If you really are an "extremely safe" and experienced cyclist, as you say in another post, then you should know just how terrifying and unsafe it is to interact with drivers who act the way you say you do. If you were an "extremely safe" driver you would not be acting unpredictably and creating situations where someone could be seriously injured, or worse.
You say you're not aggressive toward motorcycles, and give examples where they're moving faster than you. I think you'd find that most bicyclists were willing to similarly wave you past - if they weren't so threatened by your driving that they felt the need to take the whole lane as a precaution.
As for running stop signs in traffic without looking (grandparent): that's very risky behavior, and chances are they'll get injured at some point as a result. But you don't need to help things along.
This sounds like the ads that appear on the screen during a TV program. Hopefully they will stay small and unobtrusive, unlike what has happened with the TV version. A quick history of those, starting sometime in the 90's:
Small, often transparent network logo in the bottom corner of the screen
Static or scrolling single line of text with either a "this portion sponsored by:" message or a reminder of upcoming shows
Same text, but encased in prettier graphics that take up a little more screen real estate. Transitions smoothing the entrance of the graphics allow the eye to adjust and continue watching the show without being disturbed too much.
More lines of text added, perhaps with the rest of the evening's schedule. Also animations appear, but they're not very distracting.
LARGE graphics take up a significant portion of a corner of the screen, making it impossible to "squeeze" the tv show itself and preserve the whole scene. Visual information is lost and the show is negatively impacted.
More complex animations and graphics that aren't immediately recognizable as text boxes intrude farther into the picture and/or require significant viewer attention to determine whether the object that just appeared is part of the show or not.
Large, intricate animations with sound effects cause the loss of both visual and auditory information and cause the viewer to change the channel and/or shoot the tv. Sound effects? Seriously? What's the point of watching the show anymore when you can't see or hear what's going on?
As long as the YouTube ads stay reasonably close to the top of this list, we'll be ok. It won't require too much effort to disregard the ads if we're not interested in them, and they probably won't obscure the videos themselves. If they creep towards the bottom, then people will stop using YouTube, at least for content from the "partners" that allow ads to be put in.
If they can't get 4.6B for the spectrum, they'll remove the two open access restrictions? WTF?
I agree, WTF - but not for the same reason:
It should be the other way around... if they can't get 4.6B for the spectrum, then they'll ADD the two open-access restrictions that they didn't include. Then at least, they know Google would bid 4.6B and maximize their profits while also having a more open network.
I think the bigger problem is the money vs. principles problem on display. With only two of the four restrictions in place, Google won't bid on it, and everyone else will just sit tight until the restrictions go away. At which point the bidding may go far above $4.6B. The regulators can go back and say "we tried this newfangled open access thing and it just didn't work," the FCC is guaranteed their pile of money, and the incumbents maintain their entrenched business models.
If the FCC were really committed to trying the open model, they'd do something different - if there are no bidders with just two restrictions, then either do what you suggest and go to Google's four so someone will try it, or don't sell and just open it up completely. Something that will let us see how such a system could work. If Google or common ownership succeeds, great; if it fails then at least we have some data to look at and decide whether open access is actually a bad idea or just needs some tweaking.
I fill my tank for ~ $70 a month (currently $3.45/gal), and I commute 30 miles round trip on workdays. True, there are plenty of people that can afford this (remember, the fee does not include electricity to charge), but this seems to be an elitist car at the moment.
Please wake me when I can help save the environment without declaring bankruptcy.
I commute 26 miles round trip on workdays. Oh, and Sundays. I spend $0 in gas a month (currently $I don't care/gal), and maybe $10 a year in lube and $80 or so a year on tires for my bike. True, there are plenty of people that can afford this (remember, the $70 a month does not include insurance, maintenance, registration, etc.), but cars seem to be elitist at the moment. I could buy a pretty nice brand-new bike every year for what it costs to keep a car.
Please wake me when you want to join me in helping to save the environment without declaring bankruptcy.
Sure, I eat a little more, but that just means I get to practice my cooking. I also lost 25 pounds in the 3 months after I started biking and they show no sign of returning. I never have to worry about traffic or parking (also free), and I can now get around the city faster than traffic most of the day. Biking is better for me, better for the environment, better for my wallet, and better for everyone else whose traffic would be slightly worse if I were in a car.
I hate to sound like an in-your-face activist type, because I'm really not, and it's not the point of this post. But if there's one thing I really hate, it's when people take the easy way out of a discussion without actually thinking about all the options, especially in a community like Slashdot that's full of engineers and scientists that pride themselves on critical thinking. That said, I understand that everyone's needs in life are different, and while a bike works for me, others might need a car or electric vehicle or subway or whatever. More options are always a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if this different business model will attract many consumers. Many city dwellers may be willing to pay extra for this just for the form factor - the Mini is the smallest car in recent memory to be sold widely in the US, and it's done pretty well for itself, and small cars like the "smart" car have been popular in European cities.
