Bill Gates is doing the same thing that Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and the other 19th century robber barons did - he is transitioning from the persona of a despised, cut-throat, take-no-prisoners monopolist to that of a benign philanthropist, and spending the billions he acquired in order to ensure his legacy. And just like the robber barons the 1800s, I have no doubt that Gates will be viewed as a wonderful benefactor of humanity a hundred years from now. Only the historians will remember how many people and companies he mercilessly crushed to create his fortune.
Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.
Agreed. In reading many of the postings on this topic, I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point of what's going on. 25 years ago, your employers, your supervisors, and your parents spent as much time in a drug, alcohol, and sex-induced stupor as today's college students. College recruiters absolutely do not care about such matters, unless company policy requires a drug test. Your private life is your private life, because they remember they were every bit as bad in their own college days.
What is bothering them is that today's students are violating a strict social/corporate taboo - they are deliberately advertising their private lives to the entire world. When a potential competitor or customer can do a quick web search and find photographs of an employee at an S&M gangbang, that's a huge source of potential embarrassment to the company. Companies will instead hire the S&M gangbanger who had the good sense not to post pictures of his/her latest party for the entire universe to see.
People using MySpace and Facebook need to apply an old time-honored litmus test: "Would I feel comfortable if my family / relatives / minister saw this?" By all means have fun so you can swap those wild college-day stories with your co-workers ten or twenty years from now. But never put yourself in a situation where some crazy co-worker will be able to anonymously embarrass you by forwarding online photographs of something you did years earlier.
Windows 98/98 SE are still perfectly good operating systems for an inexpensive computer used as a web broswer / word processor. There are lots of people who salvage surplused computers (5+ years old) from companies and universities, clean them up, reformat their drives, install Linux, and donate them to people who couldn't afford a computer otherwise. Windows 98/98 SE works just fine on such machines.
Personally, I wish Microsoft would make Windows 98 SE free for download after this July, just as Apple has done with its older operating systems. It would be good PR for Microsoft and cost them absolutely nothing except a little bandwidth.
This technology is great, but for the love of god, please let me be able to turn it off when I want to! If I want to give the car some extra gas through a corner and kick the back end out, don't interfere with me. Safety is a great goal, but I want to tell the car what to do - I don't want the car telling me what I can do.
So you believe you're a better driver than the computer. But are you willing to bet the lives of your passengers, or the lives of other people on the road, that you're a better driver than the computer? More importantly, if I'm driving behind or beside your car in bad weather, am I willing to bet you're a better driver than a computer? I think not.
Let's look at the statistics. In 2004, a total of 42,636 people died, and 2.8 million were injured on U.S. highways. In other words, more U.S. citizens were killed and maimed on U.S. roads every three weeks than have been killed and maimed in the Iraq war after more than three years. Yet society shrugs its shoulders at this level of highway carnage.
I'll bet that many of the drivers who instigated the accidents that led to those 42,636 deaths and 2.8 million injuries in 2004 had the same thoughts: "I want to be in control of my car." "I'm a better driver than a computer." But clearly they weren't, and in many cases innocent people were hurt or killed because of that hubris.
Finally technology is reaching the point that we can build an automobile with safety features that can help compensate for bad driving habits and bad driving conditions, and yet some people argue that they should be able to turn those safety features off. That's argument makes about as much sense as the old rationalization about not using seat belts: "My chances of survival are better if I'm thrown clear of the car, instead of being strapped in." I've heard people actually say that; of course, I'm sure none of them ever worked as a paramedic at a highway accident scene, either. It's an emotional argument, not a logical one.
Sorry, but if you're going to be sharing a public road with other automobiles, then as your fellow driver I vote that you keep those safety features turned on. Furthermore, the statistics prove that if your car does have those safety features, you're foolish not to keep them turned on 100% of the time, even if they may cause more harm than good in some rare set of circumstances - because it's impossible for you to know in advance what those circumstances will be if you're involved in an accident.
I'm sure they've wanted to do it for years. The problem has always been the local affiliates. The advertising on a primetime network show consists of two parts; national advertising (sold by the network), and local advertising (sold by the affiliates). Streaming it over the web essentially cuts out the local affiliates. I guess things have finally reached the point where the networks are more afraid of losing all their advertising (to both piracy and legitimate sources like paid downloads and DVD sales) then they are of pissing off the locals affiliates.
So you bring the local affiliates into the action. They supply localized commercials to the network; you specifiy your geographic location before downloading, and the network dynamically embeds the appropriate local content as you download the show. Not trivial, but certainly not impossible either. Of course, the affiliates have to supply that content, which is extra overhead for them, but it beats not being watched at all.
Hell, just put up a torrent and leave the commercials in. Most people will just download and watch the thing and then delete it. They'll pay no more and no less attention to commercials than they already do. Why make it so damn hard on people to watch a friggin TV show?
Exactly. 99% of the general public will always do what's most convenient, and will trade off money for convenience. People pay $1.99 for an iTunes TV show because it's convenient. Forget the fact that they could download it or record it themselves, then convert it to iPod format. For most folks, it's better to pay $1.99 and avoid that much effort.
If networks released torrents of shows at 320 x 240 pixel resolution with embedded commercials, the percentage of people who would bother to strip the commercials would be very small. Most people would simply go to the official network site, start the torrent download, watch the show, then delete it. Furthermore, a low res "free" version would not compete with a later DVD release to those who wanted a big screen version. If you're worried about people skipping commercials with fast forwarding, then put the show in some sort of proprietary format that requires a special player that won't permit it. Sure, it could be cracked, but 99% of the viewing public won't bother! They'll just download the player and watch (or ignore) the commercials just like they do when watching live TV.
