An analog computer could be programmed...think of a line-following robot implemented with analog components.
So which bit is the programmable computer? The robot, or the robot and the line?
The robot can only follow lines - its not programmable. However, the odds are you could conceive a Turing-complete computer constructed from robots following lines... Useful for when you run out of ants.
Computers are programmable, this only solves the problems it was designed to solve.
Did it? Bloody hell! Perhaps, one day, the modern computing industry will catch up with ancient Greece. So much has been lost...:-)
PS: It sure ain't Turing complete but neither is any other analogue computer. Not sure about the people who did calculations for a living and used to be called "computers": people can be pretty hard to reprogram (especially without making a mess).
The thing is, I want a music player that shows up as a USB block device in any operating system I connect it to.
Yeah, I had MP3 players like that.
I ended up writing a neat little PHP script that read my MP3 files, extracted the track number and renamed the files so they started "01_", "02_", "03_" and would play in the correct order, then copied them for me.
Cool - but do you know what? I switched to iPod/iTunes and found that it was a bloody sight easier to manage your music using iTunes and then, when you plug in your iPod, just tell it which playlists you want synced. Maybe, just maybe, people who buy iPods as music players rather than programming projects think that too.
Now I'm off to install mpd on my Myth TV box so it can mount the MP3 directory on my server and play back music over the surround speakers while I'm controlling it via a web interface on my netbook.
Maybe while I'm doing that, I'll listen to some tunes on my iPod...;-)
If they could they would turn computers into "appliances" as well
Any evidence to back that assertion up and counteract all the counter-evidence, such as the inclusion in OS X of:
Free developer tools bundled with every Mac - not just the GNU toolchain, but the XCode IDE as well.
Terminal application with access to bash etc. Fantastically useful - this could easily have been left out or obfuscated, since Mac OS 9 and below never had a command-line interface as standard.
X11 server: means that a vast swathe of linux/unix GUI software can be easily ported to Mac. Again, Apple didn't have to do this. In fact, at 10.5 it was promoted from an optional install to standard.
Apache, PHP, Python, Perl as standard.
I guess some of these are needed by other parts of the OS, but including all this if your instinct is to make a locked-down "appliance" sounds like carelessness.
Anyway - maybe there is a market for "appliance" computers? This is effectively what Linux-based netbooks are to non-techie users, who will be stuck with the bundled apps and whatever the manufacturer offers on their "add software" menu. (Sure, its not enforced and a geek with an EEE PC will have the full Debian repository installed in a jiffy, but that is rocket science to a luser).
She's right. Apple is the AOL of mp3 players and has dumbed down the interface and lowered expectations so much that people think gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Guess what: most people who buy "mp3" players want to (duh!) listen to music on them. Apple have provided a nice, clean, clear way of doing this, something which many other players (especially the cheap'n'cheerful ones) have made a complete pig's ear of (Windows Mobile, anyone?)
Geeks don't like having to use iTunes but obviously haven't spent enough time on the Helldesk to understand that lusers aren't always very good at copying files around, or working out what drive letter their USB device has appeared on.
Apple actually understands the difference between a general purpose computer that geeks can program and customise and a domestic appliance which "just works".
If you buy a general purpose computer from Apple these days, it comes with a complete set of developer tools and all the Unixy command-line goodness that a geek could want (or you can just slap Linux on it). Buy an iPod, however, and, shock horror, it works like an appliance in that is a bit closed with a simple interface, for much the same reason that TVs haven't come with vertical hold and convergence knobs since sometime last century.
gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Yeah, I know - if only all those iPod customers realised that if they'd only applied the kgpzdzi patch to their lame tarball and re-built it with --enable-no-session-margin, then added the knobwurst repositories to their apt.conf and done apt-get upgrade xine that (provided they re-ripped their CDs with the -qZpxt options to cdparanoia) they could have had these features months before the iPod.
Plus, sadly, you only really need gapless playback for prog rock and the people who make Apple's money for them seem to prefer Britney.
