... is it really wise to change the logo to something that has no inherent brand identification, and to drop the incredibly recognizable 'Pentium'?
Oh, don't worry. Buying a CPU isn't like buying a toothbrush. No one says, "I'll take that one, it sounds cool" or "I recognize that name, I want that one." Everyone I know that's purchased a CPU by itself actually reads up on what the reviews say. And anyone that buys a computer doesn't really care what Dell is putting in there (trust me, my parents are the proud owners of a celeron *shudders*).
Further more, Intel chips are going to go into Macs so maybe a name change will be good to make the Mac users feel like they're recieving the new improved intel?
If you're in the states and you only get basic cable, you'll have to wait until adult swim starts airing them again. That's a lineup of shows that the Cartoon Network has late at night. I saw the first season a long time ago on there and that's the limit of my exposure to it.
Now, if you're in Canada, you'll have to wait until YTV starts airing it again. They used to have marathons on for this show so let's hope they pick up the second season.
Let us know your location and cable options. If you have really great cable, you might have some of the channels that will sporadically play it.
It's rewarding to compare Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complexto the only other great science fiction show on TV right now, the new Battlestar Galatica, as both have the same overriding theme: What does it mean to be human, and where is the line between man and machine?.
This question was about the only thing that I liked about the show. Maybe I'm the only slashdot reader who feels this way, but the Ghost in the Shell material always seemed pretty heavy and kind of inaccessible to me. I liked the issues posed by the above question but the technical jargon they use and details they go into sometimes causes me to turn the channel. There are other anime series (like Evengelion) that I feel suffer greatly when they are bogged down by a lot of pseudoscience explanations.
I still own and enjoy many anime series, however. As I'm sure all slashdot readers are familiar with, Shinichiro Watanabe has two series that are particularly well done. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are two series that I particularly enjoy. They have great plot lines that usually don't depend too heavily on the viewer to know a lot of background knowledge about the technology used in the show. Watanabe seems to be a master at taking pretty simple plot lines and mixing in great characters to get a light anime that's easy to enjoy. On top of that, those two series amazingly blend together two different genres and cultures which probably make them even more appealing to myself.
Then, there's another kind of anime I really like--which is old school hack-and-slash animes such as Vampire Hunter D. Again, you can pretty much sum the movies into one sentence and you don't need much else. Great stuff to throw popcorn in your mouth to.
Maybe I'm just a stupid American who wants cheap entertainment that I don't have to work for, but I sure hate watching a show and not being able to understand what's going on if I missed the other episodes.
These are called Sombrero Galaxies. I believe M 104 is the most famous since it was first noticed on May 11th, 1781.
Does dark matter hold our universe together in a web? Perhaps, though this would mean that there is no such thing as truly empty space as a small amount of dark matter would have to exist. Perhaps what lays beneath the edges of our universe is nothing in the sense of it being devoid of dark matter?
Check this out:
Consider this fact: In the air we breathe, each cubic centimeter contains roughly 5 X 1019 atoms. In contrast, the intergalactic medium has a density of only 10-6 particles per cubic centimeter--each atom inhabits a private box a meter on each side. This would seem to suggest that there is not much matter in the intergalactic medium. But, given the enormous volume between the galaxies, it quickly adds up: The combined atomic mass of intergalactic gas exceeds the combined atomic mass of all the stars and galaxies in the universe--possibly by as much as 50 percent! There is indeed something in empty space
While this article only mentions computer simulations, many scientific groups have gone along further researching, convinced that the cosmic web does exist. Some people have based most of their work on dark matter and the cosmic web though I believe it is still speculation and has yet to be accepted by the science community as a whole. I've read some crazy stuff about dark matter, like how it might be the "gravity particle" that is attracted to matter uniformly and causes the gravitational pull between objects. And even crazier books suggesting that the only way we'll ever be able to communicate between parallel existences is by lowering and raising these gravity particles.
Now, the slashdot community seems to be fairly educated and extremely opinionated so how about it--does dark matter exist? If so, since it is very difficult to detect, what are its defining properties?
The entry of satellite and digital radio into the technological mainstream is increasing tension with the record industry, which wants new rules governing how consumers can make digital copies of songs from the airwaves.