Given the rumors of a video iPod with a larger screen, I could imagine a future where (a) 320 x 240 downloads with commercials were free, (b) 480 x 360 or 640 x 480 downloads without commercials cost $1.99 from iTunes, and (c) DVD and cable HDTV distribution stayed the way it is now.
A favorite tactic of crackpots and cranks ....
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: 1
.. is to condemn the entire scientific and engineering establishment as being full of frauds, liars, and crooks because they don't embrace the crackpot's pet theories.
Savain is your typical "since I don't understand it, it must be wrong" crank. Ask them specific questions that require real analysis (and by "real" I mean the sort of math skills and physics knowledge that most bright high school graduates possess) and you quickly realize they're ignorant at best and mentally ill at worst.
So just how did this submission make it past the editors?
I'm more than certain as soon as Apple starts selling Mac mini x86, or even before, there will be people who hack OS X and make it run on pretty much all the x86 boxes.
Considering the fact that Darwin runs on x86, and that the backend of XCode is gcc, there really isn't anything that stops people booting OS X on regular x86 boxes. Some BIOS hacks?
I'm with you. A lot of clever people are going to devote a lot of effort to finding a way to hack OS X for their homemade beige boxes.
Here's my main concern: they will succeed, and a significant "pseudo-clone" market will spring up. It will cannabilize Mac hardware sales. In self defense, Apple will force users to register their copies of OS X. No more slipping the DVD into the drive and clicking on "install". No, now you'll have to enter a 30-character registration number, and you'll have to authorize the OS within a certain time limit. In other words, I'll be jumping through exactly the same hoops that I've always hated dealing with in the Windows world.
let's see - if the Voyager is out of power in 2015, then there are about 10 yrs (x $4M = $40M in operating costs).
Isn't there a group of Universities (US and abroad) who would be able to fund 10 yrs of space probe research?
Between grants, endowments, and gifts from Alumni in scientific fields, four univiersities would have to (1) fund $1M each for ten years and (2) convince NASA and Congress to sell the project.
Why NOT?
You won't get the money out of any U.S. universities, unless you find a private school that would allocate the money from of the school endowment - and good luck getting the trustees to sign off on that!
Outside of student tuition and rare cases of investment / IP income, universities don't generate money, they spend it. Almost every faculty research dollar comes from a sponsor, and 99% of the time that sponsor is a government agency. No government sponsor is going to agree to a "rob Peter to pay Paul" scheme to pay for Voyager. Furthermore, no sane university administrator is going to approve the funds when the money can be put to use directly on campus.
You'd be better off finding corporate sponsors. $4M a year would be peanuts to a company like Microsoft or Apple, but even then someone has to justify it to the stockholders. After all, what is the return on investment for 10 years of data about the heliopause boundary?
...oh wait. What will they do when they run out of numbers for point releases?!
I think the answer is obvious. Several years from now, after OS X.9 has been released and gotten long in the tooth, Apple's subsequent OS upgrade will be OS XX. Then Apple will start all over with OS XX.1, XX.2, XX.3, etc.
Please moderators. I am not trying to start a flame, I'm just bringing up a point. If you are so unafraid of Nuclear Power, then move your family to within site distance of a plant.
Then by the same argument, I suppose you have no problem moving your family within a couple of miles of a coal-fired power plant? Because if you're arguing that nuclear power should be avoided, then what alternatives exist for the sort of high-grade energy that an advanced industrial civilization requires?
And please note that I very much support solar and wind power. I voluntarily pay a premium for TVA wind power on my electric bill. I drive a 35 mpg Honda Civic, and I have compact fluorescents throughout my house. I believe in conservation and alternative energy - but I am sensible enough to know that we can't sustain our standard of living on conservation and alternative energy alone.
Believe me, given the choice between living near a nuclear plant or a coal / oil-fired plant, I'd take the nuclear plant in a heartbeat - as would most rational people, I think.
If you're going to condemn pro-nuclear supporters with such silly NIMBY arguments, then you are, in effect, instead condemning people to live downwind of acid rain, air pollution, and (interestingly enough) more released radioactivity in the air.
Your Rights Online... The big thing here is a Supermarket loyalty card was used against the customer.
Which is why I used a fake name and address when I signed up for my loyalty cards.
I've never seen any supermarket employee ask for ID when you fill out a loyalty card application. If anything, the employees are completely indifferent about letting customers borrow each others' cards, and will even provide spare cards of their own for customer who forget theirs.
Just use a fake name and address that are not obviously bogus, get the price discount, and stop worrying.
BatMax is designed to separate gullible people from their money, plain and simple. Consider the so-called "technical description" at http://www.batmax.com/technology-features.php:
"(1) The nanoceramic material is extracted from a natural stone and depending on the version, layered between 2 protective silicon foils or on 1 or 2 sides of a conductive sheet.
The magical stuff it's made of is "extracted" from "natural stone". Hey, if it's natural, it must be good, right? These guys are selling pieces of rock with adhesive.
The wavelength of the electron released from BatMax is around 3-40 microns, and is considered to be within almost the same range with the oscillation frequency of molecules inside the battery. These molecules are able to raise their oscillation energy and electricity generation by receiving electron wavelength from BatMax.
