On the math and computationally geared sciences, time is a serious issue and the problems are very difficult. I can't have gotten more than 3/5 of the AP Physics questions right, yet I got a 5 on the test. That's with a graphing calc and the formula sheet that they provide.
Having taken the full gamut from history to english to calc to chemistry, chemistry and physics were by far the hardest. Not to say that the rest aren't difficult, but it's a whole other level.
If you're going to be working a lot with TI-83s, definitely pick up a TI-83 (or plus, not much difference). The command set and (especially) the interfaces vary between each kind of calc, and it's not going to work well if you and your class are on completely different wavelengths.
Let's be serious, now. What plain text are you going to store for the SATs? Every word in the English language? How to perform simple arithmetic? We're not talking rocket science here.
AP exams let you use a graphing calculator on some open answer sections. They don't care about your stored notes. Hell, they give you a formula sheet. And let me tell you, even with a graphing calculator and the provided formula sheet, the AP Physics and AP Chem test were damn near the hardest tests I've ever taken, including college (the hardest being the Putnam, hehe). If you don't know what you're doing, there's no chance in hell that a calculator is going to save you.
If we're going to do that, then might as well say that people have been simultaneously recording data (writing) and viewing data (reading) since the advent of the first written languages. At what point does the generalization become invalid?
Praytell, what other market are you talking about where similar copyright issues aren't involved?
And ignoring the ridiculous argument that seems to suggest the consumer has the right to steal a product if they'll have to wait a couple hours until a store opens to get it, it seems to me that the RIAA *has* come up with a reasonable way to get people the songs they want on their computers right now. The most prominent example at the moment (that is likely to contain most RIAA music that you're looking for) is iTunes, which is just starting to come into its own.
What is their motivation? Your money, which is the root of capitalist competition. Not this strange idea that companies are beholden to the consumer for anything else.
The way you get companies to change their way of business is (surprise, surprise) not giving them your money. You may argue that it will never work, that the RIAA or some mega-conglomerate can't be swayed and the populace is being brainwashed by marketing. Well, guess what? That means that the majority of Americans are just fine with the way things are operating right now, and there's no reason to expect any company to cater to your minority stance.
Gee, let me think. First the problem is that their business model is all messed up. How can we reasonably be expected to buy CDs from stores when all we want to do is listen to them on the computer and there's no digital retailer set up?
Now that companies are finally moving on it, the problem is that it doesn't meet our exact specifications, and instead of trying to work with them we continue to pirate. Hmm, sounds like somebody wants a half-brained excuse to take a five-fingered discount.
First off, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, assuming those terms a source said were offered preliminarily panned out to be true, I'm guessing the artist's cut comes out of the 65%. I would imagine that when an artists signs on a label they're offered a certain percentage of money from any distribution method the label ends up choosing in the end.
And about this:
Otherwise artists don't give a damn... Most musicians do not make a penny in profits from CD sales, Album sales, digital sales or any other kinda music sales...
Pardon me, but it seems to me that at a certain point, I'm going to stop crying for the artists. These people are entering into a field (entertainment) that is filled to the brim with hopefuls and relatively small on demand (there isn't room for 2000 top artists). Yes, you can say that the labels under the RIAA were working as forces of oppression, but why were they able to do this?
One, distribution. You have to get your songs out somehow, and there was not a viable "zero overhead" distribution model set up by a well-funded copmany until Apple started up iTunes. I haven't seen any documentation either way, but I have no reason to believe that Apple does not want as many artists as possible to sign with them. If they won't take individual artists, then how about getting together and forming an indie label focused on online distribution?
Two, production. This is a bit tougher to fudge around with, but there are some fairly cheap programs available right now to work on digital music and the aforementioned indie label could help in this respect. In addition, production should not be the major factor in determining success. The focus on production is what has lead to a lot of the watered-down music and talentless pop stars that are out there right now. I, for one, wouldn't see a return to less production as a bad change.
Three, promotion. WIth the coming of the Internet, artists got a major boon through word of mouth spreading instantly nationwide. If their music can also spread instantly nationwide with thirty-second samples and tracks for 99 cents a pop, a lot more people will be checking out a lot more bands that they never would have heard. Hopefully, this will spread worldwide soon.