Ok, I'm no expert on this but I think internet radio has been around for a while. A long while. This isn't some new thing that's suddenly hitting the nation. Satellite radio has also been around for years but, yes, not until now has it become mainstream.
Color me a flamer but I think this is just the next thing that music executives want to complain about. So I think the only thing that would make them happy would be if we all had devices that covered our ears. Every time we started to hear a song, it would ask us to verify that we want such and such money charged to our credit card account, otherwise it would cancel the music out. After reading the article, I'm guessing that that's what it's coming down to.
I, myself, listen to NPR streams and a lot of the RadioIO Streams. What do other slashdot readers listen to out there?
Ok, so it's true that they're allowing people to use Apple laptops and computers while still receiving the benefit of Microsoft's Office Suite. But let's consider that the average Apple user just plain doesn't like Windows. Sure, there's some people running both Windows and OSX in their homes right now but I'm guessing that's pretty rare. I would say these users are about as polarized as the last U.S. presidential election.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org or selecting other free word editors?
I see this as a smart move for Microsoft in that it allows them to still maintain a dominant control on these people for publishing suites even though they might have lost them on the operating system level.
Furthermore, I don't think it's fair to compare Office on the Mac with Explorer on the Mac. There are a large amount of benefits that Microsoft Explorer gains from staying on top as the number one used browser. One of them being that Microsoft gains more clout in determining standards for webpages and the communications through the internet.
If you check out their About Us page, they seem to paint themselves as a resource in understanding the greatness that is Microsoft. I know this is just speculation but I smell Microsoft cooking up a website devoted to thrusting themselves even further into the limelight (since 1992). If this site was a little less biased, I'd be inclined to enjoy it.
Perhaps our psychological fascination with dragons and birds of prey are subsequent results of frequent bird attacks on our ancestors? At any rate, it's been commonly believed that several thousand years of exposure to a species results in a slight increase of instinct of fear with each newborn. Books like Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond explain how evolutionary fears in species develop over many thousand years of exposure. Could what we see in movies of carrion-like dragons be a remnant of psychological fears imposed by these raptors on our ancestors?
If at one time our ancestors were hunted by large birds, what happened to them? One can easily think of ways for other large predator animals to be removed from the food chain but large raptors seem to have no natural predator. Did modern man learn to defend himself from such birds? Did our stone weapons suffice for protecting us from such large aerial predators or was it not until bronze weapons that we were specialized enough to protect ourselves?
While the telltale signs might remain in skeletons, these issues raise a host of new issues that obviously require much more research to be determined.
More importantly, aren't the researchers overlooking the obvious possibility that the "ragged cuts" behind the eye sockets resulted from carrion birds after the death of the individual?
Perhaps it was the case that many of these ancestors were wiped out from a plague that left no evidence of itself and there just happened to be large scavenger birds everywhere to capitalize off of these corpses? The result would be thousands (if not millions) of dead corpses left for scavengers to ravage. Corpses close enough to an aviary or bird sanctuary would likely suffer from these skull markings. Were the markings also present on other parts of the bodies? I've seen vultures pick a corpse clean and they probably worked pretty hard to get at the fat and oil rich brain... the easiest access being the eyes.
Maybe the eyes of dead human corpses are merely a delicacy among scavenger birds or some other scavenger that left similar markings?
This article reminds me of a short story I once read by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I think it's from his book Palm Sunday.
Anyways, the world is dying because the resources were squandered by humans. As a last resort, we package our genetic material into the nose cone of a rocket and fire it blindly into space (colder than the artic tundra).
Would it be such a bad idea to launch seeds into outer space to orbit the world just in case? I mean, they have to be worth something to us, right?
From the article:
Permafrost will keep the vault below freezing point and the seeds will further be protected by metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete, two airlocks and high security blast-proof doors.
I hope there's a foot of lead included in that shielding somewhere. To me that would seem the most vital shielding they could provide.
What's so shocking? Is it because this is Google and Google never makes mistakes? If you think that, then let's talk precision, recall and F-measure on their famous search engine.
Google is going to pound "new" technology after "new" technology at us, so prepare yourself for some that might not be useful or need polishing. I would blame this on the fact that:
Engineers can devote 20 percent of their time to projects of their choice.