This is absolutely meaningless technobabble. "Receiving electron wavelength"? A previous poster is right, these guys have been watching too much Star Trek.
BatMax unblocks and regulates the flow of ions by generating an electro-magnetic cavity and oscillation frequency with negative ions emission. The ionization generated by BatMax has been mesured as a level reaching 30 times the value (7 - 8.000 Ions/cm3) of the ambiant air ionization (2 - 300 Ions/cm3). By the ions production, BatMax improves the electrodes oxidization.
So somehow, using the same principle as an air purifier, the BatMax magically provides "negative ions" (without any electrical contact to the battery, of course) and makes any battery work better. 100% complete hogwash.
I salute the BatMax promoters for their audacity at selling rocks as high tech accessories, and I can only pity those who shell out hard-earned money for them.
There are already several products on the market that utilize inductive charging. For example, electric toothbrushes have used inductive charging for years.
The charging pad acts like the primary winding of a transformer. The power receiver serves as the secondary, along with the necessary rectifier, filter, voltage regulator, etc. You're still constrained to keeping your phone in one place during charging - you just don't have to physically plug it in.
The biggest drawback would be the size / weight penalty of adding a power receiver to every handheld device, and making the energy transfer efficient enough to permit reasonably short charging times. I'm not optimistic that this can be made practical for cellphones, PDAs, and the like, where low weight and small size are so critical.
What do we know about spaceflight? Its toxic to humans and there is nowhere anywhere nearby by any conceivable technology that we could get to. The reality is that one day something from Earth will reach another planet in another galaxy but it is going to look more like R2D2 than Captain Kirk.
I don't mind if it looks like R2D2, as long as it thinks like Captain Kirk.
Too many people are arguing an either/or proposition. Either we send expensive, fragile, flexible humans, or we send dumb, hardy, inflexible robot probes. But there's the obvious middle ground - we'll send robots that think like human beings, and have the smarts and adaptability to behave and respond as humans would, without the need for prohibitively expensive life support.
After all, if a robot can describe its sensory impressions of another planet using human language and human concepts, how is that any different than an astronaut doing it for the taxpayers back home?
Of course, this all depends on whether you believe real AI is possible within the next 20 to 100 years. But if AI is possible, it will be pointless to send human bodies into space, when all we really need to send are human minds.
I love those "Cashless ATMs" and "Internet Terminal" schemes they offer on TV. Basically, they do all the the work and you just collect the profits each week! Ha! My favorite line is, "Millions have joined up, but the best locations are still available!" I wonder if those "millions" of people who signed up see those commercials and go, "WTF?! People are getting better locations than me?"
Anyone who is curious about those movie/phone/internet kiosk commercials you're always seeing on the SciFi channel ought to check out kioskscams.com. According to this site (set up by one of the victims) they're all shell companies being run by the same group of criminals operating in Florida.
These guys collect the money under a shell corporation, declare bankruptcy, then move on to a new set of victims under a new corporate name. Neither the state of Florida nor the U.S. government has moved against them yet. At $20K (or more) per victim, the kiosk scammers make 419 scammers look like petty thieves by comparison.
You get a slip of paper with the candidates for your riding listed in alphabetical order. You write an X in pencil in the circle next to your chosen candidate's name. You fold the paper and slip it into the ballot box. Done. Never have had any issues with this system.
And what happens to people who mark an "X" next to two candidates? Or people who turn in a ballot with no visible "X", but what appears to be a small pencil mark next to one candidate's name? Don't tell me such things don't happen in Canada. I'm certain they do. They're spoiled ballots, and how do they get counted?
Everyone who complains about the complexity of the American voting system fails to understand why e-voting became such an issue after the 2000 election. The difference between Bush and Gore in the Florida recount was so small that the spoiled ballots became the "swing vote". The interpretation of those ballots (e.g. hanging chads) became a life and death matter to both Democrats and Republicans.
The whole point of e-voting is to eliminate spoiled ballots. While I don't agree with the current Diebold solution (I want a paper trail too), I do understand the underlying rationale. Neither political party wants the next close U.S. election to turn into another fiasco because of a tiny percentage of uncountable votes.
If Canada ever goes through what the U.S did in 2000, and a few hundred spoiled ballots decides the future of your country, I think you'll be amazed how quickly your "simple" solution is tossed into the trash, and you find yourself facing an electronic screen come election time.
I've never been able to stomach Mutant X but I liked Andromeda at first, but now to watch episodes I originally liked I stand stand it.
Andromeda suffered from the Earth:Final Conflict syndrome - an interesting beginning that rapidly degenerated into unwatchable crap after creative team / cast changes. Andromea had me hooked at the start, and turned me off completely by the start of the third season after Robert Hewitt Wolfe was forced out as head writer.
There's little to mourn about Andromeda or Mutant X. There's always an audience for sci-fi (fickle though that audience may be), and hopefully the money that was being wasted on these train wrecks may find its way into better shows next season.
if they can't make money at $.99 a song, then why are 20 companies popping up every week doing the exact same thing with no hardware business?
Have you forgotten the dot-com boom and bust so quickly? Since when did a rational business model have anything to do with Internet companies?
Everyone is saying "Apple is doing it! So can we!" All twenty of those companies are going to lose millions as they struggle for market share. Most, if not all, will be gone in two to three years.
