Wow. What a polemic. I knew I'd get all the die-hard New Yorkers' panties twisted, but sheesh. Read my post again, I have nothing pleasant to say about traffic/transportation in Atlanta.
Maybe this wasn't clear, but I think cities at the scale of the car are a BAD THING. It's just that NYC's answer isn't the panacea the poster I was replying to made it out to be. People deal, sure, people can deal with a lot things.
Ultimately, the problem with public transport is a matter of control. Going exactly where you want, when you want, on your own terms. Getting stuck in the subway is panicky (for me anyway) because you can't do anything about it. If my car breaks down, it's up to me to handle it and I can.
Well, you moron, if you don't like transferring at the stations that require walking that half mile, don't transfer there if you can avoid it
Yeah, ad hominem's are great for making your point. I've lived in the NYC area for seven years now, I don't need tips getting around Manhattan. I have plenty of friends who live on the island and daily life chores are just more of a chore compared to suburban life. That's all. Do you get used to it? Sure. Are there other benefits to living in the most important city on the planet that outweigh those inconveniences for some people? Sure. Do I think it's simply personally exhausting and overwhelming? Yes.
Among "fat cities," Houston ranks No. 1, followed by Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Dallas, according to results released this morning on Good Morning America.
So that's two in Texas, the rest up north. Two of those (Chicago, Philly) have excellent public transportation systems. So there goes your theory.
Americans in general are fat. Period. There just happens to be a much higher concentration of image- and fitness-conscious people in the cities you mention. It's a matter of culture. Go walk around the Buckhead area of Atlanta. You won't find too many fatties. All young, very image-conscious professionals. Not too many good-ole boys either. The CITY of Atlanta is 80% black, anyway.
Now I understand this was probably meant as a troll
It wasn't.
Now take NYC or Pittsburgh, where I live. In Pittsburgh, I can take the bus anywhere in the city until about 1 or 2 in the morning depending on the night of the week. After that, I need to catch a cab, but that's the time they're most likely to be out looking for fares.
Ha! I happened to have lived in the Burgh for a couple years as well (in Squirrel Hill). The Burgh is different. It's truly still composed over "neighborly" neighborhoods in true Mr. Rogers fashion. Really, it's one of the more livable cities I've had the pleasure of being in...I have great fondness for that place. (too bad it has it negative population growth and can't manage to attract young professionals).
Ultimately driving or not driving is a lifestyle choice, and humans are amazingly adaptable. Pittsburgh is going to be an easier city, then say, LA, Atlanta, Dallas, or Houston to get along in without car. I had several housemates in Pittsburgh that didn't drive. They managed just fine.
The buses in Pittsburgh are cheap and convenient...not super dependable (at least while I lived there), and that was my biggest complaint. A lot of waiting. Waiting in the cold Pittsburgh rain. Or snow.
And, careful what you wish for. The pace of life in Pittsburgh ain't nothing like NYC. A lazy ride with a bunch of old women on the 61C down Murray is nothing like being stuffed in an overflowing subway car stuck between stations on a sweltering summer day. Or a manic cab ride through Manhattan (it's quaint about, oh, twice).
Hey, I couldn't agree with you more. My point was that NYC's system isn't a panacea, but like you say, at least it's an option.
You're right, Atlanta's traffic is an unmitigated disaster. I'm moving back to ATL, for personal reasons soon, and I'm not looking forward to spending most of my life in a car.
Uhm..I guess you're making a joke, but yeah, Atlanta was pretty much rebuilt from the ground up. But, ironically, that does not make it a well-designed city at all. Atlanta's downtown has no logical grid system. There's patches of grids, and just when it makes sense, everything changes. Some streets have numbered names (10th, 14th), but it's a cruel joke, as the system starts and stops arbitrarily and is interspersed with named streets. And let's not forget there are about 100 streets named Peachtree.
