Just got back from an 11-day vacation in Italy with my sweetie, and I took the time to stop into the above-mentioned museum. It's a little out-of-the-way place on the eastern side of the plaza where the Ufizzi gallery is, basically facing the Arno river. Inside is a huge collection of early astrolabes, thermometers, telescopes, and everything else that Florentine scientists of the 13th-18th centuries used, along with copious explanations. Be sure to pick up the English manual on the second floor (assuming you speak English and not Italian, though if you're reading this then that's a pretty safe bet).
One particular item of interest: after Galileo died, some of his students managed to scavenge the middle finger of his right hand from the corpse when it was appropriated by the Church of the time. They preserved it, and today the remains of the finger are in a little bell jar in room 6, as I recall. The irony is that the item is arranged such that as near as I could tell, it's facing the Duomo (the major cathedral in Florence) where religious figures of the day... ahem. Let's just say that it's comforting to know that, evermore, Galileo gets to give the finger to the Church.:-) Amen.
Re:Even Spielbergo could have done better...
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 1
I wish I had mod points left. Parent should have been modded up... way, WAY up.
The point the parent makes is *exactly* the problem with the movie - the primary theme of the book was omitted from the movie entirely. For those who actually read the book, they'd understand that the point of the love story is not his wrestling with his guilt, but his wrestling with the incomprehensibility of what is happenning to himself and the others. The key moment in the movie is the "dream" of Gibarian, who says, "There are no answers - only choices." Well, that is the key theme in the book too: Solaris *can't* be understood. Too bad the movie doesn't even *touch* on that theme.
In the book, the outpost is a scientific research station, and people have been studying the planet for centuries. There are hundreds of theories about what the planet is, whether it is intelligent, and why it does what it does - if it even *is* doing the things it seems to. Maybe the planet is playing with them; maybe it's being kind; maybe it's completely reflex; or maybe it's deliberately torturing them. Each of the characters interprets events in a different way; and it leads to madness or acceptance for each in different ways. Their reactions say more about themselves than about the planet, because they don't and can't understand the planet to begin with. The idea that there may be something in the universe either so foreign or so far above ourselves that we would simply never understand it, that some mysteries are simply too deep for our poor little biological brains to comprehend, is more than some people can or are willing to accept.
The movie sadly reduces the planet to mere backdrop. Sure, it is producing the replicants; but the story of the movie is only about one man's reaction to the replicant *itself*. That utterly, utterly misses the point of the book. The movie hints at this near the end, with Dr. Gordon's soliloquy on why she is so threatened by the replicants, but it's too little and way too late.
Careful what you wish for. If forged headers become illegal in email - what exactly would that mean, anyway? Presumably that sending "false" information in SMTP fields becomes illegal. So does sending "false" information in other standard protocols - say, forging your User-Agent: header in HTTP - become illegal also? Be veeeery careful with this.
Forging headers should *not* be illegal. For goodness sakes, even putting a fake return address on a n actual piece of U.S. snail-mail isn't illegal.
As the quote from IBM points out in the article, this issue is just a subset of the larger problem with Unicode compatibility in XML 1.0. And as someone else pointed out, if document creators are using the XML headers appropriately to begin with, then parsers would handle documents correctly anyway. I'm also willing to bet that the percentage of existing XML documents which contains this particular character (0x85), and which are not already on IBM mainframes, is *extremely* small.
Face it: this just isn't that big a deal. It's good for industry acceptance and propagation of the standard, at very low cost. Move along, there's nothing to see here.
Personal thanks to the author of the above post. I'm currently facing a similar situation, with a new "developer" having been foisted upon our team with little warning. The suggestion for use as a tester is simply perfect: it gives familiarization with the target application, and a semblance of usefulness, with little to no chance of endangering the project itself.
While doing research at my new job, I ran across the TinyCobol project on Source Forge. When I tried to click on the link (tinycobol.sourceforge.net), I got a filtering error back too. Category: Sex.
The Falls Church event appears to be for more than just computers or electronics; it includes bicyles and other things. But the event is running today (April 27th, 9-5) and tomorrow (April 28th, 12-5), at the Falls Church Recycling Center, located at 217 Gordon Rd. If you're wanting to swap or pick up, you might want to call first (703-248-5176), as I'm not sure they allow that sort of thing.
>> I then propose a new definition that captures >> what programming is really about.