Even the Amarok player, despite being named after a prog album with a single 60-minute track, seems a bit biassed towards track-based music.
Almost but Mr. Spock saved everyone in Star Trek II and died.
But he'd put a backup of his soul in Dr McCoy and he got better in the next film.
Mr. Data died in Star Trek Nemesis.
But he'd probably put a backup of his mind in B-4 and if they had done another TNG film and Brent Spiner still needed the money, you know damned well that he'd have been back.
Nothing not wearing a red jersey dies permanently in Trek. Its almost as bad as Heroes in that respect...
Great, except for the part that Adobe, Google Earth, and most especially iTunes, are anything BUT Free Software.
I think you're being pedantic about a stray capital letter. If I recall correctly the teacher's had originally expressed disbelief in the mere concept of software that you didn't have to pay to use: jumping straight to the four freedoms might have been a bridge too far and would probably end up with the guy being accused of supplying free beer to minors...
it's just shocking that this big-time supposed Free Software advocate doesn't even know how to spell free software!
A true devotee would probably call it Software Libre (Now he's teaching the kids communism? Burn him!)
and all the metadata for the iTunes library is locked in a proprietary, binary blob.
Actually, most if it is available in XML: I use a script copy the files from my "car" playlist to SD card (to be fair, I think some of the ratings and smart playist stuff is in blobs, but nobody ever really accused iTunes of being open).
Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information
No, Monty confuses people because he makes you focus on the one bit of information that he reveals (there is a goat behind door A) and hence ignore the other vital bit of information you have (you chose door B, and there must be a 1/3 chance that the car is behind there).
Monty also confuses people because he "personalizes" probability.
If you play the game once, you're gonna get a goat or a car. If you switch, its still quite likely that you'll get a goat, if you stick you still stand a fair chance of getting a car. Neither outcome will get you into the X-files.
Its not that the probabilities are wrong: if you're a professional quizzer who meets variations on Monty Hall all the time, knowing the math is certainly going to improve your car hit-rate. However, by his patter, Monty gets his victims imagining bits of car and goat teleporting between the doors as they deliberate...
Go write a simulation, 1000 rounds of Monty Hall: once you de-humanize it it soon becomes obvious that there are 3 quite different "games" (a) picking 1 from 3; (b) picking 1 (randomly) from 2 and (c) pick and switch. Each has a different probability of success - who'd have thought it? To do 1000 trials, you'll have to decide - 1000 trials of which game?
When Monty is working out his monthly goat order, he'll also have to estimate how likely punters are to do (a), (b) or (c).
There have been a few times when I would have liked to see the back of electronics for wiring considerations.
Or, less gimmicky but infinitely more useful, what I usually do is go to the manufacturer's website from where you can often download the complete user's manual, and not only find out what's round the back but helpful details like "Ethernet port (models R931/B and R931/S only)" without crossing your fingers and hoping that BuyMore.com have put the right picture with the right product.
Not only is that better than VR, its better than standing in a meatspace shop fumbling around the back of a monitor to try and discover, by touch, whether it has a VGA or a DVI port without setting off the alarm...
jesus christ. it's been 40 years and the mouse still ONLY has 2 buttons? wtf?
What are you talking about? Even Apple mice now have the equivalent of 4 buttons and a trackball (and the optical sensor means that they even work on those icy surfaces in hell or on the bristly back of an airborne hog).
If the Haley comet shows up one year late next time around, it'll be one year overdue.
Y'know, words have subtly different meanings depending on context.
In the case of Halley's comet, "overdue" means: "it should have been here 342 days and 17 hours ago - Hey, Frank, did you remember to factor in the perturbation from Uranus? OMG don't say the bloody thing has gone chaotic on us! What the hell are we gonna do with this space probe?"
In the case of "big ones", "field reversals" etc, "overdue" means "These things seem to come by every ten millenia or so - isn't it about time we had another one?"
Yeah, see, when something as high-quality as BSG comes along I do actually believe that the makers deserve some money in return. Crazy, I know.