From this article and I think that would explain why we get so many premature ideas thrown at us as Google consumers.
As for the "too many flavors of DRM," when have these companies ever played nicely together? After all, several competing products that do the same thing are supposed to be healthy for capitalism, so be happy you have a choice to pick which DRM restricts what you can do. Multiple DRMs can only benefit you, the consumer. I'm joking, of course.
So some software was released without sufficient end user testing. It's not like there were any flipper babies as a result.
I had assumed this article is talking about the disc jockey that plays music at dances kind of DJ. Because most real DJ's have to pay for their tracks that they mix live or they create the samples themselves.
I don't understand why they would have to pay royalties if they're mixing from mp3s when they had to pay for it.
Here's an example. Let's pretend I'm DJ Dangermouse and I bought some Beatles vinyl that I like to mix into my songs. Now, it shouldn't be a problem for me (Jay-Z) to get up there and mix these songs together. But if I put them in an album and make serious dough off of it, I'm in for a ride in the court system.
I've always been under the impression that it would be fine to perform this live and play it for an audience but once you try to sell it as a record, you're going to face some serious liabilities. I've been in bands that have covered Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles, Beck, The Pixies, etc. and we've never got in trouble for playing them live at crowded bars. In fact, when you start out, it's advised to include about 50% originals and 50% covers so that the music is accessible to anyone who might be there just for a drink.
Flat fees range from $100 to over
$10,000, while royalties to recording owners
range between half a cent and three cents for
every copy of the track sold. Musical composition
licenses typically give "the copyright
holder a percentage ownership in the new
work's musical composition copyright," as well
as an advance of a few thousand dollars on the
expected publishing income.
In the old days, artists used to smile and feel appreciated when they heard their music being played live. It was a sign of admiration. They only sought legal action if the song was recorded and money was made.
If you're a DJ who plays songs for weddings and events, then you probably should have to have a license to do so. But if you're a musician who just spins tracks together, it seems kind of ridiculous. I guess the license isn't that big of a charge if you're selling out venues.
Now, I know the initial reaction to this Anonymous Coward post is that he's a "Troll."
But I beg you not to mod him as this, I see him as a poor misunderstood individual.
His accusation was valid to make (though horrendously false). Let's examine some better delivery methods:
1) I disagree, sir.
2) Frau Farbissina: LIES! ALL LIES!
2) I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
And so you see, Anonymous Coward, you had a good underlying message, you just delivered it wrong. And you were so close to a +5 funny or +5 interesting mod!
Despite the nascent success of open source software, there has been increasing concern about potential pitfalls, such as patent infringement claims from large software companies including Microsoft. Many fear that Microsoft, often seen as an enemy of open source, is looking for the right opportunity to spring a patent infringement trap. Further fueling some of these fears is the copyright infringement by the Linux kernel claimed by SCO when it filed its lawsuit against IBM. While largely seen as unfounded, SCO's claims have led to some open source leaders calling for such things as more audits of open source code and legal indemnification from open source software vendors.
You can say that again.
Allow me to provide some anecdotal evidence of this fear. I work at Corporation X. I'm assigned to a project that requires me to program quite a bit of Java from scratch. So I download the latest version of Java and try to install it. No dice. I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough...er... impossible to do my job without the JDK and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
So this FOSS department gives me a business process to follow which contains 31 steps that I have to push paperwork through. I say screw it and attempt to befriend a system administrator. About as far as I got was asking him to put the JDK, Apache Ant and Eclipse on my computer... which resulted in him running around the room, rotating his upper torso, flailing his arms and yelling, "Warning! Danger Will Robinson!" Two weeks of pushing paperwork and I get my JDK. However, no one's asked for the Eclipse IDE version I want so that takes no less than 34 days (a day per step isn't bad).
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
I can't help but smile at the wad of dough next to this articles on the homepage as whoever made that the icon for this category had no idea how much it applies here.
I don't know about everyone else but this article was shocking to me.
Not only are the questions well picked but the some of the answers are quite interesting. For instance Phil on scalability:
The problems are those of basic client-server programming--that is, figuring out the browser/http/server data-access patterns and optimizing the protocols, extending these protocols as new functionality is introduced, and ensuring that these protocols work across geo-distributed data centers when the speed of light becomes a factor. Designing applications with built-in redundancy so that they are resilient to abuse is also a challenge.
