Cars are more efficient than people? Where exactly did you get that information? Biological organisms are much more efficient than mechanical ones.
Internal combustion engines make more heat, noise, and vibration, than they do power output per gallon of gasoline burned. Human beings and animals in general make far more efficient use of the calories we consume. In fact our bodies can sometimes be too efficient, hence the fattening of the US population.
Consider this experiment. How far can a car go on 1 gallon of gasoline and how far a person can ride a bicycle burning the equivalent calories.
A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 kilo calories (give or take) worth of stored energy.
A human being burns about 1000 calories an hour riding a bicycle at a fast speed of 20 mph.
Lets say a prius gets 60MPG, it gets one gallon of gas, and goes 60 miles.
That same amount of calories powering a human rider would equal 620 miles for one gallon of fuel.
Again, that is an average sized rider riding at near top speed on flat ground. Riding slower would increase the range.
Human beings are 10 fold more efficient than automobiles.
Red Dawn is one of the few movies I can think of that obeys the speed of sound. In the movie there are many explosions that are at a distance from the camera and you see the flash first, then several seconds later you hear the sound. It adds an authenticity to the movie that is more disturbing and impacting with realism, than any special effect.
Knowledge is power and I would be wary of any government who would treat the pursuit of it as a "mental disorder".
The internet is a utility just like your gas or electric. Homes should have water, power, communication, and information.
Labeling something an addiction or mental disorder, because it has become part of our lives, is a thinly veiled effort to prevent the free flow of information and keep people cut off and ignorant. China is one of the most restrictive industrial nations with regards to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of information.
Is it a mental disorder to read too many books instead of too many webpages? Is it a mental disorder to work 11 hours a day instead of learning or communicating? Is it a mental disorder to carry a cellphone 24 hours a day instead of having IM up 24 hours a day? If someone spends 4 hours a day commuting to work does that mean they are addicted to commuting?
An addiction is something that is un-healthy and destructive to a persons life. The internet is no more an addictive thing than your water or gas utilities. It's just an information and communication utility, two things the Chinese government doesn't want people doing is talking and sharing information.
Great. Next thing you know "The Trial" will no longer be a fictional story.
You name me one president in modern history who has directly assaulted the constitution with such vigor as the Bush administration. Never have so many doors to our constitutional rights been closed, locked, and had the key thrown away, as right here right now.
There should be riots in the streets that the ATTORNEY GENERAL doesn't feel the right to a fair trial and due process is a guaranteed right of every citizen.
Wake up, most IT is outsourced now and has been for a long time. Most hospitals have million dollar medical equipment connected to outdated and abused PC's that you wouldn't use to operate a toaster much less an MRI imaging program.
If you want to see penny pinching at it's best, go work in a hospital for awhile.
There are places in the midwest that would be comperable in savings to cities in the third world.
Using your barbie parts idea, say you take it to another country and set up shop. And 6 months later after your third dictator privatizes the mfg industry you are out of luck.
I don't buy into the whole cost savings bit. There are people in the midwest of the USA living on $10K a year. Taxes are low, there are incentives to build factories, and people who can be paid less because the cost of living is less. All of that and the added bonus of the security of being inside the greatest country on the planet.
It's not a dichotomy, it is how both sides see the others arguments.
What were the consequences of the end of the last ice age in Europe and North America? Were they good or bad? Don't forget that man hunted the Mammoth and they became extinct yet we survived with one of our primary food sources gone. The north american bison roamed all over the heartland of the USA 150 years ago and now there are a few isolated herds, did the drastic changes to our prairies cause a catastrophe?
New York is not going to be under water in 50 years but the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and New Orleans might. I'm sure when people initially think about that they are imagining a wall of water flooding out the cities and the whole "waterworld" scenario. When in reality it will slowly push people inland as new coastline is created. The Mississippi river and the Yangtze river run through some of the most populated areas of the USA and China and they are continuously changing their courses and winding back and looping on themselves, and people have little trouble living on their banks.
Jamestown, the very first US settlement was built on the banks of a river and most of the site is now under water 200 years later but do people talk about the great flood and rising oceans wiping jamestown off the face of the earth? No because the coastlines have always and will always change and people follow them inland or outland as the coastline changes.
Deserts and rainfall distribution throughout the world is greatly affected and impacted by natural obstructions like mountain ranges being pushed up, more so than the ice caps would affect them. You arguments about severe droughts or excessive flooding, are already the norm. It is already a part of our lives to live through droughts and manage flooding. The Army corps of engineers spent the last 50 years flood proofing the USA. You are arguing that it will happen more frequently but how can you say that reliably? The climate models that are in place today paint a very broad picture and the best anybody can do is guess.
I am playing devils advocate here but I truly believe that peoples reactions to global warming and the theories vary greatly based on their perspective. If you live in Siberia you probably look forward to warmer winters. If you live in Florida you probably don't look forward to the water table rising any more than it has already.
Just think of it like this. This planet is stable and self regulating, if it wasn't then any little thing could cause a global catastrophe. If all it took to cause an ice age was the desalination of the north sea to shut down the gulf stream, then do you really think things would be the way they are today? If the planet could flip through extremes so quickly do you think any of the current life on this planet would have evolved the way it has?
We are born to this world, it is ours and it is our home. We should take care of it but it also takes care of us and we are superbly adapted to live here. It has been ever changing since it was created and it will continue to change and we all have adapted to thrive in this environment.
I'm not arguing that we do nothing. I am arguing that jumping to conclusions and hastily making over our entire economy and way of life, before we have the facts, is worse than doing nothing.
I'm going to play devils advocate here for a moment.
What is the worst case scenario here? We slowly loose coastline over a few hundred years, while enjoying warmer winters, longer and more productive growing seasons and people will be able to migrate from the equatorial regions and begin settling the arctic and antarctic.
A large amount of the worlds life lives in the oceans and the coastlines that do flood will become shallow reefs that will support an abundance of life. For every species hurt by the rising ocean there will be more that will adapt or thrive in the new environment.
Think about how many people freeze to death or die because of cold weather every year. Don't you think it's a good thing to have warmer winters? Cool enough not to need air conditioning, just warm enough not to need heating oil. If we all had 70 degree winters think about how much fuel we could save.
Think about how much our economy would benefit if we could run ships through the arctic ocean instead of down through the panama canal. Think about how much rich and fertile land would be left behind by retreating glaciers and how much new land people would be able to settle in places like Asia and Canada where the harsh winters limit populations to a few small cities.
Yes if all the glaciers melted we would loose land around coastlines. But not as much as we would gain by being able to settle an ice free Antarctica, have thousands of miles of farm land in Alaska etc. The worlds population coastal will displace over decades or centuries and many people will be able to re settle into places formerly too cold to live but now warm and lush in wide open expanses.
More CO2 in the atmosphere also promotes more productive growing seasons and the lack of ice will allow wider expanses of the planet to support agriculture.
Now devils advocate aside, think about what you are talking about doing to truly make the world carbon neutral. Because that's what it's going to take to completely negate mans' presence.
If everything we do that causes CO2 has to include the cost of reclaiming that CO2 then everything would become prohibitively expensive.
