no equivalent, AFAIK. Vim scripts are evaluated at runtime.
You mean at load time yeah. Presumably you write your code, then quit and restart vim?
Anyone got some time?
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Can someone tell me how easy is it to extend vi/vim? I know it's in the manual and all that, but this is a question about the workflow. Can I define a function to be called anytime I want in vi/vim? In Emacs, it's quite trivial:
C-x b
That's control-x b, to change buffer...
*scratch* ... to change to scratch (as in scratchpad)
(defun blah (arglist) (interactive) (...))
just type away the function,... is the required action - it's just code.
C-x C-e
evaluate last-sexp. No need to compile. No need to make or whatnot.
To run it now,
M-x blah
That's it. That takes no effort at all. This can be bound to a key by M-x local-set-key (tab completion is your friend here). For frequently used functions, save it in ~/.emacs
Or alternatively,
C-x (
to start defining a keyboard macro.
... keystrokes...
type your commands here, put some thought into this, could be tricky
C-x )
end keyboard macro
C-x e
Execute keyboard macro, subsequent e to repeat keystroke sequence.
To name the macro,
M-x name-last-kbd-macro (or somesuch, check manual for your specific version), it now looks just like a function. Can be saved, edited, etc by:
M-x edit-kbd-macro
or M-x insert-kbd-macro
Too easy...
I've heard of users coming up with a Java bytecode disassembler in under 20 minutes using these methods...see here
Newer versions of Emacs has macro rings for storing multiple macros or whatnot. I know vim has numbered keyboard macros, seems slightly better, but I cannot judge until I've tried it.
Check out Episode 78 on Crytography at binrev. There a lot of other stuff on that as well (it's an hour or so of just standard radio show stuff, then some juicy bits on Elonka's exploits, and also a "dummy's guide to crypto and terminology" type intro near the end (well, I think they come in that order).
We all see Eliza or what not all the time (M-x doctor?), but I was totally blown away by this account of Julia. Compared to this piece of old technology, I really think we live in the dark ages. What's even more amazing, is that it seems to be written in C. No Lisp?
Any Tom, Dick or Harry can write subtly malicious steganographic code, or obfuscated ones. Real programmers leave no traces in their source codes: Bow to the leetest hack of them all.
I have read somewhere (sometime long ago) about this that gave me the impression that the animal husbandry industry is to blame as well.
<speculation>Don't know how resilient bacterial DNA is, but if they acquired resistance in livestock, and we eat them, the resistance plasmid DNA (or broken down form?) is probably ready to be absorbed by our gut bacteria (DNA conjugation) </speculation>.
I cannot remember that book, but it's sort of a popular science book thingy (like selfish gene, third chimpanzee, that genre).
Hospitals are a natural site for those bacteria too for sure, but we cannot stop using antibiotics use there. It makes more sense to do this for the stockfeed industry - I don't know if it's any use lobbying against this sorta thing, cause in general regulation impacts an industry as a whole, so they can pass down costs to the consumer (as it should be). I don't know if it's even a reasonable thing to do - not enough reading to know the significance of animal feed as a factor...
Out of spite for Forbes, here's the list (yeah yeah, you can click slower/faster/stop)...
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
Drug-resistant "staph" causes 102,000 hospital infections a year, more than any other. For sick patients, it can be a killer. Recently, S. aureus has escaped the hospital. The number of children infected jumped 28% in three years. Now, athletes are being infected. In 2003, five football players on the St. Louis Rams suffered staph-infected turf burns that resisted multiple antibiotics.
Escheria coli and Klebsiella
These bacteria, a major cause of urinary tract, gastrointestinal and wound infections, are quickly becoming resistant to existing drugs. Half of Klebsiella, for instance, were found to be resistant to Cipro in a recent study. More worrisome, two experimental drugs being tested against these bacteria are in the same class as drugs to which the bugs are already resistant.