If Jobs is smart, he'll wait until most of the competition has gone bust, then use iTune's leverage as the #1 legal music distributor to get a better deal from the music industry, i.e. "It's either iTunes or Kazaa. Take your pick."
Court in session, Glib Telemarketers are appealing a ruling that they can't call cell phones. Aide to judge notifies the judge that there's a call on his ultra-private emergencies only cellphone. Judge retires to his chambers to take the call...
Voice: "Hello. I'm Sodum, and I'm calling on behalf of Glib Telemarketers. Would you be interested in one of our free unlimited-credit credit cards today?"
Judge returns to court and sentances everyone at Glib Telemarketing to a slow and painful death.
This reminds me of a news story I read several years back, when "junk fax" laws were being passed in most states. (Can't find a link, unfortunately.)
A judge had to rule on a case brought by several fax marketers to stop a state law from being implemented. Somehow they found out the judge's home fax number. Big mistake.
The next morning the judge comes into the courtroom and just prior to his ruling describes how his phone number rang all night long, as one fax after another arrived, each one from a different telemarketer imploring him to strike down the junk fax legislation.
The number #1 problem with this paper's credibility is that it's being published in "Foundations of Physics Letters". In the past decade, FPL has degenerated into a "junk" journal that publishes all sorts of crackpot science papers.
For example, the following FPL papers were co-authored by the infamous pseudoscientific crackpot Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, and describes a supposed invention that extracts energy from the vacuum and violates conservation of energy!
M. W. Evans, P. K. Anastasovski, T. E. Bearden et al., "Explanation of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator with O(3) Electrodynamics," Foundations of Physics Letters, 14(1), Feb. 2001, p. 87-94.
M. W. Evans, P. K. Anastasovski, T. E. Bearden et al., "Explanation of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator by Sachs's Theory of Electrodynamics," Foundations of Physics Letters, 14(4), 2001, p. 387-393.
"Foundations of Physics Letters" has destroyed its credibility publishing this sort of junk, and is no longer taken seriously by anyone in the physics and engineering community.
First, a little background. Tilley's "miracle" electric vehicle has been getting a lot of media coverage here in Nashville over the past week, and it's been a topic of conversation at work. One of my colleagues and I decided to check it out for ourselves, out of pure curiousity.
This is not the first time Mr. Tilley has been in the Nashville news. About a year and a half ago he got some publicity by claiming that he and another inventor had created a "free energy" machine, a la Tom Bearden, Dennis Lee, and Joe Newman. When people tried to follow up on his claims, he dropped out of sight. Now he had resurfaced with a claim that he was using this machine to power an electric car. What really made it interesting was that Bobby Allison was apparently promoting Tilley's claims, both on his own web site (http://www.bobbyallison.com), and by driving the car at the Superspeedway.
Being firm believers in the second law of thermodynamics, my co-workers and I expected one of three things to happen:
(1) Tilley would attempt to hide an internal combustion engine somewhere in the Delorean, and prevent people from examining it up close (unlikely, as people would hear the engine running). He might also hide extra batteries to extend the running time.
(2) The car would make very frequent pit stops in a screened area (so as to prevent the "secret" from being stolen, of course), during which the batteries would miraculously recharge themselves.
(3) The car would suffer an unfortunate "breakdown" well before the distance limit imposed by the maximum energy storage of the twelve lead-acid batteries in his vehicle.
As it turned out, #3 was the winner. In the middle of the 13th lap, the announcer suddenly announced that the vehicle had a bad rear wheel bearing. It looked to me as if the batteries were quickly reaching the end of their charge, as the car was running very slowly on that last lap. In the 12th lap, the car had zipped by fairly quickly, about 60 mph on the track, with no visible problems. Amazing how quickly a wheel bearing will go out on you, and how some people can diagnose it while the car is still moving.:-)
Once the car had coasted into the pit, I left. I knew the demo was over, although some people in the crowd didn't (and apparently stuck around for hours afterwards!).
A few comments: my co-worker arrived earlier than me and got to see the car up close before the demo. According to him, two men with guns were standing guard and preventing anyone from looking UNDER the car. He took that as a sign that either extra batteries or an internal combustion engine must be visible from the underside.
I was in the stands with a crowd of about 50 to 60 people, maximum. Judging from the conversations around me, many of them were either investors or True Believers. I heard the usual claptrap about conspiracies, death threats by oil companies, etc., that get tossed around by the proponents of these scams.
What troubled me, of course, is that many of the investors looked like normal middle class folks, using their own savings and hoping to cash in on a world-shaking invention. They, and people like them, were the true targets of Mr. Tilley's exhibition.
As for Bobby Allison, he was there at the beginning and drove the first couple of laps, then apparently left. For his own sake, I hope he distances himself from Mr. Tilley as quickly as possible.
Finally, for those who are interested, I made a Quicktime movie of the car making the final lap (out of the pit, around part of the track, and back into the pit). You can see for yourself how slowly the car was going before the "breakdown".
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/wthwthwth/tilleyde mo.html (remove any spaces)
Someone please mirror this! I have no idea how much bandwidth Comcast will let me have, but I'm willing to bet I'll find out.:-)
Upon reading the article, you find that Mr. Brandt's main complaint about Google is that he believes that when you type in, say, "Richard M. Nixon" into Google, the material he has compiled on Nixon should be ranked #1.