You think that nice electric car you bought is carbon neutral? Think about how much coal and coke went into forging the steel your pretty little green machine is made out of. How much much oil went into creating the various lubricants, plastics, rubbers, and synthetic materials in that car.
Think about how much a gallon of milk will cost when you have to collect all the methane from the cows and gasoline is $20 a gallon to ship that milk from the farm to the store.
Our entire economy, ever facet of life in the world, is only possible because of the burning of fossil fuels.
Small changes in the price of coal, natural gas, or gasoline effect every single facet of life.
The fringe element of the climate alarmists want us to live like cave men again. They want to tear it all down in the name of the planet.
Well I for one would rather be able to swim in December than live like a primative, only to find out later that it had no effect on the planet or that the problem wasn't as bad as we thought.
I am on my own side so I care not if republicans or democrats beat each other up.
I am critical of facts people throw around and I have serious issues with some of the data on global warming. If you look at the historical evidence of these kinds of fears of doom and gloom, most of them were taken seriously based on the knowledge of the time and later debunked.
Just 30 years ago there was a concern of a new ice age.
To make my argument more clear. There are many things which control the climate of this planet and many substances which both reflect and absorb infrared radiation other than CO2.
Methane is a greenhouse gas and there are considerable amounts of it coming from livestock especially as our taste for meat grows (no I hate PETA and I'm not a vegan).
Water vapor as I mentioned has more of an effect on the greenhouse effect than CO2.
The sun is not a light bulb, it is a camp fire. It flickers, grows hotter at times, cooler at others, and the earth changes with it.
Deforestation is not nearly as rampant as people believe, outside of developing equatorial countries who are clearing rainforest for arable land that is. In the USA there are more trees now than there were 100 years ago thanks to advances in tree farming and agriculture. And these trees grow faster than their ancestors did thanks to gene manipulation in breeding.
My biggest gripes come from the way the data was collected and the amount of thought that went into finding errors or mis-interpretations of the data we gather from tree rings and ice cores. There are wide margins of error in how that data is compiled and interpreted.
This coupled with the fact that our science of climatology is in it's infancy and our computer models are crude at best, I don't think we can 100% rely on computer models and incomplete data to form an opinion.
I'm not saying deny global warming, I'm saying lets hold off on the panic button a while and get a better understanding of how this planet works before jumping to conclusions about the hows and whys.
Even trying to improve the environment can have unintended consequences and for us to play god with nature right now is folly. Consider "acid rain" which was the big environmental scare of the 70's and 80's. Fears over that had us finding ways of removing sulphur from our lignite coal and making cleaner burning power plants. The unintended effect of which was to lower sulphur in the upper atmosphere which helps to reflect sunlight and keep the planet cool.
The earth has a way of checking and balancing itself. If the system becomes unstable it self corrects in most cases. We have to get used to the idea of a planet who's climate changes. It's been happening for millions of years and it will keep happening. Sea levels rise and fall, ice ages come and go, forests become deserts, and savannahs become marsh lands, everything changes.
We are the single most adaptable single species on the planet. We have lived in all environments on this planet even without technology. We survived the European ice age and when global warming happened we were given some of the lushest and most fertile land in the world by the retreating glaciers.
Water is a buffer. If more ice melts, more water enters the climate and buffers the effects.
I'm not saying these ideas debunk everything about the climate, but they are just some of the ideas to think about and not automaticly buy in to everything you are told.
I will agree with something more from an impartial source or from a scientist than I will from a politician or the media. Politicians and sensationalists make their living on distorting facts and spinning things and I'm not buying into anything they have to say.
The scientific method doesn't work without open debate and logical people who rely on observation and facts. There for it is a healthy thing to disagree and to argue the facts. And popular opinion does not make something true or scientific and in fact it can cause serious harm.
That is fools logic. CO2 is less of a greenhouse gas than water vapor.
We know that the greenhouse effect is real because without it, earth would be frozen solid.
But the contribution and origination of the C02 in our atmosphere is something debatable.
And the current weather is also definitely debatable as to whether it is abnormal or caused by global warming, or if it is a seasonal change due to the long range climate cycles like El Nino.
Using your logic
Fact, people who get their science from the news media instead of scientific reports are stupid. Fact. Stupid people who watched a 2 hour movie about global warming will believe they are climate experts.
There are thousands of reasons why Hydrogen is not an ideal fuel source. The top ones being
Hydrogen is the lightest element. Any natural hydrogen floats off into space or is re-combined into other molecules. This lack of density also means that it is costly and time consuming to compress hydrogen into a container for storage, and that the size and weight of that container will contain less potential energy than fossil fuels. IE a hydrogen gas tank that takes 45min to fill and is the size of a small refrigerator will get a car about half as far as a tank of gasoline half that size.
Because hydrogen doesn't occur in it's pure form in any significant number, we have to extract it using energy. Currently we spend far more energy creating the hydrogen than we get back by burning it. Since it takes power to make power, hydrogen is nothing more than a glorified battery, you use electrical energy and convert it to chemical energy, then back into electrical (fuel cell) or burn it.
It is far more fuel efficient, and better for our environment to drive battery powered electric vehicles supplied from the grid and supplement our energy needs with clean Nuclear power.
Currently most of the electricity in the USA is made from coal burning power plants. If you really want to save the world from CO2 and sulfur emissions then build more Nuclear power plants and run more vehicles on electricity. Nuclear energy is a zero emission technology. There is no exhaust. The fuel is plentiful, and reactor designs like the pea bed reactors, are safe, and immune to melt downs, and the radioactive by products are useful in the medical and defense fields and can be safely stored.
Look, this whole fear of nuclear technology thing is overblown in face of the risks with global warming. Radioactive materials are already on earth, in our soil, in our mountains, it's already out there in nature decaying. Isn't it better to remove it from the environment and do some good with it? Whether it decays on a mountainside, or decays in a reactor, does it make a difference? It's already there and it would be fool hardy to waste it. People act like nuclear dumps are un-natural. What do you think happens to uranium and other radioactive substances when they aren't mined? They sit there in the rock, same as a barrel would.
If data is used so much, why are you paying your cell phone bill for voice minutes, but data plans tend to be unlimited?
I'm only going to delve into the GSM side here since it is the widest standard in use through out the world and CDMA is USA/Korea only.
Most of the network bandwidth is devoted to voice calls. In order to handle a 'data' call the provider must support either IWF/WAP, or GPRS.
IWF/WAP is the old school "dial up" type data. It uses a 9600 baud "voice" channel and gets routed to an Interworking Function (IWF) to provide the carrier tones and signalling termination to the land line.
A typical IWF configuration can support 24 - 48 data calls....for the entire market.
That means in a large place like Dallas, only a few dozen people can place these dial up or fax calls on one providers service at any one time.
CSD/WAP is transparent to the equipment and is treated like a voice call.
Then came GPRS, which is a dedicated data network for GSM.