If the GP had actually had something insightful to say about the end of 4.1, rather than gratuitously dropping a big frackin' spoiler-bomb for no adequately explored reason, then I might have been more sympathetic...
Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices
I.e. the talented people who developed the technology in the first place, and their successors.
â" unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force
You mean the people who managed one of the most staggeringly successful collection of interoperability standards that, post-OOXML, makes the ISO look like a bunch of clowns?
I think we're in safe hands - we'd be in even safer hands if the gubment got on with its job of enforcing the anti-trust laws and fixing the patent system leaving the IETF et. al. to get on with thiers.
Spoiler alert... Darth Vader is Luke's Father
(NB: Actual spoiler changed to protect the innocent - but you get the gist)
Thanks - I'm in the UK, don't have Murdochvision and had 'negotiated' the Season 4 DVDs for Xmas.
Generally, the idea of writing "spoiler alert" is to at least put a fracking blank line between the "spoiler alert" (or maybe, you know, put it in the fracking subject line) and the actual fracking spoiler so those of us who can read without pointing at each fracking word in turn can avert our fracking eyes in time.
Would you find it offensive if somebody erected a billboard in your neighbourhood depicting hardcore porn? How about gay hardcore porn? Should it be illegal? It's just free speech right?
The right of free speech does not imply the right to force others to listen.
If your blog offends me, I don't have to read it. If your radio show offends me, I can turn it off. If your shop sells hardcore porn, I can choose to go elsewhere.
If, however, you erect a huge billboard that has everybody's kids asking "mummy, what is that man doing with all those chains and the donkey?" (or even simply advertising cola) then, yes, the local population should have the right to decide that they don't want to be forced to look at it - and where they draw the line between cola and bestiality is entirely up to them. However, if the citizens of Salt Lake City start claiming the right to decide what can go on billboards in Haight-Ashbury, then it might become a free speech issue.
All the people here commenting on the morality of Lori Drew's actions are falling for the big bait and switch trick:
Its patently obvious that Lori Drew was only in court because the prosecutors wanted her punished for her role in a suicide - and they made damn sure that the Jury knew of this. Yet all of the charges actually blaming her for the suicide either failed to stand up in court or were never brought in the first place.
The only 'crime' of which she has actually been found guilty of is a fairly trivial breach of MySpace's terms of service - something which thousands of MySpace users do routinely and which has not previously been treated as a criminal offence.
In a previous discussion, someone mentioned how they got Al Capone for tax evasion when they couldn't get him for being a rank bad hat, and everybody shouted "hurrah!". However, when they did that, AFAIK, it was already well established that tax evasion could land you in jail - they didn't 'create' a new criminal offense of 'tax evasion' by twisting the laws on robbery.
In this case, the "bait" of a tragic suicide has - possibly unintentionally - been used to set a dangerous precedent.
This doesn't mean that websites are suddenly going to start getting random users locked up for breaking their TOS - but it does mean that if you are even indirectly involved with some scandal (be it, fraud, bullying, murder, genocide or, God help you, copyright infringement) and the prosecuting authorities are under pressure to get a scalp, then they can get you convicted without having to prove anything other than that you broke some part of someones TOS.
OK, so electric cars are not going to save the planet as long as the electricity still comes from fossil fuels.
However, at least Tesla seem to have a business model which involves inventing new stuff, manufacturing it and selling it to customers. Frankly, I find subsidizing them far less offensive than spending trillions bailing out the banking industry after their self-serving little pyramid scheme went titsup.
(Disclaimer: I'm in the UK so I won't be subsidizing Tesla - wish I could say the same for the banking industry).
I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish.
...but that's only the Daily Mail condensed summary of the argument (i.e. a big straw man).
What has happened, particularly in the last decade or two, is a significant increase in the amount of mandatory, external assessment of kids, coupled with an obsession with simplistic, by-the-numbers "performance targets" creating an accountability monster which must be kept fed.
In the good old bad old days, a good teacher wouldn't start exclusively cramming kids for the Big Exams (GCE/CSE and later GCSE* at age 16 and optionally, A-level at 18) until the last year or so (OK, small matter of the dreaded 11-plus, but that was abolished for most people in the 70s).