Apparently, though, the author had no intention of capturing what the *original definition* (i.e. lines-of-code) was about, which was providing a way of *quantifying* productivity so it can actually be compared, aggregated, and used for real management purposes. Note that Timothy also summarized the article by calling it "a new way of evaluating the worth of programmer time". But the word "evaluate" implies assigning a *value* to that time. Without any way of quantifying that value, there's no evaluation going on anyway.
This is a completely content-free article. For Pete's sake.
I attended Sen. Hollings' SSSCA hearing last week, and can tell you a few of the things that Valenti (and Hollings, who practically repeated everything Valenti said, so it was transparently obvious that the "hearing" was nothing more than a one-sided sham to drum up interest in the bill) said there. The comments were not the same as those I've seen posted in the "official" transcript of prepared texts.
Valenti said that, sure enough, piracy is costing them money. He said that only 2 out of 10 movies made actually make their money back at the box-office; the rest have to do it through video and overseas sales, merchandising, etc. Of course, he never said how many movies make their money back in toto - I suspect it's close to 10/10, or they wouldn't be making them, would they? Still, the 2/10 stat resonated with the Senators.
He said that the *average* cost of producing and releasing a movie today is $83 million. (Hint to the MPAA: if your product is so expensive it's reducing your profit... maybe you should cut expenses, instead of asking Congress to prop up your non-functional business model?) What the hell costs $83 million? Oh yeah - a few stars' mega-contracts. Boo-hoo. I wonder if you took the top 20 stars' contracts out of the financial picture (since those vastly skew the distribution of costs), what the "average" cost would be then. Probably much, *much* lower. So tell me again why I should care... And by the way, the linked article states that the average cost in 2001 was $43 million - about *half* what Valenti just testified to Congress. Talk about talking from both sides of your mouth!!
Valenti said the one "moat surrounding their castle" that prevented the movie industry from totally being taken down (!!) was that broadband wasn't widespread yet. He said it was critical to get all these new restrictions in place on the Internet and in home electronics before broadband bacame widespread. Of course, even if they did, the Internet is international, and as soon as a pirated movie makes it overseas, it will no longer be subject to our laws. It was obvious from comments during the hearing that they haven't figured this out yet.
At the same time he was decrying the impending rollout of broadband, he had the balls to claim that his industry was the very reason broadband hadn't gotten accepted yet! Valenti said that the reason people didn't want broadband was that "producers haven't made their highest quality content available" yet. He also turned around and said that the only reason why someone would want to have broadband today was if they were a pirate (!!). Quote: "You don't need broadband to do email; you can do that on a 56K modem." So to Jack Valenti, the two possible uses of a computer are email, and viewing video/audio content, which today must entail piracy since *his* content isn't legally available. The fact that *other* people might have legal content available - CNN, MSNBC, independent movie producers, amateur artists, countless Flash animations - or that there might be other bandwidth intensive applications besides wanting to watch a Disney flick pay-per-view, is something that apparently isn't even worth consideration. It's a totally Narcissistic mind-set - they're the only ones that exist in their minds.
As an extra-scary note, at the same moment Valenti was saying this, over in the House they were passing Tauzin-Dingell, which practically locked in the one thing that *is* preventing broadband rollout: the unacceptably high monthly cost, caused by monopolistic control over the network by the Baby Bells. Yet at least one of the Senators sat there and praised Valenti and the MPAA as being "critical" to the economic recovery, because they had to succeed to drive broadband rollout, to create the next round of economic growth. It all seemed utterly clueless to me.
Now for some scary "justifications". Valenti said that it was critical to the economic recovery in the US that his content be protected. He said that "intellectual property" production makes up 5% of GDP. He listed IP as including movies, music, books, and software. Right... which of those things is not like the others?:-) Guess which one also makes up more of that 5%? Last year's MPAA member revenues, according to Valenti, were $30 billion. Try adding up the US software industry's revenues from last year: start with Microsoft's ($27 billion), and work from there. Estimate an order of magnitude (MS is just one company, after all), so maybe $300 billion. One of the other speakers estimated it at $600 billion. Tell me: Which one of these is more relevant to the economic recovery? Which one needs more safeguards to make sure it succeeds? Right... so WHY ARE THEY KOWTOWING TO THE MOVIE INDUSTRY? Oh yeah - because they pay the Senators more than we do.
