Of course there needs to be a connection between playing the music and what's in your head - that's what practice is for. My point is that a good musician will realise when the tune or tone is off, because he has developed a good rapport with his instrument which comes from practice and playing not tuning. If anything, I think the argument is backwards, a good musician will over-ride a digital tuner if it doesn't sound right so good musicians will tend not to use digital tuners as much (or use it in a more sophisticated manner). So I agree that the set of people using tuners tend to be poorer musicians but they would have been anyway - the use of tuners is a symptom of the mediocrity rather than the cause.
Now for lutenists who seem to spend far more time tuning than anything else, I may be convinced otherwise.
Before calculators, there were slide rules and pencil and paper. I remember people saying that by making arithmetic too easy, your mind doesn't get trained and mathematics would suffer. Same with automatic tuning, if you are a good musician, your ear doesn't friggin' need to get trained by tuning a guitar - no more than a good mathematician needs to do multiplication tables to train for advanced number theory. The mediocrity in music that you hear today is because you have mediocre players that are being promoted due to things other than musical talent not because they've never tuned a guitar...
Hey calm down, if the two aren't linked just say so and tell us why or why not.
The 1997 addendum to the Canadian Copyright Act that defines the blank media tax also explicitly allows private copying of music. Now, I admit that I was probably wrong in what the courts decided that downloading is legal because of the tax. It may be true that this clarification adds nothing that did not already exist as part of fair use laws and no explicit linkage is given between the rights to private copying of music and the tax. But c'mon, to say that the two have NOTHING to do with each other is also a reach. The clarification for private copying of music definitely came in the same amendment as the imposition of the tax and it's not a stretch to surmise that this was due to some sort of compromise.
Just a reminder to our American readers, it is legal to share and download music in Canada and it is not piracy. This is a result of a the Canadian version of the RIAA's successful past pressuring of the government resulting in the imposition of a blank media tax. The proceeds are supposed go to the artists to compensate for loss revenues from sharing of music. As I understand it, the courts have deemed that sharing music via the internet is no different than copying a CD and giving it to a friend. Therefore since the record companies already accepted the tax as fair compensation for music sharing - they cannot ask for more. Someone more informed than I can provide the links and clarify the details but we download music here without worry.
But I don't.
I used to be a real record CD hound spending hours combing through the stacks. I used to go to big name concerts regularly. I no longer buy CDs (last I bought was over 10 years ago - some medieval music and some worldbeat) and when we go out it's to listen to small local pub bands, small chamber ensembles or choirs or dance to electronic music DJs. And I'm more likely to play music or sing karaoke than listen to it. A large part of this is just disillusionment with the entire big business music model. Spending a couple of hundred bucks to see Madonna or go to the Opera or listen to a warhorse symphony *again*, doesn't seem to make much sense when there are so many more enjoyable alternative musical experiences.
Of course I was saying that both Fox and Moore are wrong (though Moore less so - and with a fresher set of untruths) - and every news agency out there too. The point being that in the US you get a very limited set of views. In order to make up your mind you need to judge the evidence that they present not whether they are biased or not and whether any of it makes any sense and what the motivations might be for lying. This is impossible with the polarized drivel that is found in the US media with all their agendas.
As for WMDs - from what I remember - the information was out there at the time for any with the eyes to see it. For example, the Economist had a pretty good analysis of what was happening, as did Gwynne Dyer. Again, I'm not saying that these sources are unbiased but although they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they at least try to get at the complex Realpolitik behind the scene - something that is sorely missing in the US where everything seems to boil down to whether this supports abortion or not...
I also apologize for impugning your interest in the world - it (flaming) is an old BBS habit and I really should read up on Darfur...
I didn't believe it. Many if not most people outside the US believed that there were no or no substantial WMDs, hence the small size of the coalition of the coerced. If you had read any of the news sources outside the US rather than depending on Fox and Michael Moore, you might have known this - but then again what happens in the rest of the world is not very important...
If you follow this type of logic, one could also conclude that having blue hair or blue pills makes you more likely to use landlines.