Now, with external assessments** at age 7, 11 and 14 plus Big Ones at 16, 17 and 18*** and management breathing down teachers' necks to deliver the numbers, kids are inevitably spending more time being coached for exams instead of being taught stuff.
(Or, to put it another way, "No fair! they changed the result by measuring it!")
* GCE and CSE replaced with GCSE in the late 80s See what they did there?
** The age 14 ones were very recently scrapped - not for any deep educational reason but because the contract to deliver them went titsup - what will replace them is yet to be seen; The age 7 ones aren't "exams" as such, but they're still significant.
*** A-levels now come in two bites...
The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.
Nope. I can say from personal experience that, circa 1980, several of the age 16 Maths exams had stuff like Venn diagrams, matrices, group theory and basic calculus on them. I don't think its a loss - with the possible exception of the calculus, none of it made much sense to us (or, I suspect, the teacher) at the time.
As for calculators - nope again: The GCSE typically comes in two equal-length papers, and you only get to use calculators on one of them - and where they are allowed many questions don't need them, and calculations are still contrived to give nice round numbers, apart from a lonely question about using calculators correctly (e.g. writing down an answer to appropriate accuracy).
You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes
The problem is that the curriculum hasn't evolved to take account of calculators (let alone computers). Apart from the "calculator" question each year, you won't (e.g.) find a situation where you lose marks for saying Jill gets 2.9376128 squares of chocolate; where Aunt Lucy's inheritance (which she wants to divide in the ratio 1:2:3) isn't a multiple of six or where a quartile falls between two cases...
The RepRap is interesting here - not just as an open source hardware project in itself, but in that the ability to easily reproduce arbitrary shaped plastic widgets could make other "open source" hardware a bit less clunky.
Not if you expect to buy a complex bit of hardware like a colour laser printer for a few hundred bucks.
These things are subsidized by the sale of cartridges (which is why a new, consumer, laser printer often costs less than a set of cartridges) - hard to do if your design is "open source" - and rely on the economies of scale of mass production and custom-made parts (very expensive to tool up, but low marginal costs). Even so, the store that sells it to you probably only makes a profit if you buy a $20 USB cable with it!
Problem is, open source software can be copied and distributed for near-as-damn-it-zero cost. If its hardware, some bugger has to buy the bits and make every single unit. Even if you don't expect it to be free-as-in-beer, its hard for small manufacturers to compete with a big factory in China, and hard for something made from generic components to be as slick as something with custom-made parts. C.f. software where there's nothing technically that Microsoft can make a computer do that open source could not, with purely human effort, match.
The Skylark of Space [wikipedia.org] was serialized in 1928.
...and the term "Space Opera" is used by E.E. Doc Smith himself in "Children of the Lens" (1948*) - Chapter 3: "Kinnison writes a space opera".
Warning if you feel inclined to check: this represents Doc Smith deliberately writing bad space opera and as such could cause temporary blindness.
* To be fair, as I am not in possession of any incredibly valuable copies of "Astounding Stories" I only have a 1973 version of the novel to go on, so the reference could have been added later.
Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics?
Probably because SF stories - especially the "classics" - often involve a lot of exposition and have plots based on intellectual puzzles rather than outright adventure. This would require a slow-paced, art-house style.
Unfortunately, (a) the demand for aliens, space ships, time machines, robots etc. makes them require action/adventure-type special effects budgets and (b) the anti-SF snobbery in the arts brigade would make "arthouse" SF even harder to sell than regular arty films.
For a good example of how SF can be done properly without expensive effects, try The Man From Earth. Now try and sell that to multiplexes.
PS - for my money, though, some of the "inspired by" Philip K Dick films made much better movies than a faithful adaptation of the stories would have done - "We can remember for you wholesale" had an even dafter plot than "Total Recall" and although the premise and set-up of the original "Minority report" was great, the actual story didn't really work for me.
Slashdot Mirror
An analog computer could be programmed...think of a line-following robot implemented with analog components.
