I've been taking Welsh language lessons courtesy of the BBC
When I was a child in Dublin and the weather was *just right* we would receive BBC Wales instead of BBC Northern Ireland.
I spent many happy hours watching the US Batman series with Welsh subtitles. Just as I was learning to read I think all those crazy Welsh spellings did something to my brain.
Point taken. I am interested, however, in how to make a distinction ebtween "natural" and "artificial" in the context of gemstones. As mined, "natural" stones are the product of a vast, artificial mining apparatus that requires enormous investments of human, financial, and energy capital. And even when extracted, these stones look like, well, stones. It takes many thousands of hours of labour and some fearsome technology, distribution networks, and financial engineering to transform these dull stones in shiny gemstones.
If that isn't artificial then I don't know what is. It's possible there might be *less* middlemen and production inputs involved in the production of a lab-grown "artificial" gemstone.
I sure as heck wouldn't buy my girlfriend a lab created one. All of the many peices of jewlery I bought her were natural.
I see very little "natural" in forcing children to dig stones out of hot underground mines. If I had the option to buy satisfactory lab diamonds I would. However, despite many promises, these are not currently available in suitable quantity or sizes. Lucky for devoted diamond buyers there are Canadian-certified non-DeBeers diamonds. I am currently unaware of any large-scale slavery operations in Canada...
if your gal's educated and fairly inteligent she'll probably have no problem if you give her something other than a diamond.
Especially if she does some historical research and discovers that prior to DeBeer's marketing campaigns in the late Victorian Era, most people exchanged fancy birth stone jewellry as engagement tokens. DeBeers invented the "Diamonds Are Forever" and ran with this ideology for over a century.
I note that around the same time Coca Cola refactored Kris Kringle, named him Santa Claus, and kitted him out in their advertising logo colours. And we think *our* society is permeated by advertising!
One of the best features of iTunes is the ability to listen to the libraries of other people on a corporate LAN (or even a home LAN).
Agreed. You know what is cooler? The ability to browse libraries and stream music over WANs as well as LANs.
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center. And of course, with a trifecta or maxi, mini, and fullscreen skin options, Media Center rules for customization.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center, as well as directly transcoding for different zones.
I enjoy sharing music over intra- or internet connections with Media Center. Client-Server streaming, shared libraries, configurable ports, the whole enchilada.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
You want to own a piece of it yourself, and have voting rights regarding the company's future? Go buy a block of stock.
Shareholder "democracy" is about as unfair, undemocratic, and delusionally unresponsive as you can get. Even when and if shareholders succeed in pushing through motions at general meetings with which the Board of Directors disagree, they can still ignore them. Withness the latest round of motions in favour of options expensing that are being soundly ignored by their Boards.
I think you are using bias selection to justify your preconception. The Soviets lost the most during WW2 by a huge margin, but they were one of the victors. Overall, the "score" in WW2 in terms of military casualties was
Allies / Axis
17.2 million / 5.4 million
Therefore it seems that the Axis was a lot more "efficient" at warfare than the Allies. Or a lot less wasteful. And yet they lost.
Actually over 200,000 French soldiers died in WW2 before and during the occupation, and 350,000 civilians were slaughtered. Remember at the start of WW2 France faced the most advanced army and airforce in the world and their regular forces crumbled. Their partisan efforts during the invasion disrupted German supply lines and communications. If you scale up the French casualties compared to the US casualties (~300,000/6000) you will see that because of the US's late entry to the WW2, their per-capita casualty rate was much lower than the French. Put simply, the French suffered, while the US grandstanded, and picked over the spoils of victory.
Of course, all the Western efforts pale in comparison to the Soviet Union, which sustained at least 13 million dead soldiers and at least 7 million dead civilians. The Soviets crushed the Third Reich - without them Britain and the US would doubtless have sued for a negotiated peace or ceasefire.
In point of fact, one way of looking at WW2 is as a continuation of the European Civil War begun during WW1 and interrupted by an armistice for a couple of decades during which conflict moved to the edges and the colonies rather than the centre. Finally during WW2 both the US and the USSR entered the war while the main protagonists were becoming exhausted, and their efforts proved decisive, with the result that no European nation won the European Civil War.