For us the last straw was when the phone company wouldn't send out a tech unless we were willing to foot the bill if the line in the apartment proved defective - regardless of the fact that we had just paid the day before to have the damn thing *installed*. Good-bye TelWest - hello Sunrocket and pay-as-you-go cellphones. That was two years ago. We have 911 and mobility on the cells, VOIP for unlimited long distance with easy blocking of (most of) those annoying telespammers. It has nothing to do with age or wealth per se. We're definitely over 30 and we could certainly afford to give those Baby Bell SOBs more of our money but we choose not to and because we are aware of the technological alternatives.
Actually, no - 1200 dpi *resolution* (i.e. number of dots per inch that can be distinguished) is impossible on any dot matrix printer. That's the dot density that they print. In the old days the printer people were more honest - and computer articles were more saavy about the difference (some of the old MacUser mags from the early 90s for example).
A good laser printer might get between 300 to 600 dpi true resolution with good toner on plain paper. A dye sub might get you 300 dpi with something approaching the hues that you are talking about.
Same with scanners - while they might have the optical resolution of 1200 dpi - the number of colours that they actually distinguish is far less than the ones that they claim. Just because they keep 24 or 32 bits and their chips output that many bits doesn't mean they can *distinguish* 24 bits of colour. I believe that it's much closer to 15 to 18 bits of colour.
Re:Does anyone in the US care about Ultraman?
on
40 Years of Ultraman
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to get up early Saturday morning to watch it on TV when I was a kid. It was my favorite show and where I learned about lousy dubbing. We only had a black and white TV then so it wasn't until years later that I learned that Ultraman was greenish rather than the silver I had imagined.
Mind you, this was on Canadian TV - but the question wasn't addressed at Americans per se...
Is actually reading the wikipedia too much to ask?
Two liquids that close in vapor pressure are very difficult to separate (and requires expensive distillation equipment according to the wiki). As for the grandparent - electrolysis would work because the strength of the HO and DO bonds are different though according to the wiki this is not efficient either. But the principle is the same - unlike for larger isotopes which chemically are essentially identical (and require centrifuges to separate by density), hydrogen isotopes have different chemical properties that can be exploited in rates of reactions and one of these is given in the wikipedia for those interested.
BTW as isotopes go it is very cheap to just buy heavy water (probably because it is relatively easy to obtain) and that is probably the source for this guy's experiment.
Well, the original Sargon algorithm running on a supercomputer would still be lousy. Chess algorithms have changed - in part to take advantage of the increased number of cycles and in part due to the fact that the designers of the best programs are better chess players. If I recall correctly, the Deep Blue programmers were close to Grandmaster level players. Somewhat smart computer lookahead - but not monkeys at typewriters - can beat very smart human look-ahead...
Of course the students and adware companies were wrong but the scariest part of it was that the hospital - is getting off so easily - even in the land of geeks. What would be the reaction if the hospital had left its records, medications, instrumentation out in the open and physically rather than just electronically accessible to the public? If someone had died - who do you think would be sued - the idiot who tried to pawn the heart monitor or the hospital for leaving it on the street?
For those not familiar with the health system here - it is a private one. The motive for hospitals is to maximize profit while minimizing costs. Since there is relatively little public accountability through the government, and individual patients are largely unaware of the relative quality of hospitals, health care insurers are the ones that keep costs from getting too high and malpractice suits keep quality of care from getting too low. Mistakes can cost money - but admitting mistakes can cost a lot more and thus the level of cover-your-butt here is amazingly high.
In such a CYA environment, I question two things - the assertion that noone was hurt - and that the bot attacks were the ones that brought the network down. Both of these things may be true but are also things that administrators would say to prevent lawsuits. The fact that the staff was able to adapt so well to the computers being down suggests to me that this is not the first time that it has happened. In any case, there is no question that the computer network is poorly setup and that is almost certainly the fault of the administration. The docs can get away with small things like putting screensavers on their machines but it would take a high level admin who wanted to save money by using the same OS across the board and/or wanted remote connectivity so that his crackberry could work more easily to really screw things up. If there are lawsuits - things will probably change - not necessarily to do things in a sane matter - but so that they can't be sued. The same calculation (effect on lawsuits) will also be used to decide whether and who will be fired/scapegoated over this - and it won't be the admin with the crackberry. At worst he/she might be made to go on a junket to Japan to learn how to run a hospital more like a automotive assembly line...
we helped create the situation in 39 with the punative versailles treaty
Wilson did try to advance his 14 points which were rejected by the old European guard (eg Clemenceau) who insisted on reparations/revenge from the Huns. Of course it's easy to be farsighted when you entered the war near the end and none of it took place anywhere near your home soil. Still, it's unfair to blame Americans for Versailles much as I sympathize with your Geopolitik viewpoints...