The way I see it, the music industry is finally taking strides towards rethinking their business model. Artists are no different. If they choose to shackle themselves to an RIAA label from this point forward, I have no sympathy for them.
Well, at least you didn't make any pretenses towards morality or the unethical practices of the RIAA, which instantly puts you head and shoulders above the people who justify downloading songs to themselves as some personal crusade against oppression.
But I'd wager a good majority of the 60+ million Americans, or however many download copyrighted MP3s, have managed to delude themselves into thinking that they're fighting the good war against evil corporations instead of simply stealing to save a couple bucks. And yes, I know it's not technically stealing.
Well, the point is that in its first several months it sold 25 million songs to a market that is already completely saturated with free services that provide an arguably bigger selection, meaning that people are actually willing to pay for their music.
Sorry, I took the slow bus to Slashdot today with a bunch of windows open:)
Point still stands in reply to half of the posts on here, though. It gets me really annoyed when people use "big corporation" as an excuse to scoff down their noses and take whatever they want.
You're also paying the artist and the producer for their work. I'm not willing to face fines or go to jail to get music for free. If I'm not willing to face up to the penalties, I'm not going to do something, whether I'm going to get caught or not.
Eleven cents or whatever it is going to the artist is better than nothing, and I'd rather support a Large, Evil Corporation (TM) than steal.
The Internet is full of people who will tell you that they are boycotting the RIAA and send money to the artist for all the songs that they download. If you're one of them, the more power to you. However, if you're one of the majority that never quite gets around to sending out that ten-spot, then congratulations on your ability to sleep at night.
That option sounds like business suicide. One option they could have, though, is to sort by individual label (since they already have the labels stored for each album), so you can pick and choose which ones you want to have show up.
I'd really like to be able to customize the recently added albums and such in this manner. Of course, since this is a new service, I expect more features of the type will becoming (hopefully not for a monthly fee).
I agree with you 100%, and I do not admire the original poster's "vigilance."
Many of us have gotten selfish in the Internet age of "I want it now, I get it now" media rips and P2P downloads. I'm guessing the only software service the OP would tolerate would involve no DRM, uncompressed.WAV downloads, and no songs from any RIAA label.
Let me be the unfortunate one to break it to you, Slashdot users: it ain't going to happen. Apple, though I am not a big fan of them personally, has gone out on a limb to offer the kind of service geeks have been asking for from the beginning. The loss is minimal, the downloads are speedy, there's a decent selection, it's pay-per-song, burning is actually supported through the default software, and it's fairly easy to convert your songs into a non-DRM format using that last fact.
The only demand that iTunes hasn't really filled yet is its support of the RIAA. I'll give you all a hint: it would be business suicide to not have any RIAA bands available. I'll give you another hint: you do not have to buy from any RIAA label when you have the iTunes service, and there are more than just RIAA songs avaiable from it.
It seems to me what all of you armchair activists should be doing, instead of pulling meaningless rhetoric out of your collective ass, is trying to get bands off of RIAA labels. I haven't looked into it, but I'm pretty sure that a band without a label could get its music hosted on iTunes. If not, then how about a letter-writing campaign to Apple to find out exactly what that would take? The ball's on the artists' side of the court now, as far as I've seen.
Instead of thumbing your nose at the RIAA from an Internet message board and violating their copyright behind a veil of anonymity, how about writing a letter telling them exactly why you're violating their copyright and letting their judicial action do the talking for you?
Rosa Parks didn't jump into the front seat of a bus in the middle of the night and giggle quietly to herself, she made her transgression clearly visible. I know that the RIAA doesn't compare to racial oppression, but from the tone of some of these people, you'd think they were the new Nazi party.
Not only this, but only to users with credit cards or access to credit cards who are willing to pay for their music. Excluding the pre-teen and most of the teen market, which are those who I'm guessing make up at least half of the downloading market.
In addition to being foolhardy for several other reasons, mandatory military service would create billions of dollars of funding necessary to process all of these people and then find something worthwhile to do. Are you going to compensate them as well? More money. And while they're doing this, they're not actively contributing to the economy in any way, shape or form.
Well, there's also the question of how easy to relate and keep hidden the decryption tool is.
For something like RSA encryption, the decryption tool (or rather, the piece of information necessary to enable the decryption tool) is small enough to be scratched out quickly on a piece of paper, passed on verbally or (albeit a bit harder) committed to memory, if necessary.
