RS
This policy fails on SO many counts of interstate trade and transfer and fraud, I can't even count.
Someone else already noticed it'll take about a week forthe first lawsuit to turn this around. I wouldn't be surprised if someone like the EFF (or the FTC - oooh - nemmind - I forgot, they're run by the people they regulate now-a-days) doesn't ask for a prelim injunction against these asshats so it never happens, period.
RS
And, this isn't trolling - this is just looking at the facts of AOL's business. They're completely surrounded by superior services that cost less and don't have the "Me Too!" stigma attached. I was wondering when AOL was going to start splitting itself up. Keep an eye open for it to sell each of these divisions off to a competitor.
RS