GPRS reserves a certain number of radio time slots for each sector to be used for data only or voice first, data if they are idle. These calls bypass the local switch all together and there for don't tie up any voice bandwidth or switching power. This allows for the higher speeds of GPRS and EDGE of 56kbps - 112kbps
The key here is that you have to designate a radio time slot as voice only, data only, or voice first, data second. This means anybody logged in to the equipment can quickly determine what % of the available timeslots are dedicated for data calls.
Most radios use a small handful of their timeslots for data. In fact there are roughly 3 times more resources for voice than data.
these cell "sites" are called BTS's and they are not cheap, and a provider will need hundreds of them to build a cellular network.
Now if you want to provide a wide range of data services, you can upgrade these hundreds of already ungodly expensive BTS machines, upgrade the GPRS equipment to handle the increased data, and upgrade all the way up the line.
This would be prohibitively expensive.
The solution is to use off the shelf WIFI and WIMAX technologies "in addition to" the existing infrastructure, which effectively creates a shadow network for data, which does not interfere with call processing of voice calls at all.
GSM operates at 1800mhz in most of North America and does not interfere with the 2.4ghz wifi signals. The two exist side by side.
So in summary, right now, voice is still the king. When you get your $50 cellphone bill, it's not for surfing google, it's for purchasing and using voice minutes. Remember that please, voice plans = X number of minutes, data plans = unlimited for set fee.
WiMaxx is the cheaper answer to 3G for a lot of carriers and it is only when data becomes reliable, cheap, and widely available, that it will ever begin to surpass the common and under appreciated ability to pick up a phone and place a voice call to someone any time of day.
Oh my! I get a headache and feel weak every time I step into the office. There are wifi access points every 50 meters on all floors of the building where I work.
I feel so faint.....
so faint......can't......possibly.....work.....
We want MORE news stories like this so we can convince our bosses to work from home!
Let me start by saying that I am suspicious of a lot of the global warming 'facts' being tossed around by people saying its the end of the world.
The fact is that most people engaged in this debate, on the internet, in the media, in the government, are debating facts and opinions derived not in scientific circles, but in debate circles and media stories.
Part of the scientific process is to state a theory or hypothesis and encourage debate and the reproduction of others results. The problem here is that people who are trying to debate what we are being told, are being demonized and portrayed as whack jobs and delusioned.
The fact is that it is going to take a long time, maybe even your entire life time, to really understand what is going on with the planets climate. There is just so much data, and a lot of the computer models being used are so new, that the conclusions we form now will probably be proven wrong either way at some future time.
Climate models do not explain everything about our climate and anybody who puts their full belief in a model, or treats it as some kind of absolute is not being scientific. You have to accept that we don't know everything and the logical argument by the people against the hysteria of global warming is we are jumping to conclusions based limited data and understanding.
I have some suggestions for restoring some sanity to the debate.
1. Do not get your information from the media. Read scientific journals and reports that are intended for peer review and not a media package pushing their opinion. It is shameful that we don't have more impartial and non-partisan debate going on.
2. Pick up a history book and look at previous debates to get some perspective on the kinds of attacks and arguments being made. This will help you sort out the facts from the opinions. Read up on such greats as debate over the origins of disease (people laughed when it was suggested that mosquitoes spread malaria), The origin of species, not just Darwin's take, but the scientific consensus at the time and their reaction to his ideas and the ides of others at the time. Anything dealing with scientific debate at the late 18th century is good because it was the dawn of the age of reason when we didn't quite get everything right, and there are many parallels to arguments going on today.
3. Beware of people with agendas. I wouldn't trust our oil baron government to give me factual information on climate and fossil fuels, and I don't trust the greenpeace terrorists telling me the world will drown and bake either. The best information will not be tied to an agenda, the person releasing it will have nothing to gain.
4. Question everything. Don't implicitly accept information because it fits your world view, and vigorously protest any that doesn't. Look at everything you read or hear critically.
The global warming debate should take place in the science circles, amongst scientists and researchers. Not in the media or in government hearings.
We need to keep in mind that every decade produces a new perceived threat to man kind and the reactions are always the same. It produces doomsayers proclaiming the end and in the end, life goes on the same. African bees, save the whales, acid rain....
Our planets climate is the most complicated piece of machinery you could ever imagine. It has checks and balances and will naturally resist change. If the planet could so easily change it's climate it is very unlikely that any higher organisms could have evolved at all. Our ancestors lived through an ice age, and global warming gave us an end to glaciers in Europe and North America, and the most fertile farm land in the world.
Things do change, but it's not the end of the world.
And lastly, the talk of a solution, of changing the way we make energy, making direct changes to the environment, these all have un-predictable consequences due to the complexity of the system.
Part of the reason the earth is holding in more heat now is becaus
There are things that Bladerunner absolutely predicted that have come to pass, or are occurring in the present.
Manufactured animals. In the movie there are man made animals like snakes that are created in the bio tech industry. This is really no different than someone cloning a dead pet or Dolly the sheep. Anybody with the money can have it done.
Further more it is also common for parents to be able to pick the sex of their child.
The political and economic climate of the movie had large multinational corporations as the central power structure of society. This is exactly what is happening today. When corporations have such vast amounts of wealth to spend on lobbyists, they are the true power behind our government. Who feeds and houses our military; the government, or Haliburton?
The spread of Asian influence into every day society was also predicted in the movie.
This is something that is on going. We already have this influence in the mfg industry. All of our tech dollars eventually flow into Asia. And the Chinese economy is set to explode. At this rate, something like almost 1/4 of the population of the planet will be speaking Mandarin.
And perhaps, most profound is the disconnection of people from each other, leading to increased isolationism, and a lack of understanding and empathy of those around us. Look at the character of Sebastian. Holed up in his apartment, surrounded by friends he built himself. More comfortable around machines than people.
Or collect antiques? And why do people pay top dollar for wine that is not brand new. Why do people spend thousands of dollars trying to replicate the sound of 70's moog synthesizers. I mean they are so analog right? This is the year 2006 people, analog is out. We need digital synthesizers that use modern wave table sampling and run Linux. They make the best music right? I mean what good is an analog filter and a bunch of patch cables and no MIDI. It can't make a piano sound like a piano right?
And the same with antiques. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on old used furniture when they can go down to the LayZboy store and get something brand new.
And classic automobiles? Don't even get me started on classic automobiles. What is so classic about something that is so old it doesn't even use disc brakes, lacks airbags, and just looks old. I mean why sink money into something so old when you can get a nice Honda Civic that is going to get you around in modern style right? Who needs a Tbucket when you can get a Civic?
All mockery aside, the obvious answer to your question is that some people "like" and or "appreciate" things that are obscure, different, or old.
Not everybody wants to compose their music on an Imac. Some people choose to do it on an Atari or on a gameboy. And they make a living off it.
We have had over 30 years to improve on synthesizers but the best sounds are still made by the old patch cord Analogs like the Moogs'.
I'm not a commodore fan boy but the C64 is a capable synthesizer and music production platform. It's cheap, and it's been reverse engineered to the point that you can actually buy or make modules that will give it network access.
Having confines on something forces you to be more creative.
I mean, this guy kept some girl prisoner for 8 years, he was F'd in the head. But your arguing that classic equipment is pointless. And that's like saying that paintings are useless because of photography and photography is useless because of film, and film is useless because of television, and television is useless because of PC's with DVD players, etc etc.