Acinetobacter baumannii
This drug is perhaps most well known for its presence in troops returning from Iraq, where it has infected dozens of patients and spread to others inside hospitals. It is also an increasingly common cause of pneumonia, now accounting for 7% of hospital-acquired cases. There are few existing drugs to treat it, and no medicines in development targeted at this bug.
Aspergillis
Cancer patients, transplant patients and others with weak immune systems are at risk of being infected with this fungus. Once it gets loose in the bloodstream, aspergillis kills 50% of the time or more--and that's with the best new antifungal drugs that have been developed in recent years. Experts complain that drug companies are choosing to test their medicines on other, easier-to-treat fungal infections.
Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE)
VRE is a major cause of infection of the heart, brain and the abdomen. A recent survey of 494 U.S. hospitals found infections of 10% across all patient groups. Current drugs do not rapidly kill the bug, and only one is available as a pill.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
This bug is better than most other bacteria at becoming resistant to new antibiotics. A third of P. aeruginosa were found to be resistant to drugs like Cipro and Levaquin in 2002. Patients with cystic fibrosis are at particular risk; antibiotics can keep them healthy, but once bacteria become resistant, they may need lung transplants.
Bacterial resistance? It's an exercise in futility: doctors are very careful in prescripting antibiotics unnecessarily, but as far as I know, animal feed is laced with antibiotics (makes them grow faster, and you get less disease in crowded conditions). The antibiotics used are related to the ones used in humans. All this resistance came not from antibiotics we use on ourselves, since it is dwarfed by those use for feeding pigs and chickens... Who to blame though? This is a classic case of the "tragedy of the commons" - if one doesn't use antibiotics for his/her farm, one's competitor will.
A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.
Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...
In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog.
Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel).
Short explanation here.
There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others:
MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).
Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.
I was quite amazed when I first stumbled upon this page. Imagine that, Marvin Minsky himself invented this microscope. He invented this microscope, (co-)founded AI, a whole lot more, and had so many students - including Gerald Sussman himself. We live with some really brilliant people today.
Sometimes when you wished "I wish I was there when da Vinci did this", or when someone else did that, well, it's happening here today, at faster rates than ever, and we don't even realise it sometimes. We live in interesting times.
presenting it without editorial comment like that makes it sound like you think they were right, or at least that the premise was on target.
Who, me? From my point of view, looking back, I actually disagree with this man. Bill Gates made his software, and expected users to pay for it, and that's fair enough. Perhaps it was my cheeky post title that gave you the impression that I supported this man's arguments. My main point was actually that people continue to disagree on things, and that it's always been this way. (And that is probably a good thing).
Below is a reply in the subsequent issue from the "hobbyists". Interesting to see what things was like back then -- same discussions, arguments etc. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Your software has helped many hobbyists, and you are to be thanked for
it! However, you should not blame the hobbyists for your own inadequete
marketing of it. You gave it away; none stole it from
you. Now you're asking for software welfare so you can give more
away. If $2/hr is all you got for your efforts, then $2/hr is what
they're worth on the free market. You should either change your
product or change your way of selling it, if you feel it'll bring more
money. I'm sure that if I were MITS, I'd be chuckling all the way to
the bank over the deal I got from you. After all, your marvelous
software has allowed them to sell a computer which, without it, none
would have touched, except as a frustrating novelty item.
I congratulate you and MITS upon being major influences in the
founding of the computer hobby market. It's too bad you didn't get the
profit from your efforts that they did from theirs, but that's
your fault, not theirs or the hobbyists. You underpriced your
product.
If you want monetary reward for your software creations, you had
better stop writing code for a minute and think a little harder about
your market and how are you going to sell to it. And, by the way,
calling all of your potential future customers thieves is
perhaps "uncool" marketing strategy!
Man, it feels good to blaze away on the keyboard once in a while. If only I can code this fast! Any errors are solely mine of course. Please check originals for identity of poster, additional context regarding this letter, and to verify any typos.
