I find it highly unlikely that any Canadian band will go poor because people "rip them off" by listening to their music with MP3 players. These bands have enough trouble getting their music played on the radio (hence the need for CRTC protection to ensure a certain percentage of Canadian content) or sold in stores (not that bands make much off CD sales anyway), the additional distribution via MP3 can only help them.
Dave Bidini (of the very Canadian band the Rheostatics - http://www.rheostatics.ca/) dedicated an entire chapter to his perspective on this in his recent book.
The new Ariane-5 series however is more expensive, and it could take awhile until optimization has it back to the competitiveness level of the 4 (though it was necessary to move to the 5 due to the increasing requirements for payload weight)
AFAIK, the Arianne 5 was built as big as it was specifically for the launch of ESA's ENVISAT satellite, which is a huge, schoolbus-sized satellite. The industry is generally moving towards smaller satellites, so for other Arianne 5 launches they include multiple satellites in the same payload. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the option of using the larger capacity though.
At least one more Arianne 5 launch was only partially successful, as the second stage failed to place the two satellites it carried in the correct orbit. One of those sats was a writeoff, the other took over 6 months to limp into position with a greatly reduced lifespan.
The problem with the idea of Farscape getting picked up by another network is that SciFi would have to give up the rights to the first 88 episodes for the new network to be able to air them, which they may not be willing to do. Any potential saviour would be much less likely to step up if they could only air the 5th season and without the previous 4.
Artemis is the outer satellite destined to go stationary (it's the relay/communications satellite), and SPOT is the inner, earth observing satellite (an optical multi-spectral remote sensing satellite, to be specific).
Artemis should have been stationary already, but when it was launched earlier this year, the Arianne 5 rocket it was launched on failed in the upper stage and didn't get it out far enough to achieve it's intended geostationary orbit. They've been using the on board thrusters to move it out into the intended position since then.
I'm surprised and impressed that they even attempted this given that Artemis is not in position, and that it worked. This bodes well for ESA's ENVISAT satellite, due to launch next year: Artemis will be relaying ENVISAT's data in a similar fashion.
My understanding is that you put so many sensors on the same satellite so that you can acquire data from multiple instruments at the same time. Then you can combine the data to extract interesting information that you couldn't get from a single instrument.
Of course, there are power and storage limitations, so you can't have all the sensors on all the time.
Forget space junk... ENVISAT is being launched on an Ariane 5 rocket (one of the only rockets large enough to carry this beast of a satellite), and the last Ariane 5 launch had problems with its last stage. Of the two satellites it carried, one ended up a writeoff, and the other (another ESA satellite, meant to relay data from ENVISAT, called Artemis - here's a report of the recovery operation) will have to use most of its fuel just to reach the proper orbit, greatly reducing its operational life.
They've been investigating the problem since July, and that's the reason ENVISAT's launch has been delayed until 2002. It's all very scary, having so much riding on that one launch.
.. Or perhaps some sort of sophisticated mechanism for ensuring the guy flying the plane is actually the real pilot/copilot. Retinal scan, fingerprint scan, whatever. Trigger an emergency beacon or autopilot or some such if it's not.
The news I've read reported that the Canadian/US border was going to be closed, but still has not been. But you can bet security there is extremely tight.
I live and work under the Vancouver Airport flight path. The skies are pretty clear today.
To nitpick the nitpicker, the first four Lexx movies (which are also called Series 1) ARE available on DVD - check videoflicks.com. And Sci-Fi US did air those movies, after they finished airing Series 2.
But yeah... three of the Series 2 DVDs have been released this year, which means two more to go for the complete season. Series 3 should be available sometime next year.
Okay, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here for a moment.
First off, I agree, popup ads, in general are evil.
But I can't say I'm getting too upset by the idea that big companies are screwing each other around with this particular practice of "Gatoring". I mean, sure, it's slimy, but is it hurting the user/consumer (other than the fact that it's yet another annoying popup)?