There's more - I could go on at length about what was said. Valenti proclaimed the movie industry "the crown jewel of American industry", because it's the only major industry that has a trade surplus with every nation. Well, that's true, technically. However: A) given that the MPAA's member companies have a virtual monopoly on distribution to the number-one revenue market (the US), that's not terribly surprising, is it? And B) since many of the distribution companies are majority foreign owned (!!!), claiming that giving them money consitutes a US foreign trade surplus is downright disingenuous.
Watching him talk, it was all so obvious. But hey, what's a little song-and-dance to misdirect attention? Look at the pretty lights, people; don't watch the man behind the curtain taking your rights away. And frankly, I'm still not sure that they "get it" at all. Valenti said (regarding the inability of Intel or Cisco to utterly prevent copying of copyrighted materials in their devices), "I can't believe there aren't two young geeks in San Diego in a garage somewhere who can't figure out how to make this work." As if some "geek" is going to figure out how to undo the mathematics that make "Turing completeness" a reality. But then, explaining a Turing machine to one of these guys and getting any reaction other than slack-jawed disbelief is a trick that nobody seems to have figured out yet. That, friends, would be an awesome hack indeed.
I played violin in the Alabama Youth Symphony, back in the day (early '80s). One day the conductor brought out the new music we were supposed to play: "The Barber of Seville". Do you know, every single person already knew the music, by heart? The whole orchestra sight-read the whole piece the first time through, just about perfectly. Why? You know why.
The morning of the 11th, I was a bit late to work in my Fairfax VA office (about 12 miles from downtown DC, less than 10 from Dulles airport), arriving just about the time the Pentagon was hit. Needless to say, we were pretty worried. The question on all our lips was, "Are we at war?", and nobody knew. All 'Net outlets were swamped; all our cell phones were useless as the networks clogged; the only way to get any information at all was to go down to my car and turn on the radio. And at that point, the following things were "known" to be true:
- The Mall was on fire.
- The White House had been attacked.
- A bomb had blown up in the USA Today headquarters (which faces the Potomac, just up from the mall).
- Another hijacked plane was circling Dulles airport, practically over our heads.
- A car bomb had blown up outside the State department.
Needless to say, *none* of these stories turned out to be true - but it took hours to discover that, as all media outlets were reporting rumor as fact. Even the next day, the Washington Post was *still* reporting the State department rumor, even though anyone driving through downtown could clearly see that it was false.
You'd think that it would just have been the hurried rush of events, and that surely in the month since then, calm and reason would have returned to reporting. But if anything, some outlets seem to have become even more sensationalist. Many times the headlines look like something out of the New York Post. Granted these are extraordinary times; but that just calls for extraordinary measures, to make sure that facts are facts and the public isn't needlessly panicked. The past month has been a real eye-opener for me in terms of my ability to trust what the American media says.
On a separate note, describing this phenomenon in a hysterical meta-story, and creating a titled meme ("hypermedia") to describe it, are some of the same tactics that cause the problem in the first place.
And finally, the term "hypermedia" is already taken. Perhaps "hysterimedia" would work for you, if you have to have a meme to rally around instead of just calmly reporting facts.
A perennial favorite, "Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction to to the Art of Programming" is a very good choice. It's the first real book on programming I read 20 years ago, and it's just as entertaining today.
Re:Blockbuster did this a while back...
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Software rental was made illegal in the US under the "Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990". That law was proposed because Congress felt that rental made it "too easy" to pirate software - sound familiar? Yeah, it's the same justification used for the DMCA. As far as I know, the rental prohibition is still on the books.
>They managed to get carbon to superconduct at
>temperatures higher than liquid nitrogen
Well, slight correction. Liquid nitrogen is liquid at, what, about -70F? The story cites the experiment as achieving superconductivity at -243F, higher than liquid *helium* (and thus a hell of a lot cheaper to reproduce), but still well below liquid nitrogen. And it isn't like you can get a spool of this stuff to superconduct; it has to be immersed in two different super-cooled chemicals to remain in that state.
This isn't even the highest-temperature superconductivity ever produced - but it does appear to be the cheapest, and that's a major advance in and of itself.
10. Gives a whole new meaning to "palm oil".
9. Runs so smooth... it's like butter.
8. Stupid character recognition... I wrote "butter", but all it will say is "Parkay".
7. Gives a whole new meaning to "butter fingers".
6. And to think, they said my computer would be no substitute for a girlfriend. Boy, were THEY wrong.
5. First ever computer with a "best used by" date.
4. Would you like your PDA salted or unsalted?
3. Gives a whole new meaning to "memory churn".
2. I think heat dissipation is going to be a problem.
And the number 1, absolute LAMEST joke about the Butter PDA:
"Grajeda says NCsoft has bought all of Destination Games' technology and intellectual property."