Okay, so I did a search on Nixon on Brandt's site. Here are the first couple of results:
(1) How the Vatican conspired to hide Nazi war criminals. (2) How various activists were persecuted by the CIA and FBI.
Nowhere did I even SEE Nixon's name in these abstracts. The only relevance is that Nixon was alive at the time, or maybe president when some of them took place, but hardly the man personally responsible for all of them.
When I type "Nixon" into Google, I expect to see biographical material, both good and bad, not totally unrelated rantings. Google is doing its job, in my opinion. It is giving low rankings to Brandt's irrelevant materials. His complaints are pure self-centered sour grapes.
Yes! Check out Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, by Robert Park for an excellent discussion of this kind of thing. They have a small but nonnegligible number of people contributing to antigravity, perpetual motion, and other pseudo-science. It's pretty sad.
Interestingly enough, the aerospace industry seems to attract a disproportionate number of these types. For example, the Huntsville, Alabama area is home to a significant group of "free energy" researchers.
However, anyone who thinks that NASA's grant will settle the hydrino question once and for all simply doesn't understand the mind of a pseudoscientist. You can never present enough negative evidence to convince these types. When the hydrino rocket fails to work, they'll just claim "Oh, that guy didn't do x, y, or z, otherwise it would have worked."
Hydrinos will make headlines as long as Blacklight Power can keep convincing investors to throw away their money. In another two or three years the deep pockets will run out of patience and hydrinos will fade into crank science obscurity.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates is doing the same thing that Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and the other 19th century robber barons did - he is transitioning from the persona of a despised, cut-throat, take-no-prisoners monopolist to that of a benign philanthropist, and spending the billions he acquired in order to ensure his legacy. And just like the robber barons the 1800s, I have no doubt that Gates will be viewed as a wonderful benefactor of humanity a hundred years from now. Only the historians will remember how many people and companies he mercilessly crushed to create his fortune.
Agreed. In reading many of the postings on this topic, I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point of what's going on. 25 years ago, your employers, your supervisors, and your parents spent as much time in a drug, alcohol, and sex-induced stupor as today's college students. College recruiters absolutely do not care about such matters, unless company policy requires a drug test. Your private life is your private life, because they remember they were every bit as bad in their own college days.
What is bothering them is that today's students are violating a strict social/corporate taboo - they are deliberately advertising their private lives to the entire world. When a potential competitor or customer can do a quick web search and find photographs of an employee at an S&M gangbang, that's a huge source of potential embarrassment to the company. Companies will instead hire the S&M gangbanger who had the good sense not to post pictures of his/her latest party for the entire universe to see.
People using MySpace and Facebook need to apply an old time-honored litmus test: "Would I feel comfortable if my family / relatives / minister saw this?" By all means have fun so you can swap those wild college-day stories with your co-workers ten or twenty years from now. But never put yourself in a situation where some crazy co-worker will be able to anonymously embarrass you by forwarding online photographs of something you did years earlier.
Windows 98/98 SE are still perfectly good operating systems for an inexpensive computer used as a web broswer / word processor. There are lots of people who salvage surplused computers (5+ years old) from companies and universities, clean them up, reformat their drives, install Linux, and donate them to people who couldn't afford a computer otherwise. Windows 98/98 SE works just fine on such machines.
Personally, I wish Microsoft would make Windows 98 SE free for download after this July, just as Apple has done with its older operating systems. It would be good PR for Microsoft and cost them absolutely nothing except a little bandwidth.
So you believe you're a better driver than the computer. But are you willing to bet the lives of your passengers, or the lives of other people on the road, that you're a better driver than the computer? More importantly, if I'm driving behind or beside your car in bad weather, am I willing to bet you're a better driver than a computer? I think not.
Let's look at the statistics. In 2004, a total of 42,636 people died, and 2.8 million were injured on U.S. highways. In other words, more U.S. citizens were killed and maimed on U.S. roads every three weeks than have been killed and maimed in the Iraq war after more than three years. Yet society shrugs its shoulders at this level of highway carnage.
I'll bet that many of the drivers who instigated the accidents that led to those 42,636 deaths and 2.8 million injuries in 2004 had the same thoughts: "I want to be in control of my car." "I'm a better driver than a computer." But clearly they weren't, and in many cases innocent people were hurt or killed because of that hubris.
Finally technology is reaching the point that we can build an automobile with safety features that can help compensate for bad driving habits and bad driving conditions, and yet some people argue that they should be able to turn those safety features off. That's argument makes about as much sense as the old rationalization about not using seat belts: "My chances of survival are better if I'm thrown clear of the car, instead of being strapped in." I've heard people actually say that; of course, I'm sure none of them ever worked as a paramedic at a highway accident scene, either. It's an emotional argument, not a logical one.
Sorry, but if you're going to be sharing a public road with other automobiles, then as your fellow driver I vote that you keep those safety features turned on. Furthermore, the statistics prove that if your car does have those safety features, you're foolish not to keep them turned on 100% of the time, even if they may cause more harm than good in some rare set of circumstances - because it's impossible for you to know in advance what those circumstances will be if you're involved in an accident.
I'm sure they've wanted to do it for years. The problem has always been the local affiliates. The advertising on a primetime network show consists of two parts; national advertising (sold by the network), and local advertising (sold by the affiliates). Streaming it over the web essentially cuts out the local affiliates. I guess things have finally reached the point where the networks are more afraid of losing all their advertising (to both piracy and legitimate sources like paid downloads and DVD sales) then they are of pissing off the locals affiliates.