If I'm researching a particular product and someone points out to me that there's this other similar product that's possibly cheaper, I'd like to know about that. Obviously a lot of other people think that way too, which is why they do get such high click-through rates.
So I'm not exactly shedding tears for the companies that have been victims of this practice, although I'd like to kick the guys that sell the popup ads in the first place.
I agree... was this guy aggressive because he played games and watched pr0n, or did he play games and watch pr0n because he was aggressive? Blaming either for this ex-boyfriend's problems is a tad misguided. I have little doubt you could find someone even more aggressive who played/watched neither.
It's kinda like saying you'd never go out with someone who watched Star Trek, because they must be a nerd. Wiser to judge people as individuals, rather than pidgeonhole them like that.
I agree, and allow me to make another proposal: there is a big difference between a well-considered, rational decision and a rash, emotional one. This kid killed himself within hours of being suspended - he surely could not have thought things through. If you saw someone making any other sort of badly thought out decision, whether it's to wash your driveway with water in freezing weather, go up and pet a bear cub while mommy's not around, or hang yourself over a school suspension, are you (the fellow who said he wouldn't have intervened) saying you wouldn't say anything in any situation where you saw someone do something stupid?
Not to get offtopic, but I think a lot of the dialog in Canada about bullying has arisen from a number of teen suicides that directly resulted from bullying. The number of suicides in teens far outnumbers the number of kids who go to school and try to shoot their classmates.
I can also think of at least one high profile example of bullying turned murder here in BC, the case of Reena Virk. She was a teen who was brutally beaten and left to die by a gang of kids, for little more reason than because she was different.
And while I don't hear too many people in Canada blaming all these incidents on computer games, remember that BC, Canada is one of the first places in North America to try to put age restrictions on video games.
Where I work, and I think this is common of Canadian companies in high tech/software engineering (on the West Coast anyway), we work on the principle of flextime, sort of a combination of salary and hourly:
- You are responsible for keeping track of how many hours you work in a week, which may involve keeping a timesheet. - If you work more than 40 hours in a week, that time gets 'banked' for later. - If you work less than 40 hours a week, you use 'banked' time (the extra time you've worked previously) to make up the difference. - The company still pays you for 40 hours a week no matter how much time you actually worked. - There is no overtime, or time and a half pay. You just take the extra time you worked off at some later date.
I think this is a really smart system - you get paid for all the hours you actually work. If it's busy, you work extra hours, then take that time off when things slow down. Also, this sort of structure lends itself towards setting your own hours - I think most salaried employees who are required to work exactly 40 hours (or whatever) a week are required to work during 'business hours'. With flextime, these hours are more, well, flexible;) Especially important if you're talking about programmers, who often prefer to work outside normal business hours.
I guess I should also mention that in Canada employees get 2 or 3 weeks of holidays per year, depending on the company (2 at minimum, 3 pretty common for high tech), in addition to all the standard statutory holidays (about 12 days worth of those).
If Singer has the free-speech rights to suggest euthanizing children under certain circumstances, I have the same right to call him a murderer or a monster or a hero or a saint.
Of course you do, but how useful or productive is it to just dismiss these ideas without even attempting to form a logical argument? Besides, he's not actually doing any of these things, just talking about them - so why should there be any consequences, other than a heated debate, in a society that truly embraces free speech?
Also contributing to the hacker's success were incomplete security updates on our test site. At the time we began the tests, Red Hat Software Inc. had 21 security updates available for Red Hat 6.0, which had been out for only a couple of months.
Okay, wait a moment... if I understand the hack correctly, the security patches wouldn't necessarily have made any difference anyway, because this person got in through a flaw in the CGI, not the OS itself. While I agree it's completely foolish for a large company to skimp on easily available security updates directly from the vendor, we'll never know what affect installing them would of had on this contest since that's not how the site got hacked.
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...from the Tom Baker years?
