If I had never used a seatbelt in a car, I would still be alive today, because I've never had a serious accident. I have never had a serious accident on a bike in a city, but being car-doored, side-swiped, or just plain hit by a car usually results in bashing your head on concrete with enough force to knock you unconscious, which brings a real risk of concussion. Once I was involved in a crash where another cyclist overtook me then fell over, and the speed of his own bike was enough that he didn't know what age he was or what day it was.
Where I live, we've had the buses kill cyclists because the bike lane and the bus lane co-exist and the bus drivers don't look.
I compare cycling with buses to boating with giant whales. If a whale knows you're there, it won't hit you (nursing mothers excepted), but if it can't see you, it could obliterate your vessel unwittingly with a flick of its tail. Always be mindful of the huge blindspots on a bus, and if you're overtaking a stopped bus, pull out beyond its blindspot with several bike-lengths to spare in case he pulls out before he sees you.
I reached London after a 1000 mile trip from the French Med. Everyone thought it was incredibly brave of me to cycle across France, but it was only London that ever had me worried....
And is it OK to follow Mayor Emanuel's lead and lose the helmet?
In a city? No. The sort of accidents you're likely to have in urban cycling leave the risk of blunt-force trauma to the head. Serious cyclist who propose helmet-free cycling aren't talking about low speed urban cycling, they're talking about cycling on high-speed out-of-town roads, or high speed cycling on open roads downhill. There is an argument that in a high speed collision, the helmet increases the risk of torsional injury to the neck: if your head is in contact with a rough surface (eg a road) during a high speed skid or bounce, the scalp natural has a tendency to twist and tear, absorbing the force. A helmet doesn't twist the same, and transfers the full torsional force onto the neck. Well, that's the theory, but no-one has yet made a definitive, convincing case that proves either torsional or blunt-force injuries are a bigger problem on open roads. But in the city, it's blunt force all the way, so in the city, wear a helmet.
I personally keep the helmet on outside the city too, and I've wrecked several helmets in falls without injuring my head or neck.
I'm more interested in seeing this because it means other projects might come about from it, including TNG, Babylon 5, and other shows I wish got more such love from their fandoms. Seeing original actors involved in a passion project is icing on the cake.
The problem is that a story isn't just the actor, it's the writer. There are two diametrically opposite problems in fanfic, and most falls into one or other trap:
1) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wrote the characters the way he did, he is forced to make the characters walk the same path, parrot the same old tired lines, and never progress in any way.
2) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wote the characters the way he did, he ends up creating a character progression that is completely out-of-character for the person in question.
Consider, for example, Dumbledore from Harry Potter (never read, never watched). No-one knew he was gay until JK Rowling warned the script writers off making a reference to an ex-girlfriend. Rowling's choice of words when announcing this publically was telling: I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. Even to her as the writer, there was no explicit choice there -- she was running on her instinctual feel for how the character feels, thinks and acts. But apparently it was relevant to his actions, as he reacted to something in the story because he was in love with a particular character. Not knowing this may lead the fanfic author to consider that reaction as simply characteristic of the character, rather than specific to the circumstance in question, and the character is reduced to charicature.
Another thing to bear in mind is the advice I once read from a successful author that you should never be a fan of your own characters, because if you start to like them too much, you end up getting sloppy and letting them away with all sorts of stuff. Hell, just look at how many times in Stargate SG1 the colonel did something remarkably stupid and ill thought through that turned out to save the day. The colonel, played by series executive producer Richard Dean Anderson....
The day consoles converge to become general purpose PCs is the day they no longer have a market because they'll always be inferior at that than PCs which are always ahead in the hardware markets.
You're missing one of the subtler points of this news: the Windows apps in question will be Metro apps, not traditional windowed desktop applications. Microsoft are looking to get mobile-style apps onto the XB1, so that the XB1 is not just a games console, but not a PC replacement. The stuff they're hoping to see on it will make it more like a set-top box, or a smart TV when you're not playing games. Convergence of games console and set-top box makes perfect sense, which is why all the last generation of consoles had multimedia capabilities, even down to the PS3 being the most popular living room Blu-Ray player for quite some time after its launch.
This strategy is a very, very good one. For one thing, MS need to get people familiar with the Metro interface if they're ever going to shift any Windows Phone units in any serious numbers. For another, I've little doubt that they'd like to see Windows RT being picked up by the various smart TV manufacturers instead of their current Android and Linux-based roll-your-own jobs. In order to make it appealling to manufacturers, they need to get a critical mass of living room media apps in the app store, and the XB1's market share should draw in app developers. Being early into the Windows Marketplace is an opportunity to make a mark that isn't possible in the overcrowded iOS and Android app marketplaces.