Why hasn't the design of the guitar changed in the last few hundred years? Why has the electric guitar pickup not changed in 40 years or more? Because new doesn't always mean better. And some people like the sounds and feelings of old things.
Yeah I looked at the gif. And I could clearly see the shift to "buy buy buy". If you can see the frames, it's not subliminal.
Animated GIF's have a very limited frame rate and would not be possible in most circumstances to display a frame fast enough to escape notice.
The fields on a TV screen flicker at 60 times a second yet our eyes are fast enough to register these changes and to see the alternating flicks.
Film goes by at 24 frames per second and unless they added frames that resembled the frames around them, you would notice the abrupt change.
Consider the final scene in the movie "Seven" when Brad Pitt's character sees an image of his wife for a frame before shooting Kevin Spacey's character. That lasted one frame out of 24 but was still enough to register.
A far more effective technique for "subliminal advertising" would be for the person to not realize it's an advertisement at all, hence they wouldn't be conscious of the message. This happens all the time with viral marketing, and people who are paid to have conversations about a product in a public setting like bars and taverns.
I think it has been proven that sub-aural and sub-visual manipulations are gimmicks that have no affect on the mind. At least from the standpoint of introducing un-seen messages to the brain. Manipulation of the overall movie to carefully craft a skewed perspective or point of view is far more effective.
Like a Michael Moore "documentary" that shows a carefully thought out sequence of interviews and sound bites that lead the mind into seeing things in a limited way that the film maker wants you to see.
Having said that, if you want to try a subliminal advertisement using an animated.GIF then try this. Have your bogus stock information on the screen, and have some frames change the words of a sentence to something else. As your reading my words here you are also conscious of the words around it and above and below it even though you're not reading them. So if you replace certain phrases with phrases like "Morgan Stanley approved" or "Bill Gates made $1,000,00 profit off this stock" or something like that then those messages would have far more of an impact. Or to do it really snarky like, do individual words like inserting words to make someone think they are missing out or to make it look more legitimate. All flashed for a few tenths of a second.
Someone reading it will basically read what you wrote, but they will remember the other words and phrases even if they can't place them in context.
Flashing "buy buy buy" in different sized letters does nothing.
Microsoft stores all of it's system sounds as.wav files. Nothing is in the kernel or.dll's. You can easily substitute your own.wav with a custom startup sound but having the original vista filename, you could modify the registry, any number of things.
If you can hack the kernel and explorer to make the start menu look like a Mac then you can certainly remove or modify a sound.
I can't think of any reason why someone would want to fake a 1968 computer GUI video but there are several things here that confuse me.
1. The mouse and GUI were not invented until the 1970's by Xerox. In 1968 the microprocessor hadn't even been born yet.
2. Look at the headset that the guy is wearing. They did not have small compact, against the ear, short tube microphoned, headsets in 1968. They used around the ear headphones hte size of your fist with a boom microphone sticking out the side. They just did not have those kinds of headsets back then. Look at any vintage NASA or military video, and they had the best that money could buy.
And last but not least, despite the fact that there were no micro processors in 1968, there were also no video displays capable of rendering a rasterized mouse cursor..... They used teletype formated rows and columns of ASCII characters. Hell in 1968 even super computers still used teletype terminals and punch cards......
It looks like a well done fake using computer effects to age the video.
Copyright law in this country is stacked firmly in favor of the copyright owners.
When our founding fathers developed the idea of licensing intellectual property it was originally for 7 years of exclusivity, after which it was public domain.
Then we began to allow people to renew their copyright for a few more years. And then hollywood began to manipulate the law makers with lobbyists and more and more time began being added until it was a lifetime copyright, and then up to 70 years after the persons death.
And then they started allowing corporations to own copyrights, and since a corporation doesn't die, neither does their copyright. They also began the process of "auto renewing" copyrights whether the original author wanted to or not.
This caused a huge problem when works like documentaries on the civil rights movement, where the original copyright owner could not be located, that efectively locked the work out of the public eye.
There are thousands of orphaned works like that and since their copyrights are kept locked up indefinately after being abandoned, nobody can use them.
So we go from 7 years to lifetime +80 years. Basicly every time Mickey Mouse gets close to being public domain, Disney lobbyists get the deadline extended. The last of these was the Sonny Bono act that extended copyrights out even farther.
Look, nothing is created in a vacume. If you write a book, or a movie, or paint something, you didn't come up with all of that yourself. You had influences from other artists, from the public. There is nothing new out there, everything is based upon the work of somebody else. And if we lock everything up and use copyright as an excuse to NEVER release it back to the public then it ends up crippling the next generation of artists and innovators.
Imagine what music would be like if everything by Mozart and Bach, and other classical artists was still copyright. A lot of people don't realize it but the Happy birthday song is copyright and every time it's used in a movie they have to license it.
It was not the intention of the founding fathers of this country for works of art to remain privatized for hundreds of years. They felt that 7 years was enough, and that after that it should become public domain. This cycle of creativity is what creates new art and new artists, and if people are stingy with their art and don't give back, after taking so much, then no new art is created.
I utterly reject the concept of unlimited copyrights and the rampant lawsuits for sampling other peoples music, mashing up videos, making mosaics of photographs, or any of the other things that limit an artists creative freedoms.
Rockstar should send us all copies of their upcoming games for free or we should sue them as well! I mean it's our right as Americans to have advanced screenings of movies or games so that we can determine their detrimental affects on our children right?
And we have just as much right to demand that of Rockstar as Jack Thompson does considering he is not in any legal or formal position in the industry to make those kinds of demands.
Just look at the vast erosion of society that PacMan has rought on our pure society. Generations of kids who grew up playing this "drug mule" simulator have been training to navigate the mazes of ways into the USA while packing as many pellets into their mouths as possible. The use of drug mules has categoricaly gone up since the release of the PacMan video game.
Then there are Rad Racer and Spy Hunter with their graphic simulations of road rage that led a generation of children to become maniacs on the road, laying oil slicks, and shooting big trucks who won't get out of the way.
Not every kid who plays Pac Man is going to grow up to be a drug mule, the same way that not everybody who watches a TV commercial is going to buy the product. But some of them do! And we have a right as the American people to have access to these games so that we can understand their lack of morals and the dangers that they represent to the people and our children!
I played the Xbox version and I played it every waking minute over an entire weekend. The N64 graphics were more blocky and the voices were more aliased and "8 bit" sounding. But the humor and the interesting puzzles, like how to make a cow get the screaming shits, are the draw.
The brits just have a maliciously twisted sense of humor that makes any of those kinds of games an instant classic.
Any game that has a boss who flings giant balls of poo at you while singing along gets an A+ in my book!
Yep, or explosive hydrogen and oxygen, a corrosive poison form water, and we need oxygen in smaller quantities.
It's funny to watch people get their chemicals mixed up. Sodium Chloride, Sodium Hydroxide, one tastes good on fries, one will make your teeth white before it kills you....
Slashdot Mirror
Cars are more efficient than people? Where exactly did you get that information? Biological organisms are much more efficient than mechanical ones.