I would also hope that the spec would have a total energy consumption target (in KWh)
Giving just a wattage would make sense if they want to make sure that the robot doesn't use energy faster than it can be provided by, for example, a solar array of a certain size.
iChat is also the only "solution" (rather than hack) I'm aware of that would allow you to have multiple connections open at once (seems to be what they're going for), with up to a four-way chat. The VLC hack mentioned elsewhere might be able to achieve this also, and with larger numbers. I hope they have lots of unused bandwidth lying around...
People who vote for Bush don't watch the Daily Show, or at least not many of them. You're talking as if the entire fucking country was watching Jon Stewart every weekday evening.
Funny you should say that -
My brother and I discovered, on a recent visit to see our grandparents (both lifelong Southern Republicans), that Jon Stewart and especially Stephen Colbert were just about the only TV that our grandmother watches (religiously - she rarely misses an episode). It's great watching her make my grandfather give up the stock ticker on MSNBC for an hour... although usually he's headed to bed by then (8pm).
Fact is that a corrupt minority cannot rule over and angry majority.
Yes, they can, but only if the angry don't realize they're a majority. I won't attempt to separate cause and effect here, but this definitely appears to be an important part of the strategy of America's current ruling party.
To add to this: we use eye tracking systems in my brain lab (at a major research university). It is, in fact, highly unusual for subjects to only look at one thing, or even to look at whatever they want to do when they do it. There are many extra eye movements (saccades) to other areas of a scene for planning and multitasking, even before the person is conscious of their plans. Here are two papers relating to eye tracking and games in particular:
Needless to say, any successful attempt at eye-tracking control for something like video games would have a lot of sophisticated programming to do in order to figure out the user's intentions. From my own personal experience, especially in FPS games, I rarely look where I'm shooting. I would like to keep my sensors (eyeballs) and effectors (hands/feet/other body parts) separate, to allow me to take in more information and perform mor actions simultaneously. It would also prevent any weird interactions if the training provided by the games affects the way hardcore gamers attempt to interact with the real world (although those would be very interesting to study).
Not only does it make songs less accessible to potential listeners, but also to those parents who care enough to wonder what their kids are listening to, or even to screen the songs their kids want to purchase. Maybe some senator who prides himself on "family issues" can be convinced to demand an openly available lyrics clearinghouse as a service to parents?
Since you want to argue semantics, I'll spell it out:
A consumer wants to listen to music.
The consumer must choose between the various formats available to achieve this goal: CD, radio, iTMS, P2P, etc.
These formats differ from each other in various ways: cost, portability, extras like booklets, control over their listening, audio quality, etc.
Each of these changes the perceived value to the consumer of obtaining music by that medium.
The "deal-breaker" factors that make the consumer choose one format over another (and therefore affect sales) are the main reasons (along with the music itself) for buying the CD or flipping on the radio.
For some consumers, like the sibling poster (and me, and the OP), having lyrics in the booklet is a "deal-breaker" factor.
Just because it's not on your list doesn't mean it isn't a "main reason" for the consumer base as a whole; the OP was saying that, for some significant section of the consumer population, the content of the booklet is a "deal-breaker." Not the most important factor necessarily, but a significant one.
ergo
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics.
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics
Umm, no. One of the main reasons people buy CDs is to listen to the music.
One of the main reasons people choose CDs over other formats of music distribution is so they get the booklet with the lyrics. Some others are audio quality, DRM, etc.
ergo
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics.
... when they say that now we know how it all works.
... or, in fact, that "Bees solve complex colour puzzles." I think most readers would assume, when they see a title like that, that there would be some sort of, you know, puzzle involved in the experiment. I'll give them complexity; this is not a trivial vision task. "Puzzle" suggests, to me, something more like maybe learning to choose the middle wavelength of a set of three colors, at the very least. Maybe even logic or something.
...we didn't know whether they could also do this under more complicated conditions, ones that are in fact more typical in nature, such as dappled light across a woodland floor.
I know bees can find flowers in the forest. I see them when I go hiking. The breakthrough here is finding a way to approximate the same sort of stimulus in a laboratory setting.
... suggests they do so by using the colour relationships between objects in a scene that were statistically most useful in their past experience. Because this same strategy is also used by humans...