The biggest laugh I had playing Knights of the Old Republic recently was the name of the bar on the Sith Academy planet ... "The Drunk Side".
I find it highly unlikely that any Canadian band will go poor because people "rip them off" by listening to their music with MP3 players. These bands have enough trouble getting their music played on the radio (hence the need for CRTC protection to ensure a certain percentage of Canadian content) or sold in stores (not that bands make much off CD sales anyway), the additional distribution via MP3 can only help them.
Dave Bidini (of the very Canadian band the Rheostatics - http://www.rheostatics.ca/) dedicated an entire chapter to his perspective on this in his recent book.
AFAIK, the Arianne 5 was built as big as it was specifically for the launch of ESA's ENVISAT satellite, which is a huge, schoolbus-sized satellite. The industry is generally moving towards smaller satellites, so for other Arianne 5 launches they include multiple satellites in the same payload. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the option of using the larger capacity though.
At least one more Arianne 5 launch was only partially successful, as the second stage failed to place the two satellites it carried in the correct orbit. One of those sats was a writeoff, the other took over 6 months to limp into position with a greatly reduced lifespan.
A price is a decimal number ... wouldn't it be Rot10 ? Unless they happen to report their prices in base 26.
The problem with the idea of Farscape getting picked up by another network is that SciFi would have to give up the rights to the first 88 episodes for the new network to be able to air them, which they may not be willing to do. Any potential saviour would be much less likely to step up if they could only air the 5th season and without the previous 4.
Artemis is the outer satellite destined to go stationary (it's the relay/communications satellite), and SPOT is the inner, earth observing satellite (an optical multi-spectral remote sensing satellite, to be specific).
Artemis should have been stationary already, but when it was launched earlier this year, the Arianne 5 rocket it was launched on failed in the upper stage and didn't get it out far enough to achieve it's intended geostationary orbit. They've been using the on board thrusters to move it out into the intended position since then.
I'm surprised and impressed that they even attempted this given that Artemis is not in position, and that it worked. This bodes well for ESA's ENVISAT satellite, due to launch next year: Artemis will be relaying ENVISAT's data in a similar fashion.
My understanding is that you put so many sensors on the same satellite so that you can acquire data from multiple instruments at the same time. Then you can combine the data to extract interesting information that you couldn't get from a single instrument.
Of course, there are power and storage limitations, so you can't have all the sensors on all the time.
Basically ... Ski-A-Macky
Forget space junk ... ENVISAT is being launched on an Ariane 5 rocket (one of the only rockets large enough to carry this beast of a satellite), and the last Ariane 5 launch had problems with its last stage. Of the two satellites it carried, one ended up a writeoff, and the other (another ESA satellite, meant to relay data from ENVISAT, called Artemis - here's a report of the recovery operation) will have to use most of its fuel just to reach the proper orbit, greatly reducing its operational life.
They've been investigating the problem since July, and that's the reason ENVISAT's launch has been delayed until 2002. It's all very scary, having so much riding on that one launch.
.. Or perhaps some sort of sophisticated mechanism for ensuring the guy flying the plane is actually the real pilot/copilot. Retinal scan, fingerprint scan, whatever. Trigger an emergency beacon or autopilot or some such if it's not.
The news I've read reported that the Canadian/US border was going to be closed, but still has not been. But you can bet security there is extremely tight.
I live and work under the Vancouver Airport flight path. The skies are pretty clear today.
To nitpick the nitpicker, the first four Lexx movies (which are also called Series 1) ARE available on DVD - check videoflicks.com. And Sci-Fi US did air those movies, after they finished airing Series 2.
... three of the Series 2 DVDs have been released this year, which means two more to go for the complete season. Series 3 should be available sometime next year.