For one-times, the decryption tool in question is as large as the message itself. That means that the tool must be itself stored somewhere semi-permanent, which means that it's more susceptible to theft.
Well, there is no uncrackable code. The idea is to make it as hard as possible. For each message transmitted using one of those keys, a potential codebreaker would have to dedicate however much time this team of professional scientists on powerful computers would take.
As technology gets better, the level of encryption gets better with it. It's a constant battle. Of course, you're not going to want to make RSA your sole method of encryption and post the key all over the web if you're working on ridiculously top-secret government projects, but then again, you wouldn't want to rely solely on any type of encryption and you wouldn't be transmitting it openly over the Internet.
I find it a glaring oversight to see an article on PC game mods not even mention Half-Life, a game which has had a ridiculous shelf life powered almost solely by the bevy of mods released for it.
And no discussion of Half-Life would be complete without a discussion of Natural-Selection, a mod that turns HL into an FPRTS with marines fighting aliens and a focus on resource control (and now, with a level-based team FPS that's leagues beyond other mods dedicated solely to team FPS).
1999 called, they want their "In Soviet Ru$$ia, a Beowulf cluster of 'it is now official, a Netcraft survey confirms: all your BSD are dying' IMAGINES YOU!!" back... I, for one, welcome our new 1999 joke-taking-back overlords.
Well, the problem is a little different when the school is a fraction of the size.
In my school, class sizes are roughly around ten to twenty, less for most of the classes I take. That means the professor knows each and every one of your names and if you're in class every day.
For some reason, some of these people take it personally when you miss their class, try and drop your grade, and begin chitter-chattering with other professors about how little work you're doing for their classes.
Just to give you a little background, I'm a Junior carrying a 4.0, News Director of the radio station, Managing Editor of the school paper, an RA, and member of the math club/Putnam Team. A class where I can learn an entire month of material in two hours of book-reading is not worth spending the four to five hours of time in the classroom per week being tired and bored out of my mind. I'm sorry, all you professors out there, but it's just the way it is.
Let me begin by saying that I am a math major and a pure mathematician at heart. I love rigorous proofs, I hate rounding, and I hate decimal answers. I have the unit circle memorized. That's just in my nature. But for everyone who's not trying to establish a theorem or work with an extremely small margin of error, the ten or so decimal places provided by a scientific calculator, the fifty or so by a graphing calculator and the ridiculous amount from a computer should suffice for anyone's needs.
I'd rather get today's kids interested in math than have them memorizing trig and log tables. I'd rather have them learn how to use calculators and check answers for appropriateness, which they will likely be doing for the rest of their lives when they need to use math, than struggling through a sea of square roots and Pi symbols.
Don't get me wrong; theory should still be taught, with tests that emphasize the idea rather than the calculation. But numerical methods should be taught right alongside it.
Learning what Newton did does not require you to be as smart as Newton by any stretch of the imagination.
The greatness of Newton (and all other scientists/mathematicians) is the creative spark that leads to their theories. Once the revolutionary idea has been put into place, usually the ideas themselves are simple.
The mindblowing part of Calculus was that someone had the idea of letting a slope's denominator "approach zero" when the idea of limits wasn't even really defined yet, and then relating this newly discovered derivative to a seemingly unrelated infinite sum when infinity was a relatively touchy topic as well (although it remains almost as misunderstood today by the masses).
Euclid's great contribution wasn't one of the simple proofs (geometric or otherwise) that he laid out in his Elements, that a high schooler can understand and prove today, it was introducing the idea of postulates and rigorous proof.
Non-Euclidean geometry isn't a terribly difficult idea to grasp, but for about 1800 years people were trying to prove Euclid's Fifth until Gauss came along.
Even in DiffEq, which is a mindnumbingly boring class geared towards engineers at my college, a monkey could apply the techniques to solve linear differential equations. However, the person who came up with that beautiful relationship with the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix (especially in the case of an imaginary eigenvalue) was a true innovator.
"Doing Calculus" is pretty easy. Coming up with Calculus (and, to a lesser extent, rigorously proving the theory behind it), that's harder.
Slashdot Mirror
On the math and computationally geared sciences, time is a serious issue and the problems are very difficult. I can't have gotten more than 3/5 of the AP Physics questions right, yet I got a 5 on the test. That's with a graphing calc and the formula sheet that they provide.