Let me get this straight - Garriott et al found a new company, carrying over nothing from EA/Origin, and have not yet produced any actual games, publications, or other copyrightable material of any great magnitude... and NCsoft has "bought" their "intellectual property" anyway. Gee, can I get people to give me money for nothing too?:-) I gotta whole lotta nothing right here - any takers? Bidding starts at $3 mil!
... when I'd actually praise a TV network executive for being clueful. Did anyone catch this quote at the end of the article? In the context of whether a humungous PVR would be the death of network TV:
``Everyone said the VCR would kill network TV,'' one exec said. ``I don't think people are shivering over this.''
Gee, someone who actually gets it. What are the odds? Now if only the MPAA / RIAA executives would wake up and realize the same thing.
>If this were someone from the Southern part of the United States,
>we would all be laughing our butts off at this hair brained scheme.
Uh... balloon launched rockets have been around since the '50s. There's even a well-known term for it: a "rockoon". Try a Google search for information.
And as for "laughing your ass off" at the southern United States... one of the most successful recent rockoon launches, and the highest amateur rocket launch *ever*, was a rockoon launch just 3 years ago by... wait for it... the Huntsville, Alabama, chapter of the National Space Society. It was called Project HALO (High-Altitude Lift Off). The only reason they didn't actually reach space the last time was due to a last-second failure of the balloon; and they're still trying to raise funds to purchase another one. Quite a noble effort.
According to the research link, today's wires are known as Aluminum Conductor Steel Supported (ACSS) wires. However, USC is working with the industry to develop these fiber-composite wrapped wires, which will be known as Composite Reinforced Aluminum Conductors.
So yes, soon, all of California will be addicted to CRAC.
Slashdot Mirror
"Zealot: someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
Oh sorry - should that have been GNU/Zealot?
Just got back from an 11-day vacation in Italy with my sweetie, and I took the time to stop into the above-mentioned museum. It's a little out-of-the-way place on the eastern side of the plaza where the Ufizzi gallery is, basically facing the Arno river. Inside is a huge collection of early astrolabes, thermometers, telescopes, and everything else that Florentine scientists of the 13th-18th centuries used, along with copious explanations. Be sure to pick up the English manual on the second floor (assuming you speak English and not Italian, though if you're reading this then that's a pretty safe bet).
:-) Amen.
One particular item of interest: after Galileo died, some of his students managed to scavenge the middle finger of his right hand from the corpse when it was appropriated by the Church of the time. They preserved it, and today the remains of the finger are in a little bell jar in room 6, as I recall. The irony is that the item is arranged such that as near as I could tell, it's facing the Duomo (the major cathedral in Florence) where religious figures of the day... ahem. Let's just say that it's comforting to know that, evermore, Galileo gets to give the finger to the Church.
I wish I had mod points left. Parent should have been modded up... way, WAY up.
The point the parent makes is *exactly* the problem with the movie - the primary theme of the book was omitted from the movie entirely. For those who actually read the book, they'd understand that the point of the love story is not his wrestling with his guilt, but his wrestling with the incomprehensibility of what is happenning to himself and the others. The key moment in the movie is the "dream" of Gibarian, who says, "There are no answers - only choices." Well, that is the key theme in the book too: Solaris *can't* be understood. Too bad the movie doesn't even *touch* on that theme.
In the book, the outpost is a scientific research station, and people have been studying the planet for centuries. There are hundreds of theories about what the planet is, whether it is intelligent, and why it does what it does - if it even *is* doing the things it seems to. Maybe the planet is playing with them; maybe it's being kind; maybe it's completely reflex; or maybe it's deliberately torturing them. Each of the characters interprets events in a different way; and it leads to madness or acceptance for each in different ways. Their reactions say more about themselves than about the planet, because they don't and can't understand the planet to begin with. The idea that there may be something in the universe either so foreign or so far above ourselves that we would simply never understand it, that some mysteries are simply too deep for our poor little biological brains to comprehend, is more than some people can or are willing to accept.