The reason Atlanta's so jumbled is because it grew at such an alarming rate. Neighborhoods grew into each other. In the 1980s and 90s, massive changes were implemented to many ramps and exchanges between its many interstates and highways...even downtown. It didn't need any logical pattern to street layout because nobody was walking anywhere anyway, and you just don't need the same orientational consistency. You figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, and that's all you need to know. Plus, there just wasn't the time do it right when you're constantly trying to manage an ever evolving traffic crisis.
Spent a lot of time in NYC, which has one of the "best" public transportation systems in the world. Spent a lot of time in Atlanta, which has one of the worst.
Here's the problem. Make all the claims you want about the great convenience of public transportation, but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store (one of dozens of spots available), putting your purchases in your trunk, and then pulling right back up to your abode. This is city life in Atlanta. You don't walk anywhere, ever. Even if it's right across the street, chances are the street is 4 lanes wide and you have to traverse a couple acres of parking lot to get there. Besides residential streets, just about every commercial street is a first class highway.
NYC? It's a hassle. Everyday life is a hassle. Going grocery shopping is a hassle. Purchasing anything that you can't carry easily in your arms is a hassle. People do it, but it's a hassle. Subways are extensive, but crowded, stations are nasty and ridiculously hot. You have to walk for a quarter mile in the maze of some large stations to just chage lines (i.e. times square/42nd street station), Trains often have panic-inducing delays where youre stuck on the train--hey the system's old, sometimes something malfunctions, sometimes somebody pulls the emergency break, sometimes somebody's causing trouble and they need to wait for authorities---maybe for 5 minutes, maybe for 50 (god help you if really were planning to jump off at the next stop to hit a restroom).
Taxis? Always available?! HA. Try catching a taxi anywhere in midtown around 11 to midnight on weekends when the theaters let out. Try catching a taxi anywhere during rush hours.
Now, transport in Atlanta isn't all fun and games either. Try coming home from work 5:30 on 285-West (Atlanta's perimeter). Atlanta's regarded as having one of the worst traffic situations of any major city in the nation. Already Atlantans have longer average commute (in time) of any major city. But on weekends, or during non-peak traffic times...it's simply a breeze.
Atlanta is a new city, that really began growing after the invention of the automobile. So where as an old city like NYC or Boston is actually built at the scale of the human, Atlanta, like most big western cities, is built at the scale of the car. Pedestrians are the exception, and they're taking big chances.
This makes for a really sprawling, uncozy, alienating, uninviting city life. But I don't feel like NYC, for all its humanscale traffic is much more cozy. It's a hectic headache.
There's gotta be new thinking in people moving...focusing not just on environment, but quality of life and practicality,
People will still buy studio albums. People will still buy merchandise. And people will buy concert tickets.
Eminem is filthy rich in the time of Kazaa. Britney and NSYNC did just fine in the time of Napster.
And this is the "best" (i.e. most popular) the labels have to offer us right now.
Apple sold $100,000 worth of music in their first 72 hours of online store operation. And they represent, what, 3%, at most 5% of the computing populace?
Will distributing music/movies be the road to riches that it is today? The market should decide, not lawyers.
It's not that artists won't create art without copyright; it's that their ability to do so will be severely compromised.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Copyright->expensive studio time? Copyright->profit? What basis do you have to suppose the Beatles or any other talented artist wouldn't profit handsomely from their efforts even without copyright? And, in any case, I don't advocate the elimination of copyright wholesale, just(!) a radical rethink of its current draconian and misguided implementation. Some artists clamor against P2P, some for. ALL the major labels VOCALLY oppose it. There's is an obviated service.
And, though it's oft mentioned, look at the adult movie industry. Doing well. Extremely well. What do they not do well? Protect their copyrights. Art--well, entertainment at least--will happily continue in an IP-free world.
Also, I wish people would stop citing Bach or Mozart. Unless you really advocate returning to a time where a wealthy aristocracy serves as the only support (and, consequently, the only audience) for music, you ought to accept that the situations are not comparable.