Whatever happened to Robert Zubrin & Co's ideas for bounties & private enterprise (similar idea to the X-prize)? I was inspired by his book The Case for Mars, but haven't read a whole lot in this area since... a long time ago. The ideas proposed (very well articulated in my opinion) were visionary, but also seemed practical (still useful today for sure), so I have always wondered why this never seemed to be noticed by the "decision makers". Granted, many of the ideas can seem pretty far-out, but there must be something usable!
The Mars plan as set out by Bush, in a slightly different form, had been examined and deemed less practical too. There are lessons to be learnt, but not many are paying attention. Perhaps those who know more in this area can tell me about how realistic his ideas are. I only know of a few (well maybe a lot) dedicated and keen amateurs/professionals who are working towards the dream of Mars colonisation today in this area. Check out the Mars Society site for example.
Regardless, the book (and others by author + friends) is a good and (for me) educational read, and really did set my imaginations (but not hands) a-going.
Slightly off-topic, but one wonders about people who might have done all sorts of research on themselves/their "by-products".
If the following account is accurate, it's another example of a slightly less inethical incidence:
When he was a grad student at Princeton he was having an argument with a colleague about the mobility of sperm; Feynman went away for a bit and came back with a sample. (from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman."?)
The web page you are trying to reach is not available. This could be caused for a number of reasons, for example the page was moved and this link was not updated, the Internet is temporarily unable to complete your request for this page, etc. You can....
blah blah blah... etc
What can I say? Was it because of the slashdotting, or just incompetence (ie "WTF LOL!!!ll")?
If you have tried to read any of the derivations for the image at the focus of an interferometer, it reduces to a Fourier transform.
For a quick "hack", you can see what a point-source looks like if you just use the (2 dimensional) FFT, with two circles separated the right distance as input. (with appropriate sampling, oversampling, etc)
I find this way of looking at it quite elegant, not to mention the ease in writing the simulation code (barely any). In other words, the interferometer setup is equivalent to a big giant circular (or annular) telescope aperture, masked out, leaving two circular holes.
It's all good. Ringtones and music are mostly information, ignoring capital costs. There's no need to strip mine the planet, chop trees down, or belch (too much) CO2 to produce/consume them (from a strictly economic point of view). Culturally, if I don't like it, this just says people like me (and you too it seems) are getting old...
At US$300 billion pa (say), with 6 billion people, that's US$50 per person per year. If you think about the whole world, not many people "consume" music+ring-tones, so we need to restrict the people to radio or cellphone owners only, so the number is a few times higher. Cut that number down again to the few heavy users of music or ring-tones, and the average spend per user gets higher. Simple math, unreasonable conclusions. This defies belief!
The best number I've been able to google are $30 billion pa (unknown currency, most likely US) for music + ringtone sales, with ringtones accounting for 10% for that. It certainly looks like you're out by a factor of 10.
Interesting. Care to tell more about this solar telescope? What's the specs for your deformable mirror? What "guide-star" do you use for wavefront sensing (presumably features on the sun itself)? And what wavefront sensor is it? What wavelength? I'm particularly keen on wavefront sensors cause that's what I'm simulating at the moment (no, can't quite get them all to work yet).
Oh oh, and here's a side question: Is it true that the sun is really not that intense on a "flux per arc second^2" basis? That is, stars are pin-point bright objects, but the sun is bright also because it occupies a larger field of view? No?
Just a few silly questions, sorry, few free to ignore if you're busy.
Slightly off-topic again, but I am appalled. We have stuff from the Red Planet, Earth:Final Conflict, and even Stargate, but where's Star Wars? Remember the Phantom Menace, when Darth Maul first landed in Tatooine in search of Queen Amidala? He unrolled a similar looking device.
Haha, you might be on to something here... inline/subliminal/highly targeted ads! Watch out AdSense!
[Steve] Hello, Steve here...
[John] Hey Steve, it's John here.
[Steve] Oh hey, how's your game going?
[John] Pretty good, we're leading 8 points at half-time.
[Steve] X-treme power drink, extra bounce for the power athlete!!!