The movie sadly reduces the planet to mere backdrop. Sure, it is producing the replicants; but the story of the movie is only about one man's reaction to the replicant *itself*. That utterly, utterly misses the point of the book. The movie hints at this near the end, with Dr. Gordon's soliloquy on why she is so threatened by the replicants, but it's too little and way too late.
Careful what you wish for. If forged headers become illegal in email - what exactly would that mean, anyway? Presumably that sending "false" information in SMTP fields becomes illegal. So does sending "false" information in other standard protocols - say, forging your User-Agent: header in HTTP - become illegal also? Be veeeery careful with this.
Forging headers should *not* be illegal. For goodness sakes, even putting a fake return address on a n actual piece of U.S. snail-mail isn't illegal.
As the quote from IBM points out in the article, this issue is just a subset of the larger problem with Unicode compatibility in XML 1.0. And as someone else pointed out, if document creators are using the XML headers appropriately to begin with, then parsers would handle documents correctly anyway. I'm also willing to bet that the percentage of existing XML documents which contains this particular character (0x85), and which are not already on IBM mainframes, is *extremely* small.
Face it: this just isn't that big a deal. It's good for industry acceptance and propagation of the standard, at very low cost. Move along, there's nothing to see here.
Personal thanks to the author of the above post. I'm currently facing a similar situation, with a new "developer" having been foisted upon our team with little warning. The suggestion for use as a tester is simply perfect: it gives familiarization with the target application, and a semblance of usefulness, with little to no chance of endangering the project itself.
While doing research at my new job, I ran across the TinyCobol project on Source Forge. When I tried to click on the link (tinycobol.sourceforge.net), I got a filtering error back too. Category: Sex.
I don't even want to know.
Guess you never read Spiderman 2099....
Link:
m
http://www.ci.falls-church.va.us/meetingsapril.ht
The Falls Church event appears to be for more than just computers or electronics; it includes bicyles and other things. But the event is running today (April 27th, 9-5) and tomorrow (April 28th, 12-5), at the Falls Church Recycling Center, located at 217 Gordon Rd. If you're wanting to swap or pick up, you might want to call first (703-248-5176), as I'm not sure they allow that sort of thing.
Link:
Whaddya say we drive by and firebomb your house?
What are you complaining about - I'd do it for free!
(Note for the brain-impaired: the above illustrates the use of sarcasm, *not* an actual threat. Sheesh.)
>> I then propose a new definition that captures
>> what programming is really about.
Apparently, though, the author had no intention of capturing what the *original definition* (i.e. lines-of-code) was about, which was providing a way of *quantifying* productivity so it can actually be compared, aggregated, and used for real management purposes. Note that Timothy also summarized the article by calling it "a new way of evaluating the worth of programmer time". But the word "evaluate" implies assigning a *value* to that time. Without any way of quantifying that value, there's no evaluation going on anyway.
This is a completely content-free article. For Pete's sake.
I attended Sen. Hollings' SSSCA hearing last week, and can tell you a few of the things that Valenti (and Hollings, who practically repeated everything Valenti said, so it was transparently obvious that the "hearing" was nothing more than a one-sided sham to drum up interest in the bill) said there. The comments were not the same as those I've seen posted in the "official" transcript of prepared texts.
Valenti said that, sure enough, piracy is costing them money. He said that only 2 out of 10 movies made actually make their money back at the box-office; the rest have to do it through video and overseas sales, merchandising, etc. Of course, he never said how many movies make their money back in toto - I suspect it's close to 10/10, or they wouldn't be making them, would they? Still, the 2/10 stat resonated with the Senators.
He said that the *average* cost of producing and releasing a movie today is $83 million. (Hint to the MPAA: if your product is so expensive it's reducing your profit... maybe you should cut expenses, instead of asking Congress to prop up your non-functional business model?) What the hell costs $83 million? Oh yeah - a few stars' mega-contracts. Boo-hoo. I wonder if you took the top 20 stars' contracts out of the financial picture (since those vastly skew the distribution of costs), what the "average" cost would be then. Probably much, *much* lower. So tell me again why I should care... And by the way, the linked article states that the average cost in 2001 was $43 million - about *half* what Valenti just testified to Congress. Talk about talking from both sides of your mouth!!
Valenti said the one "moat surrounding their castle" that prevented the movie industry from totally being taken down (!!) was that broadband wasn't widespread yet. He said it was critical to get all these new restrictions in place on the Internet and in home electronics before broadband bacame widespread. Of course, even if they did, the Internet is international, and as soon as a pirated movie makes it overseas, it will no longer be subject to our laws. It was obvious from comments during the hearing that they haven't figured this out yet.