Ha! And what do you think the current situation is? Record labels ARE the modern "wealthy aristocracy" that hold their artists on retainer and supports their music production. The difference between nobility comissioning artists and modern record companies is that nobility commissioned art for art's sake...The record companies commission art for profit's sake. They are pimps, pure and simple. They offer "promotion' and "protection."
And that's not to say there isn't a place for agents, promotions, perhaps even distribution in the future. But the scale and nature of it will be (or ought to be) radically rethought. The labels provide a service, but self-preservation at all legal costs shouldn't be one of them.
And frankky, returning to Eleanor Rigby, the truth is production costs are not what they used to be. Wasn't there a recent Slashdot post exactly to that effect? With platforms like Pro Tools, etc., the landscape for production is changing, just as the landscape for distribution did.
Regardless, don't kid yourself...the labels take studio costs out of the group's cut off the top...before a single record is sold.
In a future without any respect for copyright whatsoever, live music will be all there is, because how are artists supposed to pay for expensive studio sessions when the albums they sell aren't going to make any money?...I give little credit to a business model that in retrospect might lead to "Sgt. Pepper" or "Abbey Road" not even existing.
Bullshit. In a past where there was no copyright (at least not in modern form), music flourished. Bach? Beethoven? Mozart? Do you really think Lennon&McCartney would not have put down their visions on tape if it wasn't for some legal guarantor of sales? Do you really think John Lennon (of ALL bad examples!) walked into the studio saying "Right, lads! Let's make us a SHITLOAD of money!"
Copyright emerged in regards to (and its earliest disputes concerned) two simple issues: Credit and profit. Don't take credit for someone else's work (really the root of copyright), don't make a profit off someone else's creativity. That's it. Sharing copies of music I own violates neither. "Piracy" properly defined should be limited to selling reproductions or knock offs misrepresented as the real thing. This is bad because it 1) dupes the consumer 2) dilutes the value of the real thing.
Sharing does neither as long as you 1) share, don't sell. 2) everyone in the transaction knows they're providing and receiving a copy.
That's it. It's that simple. And the "sharing dilutes value" argument is crap. It's value is only diluted if what you get isn't what was advertised. Art is intagible, has intagible value, the vanishing marginal cost of reproduction (nowadays) is a side effect. Yup, guess what, something that has near zero scarcity (i.e. transport media for reproducing musical art) is gonna have near zero value. Welcome to the free market. You know what IS scarce, though? Good art. Just like good science. There will always be a demand, people will always pay for artists to CREATE (not necessarily to distribute!). Shit, science is a great analogy: Academics give it away, every day, for free, to journals everywhere. They get paid. They're not living like rock stars, granted, but who says rock stars should live like rock stars? Industrialists? They go and patent their shit and it complicates everything (patents on methods? strategies? algorithms? intagibles? ideas?!)
And ironically enough, scientists, as the last bastion of free information, are the group most obsessed with proper citation, reference, and general acknowledgement of credit.
Intellectual property is an illusion. The sooner we come to grips with this unshakeable truth to sooner we can get over this next hurdle of human development.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? means "Who watches the watchers?"
And, aside from being cool 'cause it's latin, the most significant thing about the question is that its been around for millenia, and we still don't have an answer.
Yeah we do...the watched watch the watchers. This is called a representative democracy.
(Warning: for those interested in late 80s gaming, there's some U4 spoilers below):
I know people who became so enthralled with the completeness of Ultima IV's philosophy that it became a religion of sorts for them. People I know actually wore ankh's around their necks...NOT to signfiy a taste for Egyptian mythology (where the ankh originates), but rather because it was adopted as the spiritual symbol of the Ultima series....Similarly, the notion of an "avatar" from hinduism was badly bastardized to represent a morally enlightened being in the game's world.