Internal combustion engines make more heat, noise, and vibration, than they do power output per gallon of gasoline burned. Human beings and animals in general make far more efficient use of the calories we consume. In fact our bodies can sometimes be too efficient, hence the fattening of the US population.
Consider this experiment. How far can a car go on 1 gallon of gasoline and how far a person can ride a bicycle burning the equivalent calories.
A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 kilo calories (give or take) worth of stored energy.
A human being burns about 1000 calories an hour riding a bicycle at a fast speed of 20 mph.
Lets say a prius gets 60MPG, it gets one gallon of gas, and goes 60 miles.
That same amount of calories powering a human rider would equal 620 miles for one gallon of fuel.
Again, that is an average sized rider riding at near top speed on flat ground. Riding slower would increase the range.
Human beings are 10 fold more efficient than automobiles.
Red Dawn is one of the few movies I can think of that obeys the speed of sound. In the movie there are many explosions that are at a distance from the camera and you see the flash first, then several seconds later you hear the sound. It adds an authenticity to the movie that is more disturbing and impacting with realism, than any special effect.
Knowledge is power and I would be wary of any government who would treat the pursuit of it as a "mental disorder".
The internet is a utility just like your gas or electric. Homes should have water, power, communication, and information.
Labeling something an addiction or mental disorder, because it has become part of our lives, is a thinly veiled effort to prevent the free flow of information and keep people cut off and ignorant. China is one of the most restrictive industrial nations with regards to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of information.
Is it a mental disorder to read too many books instead of too many webpages?
Is it a mental disorder to work 11 hours a day instead of learning or communicating?
Is it a mental disorder to carry a cellphone 24 hours a day instead of having IM up 24 hours a day?
If someone spends 4 hours a day commuting to work does that mean they are addicted to commuting?
An addiction is something that is un-healthy and destructive to a persons life. The internet is no more an addictive thing than your water or gas utilities. It's just an information and communication utility, two things the Chinese government doesn't want people doing is talking and sharing information.
Someone in the know, where do we begin to petition his removal from office? He is not fit to be a part of this democracy.
Great. Next thing you know "The Trial" will no longer be a fictional story.
You name me one president in modern history who has directly assaulted the constitution with such vigor as the Bush administration. Never have so many doors to our constitutional rights been closed, locked, and had the key thrown away, as right here right now.
There should be riots in the streets that the ATTORNEY GENERAL doesn't feel the right to a fair trial and due process is a guaranteed right of every citizen.
Wake up, most IT is outsourced now and has been for a long time. Most hospitals have million dollar medical equipment connected to outdated and abused PC's that you wouldn't use to operate a toaster much less an MRI imaging program.
If you want to see penny pinching at it's best, go work in a hospital for awhile.
There are places in the midwest that would be comperable in savings to cities in the third world.
Using your barbie parts idea, say you take it to another country and set up shop. And 6 months later after your third dictator privatizes the mfg industry you are out of luck.
I don't buy into the whole cost savings bit. There are people in the midwest of the USA living on $10K a year. Taxes are low, there are incentives to build factories, and people who can be paid less because the cost of living is less. All of that and the added bonus of the security of being inside the greatest country on the planet.
It's not a dichotomy, it is how both sides see the others arguments.
What were the consequences of the end of the last ice age in Europe and North America? Were they good or bad? Don't forget that man hunted the Mammoth and they became extinct yet we survived with one of our primary food sources gone. The north american bison roamed all over the heartland of the USA 150 years ago and now there are a few isolated herds, did the drastic changes to our prairies cause a catastrophe?
New York is not going to be under water in 50 years but the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and New Orleans might. I'm sure when people initially think about that they are imagining a wall of water flooding out the cities and the whole "waterworld" scenario. When in reality it will slowly push people inland as new coastline is created. The Mississippi river and the Yangtze river run through some of the most populated areas of the USA and China and they are continuously changing their courses and winding back and looping on themselves, and people have little trouble living on their banks.
Jamestown, the very first US settlement was built on the banks of a river and most of the site is now under water 200 years later but do people talk about the great flood and rising oceans wiping jamestown off the face of the earth? No because the coastlines have always and will always change and people follow them inland or outland as the coastline changes.
Deserts and rainfall distribution throughout the world is greatly affected and impacted by natural obstructions like mountain ranges being pushed up, more so than the ice caps would affect them. You arguments about severe droughts or excessive flooding, are already the norm. It is already a part of our lives to live through droughts and manage flooding. The Army corps of engineers spent the last 50 years flood proofing the USA. You are arguing that it will happen more frequently but how can you say that reliably? The climate models that are in place today paint a very broad picture and the best anybody can do is guess.
I am playing devils advocate here but I truly believe that peoples reactions to global warming and the theories vary greatly based on their perspective. If you live in Siberia you probably look forward to warmer winters. If you live in Florida you probably don't look forward to the water table rising any more than it has already.
Just think of it like this. This planet is stable and self regulating, if it wasn't then any little thing could cause a global catastrophe. If all it took to cause an ice age was the desalination of the north sea to shut down the gulf stream, then do you really think things would be the way they are today? If the planet could flip through extremes so quickly do you think any of the current life on this planet would have evolved the way it has?
We are born to this world, it is ours and it is our home. We should take care of it but it also takes care of us and we are superbly adapted to live here. It has been ever changing since it was created and it will continue to change and we all have adapted to thrive in this environment.
I'm not arguing that we do nothing. I am arguing that jumping to conclusions and hastily making over our entire economy and way of life, before we have the facts, is worse than doing nothing.
I'm going to play devils advocate here for a moment.
What is the worst case scenario here? We slowly loose coastline over a few hundred years, while enjoying warmer winters, longer and more productive growing seasons and people will be able to migrate from the equatorial regions and begin settling the arctic and antarctic.
A large amount of the worlds life lives in the oceans and the coastlines that do flood will become shallow reefs that will support an abundance of life. For every species hurt by the rising ocean there will be more that will adapt or thrive in the new environment.
Think about how many people freeze to death or die because of cold weather every year. Don't you think it's a good thing to have warmer winters? Cool enough not to need air conditioning, just warm enough not to need heating oil. If we all had 70 degree winters think about how much fuel we could save.
Think about how much our economy would benefit if we could run ships through the arctic ocean instead of down through the panama canal. Think about how much rich and fertile land would be left behind by retreating glaciers and how much new land people would be able to settle in places like Asia and Canada where the harsh winters limit populations to a few small cities.
Yes if all the glaciers melted we would loose land around coastlines. But not as much as we would gain by being able to settle an ice free Antarctica, have thousands of miles of farm land in Alaska etc. The worlds population coastal will displace over decades or centuries and many people will be able to re settle into places formerly too cold to live but now warm and lush in wide open expanses.
More CO2 in the atmosphere also promotes more productive growing seasons and the lack of ice will allow wider expanses of the planet to support agriculture.
Now devils advocate aside, think about what you are talking about doing to truly make the world carbon neutral. Because that's what it's going to take to completely negate mans' presence.
If everything we do that causes CO2 has to include the cost of reclaiming that CO2 then everything would become prohibitively expensive.