At the same time he was decrying the impending rollout of broadband, he had the balls to claim that his industry was the very reason broadband hadn't gotten accepted yet! Valenti said that the reason people didn't want broadband was that "producers haven't made their highest quality content available" yet. He also turned around and said that the only reason why someone would want to have broadband today was if they were a pirate (!!). Quote: "You don't need broadband to do email; you can do that on a 56K modem." So to Jack Valenti, the two possible uses of a computer are email, and viewing video/audio content, which today must entail piracy since *his* content isn't legally available. The fact that *other* people might have legal content available - CNN, MSNBC, independent movie producers, amateur artists, countless Flash animations - or that there might be other bandwidth intensive applications besides wanting to watch a Disney flick pay-per-view, is something that apparently isn't even worth consideration. It's a totally Narcissistic mind-set - they're the only ones that exist in their minds.
As an extra-scary note, at the same moment Valenti was saying this, over in the House they were passing Tauzin-Dingell, which practically locked in the one thing that *is* preventing broadband rollout: the unacceptably high monthly cost, caused by monopolistic control over the network by the Baby Bells. Yet at least one of the Senators sat there and praised Valenti and the MPAA as being "critical" to the economic recovery, because they had to succeed to drive broadband rollout, to create the next round of economic growth. It all seemed utterly clueless to me.
Now for some scary "justifications". Valenti said that it was critical to the economic recovery in the US that his content be protected. He said that "intellectual property" production makes up 5% of GDP. He listed IP as including movies, music, books, and software. Right... which of those things is not like the others? :-) Guess which one also makes up more of that 5%? Last year's MPAA member revenues, according to Valenti, were $30 billion. Try adding up the US software industry's revenues from last year: start with Microsoft's ($27 billion), and work from there. Estimate an order of magnitude (MS is just one company, after all), so maybe $300 billion. One of the other speakers estimated it at $600 billion. Tell me: Which one of these is more relevant to the economic recovery? Which one needs more safeguards to make sure it succeeds? Right... so WHY ARE THEY KOWTOWING TO THE MOVIE INDUSTRY? Oh yeah - because they pay the Senators more than we do.
There's more - I could go on at length about what was said. Valenti proclaimed the movie industry "the crown jewel of American industry", because it's the only major industry that has a trade surplus with every nation. Well, that's true, technically. However: A) given that the MPAA's member companies have a virtual monopoly on distribution to the number-one revenue market (the US), that's not terribly surprising, is it? And B) since many of the distribution companies are majority foreign owned (!!!), claiming that giving them money consitutes a US foreign trade surplus is downright disingenuous.
Watching him talk, it was all so obvious. But hey, what's a little song-and-dance to misdirect attention? Look at the pretty lights, people; don't watch the man behind the curtain taking your rights away. And frankly, I'm still not sure that they "get it" at all. Valenti said (regarding the inability of Intel or Cisco to utterly prevent copying of copyrighted materials in their devices), "I can't believe there aren't two young geeks in San Diego in a garage somewhere who can't figure out how to make this work." As if some "geek" is going to figure out how to undo the mathematics that make "Turing completeness" a reality. But then, explaining a Turing machine to one of these guys and getting any reaction other than slack-jawed disbelief is a trick that nobody seems to have figured out yet. That, friends, would be an awesome hack indeed.
Somebody who things the 'Net makes any kind of control impossible has never read Lawrence Lessig's "Code". That somebody should.
I played violin in the Alabama Youth Symphony, back in the day (early '80s). One day the conductor brought out the new music we were supposed to play: "The Barber of Seville". Do you know, every single person already knew the music, by heart? The whole orchestra sight-read the whole piece the first time through, just about perfectly. Why? You know why.
Thank you, THANK you, bless you, Chuck Jones.
The morning of the 11th, I was a bit late to work in my Fairfax VA office (about 12 miles from downtown DC, less than 10 from Dulles airport), arriving just about the time the Pentagon was hit. Needless to say, we were pretty worried. The question on all our lips was, "Are we at war?", and nobody knew. All 'Net outlets were swamped; all our cell phones were useless as the networks clogged; the only way to get any information at all was to go down to my car and turn on the radio. And at that point, the following things were "known" to be true:
- The Mall was on fire.