A laptop with a 3G or better internet connection is already the end result of convergence between desktop, mobile, and games but surprisingly, people don't just have laptops and nothing else
I survived for years on a laptop and a dumbphone. The laptop can't replace a phone because it's not pocketable. But I haven't owned a desktop PC since the P2 days.
Some people might then think you're talking about the first XBox, which is the old P-III based one. Personally, Microsoft didn't think the name through. I guess, names like these should be tested on a bunch of 13 year olds to figure out whether it could become misused. I know you think that "X-Bone" is what you should be reading, but I don't and I'm pretty sure many people don't read that either. I think that says more about you than anything else: As I said, it's in wide use with the MS/XBox fanbois.
On the other hand, the fact that you assume "x bone" is something a 13 year old would come up with says more about you than anything else. I can't help reading "X-Bone", and I have an image of a cartoon bone in a dog's mouth. The 13-year-old comment suggests you think something else when you see "bone"...
However I also do not see much reason to be excited by this functionality - only time will tell, but I do not see huge potential in running dumbed down, simple apps on a gaming console.
I think the primary goal will be in trapping the "smart TV" market sector. Having media consumption apps on a cross-platform system will give them advantages in terms of market share, and they'll be hoping that this snowballs. I suspect the end-goal is getting the TV makers to drop their own smart TV platforms and start using WinRT.
But at least that sort of functionality has still been entertainment oriented.
The point is that if you start to focus on general computing then you're detracting from the whole point of a console and doing a half-arsed job of something that PCs et. al. already do far better.
The first megasuccess in console land was the NES, known in Japan as the Famicom, or "family computer", In Japan you could get all sorts of peripherals for it, but that didn't make Super Mario any less fun.
It constantly bugs me how educational theorists jump on the latest thing from neuroscience and then use it to justify anything and everything when even the neuroscientists haven't nailed down the consequences of the discovery yet.
Maybe they don't want to be stuck using neuroscience research that is over a generation old. You'd probably criticize them for that too.
You're assuming I'm moaning for the sake of moaning.
Consider that Newtonian mechanics is still taught in Physics. It has been proven wrong, basing itself on absolutist principles that were debunked by Einstein's relativistic physics, but as a paradigm it works within its own bounds. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Teaching, being several levels of abstraction away from the fundamental working of the human brain, forms a paradigm that can and should be investigated empirically. That empirical investigation can be informed by more fundamental brain sciences (the various branches of neurology and psychology), but findings in those fundamental sciences must prove their applicability to the educational paradigm.
The chief advisor to the UK government's minister of education recently published a paper bemoaning the fact that genetics were not being given the priority they should within education. He cited lots of studies that claimed to prove that genes are the most significant factor in determining individual intelligence and hence academic success.
Now these studies may well be right, but what does that mean to the teacher in the classroom? Precisely nothing, because even if we know in principle that genetics is key, we do not yet know how to identify the genetic markers that determine the differences in potential. So the cutting edge fails us yet again, because the consequences of the findings are not yet investigated.
Back to neuroscience, though, and one of the big ones is investigations of memory, which in neuroscience focus on discrete items for the sake of clarity and low experimental complexity. These studies cannot be directly applicable to school learning, because everything taught in schools fits within a framework of linked knowledge that defines the subject area, yet educationalists jump on this as hard science on "how to teach", when it is anything but (and any good neuroscientist would tell you as much).
Exactly. It constantly bugs me how educational theorists jump on the latest thing from neuroscience and then use it to justify anything and everything when even the neuroscientists haven't nailed down the consequences of the discovery yet.
But it's not simply speed, that's my point. You don't get the quarantine issue with land-based travel, which was slower than sea-based travel. It's the boat as a closed environment that makes most of the difference. You could probably get from Alicante in Spain to the toe of Italy quicker by boat than by bus, and a plague bus would be unwittingly spreading its disease at various motorway service stations on the way, whereas the plague boat would be isolated, and the symptoms would hopefully start to show before reaching the destination, thus giving the chance for total quarantine.
Actually, someone's now suggesting the "Roman" roads actually predated the Romans. I'd be tempted to dismiss this as another wild theory in search of fame, but it fits with the general trend in history: after centuries of belief in the superiority of a few "great civilisations", we are increasingly realising that there were no true "dark ages", and that civilisation has always progressed. Hell, some of the greatest monumental engineering and architecture came out in the Middle Ages, and they dubbed it "Gothic", suggesting it was barbaric and uncivilised when it was structurally superior to the relatively unsophisticated Classical styl of pillars and basic arches.