So which bit is the programmable computer? The robot, or the robot and the line?
The robot can only follow lines - its not programmable. However, the odds are you could conceive a Turing-complete computer constructed from robots following lines... Useful for when you run out of ants.
Computers are programmable, this only solves the problems it was designed to solve.
Did it? Bloody hell! Perhaps, one day, the modern computing industry will catch up with ancient Greece. So much has been lost... :-)
PS: It sure ain't Turing complete but neither is any other analogue computer. Not sure about the people who did calculations for a living and used to be called "computers": people can be pretty hard to reprogram (especially without making a mess).
The thing is, I want a music player that shows up as a USB block device in any operating system I connect it to.
Yeah, I had MP3 players like that.
I ended up writing a neat little PHP script that read my MP3 files, extracted the track number and renamed the files so they started "01_", "02_", "03_" and would play in the correct order, then copied them for me.
Cool - but do you know what? I switched to iPod/iTunes and found that it was a bloody sight easier to manage your music using iTunes and then, when you plug in your iPod, just tell it which playlists you want synced. Maybe, just maybe, people who buy iPods as music players rather than programming projects think that too.
Now I'm off to install mpd on my Myth TV box so it can mount the MP3 directory on my server and play back music over the surround speakers while I'm controlling it via a web interface on my netbook.
Maybe while I'm doing that, I'll listen to some tunes on my iPod... ;-)
If they could they would turn computers into "appliances" as well
Any evidence to back that assertion up and counteract all the counter-evidence, such as the inclusion in OS X of:
I guess some of these are needed by other parts of the OS, but including all this if your instinct is to make a locked-down "appliance" sounds like carelessness.
Anyway - maybe there is a market for "appliance" computers? This is effectively what Linux-based netbooks are to non-techie users, who will be stuck with the bundled apps and whatever the manufacturer offers on their "add software" menu. (Sure, its not enforced and a geek with an EEE PC will have the full Debian repository installed in a jiffy, but that is rocket science to a luser).
She's right. Apple is the AOL of mp3 players and has dumbed down the interface and lowered expectations so much that people think gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Guess what: most people who buy "mp3" players want to (duh!) listen to music on them. Apple have provided a nice, clean, clear way of doing this, something which many other players (especially the cheap'n'cheerful ones) have made a complete pig's ear of (Windows Mobile, anyone?)
Geeks don't like having to use iTunes but obviously haven't spent enough time on the Helldesk to understand that lusers aren't always very good at copying files around, or working out what drive letter their USB device has appeared on.
Apple actually understands the difference between a general purpose computer that geeks can program and customise and a domestic appliance which "just works".
If you buy a general purpose computer from Apple these days, it comes with a complete set of developer tools and all the Unixy command-line goodness that a geek could want (or you can just slap Linux on it). Buy an iPod, however, and, shock horror, it works like an appliance in that is a bit closed with a simple interface, for much the same reason that TVs haven't come with vertical hold and convergence knobs since sometime last century.
gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Yeah, I know - if only all those iPod customers realised that if they'd only applied the kgpzdzi patch to their lame tarball and re-built it with --enable-no-session-margin, then added the knobwurst repositories to their apt.conf and done apt-get upgrade xine that (provided they re-ripped their CDs with the -qZpxt options to cdparanoia) they could have had these features months before the iPod.
Plus, sadly, you only really need gapless playback for prog rock and the people who make Apple's money for them seem to prefer Britney.
Even the Amarok player, despite being named after a prog album with a single 60-minute track, seems a bit biassed towards track-based music.
Almost but Mr. Spock saved everyone in Star Trek II and died.
But he'd put a backup of his soul in Dr McCoy and he got better in the next film.
Mr. Data died in Star Trek Nemesis.
But he'd probably put a backup of his mind in B-4 and if they had done another TNG film and Brent Spiner still needed the money, you know damned well that he'd have been back.
Nothing not wearing a red jersey dies permanently in Trek. Its almost as bad as Heroes in that respect...