Anyway...putting aside the mixed metaphor world of English medievalism/Hinduism/Egyptology/Pseudo-Latin spells aside, the systematicity of Ultima IV's philosophy hung together so well that's it was profound. Seriously, for an adolescent, it was remarkably profound. Eight virtues, each symbolized by a color, were derived from a mixture of the three overarching "Principles:" Truth, Love, and Courage (a la three primary [pigment] colors, red yellow and blue). Each virute exemplified by a character class, each character class with its own "home" city...with a natural, face valid correspondence of the character classes with their virtues (Mages valuing truth and honesty, the scientists of the game....Fighters valuing valor....The artsy Bard valuing compassion..etc.). And with one symbol that captured the whole interconnection.
And your job in the game was basically to discover this system. Though you start out a particular character class (not chosen on your whims, but rather based on a psychological battery of sorts of moral dillemas..more fun than it sounds), your quest was to become a master of all virtues...and enlightened avatar..while, you know, fulfilling the plot points of the game as well.
The face validity of this system just made SENSE even in "real life", at a time when most kids (especially geeks) value imposing an order and meaning on the organization of the world...Here was a mythos that was at once undogmatic and common sensical yet tantalizingly mystical...It set out a remarkably self-consistent framework for how the moral world was organized, and how to be an upstanding person in it.
The way the game climax brought all these concepts together...oh yeah it affected me when I was 13, believe me.
I never got so into it that I started carrying an ankh, but the game did develop a trekkie-like cult following. It was a world you could feel good about immersing yourself in. But it definitely had its place and time. There was a "critical period" of both target audience (disenfranchised adolescents) and technological innocence (when it was still OK that imagination had to fill out some of the graphical details). Now games and gamers are far too cynical for a game like Ultima IV. If you weren't that age at that time playing U4, you missed out on an incredible gaming experience.
Indeed, make that furnace filter the 3M Filtrete 1250 Ultra-allergen filter, and apparently you have a highly effective air purifier on the cheap. Several reports suggest this. Google for "box fan" and "filtrete"
e.g. www.onlineallergycenter.com/aircleaner/ w ww.healthhouse.org/new/press/A_guide_for_Healthie r_Home.pdf www.healthboards.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/0 00088.html etc,
I love my Nex II as well...although I have to say the one most glaringly absent feature is m3u playlist support. I wrote them about this almost two years ago...they replied that it would be a major firmware overhaul. Well, there's been two new products, much less firmware releases, since then and no playlist support. The FM radio is a nice bonus, but I'm not putting my money down on any thing new from Frontier until I see playlists.
Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.
By your own admition: Saturday night, posting to Slashdot.
You may be a technical guy, but c'mon, you aren't seriously fucking. Anything.
...someone could exploit this hair-trigger paranoia to frame YOU. Taking advantage of the State's draconian tactics was a common way to turn undesirables, competitors, or rivals into "political dissidents" in the Eastern Bloc days. A few well-planted pieces of evidence and allegations, and it was off to Siberia with you. Why take chances?
What with identity theft being the fastest growing crime ever, how hard is it to make some one look suspicious enough to suddenly earn a "disappearing?"
For those of you who take the sheep-like "I trust my govn't, they must have good reasons" stance....what if the good reasons are contrived? What if it's the govn't that's being duped? What if there's just a mix-up that makes some unfortunate links between you and some shady others?
When the transparency of your judicial system starts getting this cloudy, you're open to all kinds of corruption and manipulation....whether or not the original impetus was well-intentioned.
Actually, my buddy who's a Caltech grad tells me that since their official mascot is the beaver (they're so industrious, you see) the official motto among the students is "Beaver Fever--Snatch It!"
8.6Mb/s is snatching it, all right. But small consolation for never seeing the real thing, my dear Beavers, small consolation.
This might be an ignorant question, but what happenes if you tilt it.
Nothing, I think. These tubes will be less than the thickness of a human hair (according the article), so flow will be much more governed by capillary action and pressure gradients produced by heat differences.