Not to denigrate Einstein's prodigious achievements but general relativity would have been impossible were it not for Riemann's (and Gauss before him) work setting up differential geometry. Not to mention, the contributions by Lorentz, Minkowski and other contemporaries who we forget in our quest to annoint a scientific messiah. It seems that the public *needs* a quaint ubermensch to worship with rather than accepting the more mundane truth that scientific advances occur from the concerted work of many very bright people.
On a scientific level, had Einstein not existed, someone else would have done the work eventually - the tools and conditions were in place for these discoveries to be made. But on a societal level, it probably would have been necessary to invent him...
Ok you got me there. I only have my own vague memories to go on - basically that it was obvious in the late 80's that this was true and my dad was still on integuments for years afterwards. A colleague of mine went to the doctor in '94 and didn't get antibiotics but he was an idiot. The lack of a Nobel had always been strange though...
However, I am more than willing to go along with the stupid MD theory rather than the greedy pharma one...
Can't prove it but the recent NOBEL prize winning research on H pylori may be an example. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for antibiotics to be prescribed for ulcers (a 5 year lag from what I remember) at a time when acid reducers were among the top money makers for big pharma. Also took way too long for the NOBEL to be awarded but too IMHO...
Google it. There's broadband (DSL,T1,T3) in the Northwest Territories. On the other hand, there are places here in Washington State where it's hard to get broadband because it's not profitable for QWEST to upgrade the lines. Wonder whether this is somehow tied in to the fact that Bell Canada is regulated and part of their mandate is to provide phone service to remote areas which might not necessarily be profitable in exchange for the monopoly on local phone service in urban areas...?
Now that I am in Seattle, I expect to have more broadband options but there are two cable companies that split the city (so there are two monopolies) offering the same service that I had in Ontario in 1995 for more money(?). DSL is an option but you need a land line and have to deal with QWEST. Also, I believe that recent changes may allow QWEST in the future, to decide not to lease their line third-party providers such as Speakeasy. You may guess that I don't like QWEST very much. I hope that some of these other schemes, wireless, satellite, powerlines can bypass the Baby Bells and cable oligarchies and maybe we can get some real hi-speed here...
Er... Canada is even bigger and an order magnitude lower population density and has cheaper and superior broadband and telecommunication services. There's more than "the country is too friggin' big" going on here and it has to do with the inefficiencies of the partially (de)regulated Baby Bells and cable fiefdoms in the US...
Now a marketing tool but still useful
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The ratings are somewhat helpful. I find that the audience is a bit too young and haven't seen enough films not made by Spielberg and Lucas, but you take that into account. And there's always been the film studies poseurs, the 13 year-olds, the fanboys etc that you have to filter out when reading reviews but that has always been part of the fun. Marketing shills are becoming too numerous and tedious though.
Still it's very useful for settling arguments and figuring out where you've seen that babe/hunk before. Also it can be cathartic to post a rant about how badly you just wasted your last 10 bucks...
Well, even if the trip time is the same, the main advantages I see for commuters is a shorter wait time and a more reliable arrival time since it would not be dependent on traffic conditions. The unclogging of the streets (which may or may not happen I will admit) is more of a benefit for downtown residents and businesses rather than drivers.
As for transit versus driving - it may surprise you that the fastest way to get to work in Toronto is actually driving but the mass transit system is used by many including car owners because it provides a viable alternative. My ex used to take 90 minutes to get to work by transit rather than driving which would only take 45-60 minutes because she didn't like the traffic and could read and relax with a cup of coffee on the ride. Costwise, it's about the same, *if* you don't count the cost of insurance, depreciation, and maintenance of a car. (We live downtown and rent a car when we need to..)