So you bring the local affiliates into the action. They supply localized commercials to the network; you specifiy your geographic location before downloading, and the network dynamically embeds the appropriate local content as you download the show. Not trivial, but certainly not impossible either. Of course, the affiliates have to supply that content, which is extra overhead for them, but it beats not being watched at all.
Hell, just put up a torrent and leave the commercials in. Most people will just download and watch the thing and then delete it. They'll pay no more and no less attention to commercials than they already do. Why make it so damn hard on people to watch a friggin TV show?
Exactly. 99% of the general public will always do what's most convenient, and will trade off money for convenience. People pay $1.99 for an iTunes TV show because it's convenient. Forget the fact that they could download it or record it themselves, then convert it to iPod format. For most folks, it's better to pay $1.99 and avoid that much effort.
If networks released torrents of shows at 320 x 240 pixel resolution with embedded commercials, the percentage of people who would bother to strip the commercials would be very small. Most people would simply go to the official network site, start the torrent download, watch the show, then delete it. Furthermore, a low res "free" version would not compete with a later DVD release to those who wanted a big screen version. If you're worried about people skipping commercials with fast forwarding, then put the show in some sort of proprietary format that requires a special player that won't permit it. Sure, it could be cracked, but 99% of the viewing public won't bother! They'll just download the player and watch (or ignore) the commercials just like they do when watching live TV.
Given the rumors of a video iPod with a larger screen, I could imagine a future where (a) 320 x 240 downloads with commercials were free, (b) 480 x 360 or 640 x 480 downloads without commercials cost $1.99 from iTunes, and (c) DVD and cable HDTV distribution stayed the way it is now.
.. is to condemn the entire scientific and engineering establishment as being full of frauds, liars, and crooks because they don't embrace the crackpot's pet theories.
Savain is your typical "since I don't understand it, it must be wrong" crank. Ask them specific questions that require real analysis (and by "real" I mean the sort of math skills and physics knowledge that most bright high school graduates possess) and you quickly realize they're ignorant at best and mentally ill at worst.
So just how did this submission make it past the editors?
I'm with you. A lot of clever people are going to devote a lot of effort to finding a way to hack OS X for their homemade beige boxes.
Here's my main concern: they will succeed, and a significant "pseudo-clone" market will spring up. It will cannabilize Mac hardware sales. In self defense, Apple will force users to register their copies of OS X. No more slipping the DVD into the drive and clicking on "install". No, now you'll have to enter a 30-character registration number, and you'll have to authorize the OS within a certain time limit. In other words, I'll be jumping through exactly the same hoops that I've always hated dealing with in the Windows world.
Based on customer feedback, Tiger Direct seems to be pretty hit-or-miss about customer service and satisfaction.
They're doing more damage to their reputation with their own business practices than Apple could ever do by marketing OS X 10.4.
You won't get the money out of any U.S. universities, unless you find a private school that would allocate the money from of the school endowment - and good luck getting the trustees to sign off on that!
Outside of student tuition and rare cases of investment / IP income, universities don't generate money, they spend it. Almost every faculty research dollar comes from a sponsor, and 99% of the time that sponsor is a government agency. No government sponsor is going to agree to a "rob Peter to pay Paul" scheme to pay for Voyager. Furthermore, no sane university administrator is going to approve the funds when the money can be put to use directly on campus.
You'd be better off finding corporate sponsors. $4M a year would be peanuts to a company like Microsoft or Apple, but even then someone has to justify it to the stockholders. After all, what is the return on investment for 10 years of data about the heliopause boundary?
I think the answer is obvious. Several years from now, after OS X.9 has been released and gotten long in the tooth, Apple's subsequent OS upgrade will be OS XX. Then Apple will start all over with OS XX.1, XX.2, XX.3, etc.
Then by the same argument, I suppose you have no problem moving your family within a couple of miles of a coal-fired power plant? Because if you're arguing that nuclear power should be avoided, then what alternatives exist for the sort of high-grade energy that an advanced industrial civilization requires?
And please note that I very much support solar and wind power. I voluntarily pay a premium for TVA wind power on my electric bill. I drive a 35 mpg Honda Civic, and I have compact fluorescents throughout my house. I believe in conservation and alternative energy - but I am sensible enough to know that we can't sustain our standard of living on conservation and alternative energy alone.
Believe me, given the choice between living near a nuclear plant or a coal / oil-fired plant, I'd take the nuclear plant in a heartbeat - as would most rational people, I think.
If you're going to condemn pro-nuclear supporters with such silly NIMBY arguments, then you are, in effect, instead condemning people to live downwind of acid rain, air pollution, and (interestingly enough) more released radioactivity in the air.
Which is why I used a fake name and address when I signed up for my loyalty cards.
I've never seen any supermarket employee ask for ID when you fill out a loyalty card application. If anything, the employees are completely indifferent about letting customers borrow each others' cards, and will even provide spare cards of their own for customer who forget theirs.
Just use a fake name and address that are not obviously bogus, get the price discount, and stop worrying.
BatMax is designed to separate gullible people from their money, plain and simple. Consider the so-called "technical description" at http://www.batmax.com/technology-features.php:
"(1) The nanoceramic material is extracted from a natural stone and depending on the version, layered between 2 protective silicon foils or on 1 or 2 sides of a conductive sheet.