[John] What?
[Steve] Nothing, I was just asking how your game went?
[John] Call within the next 5 minutes, and get your own Hit-the-Monkey game free! Click here FTW!!!111
[Steve] What monkey?
[John] Huh? Anyway, I was just going to ask you to record this weeks game, the...
[John] UltrzCompax VCR recorder, available now at your nearest vendor. Limited supply available.
[John]... and don't forget to bring some lunch.
[Steve] I was just leaving myself, and whats this recorder?
[John] Which one?
[Steve] The ultra compact thingy...
[Steve] UltrzCompax VCR recorder, available now at your nearest vendor. Limited supply available.
[John] What are you on?
[Steve] ???
[Messenger VOIP] Server disconnect, no connection to recipient...
Errr, wait a minute, something's not right here. First we build a structure- wind, quake, water, sun, (and even fire)-proof, then we build another gadget to bring the sun into our buildings. I'm no architect, but the buildings we can see all around us are convincing proof that we can ensure natural sunlight reaches most parts of the interior of our buildings - we have sun roofs, open areas, North facing buildings (in the Southern hemisphere), even simple windows.
This gadget is just a bunch of boys' toy, and will be forgotten in a few years. I suggest we pay more attention to the architects who are building our environments to ensure we never need such devices in the first place. A bit of design in the beginning saves plenty of effort later. For example, you won't need to crack your brains figuring out safety regulations, building codes and installation hassles for a fibre optics light and heat guide...
I second that! How were the seven seas conquered? With "iron men in wooden ships, not wooden men in iron ships". Though in the future (that ever distant future), I sure hope that space travel is safe and routine, so anything they do now should be seen as an investment towards that goal of safer space travel.
In the meantime, I must admit I'm more a robots-in-space person than a manned space exploration fan - when was the last time a human discovered anything in space? In my opinion, compared to robotic probes, the most exciting and useful (scientifically) manned project was done nearly 40 years ago on the moon.
That wasn't the end of it. Charles Dickens wrote an article (or was it a book?) decrying this sort of practice, and guess what? His article was duly copied, then reprinted and published in the US, as was the norm then. The ironies (there seem to be one or two levels of it)...
I cannot recall this source, could've been Benjamin Franklin by Carl van Doren (looks like the wrong period). You can also google for "charles dickens copyright piracy" for other related events.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, cheers.
no equivalent, AFAIK. Vim scripts are evaluated at runtime.
You mean at load time yeah. Presumably you write your code, then quit and restart vim?
Can someone tell me how easy is it to extend vi/vim? I know it's in the manual and all that, but this is a question about the workflow. Can I define a function to be called anytime I want in vi/vim? In Emacs, it's quite trivial:
C-x b ...
That's control-x b, to change buffer
*scratch*
... to change to scratch (as in scratchpad)
(defun blah (arglist) (interactive) (...)) ... is the required action - it's just code.
just type away the function,
C-x C-e
evaluate last-sexp. No need to compile. No need to make or whatnot.
To run it now,
M-x blah
That's it. That takes no effort at all. This can be bound to a key by M-x local-set-key (tab completion is your friend here). For frequently used functions, save it in ~/.emacs
Or alternatively,
C-x (
to start defining a keyboard macro.
type your commands here, put some thought into this, could be tricky
C-x )
end keyboard macro
C-x e
Execute keyboard macro, subsequent e to repeat keystroke sequence.
To name the macro,
M-x name-last-kbd-macro (or somesuch, check manual for your specific version), it now looks just like a function. Can be saved, edited, etc by:
M-x edit-kbd-macro
or M-x insert-kbd-macro
Too easy...
I've heard of users coming up with a Java bytecode disassembler in under 20 minutes using these methods...see here
Newer versions of Emacs has macro rings for storing multiple macros or whatnot. I know vim has numbered keyboard macros, seems slightly better, but I cannot judge until I've tried it.
How about vi/vim?