Before reading this article, I always had hotmail pegged as a hacked together e-mail system less organized than a monkey sh*tfight but if Phil speaks the truth, I've underestimated them. They're a hacked togethor server mess with a lot of effort put into staying afloat--and they have been doing well for a long time.
I guess I've always taken my free Hotmail account for granted.
I'll be the first to point this out (as I'm sure it's been pointed out many times on slashdot)--Gates has openly stated in an interview with Focus Magazine that users aren't interested in bug fixes.
I've read other interviews with Gates in which he went further to explain himself by saying that the feedback they received from users was rarely requesting a bug fix. He listed a percentage in the high nineties that was feedback suggesting new features. And so, with each upgrade and patch, the aim wasn't for security or bug fixes but instead for new features which a lot of people asked for. The engineers will blame him for taking that approach but I'm sure the businessmen will laugh and follow Gates all the way to the bank.
Now, to be fair, it seems he has changed his stance (which--calm down--I believe people are allowed to do). And I applaud them if they really are trying to rectify what they made mistakes on in the past with their new patching strategy. There is (obviously) much debate about if they actually are trying to fix it and if these are actually quality patches. I'm sure the flamewar that ensues on this article will demonstrate that adequately.
I will make a speculation though. IN MY OPINION, the largest thing Microsoft has to fear is a perfectly secure operation system they have created and distributed throughout the world. This is because they will no longer have "upgrades" or new versions of Windows to offer costumers. Yes, some customers are looking for new features, but oftentimes I find myself on my Windows machine just begging it to behave properly as a cut and dry OS. If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more... ever.
You know, for a while there, I really thought David Bowie had something in a 2002 New York Times article where he speculated on the future of music and its copyrights:
'The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years,' he wrote, 'and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity...'
Now, this DRM business seems to be just a sign that not only will music copyrights stand but we are also going to lose some of our rights as to what happens when we attempt to merely listen to a purchased recording.
Perhaps these new DRM actions overstep the bounds of consumer rights so far that it ensures copyrights will always be in place? What I mean is that the focus and question seems to not be, "What are the artist's musician's rights?" so much as "What rights do we even have as consumers?"
Have I angered the mod gods with my slightly offtopic (and idealistic) Bowie quote?:-) I hope not.
"Your iPod is like your home answering machine," McNealy said. "I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are."
Well, sure. Unless your iPod is your cell phone.
Perhaps the author of that article had a lot of insight and perhaps they already new about this news.
Either way, I'll follow suit and ask how much longer will it be until the iPod is your computer, media player, internet access, cell phone, credit card, personal identification, financial recorder/advisor, taser, keyless entry and pace maker?
I'm well aware of the Incompleteness Theorem and most of Kurt Gödel's work.
This wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, this is something I've thought quite a bit about. I'll stand by mathematics before I'll stand by any other -ism in the world. Yes, mathematics has holes. The great thing is that the community recognizes they're there and they are constantly striving to examine them. Not fix them or make them go away but understand them better.
How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?
Wow, a better question would be, "What part of my life hasn't been impacted by math?"
I've always liked math. And, in the past decade, there has been much evidence pointing toward math being a primary component in a better lifestyle. It didn't fully hit me until I was a freshman in college and my computer science courses started crossing paths with my linear algebra courses.
But even in grade school, there was evidence that those in control of mathematics sat a bit higher on the food chain. For instance, I got into an argument with my dad (an independent concrete pourer) when I was in eighth grade. He wanted to build a base for a grain silo and needed to know how many cubic yards of cement was needed. So he was having a hard time computing this. I told him it was (as we all know) pi*radius^2. After much debate, I gave him a piece of graph paper and a compass and told him to draw it and estimate the number of squares. I don't look down on my dad, he just never had an education like I was privileged to have.
And so I slowly started to realize that mathematics were the underlying principle to everything. Maybe you've seen the motion picture Pi and remember the part where the main character has a revelation that everything can be described by math. In my opinion, he was dead right.
The key to math is that the application of it is far more useful than the raw theory of it. That's why the actual profession of mathematician is rarely sought after, instead, the ideal situation is one who has a firm background in math due to classes or a minor.