Actually, it's not the horses that made the difference, it's the boats. The most obvious difference between a boat and a plane is speed, and it's one of the side-effects of that speed that matters here: if you got on a long-distance sailship incubating a disease, you'd be showing symptoms before you reached your destination, and the ship would be quarantined at anchor in the harbour until everyone on board is either dead or symptom-free. With planes, you'll feel a bit off and you'll be infecting other passengers, and you'll be off the plane and out of the airport long before you realise just how ill you really are.
Yes, but Netflix only has the money to produce these new shows because of the money they make renting out their massive back catalogue, much of which is over 5 years old. If you had a five-year limit on copyright, everything in the Star Trek franchise before JJ Abrams's reboot would be free. Buffy and Angel. Endless hours of South Park. Classic sitcoms from Fawlty Towers to Father Ted. All those big ticket items that have made online and physical distribution profitable -- gone.
It would also kill the market for film rights to books etc. Very few books make it through the adaptation wringer and hit the cinemas within that five year window, so why would anyone ever pay for film rights again? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: book published 2005, Hollywood adaptation 2011. The Time Traveler's Wife: book published 2003, Hollywood adaptation 2009. The Watchmen: comic book published 1986, film released 2009.
Copyright that short would seriously limit the author's potential earnings, and would specifically limit the author's earnings to the earnings in the first medium published. Making a living writing novels is very hard, and the possibility of selling the film rights certainly makes a difference to the viability of a literary career. I agree that life+70 and life+90 are too long, but working for royalties is a trade-off of risk vs reward, and 5 years would mean a lot of risk for very little reward.
But they film a heck of a lot of pilots that never get commissioned, and many serieses do bomb completely. Successful serieses do pay for the risks and losses on other projects.
As the original Super Mario games were built up of levels of reusable "slices" of a level (which is why the games are so huge), and I suspect the random level generator starts with these slices to ensure the levels are playable... which would mean even with original graphics, it would still be a copyright violation.
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If I had never used a seatbelt in a car, I would still be alive today, because I've never had a serious accident. I have never had a serious accident on a bike in a city, but being car-doored, side-swiped, or just plain hit by a car usually results in bashing your head on concrete with enough force to knock you unconscious, which brings a real risk of concussion. Once I was involved in a crash where another cyclist overtook me then fell over, and the speed of his own bike was enough that he didn't know what age he was or what day it was.
Where I live, we've had the buses kill cyclists because the bike lane and the bus lane co-exist and the bus drivers don't look.
I compare cycling with buses to boating with giant whales. If a whale knows you're there, it won't hit you (nursing mothers excepted), but if it can't see you, it could obliterate your vessel unwittingly with a flick of its tail. Always be mindful of the huge blindspots on a bus, and if you're overtaking a stopped bus, pull out beyond its blindspot with several bike-lengths to spare in case he pulls out before he sees you.
I reached London after a 1000 mile trip from the French Med. Everyone thought it was incredibly brave of me to cycle across France, but it was only London that ever had me worried....
And is it OK to follow Mayor Emanuel's lead and lose the helmet?
In a city? No. The sort of accidents you're likely to have in urban cycling leave the risk of blunt-force trauma to the head. Serious cyclist who propose helmet-free cycling aren't talking about low speed urban cycling, they're talking about cycling on high-speed out-of-town roads, or high speed cycling on open roads downhill. There is an argument that in a high speed collision, the helmet increases the risk of torsional injury to the neck: if your head is in contact with a rough surface (eg a road) during a high speed skid or bounce, the scalp natural has a tendency to twist and tear, absorbing the force. A helmet doesn't twist the same, and transfers the full torsional force onto the neck. Well, that's the theory, but no-one has yet made a definitive, convincing case that proves either torsional or blunt-force injuries are a bigger problem on open roads. But in the city, it's blunt force all the way, so in the city, wear a helmet.
I personally keep the helmet on outside the city too, and I've wrecked several helmets in falls without injuring my head or neck.
But there was still Gene Roddenberry at the top to say yay or nay.
Two characters walked through the hologram. That alone tells you This Is Not A Next Generation Holodeck.
That would have made more sense than the plot of Highlander 2....
I'm more interested in seeing this because it means other projects might come about from it, including TNG, Babylon 5, and other shows I wish got more such love from their fandoms. Seeing original actors involved in a passion project is icing on the cake.
The problem is that a story isn't just the actor, it's the writer. There are two diametrically opposite problems in fanfic, and most falls into one or other trap:
1) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wrote the characters the way he did, he is forced to make the characters walk the same path, parrot the same old tired lines, and never progress in any way.