Check out Episode 78 on Crytography at binrev. There a lot of other stuff on that as well (it's an hour or so of just standard radio show stuff, then some juicy bits on Elonka's exploits, and also a "dummy's guide to crypto and terminology" type intro near the end (well, I think they come in that order).
We all see Eliza or what not all the time (M-x doctor?), but I was totally blown away by this account of Julia. Compared to this piece of old technology, I really think we live in the dark ages. What's even more amazing, is that it seems to be written in C. No Lisp?
Any Tom, Dick or Harry can write subtly malicious steganographic code, or obfuscated ones. Real programmers leave no traces in their source codes: Bow to the leetest hack of them all.
I have read somewhere (sometime long ago) about this that gave me the impression that the animal husbandry industry is to blame as well.
<speculation>Don't know how resilient bacterial DNA is, but if they acquired resistance in livestock, and we eat them, the resistance plasmid DNA (or broken down form?) is probably ready to be absorbed by our gut bacteria (DNA conjugation) </speculation>.
I cannot remember that book, but it's sort of a popular science book thingy (like selfish gene, third chimpanzee, that genre).
Hospitals are a natural site for those bacteria too for sure, but we cannot stop using antibiotics use there. It makes more sense to do this for the stockfeed industry - I don't know if it's any use lobbying against this sorta thing, cause in general regulation impacts an industry as a whole, so they can pass down costs to the consumer (as it should be). I don't know if it's even a reasonable thing to do - not enough reading to know the significance of animal feed as a factor ...
No kidding, I went back and checked it again just in case - they're there. This wasn't my typo or copy/paste error. Not good...
Out of spite for Forbes, here's the list (yeah yeah, you can click slower/faster/stop)...
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
Drug-resistant "staph" causes 102,000 hospital infections a year, more than any other. For sick patients, it can be a killer. Recently, S. aureus has escaped the hospital. The number of children infected jumped 28% in three years. Now, athletes are being infected. In 2003, five football players on the St. Louis Rams suffered staph-infected turf burns that resisted multiple antibiotics.
Escheria coli and Klebsiella
These bacteria, a major cause of urinary tract, gastrointestinal and wound infections, are quickly becoming resistant to existing drugs. Half of Klebsiella, for instance, were found to be resistant to Cipro in a recent study. More worrisome, two experimental drugs being tested against these bacteria are in the same class as drugs to which the bugs are already resistant.
Acinetobacter baumannii
This drug is perhaps most well known for its presence in troops returning from Iraq, where it has infected dozens of patients and spread to others inside hospitals. It is also an increasingly common cause of pneumonia, now accounting for 7% of hospital-acquired cases. There are few existing drugs to treat it, and no medicines in development targeted at this bug.
Aspergillis
Cancer patients, transplant patients and others with weak immune systems are at risk of being infected with this fungus. Once it gets loose in the bloodstream, aspergillis kills 50% of the time or more--and that's with the best new antifungal drugs that have been developed in recent years. Experts complain that drug companies are choosing to test their medicines on other, easier-to-treat fungal infections.
Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE)
VRE is a major cause of infection of the heart, brain and the abdomen. A recent survey of 494 U.S. hospitals found infections of 10% across all patient groups. Current drugs do not rapidly kill the bug, and only one is available as a pill.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
This bug is better than most other bacteria at becoming resistant to new antibiotics. A third of P. aeruginosa were found to be resistant to drugs like Cipro and Levaquin in 2002. Patients with cystic fibrosis are at particular risk; antibiotics can keep them healthy, but once bacteria become resistant, they may need lung transplants.
Bacterial resistance? It's an exercise in futility: doctors are very careful in prescripting antibiotics unnecessarily, but as far as I know, animal feed is laced with antibiotics (makes them grow faster, and you get less disease in crowded conditions). The antibiotics used are related to the ones used in humans. All this resistance came not from antibiotics we use on ourselves, since it is dwarfed by those use for feeding pigs and chickens... Who to blame though? This is a classic case of the "tragedy of the commons" - if one doesn't use antibiotics for his/her farm, one's competitor will.