After taking a statistics course, I realized that math helps us predict the future based on prior events. What is more useful to a human being than to be able to predict what is going to happen? As H.G. Wells might tell you, not much.
This article was well written as it pointed out the good and bad aspects of the power of mathematics. The funny thing about math is that it's neither good nor evil until it's applied.
So if you want a visual of what they're actually talking about, look here because that damned patent site refers to images that are nowhere to be found. I think that linked diagram refers to the numbers that the patent information initially state about the design of it.
Ha, my parents wouldn't even pay for me to be put under when I had to have my wisdom teeth cut out.
You think my family would waste money on tranqs to cull a pig? Not bloody likely.
If you think family farms have the money to throw around on things like this, you're wrong. There's no coincidence I'm working for a huge company and not on a family farm--corporate farms have sapped the money from the small time farmer. Kiss the family farm goodbye & enjoy your cheap frankenfood.
When is the last time a NewsAlert went out based on the words of Michael Dell or Bill Gates?
Well, I'm not sure when the last time a news alert went out about Gates but he and his wife were kind of given people of the year by Time Magazine--perhaps you heard about that. I think that constitutes some affection by the media. Having your fugly mug plastered accross a magazine time and time again surely shows some media recognition.
Michael Dell has little to do with innovation. He's a brilliant businessman but I do not think his job function entitles him to media attention like Gates or Jobs. Dell sells computers, they don't invent them or the software they run. His expertise is reliability and customer support. Definitely an important figure head in the sale of computers but not so much the invention side.
I should point out that Gates won that probably because of all the money he and his wife donate to charities. The guy is a vaccine giving maniac no matter how much you hate his software. Oh and he is hott.
Slashdot Mirror
Further more, Intel chips are going to go into Macs so maybe a name change will be good to make the Mac users feel like they're recieving the new improved intel?
Where are you located?
A side note: your homepage that you have listed is disabled. So I couldn't use that to figure out where you live
If you're in the states and you only get basic cable, you'll have to wait until adult swim starts airing them again. That's a lineup of shows that the Cartoon Network has late at night. I saw the first season a long time ago on there and that's the limit of my exposure to it.
Now, if you're in Canada, you'll have to wait until YTV starts airing it again. They used to have marathons on for this show so let's hope they pick up the second season.
Let us know your location and cable options. If you have really great cable, you might have some of the channels that will sporadically play it.
I still own and enjoy many anime series, however. As I'm sure all slashdot readers are familiar with, Shinichiro Watanabe has two series that are particularly well done. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are two series that I particularly enjoy. They have great plot lines that usually don't depend too heavily on the viewer to know a lot of background knowledge about the technology used in the show. Watanabe seems to be a master at taking pretty simple plot lines and mixing in great characters to get a light anime that's easy to enjoy. On top of that, those two series amazingly blend together two different genres and cultures which probably make them even more appealing to myself.
Then, there's another kind of anime I really like--which is old school hack-and-slash animes such as Vampire Hunter D. Again, you can pretty much sum the movies into one sentence and you don't need much else. Great stuff to throw popcorn in your mouth to.
Maybe I'm just a stupid American who wants cheap entertainment that I don't have to work for, but I sure hate watching a show and not being able to understand what's going on if I missed the other episodes.
Does dark matter hold our universe together in a web? Perhaps, though this would mean that there is no such thing as truly empty space as a small amount of dark matter would have to exist. Perhaps what lays beneath the edges of our universe is nothing in the sense of it being devoid of dark matter?
Check this out: From this article.
While this article only mentions computer simulations, many scientific groups have gone along further researching, convinced that the cosmic web does exist. Some people have based most of their work on dark matter and the cosmic web though I believe it is still speculation and has yet to be accepted by the science community as a whole. I've read some crazy stuff about dark matter, like how it might be the "gravity particle" that is attracted to matter uniformly and causes the gravitational pull between objects. And even crazier books suggesting that the only way we'll ever be able to communicate between parallel existences is by lowering and raising these gravity particles.
Now, the slashdot community seems to be fairly educated and extremely opinionated so how about it--does dark matter exist? If so, since it is very difficult to detect, what are its defining properties?