Actually, I like the fact that Portland has no traffic in the downtown core more than the trolleys themselves and I am open to the fact that the monorail is not the best mass transit system - I would have preferred an Chicago or Vancouver system with regular rails (and I love the Montreal metro, having lived in downtown Montreal for many years) *but* those aren't being proposed just stopping the monorail after all the money has already been spent.
You are also right about the costs of transit - it's just that people always bring those costs up but rarely bring up the costs of driving which are very high making mass transit sound like there are no subsidies for drivers.
Those reasons are so lame. There is no park and ride to save money to please people like yourself. Sure it would be no faster than the bus line but it could carry a lot more people than the bus line without clogging the streets - that's the idea of mass transit. And it costs more than driving to work because of hidden subsidies supporting the infrastructure for drivers (I5 and the viaduct are not free you know..).
I'm even angrier than you and would like to see heads roll - the city councils. For ignoring 4 (or is it 5) separate plebliscites on building a monorail and for trying to pull out after land rights have been bought and contracts set at the cost of nearly a third of the total price. *That* is lunacy.
Why can't we have some vision or at least some common sense. Ever been on the Skytrain in Vancouver, or the trolleys in Portland or lived in Toronto? The downtown cores there are beautiful and thriving places where people live and work. Instead we are going spend a monorails cost to tear down and rebuild that eyesore of a viaduct on the waterfront or spend two monorails worth of money for a two mile underground tunnel. And *my* non-car owner property taxes are paying for that...
The crazy king guy was Canute who ordered the tide not to come in. The modified revisionist version I heard was that he actually did this to prove to his advisors that he was not superhuman and that it was a gesture of humility rather than one of hubris. In any case he got wet...
The couple of bucks an hour at a $200 table with a single deck is about what I would expect. If you go to multiple decks where the profits are lower it just wouldn't be worthwhile (which is why I don't lend much credence to the WIRED article - that, and the sensationalist way it was written). Unless of course, the counting tactics have gotten much more sophisticated since the 60's, which they may have, given the presence of computers.
Thanks for the update on the current blackjack scene. It sounds like the casinos have estimated the loss to good counters and have taken just enough countermeasures to keep that loss minimal (i.e. multiple decks) without losing business from the casual player or counter wannabe. However, I was really hoping for a pointer to a paper on blackjack simulations to see what the maximum advantage can be in a realistic setting - because I'm getting this crazy urge to write one out of curiousity...
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Of course there needs to be a connection between playing the music and what's in your head - that's what practice is for. My point is that a good musician will realise when the tune or tone is off, because he has developed a good rapport with his instrument which comes from practice and playing not tuning. If anything, I think the argument is backwards, a good musician will over-ride a digital tuner if it doesn't sound right so good musicians will tend not to use digital tuners as much (or use it in a more sophisticated manner). So I agree that the set of people using tuners tend to be poorer musicians but they would have been anyway - the use of tuners is a symptom of the mediocrity rather than the cause.
Now for lutenists who seem to spend far more time tuning than anything else, I may be convinced otherwise.
Before calculators, there were slide rules and pencil and paper. I remember people saying that by making arithmetic too easy, your mind doesn't get trained and mathematics would suffer. Same with automatic tuning, if you are a good musician, your ear doesn't friggin' need to get trained by tuning a guitar - no more than a good mathematician needs to do multiplication tables to train for advanced number theory. The mediocrity in music that you hear today is because you have mediocre players that are being promoted due to things other than musical talent not because they've never tuned a guitar...
Hey calm down, if the two aren't linked just say so and tell us why or why not.
The 1997 addendum to the Canadian Copyright Act that defines the blank media tax also explicitly allows private copying of music. Now, I admit that I was probably wrong in what the courts decided that downloading is legal because of the tax. It may be true that this clarification adds nothing that did not already exist as part of fair use laws and no explicit linkage is given between the rights to private copying of music and the tax. But c'mon, to say that the two have NOTHING to do with each other is also a reach. The clarification for private copying of music definitely came in the same amendment as the imposition of the tax and it's not a stretch to surmise that this was due to some sort of compromise.