A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.
Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...
In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog. Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel). Short explanation here. There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others: MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).
Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.
I was quite amazed when I first stumbled upon this page. Imagine that, Marvin Minsky himself invented this microscope. He invented this microscope, (co-)founded AI, a whole lot more, and had so many students - including Gerald Sussman himself. We live with some really brilliant people today.
Sometimes when you wished "I wish I was there when da Vinci did this", or when someone else did that, well, it's happening here today, at faster rates than ever, and we don't even realise it sometimes. We live in interesting times.
Who, me? From my point of view, looking back, I actually disagree with this man. Bill Gates made his software, and expected users to pay for it, and that's fair enough. Perhaps it was my cheeky post title that gave you the impression that I supported this man's arguments. My main point was actually that people continue to disagree on things, and that it's always been this way. (And that is probably a good thing).
Below is a reply in the subsequent issue from the "hobbyists". Interesting to see what things was like back then -- same discussions, arguments etc. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Man, it feels good to blaze away on the keyboard once in a while. If only I can code this fast! Any errors are solely mine of course. Please check originals for identity of poster, additional context regarding this letter, and to verify any typos.
Whatever happened to Robert Zubrin & Co's ideas for bounties & private enterprise (similar idea to the X-prize)? I was inspired by his book The Case for Mars, but haven't read a whole lot in this area since ... a long time ago. The ideas proposed (very well articulated in my opinion) were visionary, but also seemed practical (still useful today for sure), so I have always wondered why this never seemed to be noticed by the "decision makers". Granted, many of the ideas can seem pretty far-out, but there must be something usable!
The Mars plan as set out by Bush, in a slightly different form, had been examined and deemed less practical too. There are lessons to be learnt, but not many are paying attention. Perhaps those who know more in this area can tell me about how realistic his ideas are. I only know of a few (well maybe a lot) dedicated and keen amateurs/professionals who are working towards the dream of Mars colonisation today in this area. Check out the Mars Society site for example.
Regardless, the book (and others by author + friends) is a good and (for me) educational read, and really did set my imaginations (but not hands) a-going.
Slightly off-topic, but one wonders about people who might have done all sorts of research on themselves/their "by-products".
If the following account is accurate, it's another example of a slightly less inethical incidence:
When he was a grad student at Princeton he was having an argument with a colleague about the mobility of sperm; Feynman went away for a bit and came back with a sample. (from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman."?)
Why doesn't anyone get it?
You must read the other side of the story, the truth demands to be told.
Is it just me, or does this website have broken links? Click on any of:
Multilingual Systems
Digital Geographics
Sensor Research
at this website,
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/labs/indi a/default.aspx
and get this in return:
File Not Found
The web page you are trying to reach is not available. This could be caused for a number of reasons, for example the page was moved and this link was not updated, the Internet is temporarily unable to complete your request for this page, etc. You can ....
blah blah blah... etc
What can I say? Was it because of the slashdotting, or just incompetence (ie "WTF LOL!!!ll")?
If you have tried to read any of the derivations for the image at the focus of an interferometer, it reduces to a Fourier transform.
For a quick "hack", you can see what a point-source looks like if you just use the (2 dimensional) FFT, with two circles separated the right distance as input. (with appropriate sampling, oversampling, etc)
I find this way of looking at it quite elegant, not to mention the ease in writing the simulation code (barely any). In other words, the interferometer setup is equivalent to a big giant circular (or annular) telescope aperture, masked out, leaving two circular holes.
It's all good. Ringtones and music are mostly information, ignoring capital costs. There's no need to strip mine the planet, chop trees down, or belch (too much) CO2 to produce/consume them (from a strictly economic point of view). Culturally, if I don't like it, this just says people like me (and you too it seems) are getting old...
347 billion? Where did you get that number?