Having taken the full gamut from history to english to calc to chemistry, chemistry and physics were by far the hardest. Not to say that the rest aren't difficult, but it's a whole other level.
If you're going to be working a lot with TI-83s, definitely pick up a TI-83 (or plus, not much difference). The command set and (especially) the interfaces vary between each kind of calc, and it's not going to work well if you and your class are on completely different wavelengths.
Let's be serious, now. What plain text are you going to store for the SATs? Every word in the English language? How to perform simple arithmetic? We're not talking rocket science here.
AP exams let you use a graphing calculator on some open answer sections. They don't care about your stored notes. Hell, they give you a formula sheet. And let me tell you, even with a graphing calculator and the provided formula sheet, the AP Physics and AP Chem test were damn near the hardest tests I've ever taken, including college (the hardest being the Putnam, hehe). If you don't know what you're doing, there's no chance in hell that a calculator is going to save you.
If we're going to do that, then might as well say that people have been simultaneously recording data (writing) and viewing data (reading) since the advent of the first written languages. At what point does the generalization become invalid?
Praytell, what other market are you talking about where similar copyright issues aren't involved?
And ignoring the ridiculous argument that seems to suggest the consumer has the right to steal a product if they'll have to wait a couple hours until a store opens to get it, it seems to me that the RIAA *has* come up with a reasonable way to get people the songs they want on their computers right now. The most prominent example at the moment (that is likely to contain most RIAA music that you're looking for) is iTunes, which is just starting to come into its own.
What is their motivation? Your money, which is the root of capitalist competition. Not this strange idea that companies are beholden to the consumer for anything else.
The way you get companies to change their way of business is (surprise, surprise) not giving them your money. You may argue that it will never work, that the RIAA or some mega-conglomerate can't be swayed and the populace is being brainwashed by marketing. Well, guess what? That means that the majority of Americans are just fine with the way things are operating right now, and there's no reason to expect any company to cater to your minority stance.
Let me just say, this is off-topic, but I have to give major props to any The Longest Journey fan :)
I'm sorta disturbed by the fact that they said TLJ2 is going to be action-adventure, though...
Gee, let me think. First the problem is that their business model is all messed up. How can we reasonably be expected to buy CDs from stores when all we want to do is listen to them on the computer and there's no digital retailer set up?
Now that companies are finally moving on it, the problem is that it doesn't meet our exact specifications, and instead of trying to work with them we continue to pirate. Hmm, sounds like somebody wants a half-brained excuse to take a five-fingered discount.
First off, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, assuming those terms a source said were offered preliminarily panned out to be true, I'm guessing the artist's cut comes out of the 65%. I would imagine that when an artists signs on a label they're offered a certain percentage of money from any distribution method the label ends up choosing in the end.
And about this:
Otherwise artists don't give a damn... Most musicians do not make a penny in profits from CD sales, Album sales, digital sales or any other kinda music sales...
Pardon me, but it seems to me that at a certain point, I'm going to stop crying for the artists. These people are entering into a field (entertainment) that is filled to the brim with hopefuls and relatively small on demand (there isn't room for 2000 top artists). Yes, you can say that the labels under the RIAA were working as forces of oppression, but why were they able to do this?
One, distribution. You have to get your songs out somehow, and there was not a viable "zero overhead" distribution model set up by a well-funded copmany until Apple started up iTunes. I haven't seen any documentation either way, but I have no reason to believe that Apple does not want as many artists as possible to sign with them. If they won't take individual artists, then how about getting together and forming an indie label focused on online distribution?
Two, production. This is a bit tougher to fudge around with, but there are some fairly cheap programs available right now to work on digital music and the aforementioned indie label could help in this respect. In addition, production should not be the major factor in determining success. The focus on production is what has lead to a lot of the watered-down music and talentless pop stars that are out there right now. I, for one, wouldn't see a return to less production as a bad change.
Three, promotion. WIth the coming of the Internet, artists got a major boon through word of mouth spreading instantly nationwide. If their music can also spread instantly nationwide with thirty-second samples and tracks for 99 cents a pop, a lot more people will be checking out a lot more bands that they never would have heard. Hopefully, this will spread worldwide soon.