The brute-force method is exactly why I and my colleagues have very serious doubts about this endeavor. While I myself am not a hippocampologist, I am a neuroscientist and work closely with a few specialists in the hippocampus. The article is a bit dismissive..a lot of people do have very detailed, very interesting theories about how the hippocampus does what it does. To just brute force trace anatomical connections misses the point of mechanism.
First off, the hippocampus is one of the most dynamic, plastic parts of the brain. The strong evidence is that one of its key jobs in forming memories is to associate highly unrelated representations stored somewhere out in cortex. For example, you want to rememeber where you parked your car when you go home to work, hippocampus binds the place in the lot with your car in your mind...and associates the whole configuration with quittin' time. Quickly. Dynamically. End of day comes around, hippocampus completes the scene by evoking a memory of where you parked your car. This means the cells of hippocampus subserve the binding of highly disparate representations over the course of even a single day--no way just matching inputs to outputs will capture that dynamism.
Second, what no one really does understand is how neurons communicate information in the first place. Yes, people understand that electrical impulses (action potentials) cause the release of chemical messengers (neurotransmitter) across the synapse. But how is information actually encoded? There are rate code theories (all that matters is frequency of neuron firing) and, gaining wider support, are time code theories: the time at which spikes occur carries information in and of itself, in relation to the timing of other neurons. More firing doesn't just mean "more" of whatever signal that neuron conveys. This just skims the surface of the enormous complexity of neural systems that would have to be understood and implemented by someone producing a neural prosthetic that has some hope of working. Blind black boxing isn't going to cut it in the brain.
And, of course there are scads of neurochemicals, receptors, second-messenger pathways--subtle and sublime mechanisms that fundamental impact information processing. AND, the hippocampus isn't some cluster of a few hundred cells. We're talking about 150,000 neurons in the rat, probably hundreds of millions in the human. This is a sizable strip of brain deep in your temporal lobe.
Anyway, the hippocampus is a complicated organ. Beyond motor or sensory augmentation, I just don't think any neural prosthetic is ready for R&D prime time. I hope this group proves me wrong.
Tangentially, I'd like to add that reconstructing anything bit by bit does not add to understanding. If I could reconstruct a brain atom by atom, I wouldn't understand any better how the brain works. That's why models are, by definitions, always abstractions and simplifications of the real system. That's the only way we learn.
I use MATLAB every day for my neural network simulations. MATLAB is incredibly powerful, incredibly flexible. It is also incredibly expensive. And the decision to port it to OS X was about the best decision The Mathworks has made recently.
MATLAB offers student versions for about $99 a pop, which is dirt cheap considering its $1000 price tag for the retail version. Many universities of course have dramatic discounts, but then, you have to have be affiliated with a univeristy. Even the student version requires you to attest that youre using it for course work or student-level research and not commercial gain.
MATLAB has a number of drawbacks. Price is the largest. To enforce its license, MATLAB requires you to run the onerous and clumsy FlexLM license manager. FlexLM is brought to you by GLOBEtrotter....a division of that bastion of consumer rights, Macrovision. That should speak volumes. The license manager makes doing a lot of simple things stupidly difficult, especially if you're (like me) mobile and have to authenticate with a central server running the license manager. I can get into details if people have questions.
On top of that, MATLAB requires a yearly "maintenance" fee. It's more or less software as a service. Apparently, if you let the maintenance contract lapse, you can still use MATLAB, but you get no more support and cannot apply any new updates. That may be, but the particular license my university employs will cause my copy to simply stop working after April 1 if I don't renew. (April 1 being the beginning of the Mathworks license year. I don't think they see the irony in choosing that date).
The maintenance contract does not apply, AFAIK, to the student version.