At US$300 billion pa (say), with 6 billion people, that's US$50 per person per year. If you think about the whole world, not many people "consume" music+ring-tones, so we need to restrict the people to radio or cellphone owners only, so the number is a few times higher. Cut that number down again to the few heavy users of music or ring-tones, and the average spend per user gets higher. Simple math, unreasonable conclusions. This defies belief!
The best number I've been able to google are $30 billion pa (unknown currency, most likely US) for music + ringtone sales, with ringtones accounting for 10% for that. It certainly looks like you're out by a factor of 10.
Interesting. Care to tell more about this solar telescope? What's the specs for your deformable mirror? What "guide-star" do you use for wavefront sensing (presumably features on the sun itself)? And what wavefront sensor is it? What wavelength? I'm particularly keen on wavefront sensors cause that's what I'm simulating at the moment (no, can't quite get them all to work yet).
Oh oh, and here's a side question: Is it true that the sun is really not that intense on a "flux per arc second^2" basis? That is, stars are pin-point bright objects, but the sun is bright also because it occupies a larger field of view? No?
Just a few silly questions, sorry, few free to ignore if you're busy.
Slightly off-topic again, but I am appalled. We have stuff from the Red Planet, Earth:Final Conflict, and even Stargate, but where's Star Wars? Remember the Phantom Menace, when Darth Maul first landed in Tatooine in search of Queen Amidala? He unrolled a similar looking device.
Haha, you might be on to something here... inline/subliminal/highly targeted ads! Watch out AdSense!
[Steve] Hello, Steve here... ... ... and don't forget to bring some lunch. ...
[John] Hey Steve, it's John here.
[Steve] Oh hey, how's your game going?
[John] Pretty good, we're leading 8 points at half-time.
[Steve] X-treme power drink, extra bounce for the power athlete!!!
[John] What?
[Steve] Nothing, I was just asking how your game went?
[John] Call within the next 5 minutes, and get your own Hit-the-Monkey game free! Click here FTW!!!111
[Steve] What monkey?
[John] Huh? Anyway, I was just going to ask you to record this weeks game, the
[John] UltrzCompax VCR recorder, available now at your nearest vendor. Limited supply available.
[John]
[Steve] I was just leaving myself, and whats this recorder?
[John] Which one?
[Steve] The ultra compact thingy
[Steve] UltrzCompax VCR recorder, available now at your nearest vendor. Limited supply available.
[John] What are you on?
[Steve] ???
[Messenger VOIP] Server disconnect, no connection to recipient...
Errr, wait a minute, something's not right here. First we build a structure- wind, quake, water, sun, (and even fire)-proof, then we build another gadget to bring the sun into our buildings. I'm no architect, but the buildings we can see all around us are convincing proof that we can ensure natural sunlight reaches most parts of the interior of our buildings - we have sun roofs, open areas, North facing buildings (in the Southern hemisphere), even simple windows.
This gadget is just a bunch of boys' toy, and will be forgotten in a few years. I suggest we pay more attention to the architects who are building our environments to ensure we never need such devices in the first place. A bit of design in the beginning saves plenty of effort later. For example, you won't need to crack your brains figuring out safety regulations, building codes and installation hassles for a fibre optics light and heat guide...
I second that! How were the seven seas conquered? With "iron men in wooden ships, not wooden men in iron ships". Though in the future (that ever distant future), I sure hope that space travel is safe and routine, so anything they do now should be seen as an investment towards that goal of safer space travel.
In the meantime, I must admit I'm more a robots-in-space person than a manned space exploration fan - when was the last time a human discovered anything in space? In my opinion, compared to robotic probes, the most exciting and useful (scientifically) manned project was done nearly 40 years ago on the moon.
That wasn't the end of it. Charles Dickens wrote an article (or was it a book?) decrying this sort of practice, and guess what? His article was duly copied, then reprinted and published in the US, as was the norm then. The ironies (there seem to be one or two levels of it)...
I cannot recall this source, could've been Benjamin Franklin by Carl van Doren (looks like the wrong period). You can also google for "charles dickens copyright piracy" for other related events.