The magical stuff it's made of is "extracted" from "natural stone". Hey, if it's natural, it must be good, right? These guys are selling pieces of rock with adhesive.
The wavelength of the electron released from BatMax is around 3-40 microns, and is considered to be within almost the same range with the oscillation frequency of molecules inside the battery. These molecules are able to raise their oscillation energy and electricity generation by receiving electron wavelength from BatMax.
This is absolutely meaningless technobabble. "Receiving electron wavelength"? A previous poster is right, these guys have been watching too much Star Trek.
BatMax unblocks and regulates the flow of ions by generating an electro-magnetic cavity and oscillation frequency with negative ions emission. The ionization generated by BatMax has been mesured as a level reaching 30 times the value (7 - 8.000 Ions/cm3) of the ambiant air ionization (2 - 300 Ions/cm3). By the ions production, BatMax improves the electrodes oxidization.
So somehow, using the same principle as an air purifier, the BatMax magically provides "negative ions" (without any electrical contact to the battery, of course) and makes any battery work better. 100% complete hogwash.
I salute the BatMax promoters for their audacity at selling rocks as high tech accessories, and I can only pity those who shell out hard-earned money for them.
There are already several products on the market that utilize inductive charging. For example, electric toothbrushes have used inductive charging for years.
The charging pad acts like the primary winding of a transformer. The power receiver serves as the secondary, along with the necessary rectifier, filter, voltage regulator, etc. You're still constrained to keeping your phone in one place during charging - you just don't have to physically plug it in.
The biggest drawback would be the size / weight penalty of adding a power receiver to every handheld device, and making the energy transfer efficient enough to permit reasonably short charging times. I'm not optimistic that this can be made practical for cellphones, PDAs, and the like, where low weight and small size are so critical.
I don't mind if it looks like R2D2, as long as it thinks like Captain Kirk.
Too many people are arguing an either/or proposition. Either we send expensive, fragile, flexible humans, or we send dumb, hardy, inflexible robot probes. But there's the obvious middle ground - we'll send robots that think like human beings, and have the smarts and adaptability to behave and respond as humans would, without the need for prohibitively expensive life support.
After all, if a robot can describe its sensory impressions of another planet using human language and human concepts, how is that any different than an astronaut doing it for the taxpayers back home?
Of course, this all depends on whether you believe real AI is possible within the next 20 to 100 years. But if AI is possible, it will be pointless to send human bodies into space, when all we really need to send are human minds.
Anyone who is curious about those movie/phone/internet kiosk commercials you're always seeing on the SciFi channel ought to check out kioskscams.com. According to this site (set up by one of the victims) they're all shell companies being run by the same group of criminals operating in Florida.
These guys collect the money under a shell corporation, declare bankruptcy, then move on to a new set of victims under a new corporate name. Neither the state of Florida nor the U.S. government has moved against them yet. At $20K (or more) per victim, the kiosk scammers make 419 scammers look like petty thieves by comparison.
And what happens to people who mark an "X" next to two candidates? Or people who turn in a ballot with no visible "X", but what appears to be a small pencil mark next to one candidate's name? Don't tell me such things don't happen in Canada. I'm certain they do. They're spoiled ballots, and how do they get counted?
Everyone who complains about the complexity of the American voting system fails to understand why e-voting became such an issue after the 2000 election. The difference between Bush and Gore in the Florida recount was so small that the spoiled ballots became the "swing vote". The interpretation of those ballots (e.g. hanging chads) became a life and death matter to both Democrats and Republicans.
The whole point of e-voting is to eliminate spoiled ballots. While I don't agree with the current Diebold solution (I want a paper trail too), I do understand the underlying rationale. Neither political party wants the next close U.S. election to turn into another fiasco because of a tiny percentage of uncountable votes.
If Canada ever goes through what the U.S did in 2000, and a few hundred spoiled ballots decides the future of your country, I think you'll be amazed how quickly your "simple" solution is tossed into the trash, and you find yourself facing an electronic screen come election time.
Andromeda suffered from the Earth:Final Conflict syndrome - an interesting beginning that rapidly degenerated into unwatchable crap after creative team / cast changes. Andromea had me hooked at the start, and turned me off completely by the start of the third season after Robert Hewitt Wolfe was forced out as head writer.
There's little to mourn about Andromeda or Mutant X. There's always an audience for sci-fi (fickle though that audience may be), and hopefully the money that was being wasted on these train wrecks may find its way into better shows next season.
Have you forgotten the dot-com boom and bust so quickly? Since when did a rational business model have anything to do with Internet companies?
Everyone is saying "Apple is doing it! So can we!" All twenty of those companies are going to lose millions as they struggle for market share. Most, if not all, will be gone in two to three years.
If Jobs is smart, he'll wait until most of the competition has gone bust, then use iTune's leverage as the #1 legal music distributor to get a better deal from the music industry, i.e. "It's either iTunes or Kazaa. Take your pick."
This reminds me of a news story I read several years back, when "junk fax" laws were being passed in most states. (Can't find a link, unfortunately.)
A judge had to rule on a case brought by several fax marketers to stop a state law from being implemented. Somehow they found out the judge's home fax number. Big mistake.
The next morning the judge comes into the courtroom and just prior to his ruling describes how his phone number rang all night long, as one fax after another arrived, each one from a different telemarketer imploring him to strike down the junk fax legislation.
One guess how the judge ruled.