Just a reminder to our American readers, it is legal to share and download music in Canada and it is not piracy. This is a result of a the Canadian version of the RIAA's successful past pressuring of the government resulting in the imposition of a blank media tax. The proceeds are supposed go to the artists to compensate for loss revenues from sharing of music. As I understand it, the courts have deemed that sharing music via the internet is no different than copying a CD and giving it to a friend. Therefore since the record companies already accepted the tax as fair compensation for music sharing - they cannot ask for more. Someone more informed than I can provide the links and clarify the details but we download music here without worry.
But I don't.
I used to be a real record CD hound spending hours combing through the stacks. I used to go to big name concerts regularly. I no longer buy CDs (last I bought was over 10 years ago - some medieval music and some worldbeat) and when we go out it's to listen to small local pub bands, small chamber ensembles or choirs or dance to electronic music DJs. And I'm more likely to play music or sing karaoke than listen to it. A large part of this is just disillusionment with the entire big business music model. Spending a couple of hundred bucks to see Madonna or go to the Opera or listen to a warhorse symphony *again*, doesn't seem to make much sense when there are so many more enjoyable alternative musical experiences.
Of course I was saying that both Fox and Moore are wrong (though Moore less so - and with a fresher set of untruths) - and every news agency out there too. The point being that in the US you get a very limited set of views. In order to make up your mind you need to judge the evidence that they present not whether they are biased or not and whether any of it makes any sense and what the motivations might be for lying. This is impossible with the polarized drivel that is found in the US media with all their agendas.
As for WMDs - from what I remember - the information was out there at the time for any with the eyes to see it. For example, the Economist had a pretty good analysis of what was happening, as did Gwynne Dyer. Again, I'm not saying that these sources are unbiased but although they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they at least try to get at the complex Realpolitik behind the scene - something that is sorely missing in the US where everything seems to boil down to whether this supports abortion or not...
I also apologize for impugning your interest in the world - it (flaming) is an old BBS habit and I really should read up on Darfur...
I didn't believe it. Many if not most people outside the US believed that there were no or no substantial WMDs, hence the small size of the coalition of the coerced. If you had read any of the news sources outside the US rather than depending on Fox and Michael Moore, you might have known this - but then again what happens in the rest of the world is not very important...
If you follow this type of logic, one could also conclude that having blue hair or blue pills makes you more likely to use landlines.
For us the last straw was when the phone company wouldn't send out a tech unless we were willing to foot the bill if the line in the apartment proved defective - regardless of the fact that we had just paid the day before to have the damn thing *installed*. Good-bye TelWest - hello Sunrocket and pay-as-you-go cellphones. That was two years ago. We have 911 and mobility on the cells, VOIP for unlimited long distance with easy blocking of (most of) those annoying telespammers. It has nothing to do with age or wealth per se. We're definitely over 30 and we could certainly afford to give those Baby Bell SOBs more of our money but we choose not to and because we are aware of the technological alternatives.
Actually, no - 1200 dpi *resolution* (i.e. number of dots per inch that can be distinguished) is impossible on any dot matrix printer. That's the dot density that they print. In the old days the printer people were more honest - and computer articles were more saavy about the difference (some of the old MacUser mags from the early 90s for example).
A good laser printer might get between 300 to 600 dpi true resolution with good toner on plain paper. A dye sub might get you 300 dpi with something approaching the hues that you are talking about.
Same with scanners - while they might have the optical resolution of 1200 dpi - the number of colours that they actually distinguish is far less than the ones that they claim. Just because they keep 24 or 32 bits and their chips output that many bits doesn't mean they can *distinguish* 24 bits of colour. I believe that it's much closer to 15 to 18 bits of colour.
I used to get up early Saturday morning to watch it on TV when I was a kid. It was my favorite show and where I learned about lousy dubbing. We only had a black and white TV then so it wasn't until years later that I learned that Ultraman was greenish rather than the silver I had imagined.
Mind you, this was on Canadian TV - but the question wasn't addressed at Americans per se...
Is actually reading the wikipedia too much to ask?
Two liquids that close in vapor pressure are very difficult to separate (and requires expensive distillation equipment according to the wiki). As for the grandparent - electrolysis would work because the strength of the HO and DO bonds are different though according to the wiki this is not efficient either. But the principle is the same - unlike for larger isotopes which chemically are essentially identical (and require centrifuges to separate by density), hydrogen isotopes have different chemical properties that can be exploited in rates of reactions and one of these is given in the wikipedia for those interested.