I don't know very much about insect neuroscience in particular, but data from the study of higher animals (monkeys, humans, rats, cats, some birds, and others) strongly suggests that this type of statistical pattern extraction is what is taking place. Computer modeling systems involving neurally-inspired architectures (neural nets) also indicate that this sort of behavior arises naturally from these systems and so is a computationally plausible explanation as well. I'm very surprised to read that they didn't think this was a possible model for bee brains as well.
...may enable us to understand the general principles by which any visual system (natural or artificial) can construct useful behaviour from ambiguous sensory information.
We may some day get as far as being able to "construct useful behavior," but all this study can do is shed some insight into how a visual system can construct useful representations from ambiguous sensory information. The construction of useful behavior in this study happened when they trained the bee to go prefer a particular color. Then they used that useful behavior to find out just what the bee could see.
In conclusion: a very useful study, that gives us important new information to help us figure out how visual systems in particular, and bee brains in particular, extract useful information from confusing data. But all of the grandstanding about complex puzzles and computer vision? I say they're blowing steam out their... um... stingers.
You're missing the GP's point: with this law in place, indie film-making with consumer-level equipment is no longer legal. You'd have to shell out $$$ for the pro-level equipment that's been "approved" (read: taxed) by the **AA.
with the receiver off, how will your phone know it's getting a call?
with the transmitter off, how will the towers know where to route the signal?
if by "off" you mean "powered off"...
what is accomplished by leaving the clock on? It's trivial to receive a timecode as part of the initial handshake with a tower.
why would the phone need to scan for keyboard input?
why would it be storing instructions or data in its volatile (working) memory?
I was talking about the post you replied to. Read the sentence after the one you quoted:
Now, of course the failures won't be spread out evenly, which makes this even trickier.
He knows the even spreading isn't a very accurate description; he's just providing it to give a sense of the scale of the problem. He goes on to describe failure patterns that would emerge in a real-world setting.
It looks like we've moved beyond RTFA to RTFP. Cheesedog goes on to say that the part you quoted is a bad assumption.
A lot of trouble could be spared if people would listen to somebody's entire argument before calling them stupid...
One things people who fall for intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that life has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and perfect itself.
One thing people who argue against intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that religious establishments have had (in most cases) thousands of years to insist that "it's always been this way." They're using an entirely different structure of argument than you, and so the chances of getting through to them using the traditional evolutionist (hell, let's just say scientist - it's happened before and it'll happen again) arguments in any reasonable amount of time are about as good as life spontaneously appearing on a planet. Remember, for the Christian die-hards, the source of all their knowledge and reasoning is a book that stopped getting edited nearly 2,000 years ago.
When a scientist goes up against a heavily indoctrinated religious type, perhaps the best way to get them to listen is to present an argument in terms of religion. Here's something different to try:
-If God created everything, why did he make it look like he didn't?
Assuming He had some reason for the above:
-God made us curious. Shouldn't we use our curiosity to investigate this universe that He created for us, including, say, life?
-How did God create everything/anything? What's the big problem with looking for these mechanisms?
I think many creationists would be a lot less militant if they realized that the science teachers who are opposing all of these pushes into the school system are not trying to shut down The Church. The big issue that they don't seem to understand is that we're dealing with two separate ideas that don't necessarily conflict and that have their place in two separate arenas. Evolution as a natural phenomenon (which is as far as it went in my high school biology class) does not need to conflict with anything the creationists teach. However, evolution is a theory that is based on observation, conjecture, testing and proof, and so belongs in a science classroom, while Creationism Intelligent Design is a philosophical construction based on ancient texts, mythology and Faith, and so belongs in a philosophy/history/social studies/sunday school classroom. Look, that's four to one - remind me again why they need to insert themselves into the science classrooms, too?
---
If the Finger of God is a lightning bolt, then maybe He did zap the primordial soup! Or maybe He was just microwaving His lunch...
On another note, can he protect the source of his download, claiming journalistic integrity?
If John Q. Student writes an article in his school newspaper about downloading and the **AA, are all the people he downloaded from (you know, for posterity) off-limits?
Slashdot Mirror
If you really are an "extremely safe" and experienced cyclist, as you say in another post, then you should know just how terrifying and unsafe it is to interact with drivers who act the way you say you do. If you were an "extremely safe" driver you would not be acting unpredictably and creating situations where someone could be seriously injured, or worse.
You say you're not aggressive toward motorcycles, and give examples where they're moving faster than you. I think you'd find that most bicyclists were willing to similarly wave you past - if they weren't so threatened by your driving that they felt the need to take the whole lane as a precaution.
As for running stop signs in traffic without looking (grandparent): that's very risky behavior, and chances are they'll get injured at some point as a result. But you don't need to help things along.