Color me a flamer but I think this is just the next thing that music executives want to complain about. So I think the only thing that would make them happy would be if we all had devices that covered our ears. Every time we started to hear a song, it would ask us to verify that we want such and such money charged to our credit card account, otherwise it would cancel the music out. After reading the article, I'm guessing that that's what it's coming down to.
I, myself, listen to NPR streams and a lot of the RadioIO Streams. What do other slashdot readers listen to out there?
I should start by saying that there's a wealth of information out online about Lockheed Martin's Atlas V.
The article gave a link to www.space.com but if you want the source of this information, you should go to Spaceflight Now for their informative diagrams. You can get an idea of how the vehicle actually breaks apart to deliver its payload. You can read about how they plan to retrieve the boosters from the ocean, the simulated views of onboard cameras, or previous Atlas launches. This site contains for more information than the one listed in the article.
If you're interested in payload sizes, check out Wikipedia's entries on this topic or the International Launch Service's documentation of preparation for Atlas V launches.
These past few days, my employer has failed to utilize me sufficiently; therefore, I focused some effort on Slashdot.
...
My goal was to gain moderator status in two days. I guess I've failed.
I've constructed a Dr. Suess quote that culminates the results of my findings over the past two days:
The only dogs
Who get to have mods
Are the dogs
Who slobber CowboyNeal's knob.
I appreciate your comments on my writing ability but I warn you that I am but a stupid farmer boy who wandered into the city one fateful day
Ok, so it's true that they're allowing people to use Apple laptops and computers while still receiving the benefit of Microsoft's Office Suite. But let's consider that the average Apple user just plain doesn't like Windows. Sure, there's some people running both Windows and OSX in their homes right now but I'm guessing that's pretty rare. I would say these users are about as polarized as the last U.S. presidential election.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org or selecting other free word editors?
I see this as a smart move for Microsoft in that it allows them to still maintain a dominant control on these people for publishing suites even though they might have lost them on the operating system level.
Furthermore, I don't think it's fair to compare Office on the Mac with Explorer on the Mac. There are a large amount of benefits that Microsoft Explorer gains from staying on top as the number one used browser. One of them being that Microsoft gains more clout in determining standards for webpages and the communications through the internet.
Now, back to the original article, who the hell is Directions on Microsoft? And, more importantly, what do they have to gain from authoring and publishing Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2006?
If you check out their About Us page, they seem to paint themselves as a resource in understanding the greatness that is Microsoft. I know this is just speculation but I smell Microsoft cooking up a website devoted to thrusting themselves even further into the limelight (since 1992). If this site was a little less biased, I'd be inclined to enjoy it.
Perhaps our psychological fascination with dragons and birds of prey are subsequent results of frequent bird attacks on our ancestors? At any rate, it's been commonly believed that several thousand years of exposure to a species results in a slight increase of instinct of fear with each newborn. Books like Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond explain how evolutionary fears in species develop over many thousand years of exposure. Could what we see in movies of carrion-like dragons be a remnant of psychological fears imposed by these raptors on our ancestors?
... the easiest access being the eyes.
If at one time our ancestors were hunted by large birds, what happened to them? One can easily think of ways for other large predator animals to be removed from the food chain but large raptors seem to have no natural predator. Did modern man learn to defend himself from such birds? Did our stone weapons suffice for protecting us from such large aerial predators or was it not until bronze weapons that we were specialized enough to protect ourselves?
While the telltale signs might remain in skeletons, these issues raise a host of new issues that obviously require much more research to be determined.
More importantly, aren't the researchers overlooking the obvious possibility that the "ragged cuts" behind the eye sockets resulted from carrion birds after the death of the individual?
Perhaps it was the case that many of these ancestors were wiped out from a plague that left no evidence of itself and there just happened to be large scavenger birds everywhere to capitalize off of these corpses? The result would be thousands (if not millions) of dead corpses left for scavengers to ravage. Corpses close enough to an aviary or bird sanctuary would likely suffer from these skull markings. Were the markings also present on other parts of the bodies? I've seen vultures pick a corpse clean and they probably worked pretty hard to get at the fat and oil rich brain
Maybe the eyes of dead human corpses are merely a delicacy among scavenger birds or some other scavenger that left similar markings?