Great, except for the part that Adobe, Google Earth, and most especially iTunes, are anything BUT Free Software.
I think you're being pedantic about a stray capital letter. If I recall correctly the teacher's had originally expressed disbelief in the mere concept of software that you didn't have to pay to use: jumping straight to the four freedoms might have been a bridge too far and would probably end up with the guy being accused of supplying free beer to minors...
it's just shocking that this big-time supposed Free Software advocate doesn't even know how to spell free software!
A true devotee would probably call it Software Libre (Now he's teaching the kids communism? Burn him!)
and all the metadata for the iTunes library is locked in a proprietary, binary blob.
Actually, most if it is available in XML: I use a script copy the files from my "car" playlist to SD card (to be fair, I think some of the ratings and smart playist stuff is in blobs, but nobody ever really accused iTunes of being open).
Ignorance is the most expensive commodity in the USA today.
Well, that just about wraps it up for the law of "supply and demand"... :-)
Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information
No, Monty confuses people because he makes you focus on the one bit of information that he reveals (there is a goat behind door A) and hence ignore the other vital bit of information you have (you chose door B, and there must be a 1/3 chance that the car is behind there).
Monty also confuses people because he "personalizes" probability.
If you play the game once, you're gonna get a goat or a car. If you switch, its still quite likely that you'll get a goat, if you stick you still stand a fair chance of getting a car. Neither outcome will get you into the X-files.
Its not that the probabilities are wrong: if you're a professional quizzer who meets variations on Monty Hall all the time, knowing the math is certainly going to improve your car hit-rate. However, by his patter, Monty gets his victims imagining bits of car and goat teleporting between the doors as they deliberate...
Go write a simulation, 1000 rounds of Monty Hall: once you de-humanize it it soon becomes obvious that there are 3 quite different "games" (a) picking 1 from 3; (b) picking 1 (randomly) from 2 and (c) pick and switch. Each has a different probability of success - who'd have thought it? To do 1000 trials, you'll have to decide - 1000 trials of which game?
When Monty is working out his monthly goat order, he'll also have to estimate how likely punters are to do (a), (b) or (c).
42. Google confirms: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything+&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq= [google.com]
OK smartass, where's the link to the question then? :-)
There have been a few times when I would have liked to see the back of electronics for wiring considerations.
Or, less gimmicky but infinitely more useful, what I usually do is go to the manufacturer's website from where you can often download the complete user's manual, and not only find out what's round the back but helpful details like "Ethernet port (models R931/B and R931/S only)" without crossing your fingers and hoping that BuyMore.com have put the right picture with the right product.
Not only is that better than VR, its better than standing in a meatspace shop fumbling around the back of a monitor to try and discover, by touch, whether it has a VGA or a DVI port without setting off the alarm...
I'm sorry, but Mr Ballmer can't see you now - he's on an intergalactic cruise in his office.
Strange, I'd always thought that Microsoft were more Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to Apple/Google/Wikipedia's Megadodo Publications...
I suppose the Vogons have taken over by now.
jesus christ. it's been 40 years and the mouse still ONLY has 2 buttons? wtf?
What are you talking about? Even Apple mice now have the equivalent of 4 buttons and a trackball (and the optical sensor means that they even work on those icy surfaces in hell or on the bristly back of an airborne hog).
If the Haley comet shows up one year late next time around, it'll be one year overdue.
Y'know, words have subtly different meanings depending on context.
In the case of Halley's comet, "overdue" means: "it should have been here 342 days and 17 hours ago - Hey, Frank, did you remember to factor in the perturbation from Uranus? OMG don't say the bloody thing has gone chaotic on us! What the hell are we gonna do with this space probe?"
In the case of "big ones", "field reversals" etc, "overdue" means "These things seem to come by every ten millenia or so - isn't it about time we had another one?"
The latter is a rather weaker use of the word.
You wait? You actually _wait_???
Yeah, see, when something as high-quality as BSG comes along I do actually believe that the makers deserve some money in return. Crazy, I know.