2) Because the fan doesn't know why the original author wote the characters the way he did, he ends up creating a character progression that is completely out-of-character for the person in question.
Consider, for example, Dumbledore from Harry Potter (never read, never watched). No-one knew he was gay until JK Rowling warned the script writers off making a reference to an ex-girlfriend. Rowling's choice of words when announcing this publically was telling: I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. Even to her as the writer, there was no explicit choice there -- she was running on her instinctual feel for how the character feels, thinks and acts. But apparently it was relevant to his actions, as he reacted to something in the story because he was in love with a particular character. Not knowing this may lead the fanfic author to consider that reaction as simply characteristic of the character, rather than specific to the circumstance in question, and the character is reduced to charicature.
Another thing to bear in mind is the advice I once read from a successful author that you should never be a fan of your own characters, because if you start to like them too much, you end up getting sloppy and letting them away with all sorts of stuff. Hell, just look at how many times in Stargate SG1 the colonel did something remarkably stupid and ill thought through that turned out to save the day. The colonel, played by series executive producer Richard Dean Anderson....
I've got nothing to say... I'm only responding on reflex....
The day consoles converge to become general purpose PCs is the day they no longer have a market because they'll always be inferior at that than PCs which are always ahead in the hardware markets.
You're missing one of the subtler points of this news: the Windows apps in question will be Metro apps, not traditional windowed desktop applications. Microsoft are looking to get mobile-style apps onto the XB1, so that the XB1 is not just a games console, but not a PC replacement. The stuff they're hoping to see on it will make it more like a set-top box, or a smart TV when you're not playing games. Convergence of games console and set-top box makes perfect sense, which is why all the last generation of consoles had multimedia capabilities, even down to the PS3 being the most popular living room Blu-Ray player for quite some time after its launch.
This strategy is a very, very good one. For one thing, MS need to get people familiar with the Metro interface if they're ever going to shift any Windows Phone units in any serious numbers. For another, I've little doubt that they'd like to see Windows RT being picked up by the various smart TV manufacturers instead of their current Android and Linux-based roll-your-own jobs. In order to make it appealling to manufacturers, they need to get a critical mass of living room media apps in the app store, and the XB1's market share should draw in app developers. Being early into the Windows Marketplace is an opportunity to make a mark that isn't possible in the overcrowded iOS and Android app marketplaces.
A laptop with a 3G or better internet connection is already the end result of convergence between desktop, mobile, and games but surprisingly, people don't just have laptops and nothing else
I survived for years on a laptop and a dumbphone. The laptop can't replace a phone because it's not pocketable. But I haven't owned a desktop PC since the P2 days.
Target the latest Direct X. Not hard. Valve wanted their own store because there's opportunity in curating.
He wasn't talking about the Steam store -- he was talking about Steam OS.
Some people might then think you're talking about the first XBox, which is the old P-III based one. Personally, Microsoft didn't think the name through. I guess, names like these should be tested on a bunch of 13 year olds to figure out whether it could become misused. I know you think that "X-Bone" is what you should be reading, but I don't and I'm pretty sure many people don't read that either. I think that says more about you than anything else: As I said, it's in wide use with the MS/XBox fanbois.
On the other hand, the fact that you assume "x bone" is something a 13 year old would come up with says more about you than anything else. I can't help reading "X-Bone", and I have an image of a cartoon bone in a dog's mouth. The 13-year-old comment suggests you think something else when you see "bone"...
But there's nothing in the store worth the effort of downloading.
...yet. But with the XB1 users on the appstore by default, Microsoft will be hoping that they've got the inertia to get developers interested.
However I also do not see much reason to be excited by this functionality - only time will tell, but I do not see huge potential in running dumbed down, simple apps on a gaming console.
I think the primary goal will be in trapping the "smart TV" market sector. Having media consumption apps on a cross-platform system will give them advantages in terms of market share, and they'll be hoping that this snowballs. I suspect the end-goal is getting the TV makers to drop their own smart TV platforms and start using WinRT.
But at least that sort of functionality has still been entertainment oriented.
The point is that if you start to focus on general computing then you're detracting from the whole point of a console and doing a half-arsed job of something that PCs et. al. already do far better.
The first megasuccess in console land was the NES, known in Japan as the Famicom, or "family computer", In Japan you could get all sorts of peripherals for it, but that didn't make Super Mario any less fun.
It constantly bugs me how educational theorists jump on the latest thing from neuroscience and then use it to justify anything and everything when even the neuroscientists haven't nailed down the consequences of the discovery yet.
Maybe they don't want to be stuck using neuroscience research that is over a generation old. You'd probably criticize them for that too.
You're assuming I'm moaning for the sake of moaning.