For Americans, it's like imagining that during the US Civil War, that Britain had entered the war on the side of the slave states while France and Germany decided to join the Union states. I think Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine had some alternate history quite like this, with European intervention leading to a separate CSA and USA.
most rendering is done with the CPU, not the CPU from my understanding
That's because with AGP it's such a PITA to pull large volumes of data back from the GPU up to the CPU. AGP is effectively a one-way route. And PCI is skewed toward downstream, and has limited bandwidth anyway.
PCI Express is bi-symmetrical along the bus. CPUGPU(s) can communicate at will. This is an important new thing. You will be able to offload large arrays to the GPU for vector and matrix processing, then get the results back. You would have to go back to the 1980s Amiga/Atari for examples of mainstream chipsets that integrated their GPUs and CPUs in such a fashion.
The technology required to burn these things is rather bulky and expensive.
Sorry, but Vestax have devised a rather cheap, portable, and excellent vinyl cutter to duplicate this newfangled analog vinyl technology of which you speak.
Slashdot Mirror
re-read your copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel"
If you liked Guns Germs and Steel, then you owe it to yourself to read the "original" book in this vein: Ecological Imperialism : The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 .
I've been taking Welsh language lessons courtesy of the BBC
When I was a child in Dublin and the weather was *just right* we would receive BBC Wales instead of BBC Northern Ireland.
I spent many happy hours watching the US Batman series with Welsh subtitles. Just as I was learning to read I think all those crazy Welsh spellings did something to my brain.
I was talking about other gem stones.
Point taken. I am interested, however, in how to make a distinction ebtween "natural" and "artificial" in the context of gemstones. As mined, "natural" stones are the product of a vast, artificial mining apparatus that requires enormous investments of human, financial, and energy capital. And even when extracted, these stones look like, well, stones. It takes many thousands of hours of labour and some fearsome technology, distribution networks, and financial engineering to transform these dull stones in shiny gemstones.
If that isn't artificial then I don't know what is. It's possible there might be *less* middlemen and production inputs involved in the production of a lab-grown "artificial" gemstone.
I sure as heck wouldn't buy my girlfriend a lab created one. All of the many peices of jewlery I bought her were natural.
I see very little "natural" in forcing children to dig stones out of hot underground mines. If I had the option to buy satisfactory lab diamonds I would. However, despite many promises, these are not currently available in suitable quantity or sizes. Lucky for devoted diamond buyers there are Canadian-certified non-DeBeers diamonds. I am currently unaware of any large-scale slavery operations in Canada...
That was the dumbest thing I have ever read. God damn hippie.
It's easy to criticise, less easy to be constructive. Since you disagree so much with the sentiments expressed, what's your alternative proposal?
The more you tighten your grip, Steve, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
if your gal's educated and fairly inteligent she'll probably have no problem if you give her something other than a diamond.
Especially if she does some historical research and discovers that prior to DeBeer's marketing campaigns in the late Victorian Era, most people exchanged fancy birth stone jewellry as engagement tokens. DeBeers invented the "Diamonds Are Forever" and ran with this ideology for over a century.
I note that around the same time Coca Cola refactored Kris Kringle, named him Santa Claus, and kitted him out in their advertising logo colours. And we think *our* society is permeated by advertising!
Ken Macleod is a socialist bastage anyway
Really? His politics always struck me as tilted more towards anarcho-syndicalism.
Singularity is Rapture For Nerds
One of the best features of iTunes is the ability to listen to the libraries of other people on a corporate LAN (or even a home LAN).
Agreed. You know what is cooler? The ability to browse libraries and stream music over WANs as well as LANs.
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center. And of course, with a trifecta or maxi, mini, and fullscreen skin options, Media Center rules for customization.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod
My gf uses iTunes to manage her Archos recorder. She got the iTunes plugin from the Archos website. It seems to work pretty well.
I think that's about it for now.
I've been enjoying doing almost exactly what you specify for several years with Media Center.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
it's really pleasing to see a major company release a tool which will reduce the number of Windows Media files in existence in the world.
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
Why can't iTunes share songs over the net?
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center, as well as directly transcoding for different zones.
I enjoy sharing music over intra- or internet connections with Media Center. Client-Server streaming, shared libraries, configurable ports, the whole enchilada.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
You can now use other playlists as criteria for a Smart Playlist. Create one playlist that is a combination of several other playlists.