With special commendation for using the correct "their."
This sounds like the ads that appear on the screen during a TV program. Hopefully they will stay small and unobtrusive, unlike what has happened with the TV version. A quick history of those, starting sometime in the 90's:
As long as the YouTube ads stay reasonably close to the top of this list, we'll be ok. It won't require too much effort to disregard the ads if we're not interested in them, and they probably won't obscure the videos themselves. If they creep towards the bottom, then people will stop using YouTube, at least for content from the "partners" that allow ads to be put in.
I think the bigger problem is the money vs. principles problem on display. With only two of the four restrictions in place, Google won't bid on it, and everyone else will just sit tight until the restrictions go away. At which point the bidding may go far above $4.6B. The regulators can go back and say "we tried this newfangled open access thing and it just didn't work," the FCC is guaranteed their pile of money, and the incumbents maintain their entrenched business models.
If the FCC were really committed to trying the open model, they'd do something different - if there are no bidders with just two restrictions, then either do what you suggest and go to Google's four so someone will try it, or don't sell and just open it up completely. Something that will let us see how such a system could work. If Google or common ownership succeeds, great; if it fails then at least we have some data to look at and decide whether open access is actually a bad idea or just needs some tweaking.
I commute 26 miles round trip on workdays. Oh, and Sundays. I spend $0 in gas a month (currently $I don't care/gal), and maybe $10 a year in lube and $80 or so a year on tires for my bike. True, there are plenty of people that can afford this (remember, the $70 a month does not include insurance, maintenance, registration, etc.), but cars seem to be elitist at the moment. I could buy a pretty nice brand-new bike every year for what it costs to keep a car.
Please wake me when you want to join me in helping to save the environment without declaring bankruptcy.
Sure, I eat a little more, but that just means I get to practice my cooking. I also lost 25 pounds in the 3 months after I started biking and they show no sign of returning. I never have to worry about traffic or parking (also free), and I can now get around the city faster than traffic most of the day. Biking is better for me, better for the environment, better for my wallet, and better for everyone else whose traffic would be slightly worse if I were in a car.
I hate to sound like an in-your-face activist type, because I'm really not, and it's not the point of this post. But if there's one thing I really hate, it's when people take the easy way out of a discussion without actually thinking about all the options, especially in a community like Slashdot that's full of engineers and scientists that pride themselves on critical thinking. That said, I understand that everyone's needs in life are different, and while a bike works for me, others might need a car or electric vehicle or subway or whatever. More options are always a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if this different business model will attract many consumers. Many city dwellers may be willing to pay extra for this just for the form factor - the Mini is the smallest car in recent memory to be sold widely in the US, and it's done pretty well for itself, and small cars like the "smart" car have been popular in European cities.
iChat is also the only "solution" (rather than hack) I'm aware of that would allow you to have multiple connections open at once (seems to be what they're going for), with up to a four-way chat. The VLC hack mentioned elsewhere might be able to achieve this also, and with larger numbers. I hope they have lots of unused bandwidth lying around...
My brother and I discovered, on a recent visit to see our grandparents (both lifelong Southern Republicans), that Jon Stewart and especially Stephen Colbert were just about the only TV that our grandmother watches (religiously - she rarely misses an episode). It's great watching her make my grandfather give up the stock ticker on MSNBC for an hour... although usually he's headed to bed by then (8pm).
To add to this: we use eye tracking systems in my brain lab (at a major research university). It is, in fact, highly unusual for subjects to only look at one thing, or even to look at whatever they want to do when they do it. There are many extra eye movements (saccades) to other areas of a scene for planning and multitasking, even before the person is conscious of their plans. Here are two papers relating to eye tracking and games in particular:
motion tracking and planning:
Ripoll H. Percept Mot Skills. 1989 Apr;68(2):507-12.
multitasking:
Cavanagh P, Alvarez GA. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Jul;9(7):349-54.
Needless to say, any successful attempt at eye-tracking control for something like video games would have a lot of sophisticated programming to do in order to figure out the user's intentions. From my own personal experience, especially in FPS games, I rarely look where I'm shooting. I would like to keep my sensors (eyeballs) and effectors (hands/feet/other body parts) separate, to allow me to take in more information and perform mor actions simultaneously. It would also prevent any weird interactions if the training provided by the games affects the way hardcore gamers attempt to interact with the real world (although those would be very interesting to study).
Not only does it make songs less accessible to potential listeners, but also to those parents who care enough to wonder what their kids are listening to, or even to screen the songs their kids want to purchase. Maybe some senator who prides himself on "family issues" can be convinced to demand an openly available lyrics clearinghouse as a service to parents?