Anyways, the world is dying because the resources were squandered by humans. As a last resort, we package our genetic material into the nose cone of a rocket and fire it blindly into space (colder than the artic tundra).
Would it be such a bad idea to launch seeds into outer space to orbit the world just in case? I mean, they have to be worth something to us, right?
From the article:I hope there's a foot of lead included in that shielding somewhere. To me that would seem the most vital shielding they could provide.
In my opinion, I think there is some competition to consider before making that bold statement.
Google is going to pound "new" technology after "new" technology at us, so prepare yourself for some that might not be useful or need polishing. I would blame this on the fact that: From this article and I think that would explain why we get so many premature ideas thrown at us as Google consumers.
As for the "too many flavors of DRM," when have these companies ever played nicely together? After all, several competing products that do the same thing are supposed to be healthy for capitalism, so be happy you have a choice to pick which DRM restricts what you can do. Multiple DRMs can only benefit you, the consumer. I'm joking, of course.
So some software was released without sufficient end user testing. It's not like there were any flipper babies as a result.
There weren't any flipper babies, right?
You do know how much I hate flipper babies!
I don't understand why they would have to pay royalties if they're mixing from mp3s when they had to pay for it.
Here's an example. Let's pretend I'm DJ Dangermouse and I bought some Beatles vinyl that I like to mix into my songs. Now, it shouldn't be a problem for me (Jay-Z) to get up there and mix these songs together. But if I put them in an album and make serious dough off of it, I'm in for a ride in the court system.
I've always been under the impression that it would be fine to perform this live and play it for an audience but once you try to sell it as a record, you're going to face some serious liabilities. I've been in bands that have covered Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles, Beck, The Pixies, etc. and we've never got in trouble for playing them live at crowded bars. In fact, when you start out, it's advised to include about 50% originals and 50% covers so that the music is accessible to anyone who might be there just for a drink.
There's a lot of studying to be done if you want to fully understand how sampling works with musical copyrights but up until this point, the only litigation I have seen is often brought up in instances of recordings.
Here's a straight forward article containing: In the old days, artists used to smile and feel appreciated when they heard their music being played live. It was a sign of admiration. They only sought legal action if the song was recorded and money was made.
If you're a DJ who plays songs for weddings and events, then you probably should have to have a license to do so. But if you're a musician who just spins tracks together, it seems kind of ridiculous. I guess the license isn't that big of a charge if you're selling out venues.
Now, I know the initial reaction to this Anonymous Coward post is that he's a "Troll."
But I beg you not to mod him as this, I see him as a poor misunderstood individual.
His accusation was valid to make (though horrendously false). Let's examine some better delivery methods:
1) I disagree, sir.
2) Frau Farbissina: LIES! ALL LIES!
2) I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
And so you see, Anonymous Coward, you had a good underlying message, you just delivered it wrong. And you were so close to a +5 funny or +5 interesting mod!
*pats AC on the head* In time, young padawan.
Allow me to provide some anecdotal evidence of this fear. I work at Corporation X. I'm assigned to a project that requires me to program quite a bit of Java from scratch. So I download the latest version of Java and try to install it. No dice. I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough
So this FOSS department gives me a business process to follow which contains 31 steps that I have to push paperwork through. I say screw it and attempt to befriend a system administrator. About as far as I got was asking him to put the JDK, Apache Ant and Eclipse on my computer
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
I can't help but smile at the wad of dough next to this articles on the homepage as whoever made that the icon for this category had no idea how much it applies here.
Not only are the questions well picked but the some of the answers are quite interesting. For instance Phil on scalability: Before reading this article, I always had hotmail pegged as a hacked together e-mail system less organized than a monkey sh*tfight but if Phil speaks the truth, I've underestimated them. They're a hacked togethor server mess with a lot of effort put into staying afloat--and they have been doing well for a long time.
I guess I've always taken my free Hotmail account for granted.
I'll be the first to point this out (as I'm sure it's been pointed out many times on slashdot)--Gates has openly stated in an interview with Focus Magazine that users aren't interested in bug fixes.
... ever.
I've read other interviews with Gates in which he went further to explain himself by saying that the feedback they received from users was rarely requesting a bug fix. He listed a percentage in the high nineties that was feedback suggesting new features. And so, with each upgrade and patch, the aim wasn't for security or bug fixes but instead for new features which a lot of people asked for. The engineers will blame him for taking that approach but I'm sure the businessmen will laugh and follow Gates all the way to the bank.