You think that nice electric car you bought is carbon neutral? Think about how much coal and coke went into forging the steel your pretty little green machine is made out of. How much much oil went into creating the various lubricants, plastics, rubbers, and synthetic materials in that car.
Think about how much a gallon of milk will cost when you have to collect all the methane from the cows and gasoline is $20 a gallon to ship that milk from the farm to the store.
Our entire economy, ever facet of life in the world, is only possible because of the burning of fossil fuels.
Small changes in the price of coal, natural gas, or gasoline effect every single facet of life.
The fringe element of the climate alarmists want us to live like cave men again. They want to tear it all down in the name of the planet.
Well I for one would rather be able to swim in December than live like a primative, only to find out later that it had no effect on the planet or that the problem wasn't as bad as we thought.
I am on my own side so I care not if republicans or democrats beat each other up.
I am critical of facts people throw around and I have serious issues with some of the data on global warming. If you look at the historical evidence of these kinds of fears of doom and gloom, most of them were taken seriously based on the knowledge of the time and later debunked.
Just 30 years ago there was a concern of a new ice age.
To make my argument more clear. There are many things which control the climate of this planet and many substances which both reflect and absorb infrared radiation other than CO2.
Methane is a greenhouse gas and there are considerable amounts of it coming from livestock especially as our taste for meat grows (no I hate PETA and I'm not a vegan).
Water vapor as I mentioned has more of an effect on the greenhouse effect than CO2.
The sun is not a light bulb, it is a camp fire. It flickers, grows hotter at times, cooler at others, and the earth changes with it.
Deforestation is not nearly as rampant as people believe, outside of developing equatorial countries who are clearing rainforest for arable land that is. In the USA there are more trees now than there were 100 years ago thanks to advances in tree farming and agriculture. And these trees grow faster than their ancestors did thanks to gene manipulation in breeding.
My biggest gripes come from the way the data was collected and the amount of thought that went into finding errors or mis-interpretations of the data we gather from tree rings and ice cores. There are wide margins of error in how that data is compiled and interpreted.
This coupled with the fact that our science of climatology is in it's infancy and our computer models are crude at best, I don't think we can 100% rely on computer models and incomplete data to form an opinion.
I'm not saying deny global warming, I'm saying lets hold off on the panic button a while and get a better understanding of how this planet works before jumping to conclusions about the hows and whys.
Even trying to improve the environment can have unintended consequences and for us to play god with nature right now is folly. Consider "acid rain" which was the big environmental scare of the 70's and 80's. Fears over that had us finding ways of removing sulphur from our lignite coal and making cleaner burning power plants. The unintended effect of which was to lower sulphur in the upper atmosphere which helps to reflect sunlight and keep the planet cool.
The earth has a way of checking and balancing itself. If the system becomes unstable it self corrects in most cases. We have to get used to the idea of a planet who's climate changes. It's been happening for millions of years and it will keep happening. Sea levels rise and fall, ice ages come and go, forests become deserts, and savannahs become marsh lands, everything changes.
We are the single most adaptable single species on the planet. We have lived in all environments on this planet even without technology. We survived the European ice age and when global warming happened we were given some of the lushest and most fertile land in the world by the retreating glaciers.
Water is a buffer. If more ice melts, more water enters the climate and buffers the effects.
I'm not saying these ideas debunk everything about the climate, but they are just some of the ideas to think about and not automaticly buy in to everything you are told.
I will agree with something more from an impartial source or from a scientist than I will from a politician or the media. Politicians and sensationalists make their living on distorting facts and spinning things and I'm not buying into anything they have to say.
The scientific method doesn't work without open debate and logical people who rely on observation and facts. There for it is a healthy thing to disagree and to argue the facts. And popular opinion does not make something true or scientific and in fact it can cause serious harm.
That is fools logic. CO2 is less of a greenhouse gas than water vapor.
We know that the greenhouse effect is real because without it, earth would be frozen solid.
But the contribution and origination of the C02 in our atmosphere is something debatable.
And the current weather is also definitely debatable as to whether it is abnormal or caused by global warming, or if it is a seasonal change due to the long range climate cycles like El Nino.
Using your logic
Fact, people who get their science from the news media instead of scientific reports are stupid.
Fact. Stupid people who watched a 2 hour movie about global warming will believe they are climate experts.
There are thousands of reasons why Hydrogen is not an ideal fuel source. The top ones being
Hydrogen is the lightest element. Any natural hydrogen floats off into space or is re-combined into other molecules. This lack of density also means that it is costly and time consuming to compress hydrogen into a container for storage, and that the size and weight of that container will contain less potential energy than fossil fuels. IE a hydrogen gas tank that takes 45min to fill and is the size of a small refrigerator will get a car about half as far as a tank of gasoline half that size.
Because hydrogen doesn't occur in it's pure form in any significant number, we have to extract it using energy. Currently we spend far more energy creating the hydrogen than we get back by burning it. Since it takes power to make power, hydrogen is nothing more than a glorified battery, you use electrical energy and convert it to chemical energy, then back into electrical (fuel cell) or burn it.
It is far more fuel efficient, and better for our environment to drive battery powered electric vehicles supplied from the grid and supplement our energy needs with clean Nuclear power.
Currently most of the electricity in the USA is made from coal burning power plants. If you really want to save the world from CO2 and sulfur emissions then build more Nuclear power plants and run more vehicles on electricity. Nuclear energy is a zero emission technology. There is no exhaust. The fuel is plentiful, and reactor designs like the pea bed reactors, are safe, and immune to melt downs, and the radioactive by products are useful in the medical and defense fields and can be safely stored.
Look, this whole fear of nuclear technology thing is overblown in face of the risks with global warming. Radioactive materials are already on earth, in our soil, in our mountains, it's already out there in nature decaying. Isn't it better to remove it from the environment and do some good with it? Whether it decays on a mountainside, or decays in a reactor, does it make a difference? It's already there and it would be fool hardy to waste it. People act like nuclear dumps are un-natural. What do you think happens to uranium and other radioactive substances when they aren't mined? They sit there in the rock, same as a barrel would.
If data is used so much, why are you paying your cell phone bill for voice minutes, but data plans tend to be unlimited?
I'm only going to delve into the GSM side here since it is the widest standard in use through out the world and CDMA is USA/Korea only.
Most of the network bandwidth is devoted to voice calls. In order to handle a 'data' call the provider must support either IWF/WAP, or GPRS.
IWF/WAP is the old school "dial up" type data. It uses a 9600 baud "voice" channel and gets routed to an Interworking Function (IWF) to provide the carrier tones and signalling termination to the land line.
A typical IWF configuration can support 24 - 48 data calls....for the entire market.
That means in a large place like Dallas, only a few dozen people can place these dial up or fax calls on one providers service at any one time.
CSD/WAP is transparent to the equipment and is treated like a voice call.
Then came GPRS, which is a dedicated data network for GSM.