A consumer wants to listen to music.
The consumer must choose between the various formats available to achieve this goal: CD, radio, iTMS, P2P, etc.
These formats differ from each other in various ways: cost, portability, extras like booklets, control over their listening, audio quality, etc.
Each of these changes the perceived value to the consumer of obtaining music by that medium.
The "deal-breaker" factors that make the consumer choose one format over another (and therefore affect sales) are the main reasons (along with the music itself) for buying the CD or flipping on the radio.
For some consumers, like the sibling poster (and me, and the OP), having lyrics in the booklet is a "deal-breaker" factor.
Just because it's not on your list doesn't mean it isn't a "main reason" for the consumer base as a whole; the OP was saying that, for some significant section of the consumer population, the content of the booklet is a "deal-breaker." Not the most important factor necessarily, but a significant one.
ergo
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics.
ergo
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics.
As I understand the post, the GP wants a way to tell which artists listed themselves and which ones are being listed through the RIAA.
... or, in fact, that "Bees solve complex colour puzzles." I think most readers would assume, when they see a title like that, that there would be some sort of, you know, puzzle involved in the experiment. I'll give them complexity; this is not a trivial vision task. "Puzzle" suggests, to me, something more like maybe learning to choose the middle wavelength of a set of three colors, at the very least. Maybe even logic or something.
I know bees can find flowers in the forest. I see them when I go hiking. The breakthrough here is finding a way to approximate the same sort of stimulus in a laboratory setting. I don't know very much about insect neuroscience in particular, but data from the study of higher animals (monkeys, humans, rats, cats, some birds, and others) strongly suggests that this type of statistical pattern extraction is what is taking place. Computer modeling systems involving neurally-inspired architectures (neural nets) also indicate that this sort of behavior arises naturally from these systems and so is a computationally plausible explanation as well. I'm very surprised to read that they didn't think this was a possible model for bee brains as well. We may some day get as far as being able to "construct useful behavior," but all this study can do is shed some insight into how a visual system can construct useful representations from ambiguous sensory information. The construction of useful behavior in this study happened when they trained the bee to go prefer a particular color. Then they used that useful behavior to find out just what the bee could see.In conclusion: a very useful study, that gives us important new information to help us figure out how visual systems in particular, and bee brains in particular, extract useful information from confusing data. But all of the grandstanding about complex puzzles and computer vision? I say they're blowing steam out their... um... stingers.
ok, I'll buy that. Thanks.
You're missing the GP's point: with this law in place, indie film-making with consumer-level equipment is no longer legal. You'd have to shell out $$$ for the pro-level equipment that's been "approved" (read: taxed) by the **AA.
with the receiver off, how will your phone know it's getting a call?
with the transmitter off, how will the towers know where to route the signal?
if by "off" you mean "powered off"...
what is accomplished by leaving the clock on? It's trivial to receive a timecode as part of the initial handshake with a tower.
why would the phone need to scan for keyboard input?
why would it be storing instructions or data in its volatile (working) memory?
wait, don't tell me.... venusians, right?
It looks like we've moved beyond RTFA to RTFP. Cheesedog goes on to say that the part you quoted is a bad assumption. A lot of trouble could be spared if people would listen to somebody's entire argument before calling them stupid...
-If God created everything, why did he make it look like he didn't?
Assuming He had some reason for the above:
-God made us curious. Shouldn't we use our curiosity to investigate this universe that He created for us, including, say, life?
-How did God create everything/anything? What's the big problem with looking for these mechanisms?
I think many creationists would be a lot less militant if they realized that the science teachers who are opposing all of these pushes into the school system are not trying to shut down The Church. The big issue that they don't seem to understand is that we're dealing with two separate ideas that don't necessarily conflict and that have their place in two separate arenas. Evolution as a natural phenomenon (which is as far as it went in my high school biology class) does not need to conflict with anything the creationists teach. However, evolution is a theory that is based on observation, conjecture, testing and proof, and so belongs in a science classroom, while Creationism Intelligent Design is a philosophical construction based on ancient texts, mythology and Faith, and so belongs in a philosophy/history/social studies/sunday school classroom. Look, that's four to one - remind me again why they need to insert themselves into the science classrooms, too?
---
If the Finger of God is a lightning bolt, then maybe He did zap the primordial soup! Or maybe He was just microwaving His lunch...
On another note, can he protect the source of his download, claiming journalistic integrity?
If John Q. Student writes an article in his school newspaper about downloading and the **AA, are all the people he downloaded from (you know, for posterity) off-limits?
In Canadian McDonald's, FOOD tracks YOU!