BTW as isotopes go it is very cheap to just buy heavy water (probably because it is relatively easy to obtain) and that is probably the source for this guy's experiment.
Well, the original Sargon algorithm running on a supercomputer would still be lousy. Chess algorithms have changed - in part to take advantage of the increased number of cycles and in part due to the fact that the designers of the best programs are better chess players. If I recall correctly, the Deep Blue programmers were close to Grandmaster level players. Somewhat smart computer lookahead - but not monkeys at typewriters - can beat very smart human look-ahead...
Of course the students and adware companies were wrong but the scariest part of it was that the hospital - is getting off so easily - even in the land of geeks. What would be the reaction if the hospital had left its records, medications, instrumentation out in the open and physically rather than just electronically accessible to the public? If someone had died - who do you think would be sued - the idiot who tried to pawn the heart monitor or the hospital for leaving it on the street?
For those not familiar with the health system here - it is a private one. The motive for hospitals is to maximize profit while minimizing costs. Since there is relatively little public accountability through the government, and individual patients are largely unaware of the relative quality of hospitals, health care insurers are the ones that keep costs from getting too high and malpractice suits keep quality of care from getting too low. Mistakes can cost money - but admitting mistakes can cost a lot more and thus the level of cover-your-butt here is amazingly high.
In such a CYA environment, I question two things - the assertion that noone was hurt - and that the bot attacks were the ones that brought the network down. Both of these things may be true but are also things that administrators would say to prevent lawsuits. The fact that the staff was able to adapt so well to the computers being down suggests to me that this is not the first time that it has happened. In any case, there is no question that the computer network is poorly setup and that is almost certainly the fault of the administration. The docs can get away with small things like putting screensavers on their machines but it would take a high level admin who wanted to save money by using the same OS across the board and/or wanted remote connectivity so that his crackberry could work more easily to really screw things up. If there are lawsuits - things will probably change - not necessarily to do things in a sane matter - but so that they can't be sued. The same calculation (effect on lawsuits) will also be used to decide whether and who will be fired/scapegoated over this - and it won't be the admin with the crackberry. At worst he/she might be made to go on a junket to Japan to learn how to run a hospital more like a automotive assembly line...
Not to denigrate Einstein's prodigious achievements but general relativity would have been impossible were it not for Riemann's (and Gauss before him) work setting up differential geometry. Not to mention, the contributions by Lorentz, Minkowski and other contemporaries who we forget in our quest to annoint a scientific messiah. It seems that the public *needs* a quaint ubermensch to worship with rather than accepting the more mundane truth that scientific advances occur from the concerted work of many very bright people.
On a scientific level, had Einstein not existed, someone else would have done the work eventually - the tools and conditions were in place for these discoveries to be made. But on a societal level, it probably would have been necessary to invent him...
Ok you got me there. I only have my own vague memories to go on - basically that it was obvious in the late 80's that this was true and my dad was still on integuments for years afterwards. A colleague of mine went to the doctor in '94 and didn't get antibiotics but he was an idiot. The lack of a Nobel had always been strange though...
However, I am more than willing to go along with the stupid MD theory rather than the greedy pharma one...
No it doesn't. The relevant medicines are off-patent now and have been for a while. The Nobel should have been awarded to these guys many years ago...
Can't prove it but the recent NOBEL prize winning research on H pylori may be an example. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for antibiotics to be prescribed for ulcers (a 5 year lag from what I remember) at a time when acid reducers were among the top money makers for big pharma. Also took way too long for the NOBEL to be awarded but too IMHO...
Google it. There's broadband (DSL,T1,T3) in the Northwest Territories. On the other hand, there are places here in Washington State where it's hard to get broadband because it's not profitable for QWEST to upgrade the lines. Wonder whether this is somehow tied in to the fact that Bell Canada is regulated and part of their mandate is to provide phone service to remote areas which might not necessarily be profitable in exchange for the monopoly on local phone service in urban areas...?