GPRS reserves a certain number of radio time slots for each sector to be used for data only or voice first, data if they are idle. These calls bypass the local switch all together and there for don't tie up any voice bandwidth or switching power. This allows for the higher speeds of GPRS and EDGE of 56kbps - 112kbps
The key here is that you have to designate a radio time slot as voice only, data only, or voice first, data second. This means anybody logged in to the equipment can quickly determine what % of the available timeslots are dedicated for data calls.
Most radios use a small handful of their timeslots for data. In fact there are roughly 3 times more resources for voice than data.
these cell "sites" are called BTS's and they are not cheap, and a provider will need hundreds of them to build a cellular network.
Now if you want to provide a wide range of data services, you can upgrade these hundreds of already ungodly expensive BTS machines, upgrade the GPRS equipment to handle the increased data, and upgrade all the way up the line.
This would be prohibitively expensive.
The solution is to use off the shelf WIFI and WIMAX technologies "in addition to" the existing infrastructure, which effectively creates a shadow network for data, which does not interfere with call processing of voice calls at all.
GSM operates at 1800mhz in most of North America and does not interfere with the 2.4ghz wifi signals. The two exist side by side.
So in summary, right now, voice is still the king. When you get your $50 cellphone bill, it's not for surfing google, it's for purchasing and using voice minutes. Remember that please, voice plans = X number of minutes, data plans = unlimited for set fee.
WiMaxx is the cheaper answer to 3G for a lot of carriers and it is only when data becomes reliable, cheap, and widely available, that it will ever begin to surpass the common and under appreciated ability to pick up a phone and place a voice call to someone any time of day.
Oh my! I get a headache and feel weak every time I step into the office. There are wifi access points every 50 meters on all floors of the building where I work.
I feel so faint.....
so faint......can't......possibly.....work.....
We want MORE news stories like this so we can convince our bosses to work from home!
Let me start by saying that I am suspicious of a lot of the global warming 'facts' being tossed around by people saying its the end of the world.
The fact is that most people engaged in this debate, on the internet, in the media, in the government, are debating facts and opinions derived not in scientific circles, but in debate circles and media stories.
Part of the scientific process is to state a theory or hypothesis and encourage debate and the reproduction of others results. The problem here is that people who are trying to debate what we are being told, are being demonized and portrayed as whack jobs and delusioned.
The fact is that it is going to take a long time, maybe even your entire life time, to really understand what is going on with the planets climate. There is just so much data, and a lot of the computer models being used are so new, that the conclusions we form now will probably be proven wrong either way at some future time.
Climate models do not explain everything about our climate and anybody who puts their full belief in a model, or treats it as some kind of absolute is not being scientific. You have to accept that we don't know everything and the logical argument by the people against the hysteria of global warming is we are jumping to conclusions based limited data and understanding.
I have some suggestions for restoring some sanity to the debate.
1. Do not get your information from the media. Read scientific journals and reports that are intended for peer review and not a media package pushing their opinion. It is shameful that we don't have more impartial and non-partisan debate going on.
2. Pick up a history book and look at previous debates to get some perspective on the kinds of attacks and arguments being made. This will help you sort out the facts from the opinions. Read up on such greats as debate over the origins of disease (people laughed when it was suggested that mosquitoes spread malaria), The origin of species, not just Darwin's take, but the scientific consensus at the time and their reaction to his ideas and the ides of others at the time. Anything dealing with scientific debate at the late 18th century is good because it was the dawn of the age of reason when we didn't quite get everything right, and there are many parallels to arguments going on today.
3. Beware of people with agendas. I wouldn't trust our oil baron government to give me factual information on climate and fossil fuels, and I don't trust the greenpeace terrorists telling me the world will drown and bake either. The best information will not be tied to an agenda, the person releasing it will have nothing to gain.
4. Question everything. Don't implicitly accept information because it fits your world view, and vigorously protest any that doesn't. Look at everything you read or hear critically.
The global warming debate should take place in the science circles, amongst scientists and researchers. Not in the media or in government hearings.
We need to keep in mind that every decade produces a new perceived threat to man kind and the reactions are always the same. It produces doomsayers proclaiming the end and in the end, life goes on the same. African bees, save the whales, acid rain....
Our planets climate is the most complicated piece of machinery you could ever imagine. It has checks and balances and will naturally resist change. If the planet could so easily change it's climate it is very unlikely that any higher organisms could have evolved at all. Our ancestors lived through an ice age, and global warming gave us an end to glaciers in Europe and North America, and the most fertile farm land in the world.
Things do change, but it's not the end of the world.
And lastly, the talk of a solution, of changing the way we make energy, making direct changes to the environment, these all have un-predictable consequences due to the complexity of the system.
Part of the reason the earth is holding in more heat now is becaus
Forget those guys. I'd rather be playing hello kitty island adventures.
(s)
There are things that Bladerunner absolutely predicted that have come to pass, or are occurring in the present.
Manufactured animals. In the movie there are man made animals like snakes that are created in the bio tech industry. This is really no different than someone cloning a dead pet or Dolly the sheep. Anybody with the money can have it done.
Further more it is also common for parents to be able to pick the sex of their child.
The political and economic climate of the movie had large multinational corporations as the central power structure of society. This is exactly what is happening today. When corporations have such vast amounts of wealth to spend on lobbyists, they are the true power behind our government. Who feeds and houses our military; the government, or Haliburton?
The spread of Asian influence into every day society was also predicted in the movie.
This is something that is on going. We already have this influence in the mfg industry. All of our tech dollars eventually flow into Asia. And the Chinese economy is set to explode. At this rate, something like almost 1/4 of the population of the planet will be speaking Mandarin.
And perhaps, most profound is the disconnection of people from each other, leading to increased isolationism, and a lack of understanding and empathy of those around us. Look at the character of Sebastian. Holed up in his apartment, surrounded by friends he built himself. More comfortable around machines than people.
Or collect antiques? And why do people pay top dollar for wine that is not brand new. Why do people spend thousands of dollars trying to replicate the sound of 70's moog synthesizers. I mean they are so analog right? This is the year 2006 people, analog is out. We need digital synthesizers that use modern wave table sampling and run Linux. They make the best music right? I mean what good is an analog filter and a bunch of patch cables and no MIDI. It can't make a piano sound like a piano right?
And the same with antiques. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on old used furniture when they can go down to the LayZboy store and get something brand new.
And classic automobiles? Don't even get me started on classic automobiles. What is so classic about something that is so old it doesn't even use disc brakes, lacks airbags, and just looks old. I mean why sink money into something so old when you can get a nice Honda Civic that is going to get you around in modern style right? Who needs a Tbucket when you can get a Civic?
All mockery aside, the obvious answer to your question is that some people "like" and or "appreciate" things that are obscure, different, or old.
Not everybody wants to compose their music on an Imac. Some people choose to do it on an Atari or on a gameboy. And they make a living off it.
We have had over 30 years to improve on synthesizers but the best sounds are still made by the old patch cord Analogs like the Moogs'.
I'm not a commodore fan boy but the C64 is a capable synthesizer and music production platform. It's cheap, and it's been reverse engineered to the point that you can actually buy or make modules that will give it network access.
Having confines on something forces you to be more creative.