- The White House had been attacked.
- A bomb had blown up in the USA Today headquarters (which faces the Potomac, just up from the mall).
- Another hijacked plane was circling Dulles airport, practically over our heads.
- A car bomb had blown up outside the State department.
Needless to say, *none* of these stories turned out to be true - but it took hours to discover that, as all media outlets were reporting rumor as fact. Even the next day, the Washington Post was *still* reporting the State department rumor, even though anyone driving through downtown could clearly see that it was false.
You'd think that it would just have been the hurried rush of events, and that surely in the month since then, calm and reason would have returned to reporting. But if anything, some outlets seem to have become even more sensationalist. Many times the headlines look like something out of the New York Post. Granted these are extraordinary times; but that just calls for extraordinary measures, to make sure that facts are facts and the public isn't needlessly panicked. The past month has been a real eye-opener for me in terms of my ability to trust what the American media says.
On a separate note, describing this phenomenon in a hysterical meta-story, and creating a titled meme ("hypermedia") to describe it, are some of the same tactics that cause the problem in the first place.
And finally, the term "hypermedia" is already taken. Perhaps "hysterimedia" would work for you, if you have to have a meme to rally around instead of just calmly reporting facts.
A perennial favorite, "Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction to to the Art of Programming" is a very good choice. It's the first real book on programming I read 20 years ago, and it's just as entertaining today.
Software rental was made illegal in the US under the "Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990". That law was proposed because Congress felt that rental made it "too easy" to pirate software - sound familiar? Yeah, it's the same justification used for the DMCA. As far as I know, the rental prohibition is still on the books.
>They managed to get carbon to superconduct at
>temperatures higher than liquid nitrogen
Well, slight correction. Liquid nitrogen is liquid at, what, about -70F? The story cites the experiment as achieving superconductivity at -243F, higher than liquid *helium* (and thus a hell of a lot cheaper to reproduce), but still well below liquid nitrogen. And it isn't like you can get a spool of this stuff to superconduct; it has to be immersed in two different super-cooled chemicals to remain in that state.
This isn't even the highest-temperature superconductivity ever produced - but it does appear to be the cheapest, and that's a major advance in and of itself.
10. Gives a whole new meaning to "palm oil".
9. Runs so smooth... it's like butter.
8. Stupid character recognition... I wrote "butter", but all it will say is "Parkay".
7. Gives a whole new meaning to "butter fingers".
6. And to think, they said my computer would be no substitute for a girlfriend. Boy, were THEY wrong.
5. First ever computer with a "best used by" date.
4. Would you like your PDA salted or unsalted?
3. Gives a whole new meaning to "memory churn".
2. I think heat dissipation is going to be a problem.
And the number 1, absolute LAMEST joke about the Butter PDA:
1. I think I've milked this long enough.
From the article:
:-) I gotta whole lotta nothing right here - any takers? Bidding starts at $3 mil!
"Grajeda says NCsoft has bought all of Destination Games' technology and intellectual property."
Let me get this straight - Garriott et al found a new company, carrying over nothing from EA/Origin, and have not yet produced any actual games, publications, or other copyrightable material of any great magnitude... and NCsoft has "bought" their "intellectual property" anyway. Gee, can I get people to give me money for nothing too?
... when I'd actually praise a TV network executive for being clueful. Did anyone catch this quote at the end of the article? In the context of whether a humungous PVR would be the death of network TV:
``Everyone said the VCR would kill network TV,'' one exec said. ``I don't think people are shivering over this.''
Gee, someone who actually gets it. What are the odds? Now if only the MPAA / RIAA executives would wake up and realize the same thing.
>If this were someone from the Southern part of the United States,
>we would all be laughing our butts off at this hair brained scheme.
Uh... balloon launched rockets have been around since the '50s. There's even a well-known term for it: a "rockoon". Try a Google search for information.
And as for "laughing your ass off" at the southern United States... one of the most successful recent rockoon launches, and the highest amateur rocket launch *ever*, was a rockoon launch just 3 years ago by... wait for it... the Huntsville, Alabama, chapter of the National Space Society. It was called Project HALO (High-Altitude Lift Off). The only reason they didn't actually reach space the last time was due to a last-second failure of the balloon; and they're still trying to raise funds to purchase another one. Quite a noble effort.
Who are you talking about, Gates or Katz?
So yes, soon, all of California will be addicted to CRAC.
Sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up.