On top of THAT, the student version or the $1000 base retail installation just gets you the MATLAB core. Which, granted, is extremely powerful. But the Mathworks also has a couple dozen or so Toolboxes, each with a range of specialized functions and tools (i.e. Signal Processing, Image Processing, MATLAB-to-C Compiler, Symbolic Math, etc. etc.). Each of these comes for an additional price, and its own maintenance fees. IIRC, these are like $500-$700 more each.
Did I mention all these prices are for licenses on a per seat basis? Any institution or company thinking about MATLAB is going to shell out serious bucks for the privelage.
On the other hand...MATLAB is a serious, extensible, highly flexible platform for technical and mathematical computing. I find that I can prototype programs for solving scientific problems in MATLAB far faster than I can in any other language. And its visualization features are truly impressive...even if the Handle Graphics system it uses is SO DAMN KLUDGY to program. You can customize visualizations just about however you can imagine...ALTHOUGH, some simple customizations are going to be UNNECESSARILY tedious to program.
Another drawback to programming in MATLAB is speed. MATLAB ("Matrix Laboratory") is exceptionally optimized for handling calculations of very large matrices. However, because it's interpreted, if you have any loops, it's going to be very slow going. There often many tricks to "vectorize" operations you'd normally do iteratively in other languages, but often the only solution is the ol' for-next or while loop. These are slow. Very very slow. Yes, there's a compiler, but in my experience the compiler isn't that great at optimizing code...and, did I mention it costs extra?
Anyway, MATLAB is amazing in its breadth and depth of power. I haven't even touched on its capabilities for engineers, like the SimuLink system design simulator, and hardware interface toolboxes. I can't imagine a problem needing to use a "mix" of math packages (as the original poster asked) if you're using MATLAB. But the purchase and ownership costs are very steep.
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Wow. What a polemic. I knew I'd get all the die-hard New Yorkers' panties twisted, but sheesh. Read my post again, I have nothing pleasant to say about traffic/transportation in Atlanta.
Maybe this wasn't clear, but I think cities at the scale of the car are a BAD THING. It's just that NYC's answer isn't the panacea the poster I was replying to made it out to be. People deal, sure, people can deal with a lot things.
Ultimately, the problem with public transport is a matter of control. Going exactly where you want, when you want, on your own terms. Getting stuck in the subway is panicky (for me anyway) because you can't do anything about it. If my car breaks down, it's up to me to handle it and I can.
Well, you moron, if you don't like transferring at the stations that require walking that half mile, don't transfer there if you can avoid it
Yeah, ad hominem's are great for making your point. I've lived in the NYC area for seven years now, I don't need tips getting around Manhattan. I have plenty of friends who live on the island and daily life chores are just more of a chore compared to suburban life. That's all. Do you get used to it? Sure. Are there other benefits to living in the most important city on the planet that outweigh those inconveniences for some people? Sure. Do I think it's simply personally exhausting and overwhelming? Yes.
De gustibus non est disputandum
Uhm, no, according to this story at ABC News:
Among "fat cities," Houston ranks No. 1, followed by Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Dallas, according to results released this morning on Good Morning America.
So that's two in Texas, the rest up north. Two of those (Chicago, Philly) have excellent public transportation systems. So there goes your theory.
Americans in general are fat. Period. There just happens to be a much higher concentration of image- and fitness-conscious people in the cities you mention. It's a matter of culture. Go walk around the Buckhead area of Atlanta. You won't find too many fatties. All young, very image-conscious professionals. Not too many good-ole boys either. The CITY of Atlanta is 80% black, anyway.
Now I understand this was probably meant as a troll
It wasn't.
Now take NYC or Pittsburgh, where I live. In Pittsburgh, I can take the bus anywhere in the city until about 1 or 2 in the morning depending on the night of the week. After that, I need to catch a cab, but that's the time they're most likely to be out looking for fares.
Ha! I happened to have lived in the Burgh for a couple years as well (in Squirrel Hill). The Burgh is different. It's truly still composed over "neighborly" neighborhoods in true Mr. Rogers fashion. Really, it's one of the more livable cities I've had the pleasure of being in...I have great fondness for that place. (too bad it has it negative population growth and can't manage to attract young professionals).