Consider that Newtonian mechanics is still taught in Physics. It has been proven wrong, basing itself on absolutist principles that were debunked by Einstein's relativistic physics, but as a paradigm it works within its own bounds. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Teaching, being several levels of abstraction away from the fundamental working of the human brain, forms a paradigm that can and should be investigated empirically. That empirical investigation can be informed by more fundamental brain sciences (the various branches of neurology and psychology), but findings in those fundamental sciences must prove their applicability to the educational paradigm.
The chief advisor to the UK government's minister of education recently published a paper bemoaning the fact that genetics were not being given the priority they should within education. He cited lots of studies that claimed to prove that genes are the most significant factor in determining individual intelligence and hence academic success.
Now these studies may well be right, but what does that mean to the teacher in the classroom? Precisely nothing, because even if we know in principle that genetics is key, we do not yet know how to identify the genetic markers that determine the differences in potential. So the cutting edge fails us yet again, because the consequences of the findings are not yet investigated.
Back to neuroscience, though, and one of the big ones is investigations of memory, which in neuroscience focus on discrete items for the sake of clarity and low experimental complexity. These studies cannot be directly applicable to school learning, because everything taught in schools fits within a framework of linked knowledge that defines the subject area, yet educationalists jump on this as hard science on "how to teach", when it is anything but (and any good neuroscientist would tell you as much).
Bloody amateur. I use FFT to create my emotions. I've even got dedicated silicon for it!
Exactly. It constantly bugs me how educational theorists jump on the latest thing from neuroscience and then use it to justify anything and everything when even the neuroscientists haven't nailed down the consequences of the discovery yet.
But it's not simply speed, that's my point. You don't get the quarantine issue with land-based travel, which was slower than sea-based travel. It's the boat as a closed environment that makes most of the difference. You could probably get from Alicante in Spain to the toe of Italy quicker by boat than by bus, and a plague bus would be unwittingly spreading its disease at various motorway service stations on the way, whereas the plague boat would be isolated, and the symptoms would hopefully start to show before reaching the destination, thus giving the chance for total quarantine.
Still, technologically, there's no reason the Kickstarter platform couldn't have additional conditions as described.
Actually, someone's now suggesting the "Roman" roads actually predated the Romans. I'd be tempted to dismiss this as another wild theory in search of fame, but it fits with the general trend in history: after centuries of belief in the superiority of a few "great civilisations", we are increasingly realising that there were no true "dark ages", and that civilisation has always progressed. Hell, some of the greatest monumental engineering and architecture came out in the Middle Ages, and they dubbed it "Gothic", suggesting it was barbaric and uncivilised when it was structurally superior to the relatively unsophisticated Classical styl of pillars and basic arches.
Actually, it's not the horses that made the difference, it's the boats. The most obvious difference between a boat and a plane is speed, and it's one of the side-effects of that speed that matters here: if you got on a long-distance sailship incubating a disease, you'd be showing symptoms before you reached your destination, and the ship would be quarantined at anchor in the harbour until everyone on board is either dead or symptom-free. With planes, you'll feel a bit off and you'll be infecting other passengers, and you'll be off the plane and out of the airport long before you realise just how ill you really are.
Yes, but Netflix only has the money to produce these new shows because of the money they make renting out their massive back catalogue, much of which is over 5 years old. If you had a five-year limit on copyright, everything in the Star Trek franchise before JJ Abrams's reboot would be free. Buffy and Angel. Endless hours of South Park. Classic sitcoms from Fawlty Towers to Father Ted. All those big ticket items that have made online and physical distribution profitable -- gone.
It would also kill the market for film rights to books etc. Very few books make it through the adaptation wringer and hit the cinemas within that five year window, so why would anyone ever pay for film rights again? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: book published 2005, Hollywood adaptation 2011. The Time Traveler's Wife: book published 2003, Hollywood adaptation 2009. The Watchmen: comic book published 1986, film released 2009.
Copyright that short would seriously limit the author's potential earnings, and would specifically limit the author's earnings to the earnings in the first medium published. Making a living writing novels is very hard, and the possibility of selling the film rights certainly makes a difference to the viability of a literary career. I agree that life+70 and life+90 are too long, but working for royalties is a trade-off of risk vs reward, and 5 years would mean a lot of risk for very little reward.
But they film a heck of a lot of pilots that never get commissioned, and many serieses do bomb completely. Successful serieses do pay for the risks and losses on other projects.
As the original Super Mario games were built up of levels of reusable "slices" of a level (which is why the games are so huge), and I suspect the random level generator starts with these slices to ensure the levels are playable... which would mean even with original graphics, it would still be a copyright violation.