But yeah
Okay, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here for a moment. First off, I agree, popup ads, in general are evil. But I can't say I'm getting too upset by the idea that big companies are screwing each other around with this particular practice of "Gatoring". I mean, sure, it's slimy, but is it hurting the user/consumer (other than the fact that it's yet another annoying popup)? If I'm researching a particular product and someone points out to me that there's this other similar product that's possibly cheaper, I'd like to know about that. Obviously a lot of other people think that way too, which is why they do get such high click-through rates. So I'm not exactly shedding tears for the companies that have been victims of this practice, although I'd like to kick the guys that sell the popup ads in the first place.
I agree ... was this guy aggressive because he played games and watched pr0n, or did he play games and watch pr0n because he was aggressive? Blaming either for this ex-boyfriend's problems is a tad misguided. I have little doubt you could find someone even more aggressive who played/watched neither.
It's kinda like saying you'd never go out with someone who watched Star Trek, because they must be a nerd. Wiser to judge people as individuals, rather than pidgeonhole them like that.
I agree, and allow me to make another proposal: there is a big difference between a well-considered, rational decision and a rash, emotional one. This kid killed himself within hours of being suspended - he surely could not have thought things through. If you saw someone making any other sort of badly thought out decision, whether it's to wash your driveway with water in freezing weather, go up and pet a bear cub while mommy's not around, or hang yourself over a school suspension, are you (the fellow who said he wouldn't have intervened) saying you wouldn't say anything in any situation where you saw someone do something stupid?
Not to get offtopic, but I think a lot of the dialog in Canada about bullying has arisen from a number of teen suicides that directly resulted from bullying. The number of suicides in teens far outnumbers the number of kids who go to school and try to shoot their classmates.
I can also think of at least one high profile example of bullying turned murder here in BC, the case of Reena Virk. She was a teen who was brutally beaten and left to die by a gang of kids, for little more reason than because she was different.
And while I don't hear too many people in Canada blaming all these incidents on computer games, remember that BC, Canada is one of the first places in North America to try to put age restrictions on video games.
Where I work, and I think this is common of Canadian companies in high tech/software engineering (on the West Coast anyway), we work on the principle of flextime, sort of a combination of salary and hourly:
;) Especially important if you're talking about programmers, who often prefer to work outside normal business hours.
- You are responsible for keeping track of how many hours you work in a week, which may involve keeping a timesheet.
- If you work more than 40 hours in a week, that time gets 'banked' for later.
- If you work less than 40 hours a week, you use 'banked' time (the extra time you've worked previously) to make up the difference.
- The company still pays you for 40 hours a week no matter how much time you actually worked.
- There is no overtime, or time and a half pay. You just take the extra time you worked off at some later date.
I think this is a really smart system - you get paid for all the hours you actually work. If it's busy, you work extra hours, then take that time off when things slow down. Also, this sort of structure lends itself towards setting your own hours - I think most salaried employees who are required to work exactly 40 hours (or whatever) a week are required to work during 'business hours'. With flextime, these hours are more, well, flexible
I guess I should also mention that in Canada employees get 2 or 3 weeks of holidays per year, depending on the company (2 at minimum, 3 pretty common for high tech), in addition to all the standard statutory holidays (about 12 days worth of those).
If Singer has the free-speech rights to suggest euthanizing children under certain circumstances, I have the same right to call him a murderer or a monster or a hero or a saint.
Of course you do, but how useful or productive is it to just dismiss these ideas without even attempting to form a logical argument? Besides, he's not actually doing any of these things, just talking about them - so why should there be any consequences, other than a heated debate, in a society that truly embraces free speech?
Also contributing to the hacker's success were incomplete security updates on our test site. At the time we began the tests, Red Hat Software Inc. had 21 security updates available for Red Hat 6.0, which had been out for only a couple of months.
... if I understand the hack correctly, the security patches wouldn't necessarily have made any difference anyway, because this person got in through a flaw in the CGI, not the OS itself. While I agree it's completely foolish for a large company to skimp on easily available security updates directly from the vendor, we'll never know what affect installing them would of had on this contest since that's not how the site got hacked.
Okay, wait a moment