Ultimately driving or not driving is a lifestyle choice, and humans are amazingly adaptable. Pittsburgh is going to be an easier city, then say, LA, Atlanta, Dallas, or Houston to get along in without car. I had several housemates in Pittsburgh that didn't drive. They managed just fine.
The buses in Pittsburgh are cheap and convenient...not super dependable (at least while I lived there), and that was my biggest complaint. A lot of waiting. Waiting in the cold Pittsburgh rain. Or snow.
And, careful what you wish for. The pace of life in Pittsburgh ain't nothing like NYC. A lazy ride with a bunch of old women on the 61C down Murray is nothing like being stuffed in an overflowing subway car stuck between stations on a sweltering summer day. Or a manic cab ride through Manhattan (it's quaint about, oh, twice).
Hey, I couldn't agree with you more. My point was that NYC's system isn't a panacea, but like you say, at least it's an option.
You're right, Atlanta's traffic is an unmitigated disaster. I'm moving back to ATL, for personal reasons soon, and I'm not looking forward to spending most of my life in a car.
Uhm..I guess you're making a joke, but yeah, Atlanta was pretty much rebuilt from the ground up. But, ironically, that does not make it a well-designed city at all. Atlanta's downtown has no logical grid system. There's patches of grids, and just when it makes sense, everything changes. Some streets have numbered names (10th, 14th), but it's a cruel joke, as the system starts and stops arbitrarily and is interspersed with named streets. And let's not forget there are about 100 streets named Peachtree.
The reason Atlanta's so jumbled is because it grew at such an alarming rate. Neighborhoods grew into each other. In the 1980s and 90s, massive changes were implemented to many ramps and exchanges between its many interstates and highways...even downtown. It didn't need any logical pattern to street layout because nobody was walking anywhere anyway, and you just don't need the same orientational consistency. You figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, and that's all you need to know. Plus, there just wasn't the time do it right when you're constantly trying to manage an ever evolving traffic crisis.
Spent a lot of time in NYC, which has one of the "best" public transportation systems in the world. Spent a lot of time in Atlanta, which has one of the worst.
Here's the problem. Make all the claims you want about the great convenience of public transportation, but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store (one of dozens of spots available), putting your purchases in your trunk, and then pulling right back up to your abode. This is city life in Atlanta. You don't walk anywhere, ever. Even if it's right across the street, chances are the street is 4 lanes wide and you have to traverse a couple acres of parking lot to get there. Besides residential streets, just about every commercial street is a first class highway.
NYC? It's a hassle. Everyday life is a hassle. Going grocery shopping is a hassle. Purchasing anything that you can't carry easily in your arms is a hassle. People do it, but it's a hassle. Subways are extensive, but crowded, stations are nasty and ridiculously hot. You have to walk for a quarter mile in the maze of some large stations to just chage lines (i.e. times square/42nd street station), Trains often have panic-inducing delays where youre stuck on the train--hey the system's old, sometimes something malfunctions, sometimes somebody pulls the emergency break, sometimes somebody's causing trouble and they need to wait for authorities---maybe for 5 minutes, maybe for 50 (god help you if really were planning to jump off at the next stop to hit a restroom).
Taxis? Always available?! HA. Try catching a taxi anywhere in midtown around 11 to midnight on weekends when the theaters let out. Try catching a taxi anywhere during rush hours.
Now, transport in Atlanta isn't all fun and games either. Try coming home from work 5:30 on 285-West (Atlanta's perimeter). Atlanta's regarded as having one of the worst traffic situations of any major city in the nation. Already Atlantans have longer average commute (in time) of any major city. But on weekends, or during non-peak traffic times...it's simply a breeze.