I've been enjoying doing exactly this for several years with Media Center, as well as directly transcoding WMA->AAC.
It's nice to know you can usually rely on Apple to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the alternatives.
As the consumer (rather, a potential consumer) I should be able to determine the format I want. I choose 192k mp3s.
AllOfMp3.com lets you choose formats (Ogg, MP3, AAC, and so on) and bitrate/quality settings as part of your download process.
If questionably legal sites like this can offer such services, I can't see why it is so difficult for the "offficial" distributors.
You want to own a piece of it yourself, and have voting rights regarding the company's future? Go buy a block of stock.
Shareholder "democracy" is about as unfair, undemocratic, and delusionally unresponsive as you can get. Even when and if shareholders succeed in pushing through motions at general meetings with which the Board of Directors disagree, they can still ignore them. Withness the latest round of motions in favour of options expensing that are being soundly ignored by their Boards.
The loser usually suffers more loses.
I think you are using bias selection to justify your preconception. The Soviets lost the most during WW2 by a huge margin, but they were one of the victors. Overall, the "score" in WW2 in terms of military casualties was
Allies / Axis
17.2 million / 5.4 million
Therefore it seems that the Axis was a lot more "efficient" at warfare than the Allies. Or a lot less wasteful. And yet they lost.
France was a door mat that said "Bienvenue!"
Actually over 200,000 French soldiers died in WW2 before and during the occupation, and 350,000 civilians were slaughtered. Remember at the start of WW2 France faced the most advanced army and airforce in the world and their regular forces crumbled. Their partisan efforts during the invasion disrupted German supply lines and communications. If you scale up the French casualties compared to the US casualties (~300,000/6000) you will see that because of the US's late entry to the WW2, their per-capita casualty rate was much lower than the French. Put simply, the French suffered, while the US grandstanded, and picked over the spoils of victory.
Of course, all the Western efforts pale in comparison to the Soviet Union, which sustained at least 13 million dead soldiers and at least 7 million dead civilians. The Soviets crushed the Third Reich - without them Britain and the US would doubtless have sued for a negotiated peace or ceasefire.
In point of fact, one way of looking at WW2 is as a continuation of the European Civil War begun during WW1 and interrupted by an armistice for a couple of decades during which conflict moved to the edges and the colonies rather than the centre. Finally during WW2 both the US and the USSR entered the war while the main protagonists were becoming exhausted, and their efforts proved decisive, with the result that no European nation won the European Civil War.
For Americans, it's like imagining that during the US Civil War, that Britain had entered the war on the side of the slave states while France and Germany decided to join the Union states. I think Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine had some alternate history quite like this, with European intervention leading to a separate CSA and USA.
If you use iTunes, the only handheld player that can help you is an iPod. You're stuck picking from Apple's line of products.
That's not true. My gf uses iTunes on OS9 to manage her Archos. It does playlists, syncing, all that stuff.
When even the NY Times sub eds let "DVD's" through instead of correcting it to "DVDs", then we know the End Times are at hand.
you say '3D'
Sorceror. It gets trickier. Maze is horizontal and vertical. Think of the maze in Cube .
Never underestimate the ability of this Wired writer Kahney to write any amount of portentuous material and tie it to an iPod:
"Why The Entire Population Of New York Cast Aside Their Old Religions And Now Worship A Giant Wicker iPod" by Leander Kahney
Played them, loved them, but goddam that transparent crystal 3D mze was a killer. Literally.
most rendering is done with the CPU, not the CPU from my understanding
That's because with AGP it's such a PITA to pull large volumes of data back from the GPU up to the CPU. AGP is effectively a one-way route. And PCI is skewed toward downstream, and has limited bandwidth anyway.
PCI Express is bi-symmetrical along the bus. CPUGPU(s) can communicate at will. This is an important new thing. You will be able to offload large arrays to the GPU for vector and matrix processing, then get the results back. You would have to go back to the 1980s Amiga/Atari for examples of mainstream chipsets that integrated their GPUs and CPUs in such a fashion.
The technology required to burn these things is rather bulky and expensive.
Sorry, but Vestax have devised a rather cheap, portable, and excellent vinyl cutter to duplicate this newfangled analog vinyl technology of which you speak.