If the GP had actually had something insightful to say about the end of 4.1, rather than gratuitously dropping a big frackin' spoiler-bomb for no adequately explored reason, then I might have been more sympathetic...
Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices
I.e. the talented people who developed the technology in the first place, and their successors.
â" unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force
You mean the people who managed one of the most staggeringly successful collection of interoperability standards that, post-OOXML, makes the ISO look like a bunch of clowns?
I think we're in safe hands - we'd be in even safer hands if the gubment got on with its job of enforcing the anti-trust laws and fixing the patent system leaving the IETF et. al. to get on with thiers.
Spoiler alert... Darth Vader is Luke's Father (NB: Actual spoiler changed to protect the innocent - but you get the gist)
Thanks - I'm in the UK, don't have Murdochvision and had 'negotiated' the Season 4 DVDs for Xmas.
Generally, the idea of writing "spoiler alert" is to at least put a fracking blank line between the "spoiler alert" (or maybe, you know, put it in the fracking subject line) and the actual fracking spoiler so those of us who can read without pointing at each fracking word in turn can avert our fracking eyes in time.
Frack frack frackity-frack!
Would you find it offensive if somebody erected a billboard in your neighbourhood depicting hardcore porn? How about gay hardcore porn? Should it be illegal? It's just free speech right?
The right of free speech does not imply the right to force others to listen.
If your blog offends me, I don't have to read it. If your radio show offends me, I can turn it off. If your shop sells hardcore porn, I can choose to go elsewhere.
If, however, you erect a huge billboard that has everybody's kids asking "mummy, what is that man doing with all those chains and the donkey?" (or even simply advertising cola) then, yes, the local population should have the right to decide that they don't want to be forced to look at it - and where they draw the line between cola and bestiality is entirely up to them. However, if the citizens of Salt Lake City start claiming the right to decide what can go on billboards in Haight-Ashbury, then it might become a free speech issue.
All the people here commenting on the morality of Lori Drew's actions are falling for the big bait and switch trick:
Its patently obvious that Lori Drew was only in court because the prosecutors wanted her punished for her role in a suicide - and they made damn sure that the Jury knew of this. Yet all of the charges actually blaming her for the suicide either failed to stand up in court or were never brought in the first place.
The only 'crime' of which she has actually been found guilty of is a fairly trivial breach of MySpace's terms of service - something which thousands of MySpace users do routinely and which has not previously been treated as a criminal offence.
In a previous discussion, someone mentioned how they got Al Capone for tax evasion when they couldn't get him for being a rank bad hat, and everybody shouted "hurrah!". However, when they did that, AFAIK, it was already well established that tax evasion could land you in jail - they didn't 'create' a new criminal offense of 'tax evasion' by twisting the laws on robbery.
In this case, the "bait" of a tragic suicide has - possibly unintentionally - been used to set a dangerous precedent.
This doesn't mean that websites are suddenly going to start getting random users locked up for breaking their TOS - but it does mean that if you are even indirectly involved with some scandal (be it, fraud, bullying, murder, genocide or, God help you, copyright infringement) and the prosecuting authorities are under pressure to get a scalp, then they can get you convicted without having to prove anything other than that you broke some part of someones TOS.
OK, so electric cars are not going to save the planet as long as the electricity still comes from fossil fuels.
However, at least Tesla seem to have a business model which involves inventing new stuff, manufacturing it and selling it to customers. Frankly, I find subsidizing them far less offensive than spending trillions bailing out the banking industry after their self-serving little pyramid scheme went titsup.
(Disclaimer: I'm in the UK so I won't be subsidizing Tesla - wish I could say the same for the banking industry).
I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish.
...but that's only the Daily Mail condensed summary of the argument (i.e. a big straw man).
What has happened, particularly in the last decade or two, is a significant increase in the amount of mandatory, external assessment of kids, coupled with an obsession with simplistic, by-the-numbers "performance targets" creating an accountability monster which must be kept fed.
In the good old bad old days, a good teacher wouldn't start exclusively cramming kids for the Big Exams (GCE/CSE and later GCSE* at age 16 and optionally, A-level at 18) until the last year or so (OK, small matter of the dreaded 11-plus, but that was abolished for most people in the 70s).