The way I see it, the music industry is finally taking strides towards rethinking their business model. Artists are no different. If they choose to shackle themselves to an RIAA label from this point forward, I have no sympathy for them.
Well, at least you didn't make any pretenses towards morality or the unethical practices of the RIAA, which instantly puts you head and shoulders above the people who justify downloading songs to themselves as some personal crusade against oppression.
But I'd wager a good majority of the 60+ million Americans, or however many download copyrighted MP3s, have managed to delude themselves into thinking that they're fighting the good war against evil corporations instead of simply stealing to save a couple bucks. And yes, I know it's not technically stealing.
Well, the point is that in its first several months it sold 25 million songs to a market that is already completely saturated with free services that provide an arguably bigger selection, meaning that people are actually willing to pay for their music.
Sorry, I took the slow bus to Slashdot today with a bunch of windows open :)
Point still stands in reply to half of the posts on here, though. It gets me really annoyed when people use "big corporation" as an excuse to scoff down their noses and take whatever they want.
You're also paying the artist and the producer for their work. I'm not willing to face fines or go to jail to get music for free. If I'm not willing to face up to the penalties, I'm not going to do something, whether I'm going to get caught or not.
Eleven cents or whatever it is going to the artist is better than nothing, and I'd rather support a Large, Evil Corporation (TM) than steal.
The Internet is full of people who will tell you that they are boycotting the RIAA and send money to the artist for all the songs that they download. If you're one of them, the more power to you. However, if you're one of the majority that never quite gets around to sending out that ten-spot, then congratulations on your ability to sleep at night.
That option sounds like business suicide. One option they could have, though, is to sort by individual label (since they already have the labels stored for each album), so you can pick and choose which ones you want to have show up.
I'd really like to be able to customize the recently added albums and such in this manner. Of course, since this is a new service, I expect more features of the type will becoming (hopefully not for a monthly fee).
I agree with you 100%, and I do not admire the original poster's "vigilance."
.WAV downloads, and no songs from any RIAA label.
Many of us have gotten selfish in the Internet age of "I want it now, I get it now" media rips and P2P downloads. I'm guessing the only software service the OP would tolerate would involve no DRM, uncompressed
Let me be the unfortunate one to break it to you, Slashdot users: it ain't going to happen. Apple, though I am not a big fan of them personally, has gone out on a limb to offer the kind of service geeks have been asking for from the beginning. The loss is minimal, the downloads are speedy, there's a decent selection, it's pay-per-song, burning is actually supported through the default software, and it's fairly easy to convert your songs into a non-DRM format using that last fact.
The only demand that iTunes hasn't really filled yet is its support of the RIAA. I'll give you all a hint: it would be business suicide to not have any RIAA bands available. I'll give you another hint: you do not have to buy from any RIAA label when you have the iTunes service, and there are more than just RIAA songs avaiable from it.
It seems to me what all of you armchair activists should be doing, instead of pulling meaningless rhetoric out of your collective ass, is trying to get bands off of RIAA labels. I haven't looked into it, but I'm pretty sure that a band without a label could get its music hosted on iTunes. If not, then how about a letter-writing campaign to Apple to find out exactly what that would take? The ball's on the artists' side of the court now, as far as I've seen.
Instead of thumbing your nose at the RIAA from an Internet message board and violating their copyright behind a veil of anonymity, how about writing a letter telling them exactly why you're violating their copyright and letting their judicial action do the talking for you?
Rosa Parks didn't jump into the front seat of a bus in the middle of the night and giggle quietly to herself, she made her transgression clearly visible. I know that the RIAA doesn't compare to racial oppression, but from the tone of some of these people, you'd think they were the new Nazi party.
Not only this, but only to users with credit cards or access to credit cards who are willing to pay for their music. Excluding the pre-teen and most of the teen market, which are those who I'm guessing make up at least half of the downloading market.
In addition to being foolhardy for several other reasons, mandatory military service would create billions of dollars of funding necessary to process all of these people and then find something worthwhile to do. Are you going to compensate them as well? More money. And while they're doing this, they're not actively contributing to the economy in any way, shape or form.
Well, there's also the question of how easy to relate and keep hidden the decryption tool is.
For something like RSA encryption, the decryption tool (or rather, the piece of information necessary to enable the decryption tool) is small enough to be scratched out quickly on a piece of paper, passed on verbally or (albeit a bit harder) committed to memory, if necessary.