I mean, this guy kept some girl prisoner for 8 years, he was F'd in the head. But your arguing that classic equipment is pointless. And that's like saying that paintings are useless because of photography and photography is useless because of film, and film is useless because of television, and television is useless because of PC's with DVD players, etc etc.
Why hasn't the design of the guitar changed in the last few hundred years? Why has the electric guitar pickup not changed in 40 years or more? Because new doesn't always mean better. And some people like the sounds and feelings of old things.
Yeah I looked at the gif. And I could clearly see the shift to "buy buy buy". If you can see the frames, it's not subliminal.
.GIF then try this. Have your bogus stock information on the screen, and have some frames change the words of a sentence to something else. As your reading my words here you are also conscious of the words around it and above and below it even though you're not reading them. So if you replace certain phrases with phrases like "Morgan Stanley approved" or "Bill Gates made $1,000,00 profit off this stock" or something like that then those messages would have far more of an impact. Or to do it really snarky like, do individual words like inserting words to make someone think they are missing out or to make it look more legitimate. All flashed for a few tenths of a second.
Animated GIF's have a very limited frame rate and would not be possible in most circumstances to display a frame fast enough to escape notice.
The fields on a TV screen flicker at 60 times a second yet our eyes are fast enough to register these changes and to see the alternating flicks.
Film goes by at 24 frames per second and unless they added frames that resembled the frames around them, you would notice the abrupt change.
Consider the final scene in the movie "Seven" when Brad Pitt's character sees an image of his wife for a frame before shooting Kevin Spacey's character. That lasted one frame out of 24 but was still enough to register.
A far more effective technique for "subliminal advertising" would be for the person to not realize it's an advertisement at all, hence they wouldn't be conscious of the message. This happens all the time with viral marketing, and people who are paid to have conversations about a product in a public setting like bars and taverns.
I think it has been proven that sub-aural and sub-visual manipulations are gimmicks that have no affect on the mind. At least from the standpoint of introducing un-seen messages to the brain. Manipulation of the overall movie to carefully craft a skewed perspective or point of view is far more effective.
Like a Michael Moore "documentary" that shows a carefully thought out sequence of interviews and sound bites that lead the mind into seeing things in a limited way that the film maker wants you to see.
Having said that, if you want to try a subliminal advertisement using an animated
Someone reading it will basically read what you wrote, but they will remember the other words and phrases even if they can't place them in context.
Flashing "buy buy buy" in different sized letters does nothing.
Microsoft stores all of it's system sounds as .wav files. Nothing is in the kernel or .dll's. You can easily substitute your own .wav with a custom startup sound but having the original vista filename, you could modify the registry, any number of things.
If you can hack the kernel and explorer to make the start menu look like a Mac then you can certainly remove or modify a sound.
I can't think of any reason why someone would want to fake a 1968 computer GUI video but there are several things here that confuse me.
1. The mouse and GUI were not invented until the 1970's by Xerox. In 1968 the microprocessor hadn't even been born yet.
2. Look at the headset that the guy is wearing. They did not have small compact, against the ear, short tube microphoned, headsets in 1968. They used around the ear headphones hte size of your fist with a boom microphone sticking out the side. They just did not have those kinds of headsets back then. Look at any vintage NASA or military video, and they had the best that money could buy.
And last but not least, despite the fact that there were no micro processors in 1968, there were also no video displays capable of rendering a rasterized mouse cursor..... They used teletype formated rows and columns of ASCII characters. Hell in 1968 even super computers still used teletype terminals and punch cards......
It looks like a well done fake using computer effects to age the video.
Copyright law in this country is stacked firmly in favor of the copyright owners.
When our founding fathers developed the idea of licensing intellectual property it was originally for 7 years of exclusivity, after which it was public domain.
Then we began to allow people to renew their copyright for a few more years. And then hollywood began to manipulate the law makers with lobbyists and more and more time began being added until it was a lifetime copyright, and then up to 70 years after the persons death.
And then they started allowing corporations to own copyrights, and since a corporation doesn't die, neither does their copyright. They also began the process of "auto renewing" copyrights whether the original author wanted to or not.
This caused a huge problem when works like documentaries on the civil rights movement, where the original copyright owner could not be located, that efectively locked the work out of the public eye.
There are thousands of orphaned works like that and since their copyrights are kept locked up indefinately after being abandoned, nobody can use them.
So we go from 7 years to lifetime +80 years. Basicly every time Mickey Mouse gets close to being public domain, Disney lobbyists get the deadline extended. The last of these was the Sonny Bono act that extended copyrights out even farther.
Look, nothing is created in a vacume. If you write a book, or a movie, or paint something, you didn't come up with all of that yourself. You had influences from other artists, from the public. There is nothing new out there, everything is based upon the work of somebody else. And if we lock everything up and use copyright as an excuse to NEVER release it back to the public then it ends up crippling the next generation of artists and innovators.
Imagine what music would be like if everything by Mozart and Bach, and other classical artists was still copyright. A lot of people don't realize it but the Happy birthday song is copyright and every time it's used in a movie they have to license it.
It was not the intention of the founding fathers of this country for works of art to remain privatized for hundreds of years. They felt that 7 years was enough, and that after that it should become public domain. This cycle of creativity is what creates new art and new artists, and if people are stingy with their art and don't give back, after taking so much, then no new art is created.
I utterly reject the concept of unlimited copyrights and the rampant lawsuits for sampling other peoples music, mashing up videos, making mosaics of photographs, or any of the other things that limit an artists creative freedoms.
Yeah! Thompson has the right idea.
Rockstar should send us all copies of their upcoming games for free or we should sue them as well! I mean it's our right as Americans to have advanced screenings of movies or games so that we can determine their detrimental affects on our children right?
And we have just as much right to demand that of Rockstar as Jack Thompson does considering he is not in any legal or formal position in the industry to make those kinds of demands.
Just look at the vast erosion of society that PacMan has rought on our pure society. Generations of kids who grew up playing this "drug mule" simulator have been training to navigate the mazes of ways into the USA while packing as many pellets into their mouths as possible. The use of drug mules has categoricaly gone up since the release of the PacMan video game.
Then there are Rad Racer and Spy Hunter with their graphic simulations of road rage that led a generation of children to become maniacs on the road, laying oil slicks, and shooting big trucks who won't get out of the way.
Not every kid who plays Pac Man is going to grow up to be a drug mule, the same way that not everybody who watches a TV commercial is going to buy the product. But some of them do! And we have a right as the American people to have access to these games so that we can understand their lack of morals and the dangers that they represent to the people and our children!
I played the Xbox version and I played it every waking minute over an entire weekend. The N64 graphics were more blocky and the voices were more aliased and "8 bit" sounding. But the humor and the interesting puzzles, like how to make a cow get the screaming shits, are the draw.
The brits just have a maliciously twisted sense of humor that makes any of those kinds of games an instant classic.
Any game that has a boss who flings giant balls of poo at you while singing along gets an A+ in my book!
Yep, or explosive hydrogen and oxygen, a corrosive poison form water, and we need oxygen in smaller quantities.
It's funny to watch people get their chemicals mixed up. Sodium Chloride, Sodium Hydroxide, one tastes good on fries, one will make your teeth white before it kills you....