The number #1 problem with this paper's credibility is that it's being published in "Foundations of Physics Letters". In the past decade, FPL has degenerated into a "junk" journal that publishes all sorts of crackpot science papers.
For example, the following FPL papers were co-authored by the infamous pseudoscientific crackpot Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, and describes a supposed invention that extracts energy from the vacuum and violates conservation of energy!
M. W. Evans, P. K. Anastasovski, T. E. Bearden et al., "Explanation of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator with O(3) Electrodynamics," Foundations of Physics Letters, 14(1), Feb. 2001, p. 87-94.
M. W. Evans, P. K. Anastasovski, T. E. Bearden et al., "Explanation of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator by Sachs's Theory of Electrodynamics," Foundations of Physics Letters, 14(4), 2001, p. 387-393.
"Foundations of Physics Letters" has destroyed its credibility publishing this sort of junk, and is no longer taken seriously by anyone in the physics and engineering community.
...and watched the demo.
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First, a little background. Tilley's "miracle" electric vehicle has been getting a lot of media coverage here in Nashville over the past week, and it's been a topic of conversation at work. One of my colleagues and I decided to check it out for ourselves, out of pure curiousity.
This is not the first time Mr. Tilley has been in the Nashville news. About a year and a half ago he got some publicity by claiming that he and another inventor had created a "free energy" machine, a la Tom Bearden, Dennis Lee, and Joe Newman. When people tried to follow up on his claims, he dropped out of sight. Now he had resurfaced with a claim that he was using this machine to power an electric car. What really made it interesting was that Bobby Allison was apparently promoting Tilley's claims, both on his own web site (http://www.bobbyallison.com), and by driving the car at the Superspeedway.
Being firm believers in the second law of thermodynamics, my co-workers and I expected one of three things to happen:
(1) Tilley would attempt to hide an internal combustion engine somewhere in the Delorean, and prevent people from examining it up close (unlikely, as people would hear the engine running). He might also hide extra batteries to extend the running time.
(2) The car would make very frequent pit stops in a screened area (so as to prevent the "secret" from being stolen, of course), during which the batteries would miraculously recharge themselves.
(3) The car would suffer an unfortunate "breakdown" well before the distance limit imposed by the maximum energy storage of the twelve lead-acid batteries in his vehicle.
As it turned out, #3 was the winner. In the middle of the 13th lap, the announcer suddenly announced that the vehicle had a bad rear wheel bearing. It looked to me as if the batteries were quickly reaching the end of their charge, as the car was running very slowly on that last lap. In the 12th lap, the car had zipped by fairly quickly, about 60 mph on the track, with no visible problems. Amazing how quickly a wheel bearing will go out on you, and how some people can diagnose it while the car is still moving.
Once the car had coasted into the pit, I left. I knew the demo was over, although some people in the crowd didn't (and apparently stuck around for hours afterwards!).
A few comments: my co-worker arrived earlier than me and got to see the car up close before the demo. According to him, two men with guns were standing guard and preventing anyone from looking UNDER the car. He took that as a sign that either extra batteries or an internal combustion engine must be visible from the underside.
I was in the stands with a crowd of about 50 to 60 people, maximum. Judging from the conversations around me, many of them were either investors or True Believers. I heard the usual claptrap about conspiracies, death threats by oil companies, etc., that get tossed around by the proponents of these scams.
What troubled me, of course, is that many of the investors looked like normal middle class folks, using their own savings and hoping to cash in on a world-shaking invention. They, and people like them, were the true targets of Mr. Tilley's exhibition.
As for Bobby Allison, he was there at the beginning and drove the first couple of laps, then apparently left. For his own sake, I hope he distances himself from Mr. Tilley as quickly as possible.
Finally, for those who are interested, I made a Quicktime movie of the car making the final lap (out of the pit, around part of the track, and back into the pit). You can see for yourself how slowly the car was going before the "breakdown".
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/wthwthwth/tilleyd
Someone please mirror this! I have no idea how much bandwidth Comcast will let me have, but I'm willing to bet I'll find out.
Upon reading the article, you find that Mr. Brandt's main complaint about Google is that he believes that when you type in, say, "Richard M. Nixon" into Google, the material he has compiled on Nixon should be ranked #1.
Okay, so I did a search on Nixon on Brandt's site. Here are the first couple of results:
(1) How the Vatican conspired to hide Nazi war criminals.
(2) How various activists were persecuted by the CIA and FBI.
Nowhere did I even SEE Nixon's name in these abstracts. The only relevance is that Nixon was alive at the time, or maybe president when some of them took place, but hardly the man personally responsible for all of them.
When I type "Nixon" into Google, I expect to see biographical material, both good and bad, not totally unrelated rantings. Google is doing its job, in my opinion. It is giving low rankings to Brandt's irrelevant materials. His complaints are pure self-centered sour grapes.
Interestingly enough, the aerospace industry seems to attract a disproportionate number of these types. For example, the Huntsville, Alabama area is home to a significant group of "free energy" researchers.
However, anyone who thinks that NASA's grant will settle the hydrino question once and for all simply doesn't understand the mind of a pseudoscientist. You can never present enough negative evidence to convince these types. When the hydrino rocket fails to work, they'll just claim "Oh, that guy didn't do x, y, or z, otherwise it would have worked."
Hydrinos will make headlines as long as Blacklight Power can keep convincing investors to throw away their money. In another two or three years the deep pockets will run out of patience and hydrinos will fade into crank science obscurity.