Now that I am in Seattle, I expect to have more broadband options but there are two cable companies that split the city (so there are two monopolies) offering the same service that I had in Ontario in 1995 for more money(?). DSL is an option but you need a land line and have to deal with QWEST. Also, I believe that recent changes may allow QWEST in the future, to decide not to lease their line third-party providers such as Speakeasy. You may guess that I don't like QWEST very much. I hope that some of these other schemes, wireless, satellite, powerlines can bypass the Baby Bells and cable oligarchies and maybe we can get some real hi-speed here...
Er... Canada is even bigger and an order magnitude lower population density and has cheaper and superior broadband and telecommunication services. There's more than "the country is too friggin' big" going on here and it has to do with the inefficiencies of the partially (de)regulated Baby Bells and cable fiefdoms in the US...
The ratings are somewhat helpful. I find that the audience is a bit too young and haven't seen enough films not made by Spielberg and Lucas, but you take that into account. And there's always been the film studies poseurs, the 13 year-olds, the fanboys etc that you have to filter out when reading reviews but that has always been part of the fun. Marketing shills are becoming too numerous and tedious though.
Still it's very useful for settling arguments and figuring out where you've seen that babe/hunk before. Also it can be cathartic to post a rant about how badly you just wasted your last 10 bucks...
Well, even if the trip time is the same, the main advantages I see for commuters is a shorter wait time and a more reliable arrival time since it would not be dependent on traffic conditions. The unclogging of the streets (which may or may not happen I will admit) is more of a benefit for downtown residents and businesses rather than drivers.
As for transit versus driving - it may surprise you that the fastest way to get to work in Toronto is actually driving but the mass transit system is used by many including car owners because it provides a viable alternative. My ex used to take 90 minutes to get to work by transit rather than driving which would only take 45-60 minutes because she didn't like the traffic and could read and relax with a cup of coffee on the ride. Costwise, it's about the same, *if* you don't count the cost of insurance, depreciation, and maintenance of a car. (We live downtown and rent a car when we need to..)
Actually, I like the fact that Portland has no traffic in the downtown core more than the trolleys themselves and I am open to the fact that the monorail is not the best mass transit system - I would have preferred an Chicago or Vancouver system with regular rails (and I love the Montreal metro, having lived in downtown Montreal for many years) *but* those aren't being proposed just stopping the monorail after all the money has already been spent.
You are also right about the costs of transit - it's just that people always bring those costs up but rarely bring up the costs of driving which are very high making mass transit sound like there are no subsidies for drivers.
Those reasons are so lame. There is no park and ride to save money to please people like yourself. Sure it would be no faster than the bus line but it could carry a lot more people than the bus line without clogging the streets - that's the idea of mass transit. And it costs more than driving to work because of hidden subsidies supporting the infrastructure for drivers (I5 and the viaduct are not free you know..).
I'm even angrier than you and would like to see heads roll - the city councils. For ignoring 4 (or is it 5) separate plebliscites on building a monorail and for trying to pull out after land rights have been bought and contracts set at the cost of nearly a third of the total price. *That* is lunacy.
Why can't we have some vision or at least some common sense. Ever been on the Skytrain in Vancouver, or the trolleys in Portland or lived in Toronto? The downtown cores there are beautiful and thriving places where people live and work. Instead we are going spend a monorails cost to tear down and rebuild that eyesore of a viaduct on the waterfront or spend two monorails worth of money for a two mile underground tunnel. And *my* non-car owner property taxes are paying for that...
The crazy king guy was Canute who ordered the tide not to come in. The modified revisionist version I heard was that he actually did this to prove to his advisors that he was not superhuman and that it was a gesture of humility rather than one of hubris. In any case he got wet...
The couple of bucks an hour at a $200 table with a single deck is about what I would expect. If you go to multiple decks where the profits are lower it just wouldn't be worthwhile (which is why I don't lend much credence to the WIRED article - that, and the sensationalist way it was written). Unless of course, the counting tactics have gotten much more sophisticated since the 60's, which they may have, given the presence of computers.
Thanks for the update on the current blackjack scene. It sounds like the casinos have estimated the loss to good counters and have taken just enough countermeasures to keep that loss minimal (i.e. multiple decks) without losing business from the casual player or counter wannabe. However, I was really hoping for a pointer to a paper on blackjack simulations to see what the maximum advantage can be in a realistic setting - because I'm getting this crazy urge to write one out of curiousity...