Now, with external assessments** at age 7, 11 and 14 plus Big Ones at 16, 17 and 18*** and management breathing down teachers' necks to deliver the numbers, kids are inevitably spending more time being coached for exams instead of being taught stuff.
(Or, to put it another way, "No fair! they changed the result by measuring it!")
* GCE and CSE replaced with GCSE in the late 80s See what they did there?
** The age 14 ones were very recently scrapped - not for any deep educational reason but because the contract to deliver them went titsup - what will replace them is yet to be seen; The age 7 ones aren't "exams" as such, but they're still significant.
*** A-levels now come in two bites...
The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.
Nope. I can say from personal experience that, circa 1980, several of the age 16 Maths exams had stuff like Venn diagrams, matrices, group theory and basic calculus on them. I don't think its a loss - with the possible exception of the calculus, none of it made much sense to us (or, I suspect, the teacher) at the time.
As for calculators - nope again: The GCSE typically comes in two equal-length papers, and you only get to use calculators on one of them - and where they are allowed many questions don't need them, and calculations are still contrived to give nice round numbers, apart from a lonely question about using calculators correctly (e.g. writing down an answer to appropriate accuracy).
You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes
The problem is that the curriculum hasn't evolved to take account of calculators (let alone computers). Apart from the "calculator" question each year, you won't (e.g.) find a situation where you lose marks for saying Jill gets 2.9376128 squares of chocolate; where Aunt Lucy's inheritance (which she wants to divide in the ratio 1:2:3) isn't a multiple of six or where a quartile falls between two cases...
The RepRap is interesting here - not just as an open source hardware project in itself, but in that the ability to easily reproduce arbitrary shaped plastic widgets could make other "open source" hardware a bit less clunky.
Am I reasonable to expect this?
Not if you expect to buy a complex bit of hardware like a colour laser printer for a few hundred bucks.
These things are subsidized by the sale of cartridges (which is why a new, consumer, laser printer often costs less than a set of cartridges) - hard to do if your design is "open source" - and rely on the economies of scale of mass production and custom-made parts (very expensive to tool up, but low marginal costs). Even so, the store that sells it to you probably only makes a profit if you buy a $20 USB cable with it!
Problem is, open source software can be copied and distributed for near-as-damn-it-zero cost. If its hardware, some bugger has to buy the bits and make every single unit. Even if you don't expect it to be free-as-in-beer, its hard for small manufacturers to compete with a big factory in China, and hard for something made from generic components to be as slick as something with custom-made parts. C.f. software where there's nothing technically that Microsoft can make a computer do that open source could not, with purely human effort, match.
The Skylark of Space [wikipedia.org] was serialized in 1928.
...and the term "Space Opera" is used by E.E. Doc Smith himself in "Children of the Lens" (1948*) - Chapter 3: "Kinnison writes a space opera".
Warning if you feel inclined to check: this represents Doc Smith deliberately writing bad space opera and as such could cause temporary blindness.
* To be fair, as I am not in possession of any incredibly valuable copies of "Astounding Stories" I only have a 1973 version of the novel to go on, so the reference could have been added later.
Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics?
Probably because SF stories - especially the "classics" - often involve a lot of exposition and have plots based on intellectual puzzles rather than outright adventure. This would require a slow-paced, art-house style.
Unfortunately, (a) the demand for aliens, space ships, time machines, robots etc. makes them require action/adventure-type special effects budgets and (b) the anti-SF snobbery in the arts brigade would make "arthouse" SF even harder to sell than regular arty films.
For a good example of how SF can be done properly without expensive effects, try The Man From Earth. Now try and sell that to multiplexes.
PS - for my money, though, some of the "inspired by" Philip K Dick films made much better movies than a faithful adaptation of the stories would have done - "We can remember for you wholesale" had an even dafter plot than "Total Recall" and although the premise and set-up of the original "Minority report" was great, the actual story didn't really work for me.