For one-times, the decryption tool in question is as large as the message itself. That means that the tool must be itself stored somewhere semi-permanent, which means that it's more susceptible to theft.
Well, there is no uncrackable code. The idea is to make it as hard as possible. For each message transmitted using one of those keys, a potential codebreaker would have to dedicate however much time this team of professional scientists on powerful computers would take.
As technology gets better, the level of encryption gets better with it. It's a constant battle. Of course, you're not going to want to make RSA your sole method of encryption and post the key all over the web if you're working on ridiculously top-secret government projects, but then again, you wouldn't want to rely solely on any type of encryption and you wouldn't be transmitting it openly over the Internet.
I find it a glaring oversight to see an article on PC game mods not even mention Half-Life, a game which has had a ridiculous shelf life powered almost solely by the bevy of mods released for it.
And no discussion of Half-Life would be complete without a discussion of Natural-Selection, a mod that turns HL into an FPRTS with marines fighting aliens and a focus on resource control (and now, with a level-based team FPS that's leagues beyond other mods dedicated solely to team FPS).
1999 called, they want their "In Soviet Ru$$ia, a Beowulf cluster of 'it is now official, a Netcraft survey confirms: all your BSD are dying' IMAGINES YOU!!" back... I, for one, welcome our new 1999 joke-taking-back overlords.
Well, the problem is a little different when the school is a fraction of the size.
In my school, class sizes are roughly around ten to twenty, less for most of the classes I take. That means the professor knows each and every one of your names and if you're in class every day.
For some reason, some of these people take it personally when you miss their class, try and drop your grade, and begin chitter-chattering with other professors about how little work you're doing for their classes.
Just to give you a little background, I'm a Junior carrying a 4.0, News Director of the radio station, Managing Editor of the school paper, an RA, and member of the math club/Putnam Team. A class where I can learn an entire month of material in two hours of book-reading is not worth spending the four to five hours of time in the classroom per week being tired and bored out of my mind. I'm sorry, all you professors out there, but it's just the way it is.
Pshaw. Those Babylonians couldn't even factor a quintic properly.
Errm, it's kinda hard to do a long-term study when there hasn't yet been a long term with which to study.
I disagree.
Let me begin by saying that I am a math major and a pure mathematician at heart. I love rigorous proofs, I hate rounding, and I hate decimal answers. I have the unit circle memorized. That's just in my nature. But for everyone who's not trying to establish a theorem or work with an extremely small margin of error, the ten or so decimal places provided by a scientific calculator, the fifty or so by a graphing calculator and the ridiculous amount from a computer should suffice for anyone's needs.
I'd rather get today's kids interested in math than have them memorizing trig and log tables. I'd rather have them learn how to use calculators and check answers for appropriateness, which they will likely be doing for the rest of their lives when they need to use math, than struggling through a sea of square roots and Pi symbols.
Don't get me wrong; theory should still be taught, with tests that emphasize the idea rather than the calculation. But numerical methods should be taught right alongside it.
Learning what Newton did does not require you to be as smart as Newton by any stretch of the imagination.
The greatness of Newton (and all other scientists/mathematicians) is the creative spark that leads to their theories. Once the revolutionary idea has been put into place, usually the ideas themselves are simple.
The mindblowing part of Calculus was that someone had the idea of letting a slope's denominator "approach zero" when the idea of limits wasn't even really defined yet, and then relating this newly discovered derivative to a seemingly unrelated infinite sum when infinity was a relatively touchy topic as well (although it remains almost as misunderstood today by the masses).
Euclid's great contribution wasn't one of the simple proofs (geometric or otherwise) that he laid out in his Elements, that a high schooler can understand and prove today, it was introducing the idea of postulates and rigorous proof.
Non-Euclidean geometry isn't a terribly difficult idea to grasp, but for about 1800 years people were trying to prove Euclid's Fifth until Gauss came along.
Even in DiffEq, which is a mindnumbingly boring class geared towards engineers at my college, a monkey could apply the techniques to solve linear differential equations. However, the person who came up with that beautiful relationship with the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix (especially in the case of an imaginary eigenvalue) was a true innovator.
"Doing Calculus" is pretty easy. Coming up with Calculus (and, to a lesser extent, rigorously proving the theory behind it), that's harder.