Now, to be fair, it seems he has changed his stance (which--calm down--I believe people are allowed to do). And I applaud them if they really are trying to rectify what they made mistakes on in the past with their new patching strategy. There is (obviously) much debate about if they actually are trying to fix it and if these are actually quality patches. I'm sure the flamewar that ensues on this article will demonstrate that adequately.
I will make a speculation though. IN MY OPINION, the largest thing Microsoft has to fear is a perfectly secure operation system they have created and distributed throughout the world. This is because they will no longer have "upgrades" or new versions of Windows to offer costumers. Yes, some customers are looking for new features, but oftentimes I find myself on my Windows machine just begging it to behave properly as a cut and dry OS. If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more
Perhaps these new DRM actions overstep the bounds of consumer rights so far that it ensures copyrights will always be in place? What I mean is that the focus and question seems to not be, "What are the artist's musician's rights?" so much as "What rights do we even have as consumers?"
Have I angered the mod gods with my slightly offtopic (and idealistic) Bowie quote?
Either way, I'll follow suit and ask how much longer will it be until the iPod is your computer, media player, internet access, cell phone, credit card, personal identification, financial recorder/advisor, taser, keyless entry and pace maker?
I'm well aware of the Incompleteness Theorem and most of Kurt Gödel's work.
This wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, this is something I've thought quite a bit about. I'll stand by mathematics before I'll stand by any other -ism in the world. Yes, mathematics has holes. The great thing is that the community recognizes they're there and they are constantly striving to examine them. Not fix them or make them go away but understand them better.
I've always liked math. And, in the past decade, there has been much evidence pointing toward math being a primary component in a better lifestyle. It didn't fully hit me until I was a freshman in college and my computer science courses started crossing paths with my linear algebra courses.
But even in grade school, there was evidence that those in control of mathematics sat a bit higher on the food chain. For instance, I got into an argument with my dad (an independent concrete pourer) when I was in eighth grade. He wanted to build a base for a grain silo and needed to know how many cubic yards of cement was needed. So he was having a hard time computing this. I told him it was (as we all know) pi*radius^2. After much debate, I gave him a piece of graph paper and a compass and told him to draw it and estimate the number of squares. I don't look down on my dad, he just never had an education like I was privileged to have.
And so I slowly started to realize that mathematics were the underlying principle to everything. Maybe you've seen the motion picture Pi and remember the part where the main character has a revelation that everything can be described by math. In my opinion, he was dead right.
The key to math is that the application of it is far more useful than the raw theory of it. That's why the actual profession of mathematician is rarely sought after, instead, the ideal situation is one who has a firm background in math due to classes or a minor.
After taking a statistics course, I realized that math helps us predict the future based on prior events. What is more useful to a human being than to be able to predict what is going to happen? As H.G. Wells might tell you, not much.
This article was well written as it pointed out the good and bad aspects of the power of mathematics. The funny thing about math is that it's neither good nor evil until it's applied.
So if you want a visual of what they're actually talking about, look here because that damned patent site refers to images that are nowhere to be found. I think that linked diagram refers to the numbers that the patent information initially state about the design of it.
Ha, my parents wouldn't even pay for me to be put under when I had to have my wisdom teeth cut out.
You think my family would waste money on tranqs to cull a pig? Not bloody likely.
If you think family farms have the money to throw around on things like this, you're wrong. There's no coincidence I'm working for a huge company and not on a family farm--corporate farms have sapped the money from the small time farmer. Kiss the family farm goodbye & enjoy your cheap frankenfood.
They sell them here for $50 if you're interested in putting one in your mod or computer.
You may also be interested in the pdf guide for the picoPSU-120.
Michael Dell has little to do with innovation. He's a brilliant businessman but I do not think his job function entitles him to media attention like Gates or Jobs. Dell sells computers, they don't invent them or the software they run. His expertise is reliability and customer support. Definitely an important figure head in the sale of computers but not so much the invention side.
I should point out that Gates won that probably because of all the money he and his wife donate to charities. The guy is a vaccine giving maniac no matter how much you hate his software. Oh and he is hott .