Atlanta is a new city, that really began growing after the invention of the automobile. So where as an old city like NYC or Boston is actually built at the scale of the human, Atlanta, like most big western cities, is built at the scale of the car. Pedestrians are the exception, and they're taking big chances.
This makes for a really sprawling, uncozy, alienating, uninviting city life. But I don't feel like NYC, for all its humanscale traffic is much more cozy. It's a hectic headache.
There's gotta be new thinking in people moving...focusing not just on environment, but quality of life and practicality,
People will still buy studio albums. People will still buy merchandise. And people will buy concert tickets.
Eminem is filthy rich in the time of Kazaa. Britney and NSYNC did just fine in the time of Napster.
And this is the "best" (i.e. most popular) the labels have to offer us right now.
Apple sold $100,000 worth of music in their first 72 hours of online store operation. And they represent, what, 3%, at most 5% of the computing populace?
Will distributing music/movies be the road to riches that it is today? The market should decide, not lawyers.
It's not that artists won't create art without copyright; it's that their ability to do so will be severely compromised.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Copyright->expensive studio time? Copyright->profit? What basis do you have to suppose the Beatles or any other talented artist wouldn't profit handsomely from their efforts even without copyright? And, in any case, I don't advocate the elimination of copyright wholesale, just(!) a radical rethink of its current draconian and misguided implementation. Some artists clamor against P2P, some for. ALL the major labels VOCALLY oppose it. There's is an obviated service.
And, though it's oft mentioned, look at the adult movie industry. Doing well. Extremely well. What do they not do well? Protect their copyrights. Art--well, entertainment at least--will happily continue in an IP-free world.
Also, I wish people would stop citing Bach or Mozart. Unless you really advocate returning to a time where a wealthy aristocracy serves as the only support (and, consequently, the only audience) for music, you ought to accept that the situations are not comparable.
Ha! And what do you think the current situation is? Record labels ARE the modern "wealthy aristocracy" that hold their artists on retainer and supports their music production. The difference between nobility comissioning artists and modern record companies is that nobility commissioned art for art's sake...The record companies commission art for profit's sake. They are pimps, pure and simple. They offer "promotion' and "protection."
And that's not to say there isn't a place for agents, promotions, perhaps even distribution in the future. But the scale and nature of it will be (or ought to be) radically rethought. The labels provide a service, but self-preservation at all legal costs shouldn't be one of them.
And frankky, returning to Eleanor Rigby, the truth is production costs are not what they used to be. Wasn't there a recent Slashdot post exactly to that effect? With platforms like Pro Tools, etc., the landscape for production is changing, just as the landscape for distribution did.
Regardless, don't kid yourself...the labels take studio costs out of the group's cut off the top...before a single record is sold.
In a future without any respect for copyright whatsoever, live music will be all there is, because how are artists supposed to pay for expensive studio sessions when the albums they sell aren't going to make any money?...I give little credit to a business model that in retrospect might lead to "Sgt. Pepper" or "Abbey Road" not even existing.
Bullshit. In a past where there was no copyright (at least not in modern form), music flourished. Bach? Beethoven? Mozart? Do you really think Lennon&McCartney would not have put down their visions on tape if it wasn't for some legal guarantor of sales? Do you really think John Lennon (of ALL bad examples!) walked into the studio saying "Right, lads! Let's make us a SHITLOAD of money!"
Copyright emerged in regards to (and its earliest disputes concerned) two simple issues: Credit and profit. Don't take credit for someone else's work (really the root of copyright), don't make a profit off someone else's creativity. That's it. Sharing copies of music I own violates neither. "Piracy" properly defined should be limited to selling reproductions or knock offs misrepresented as the real thing. This is bad because it 1) dupes the consumer 2) dilutes the value of the real thing.
Sharing does neither as long as you 1) share, don't sell. 2) everyone in the transaction knows they're providing and receiving a copy.
That's it. It's that simple. And the "sharing dilutes value" argument is crap. It's value is only diluted if what you get isn't what was advertised. Art is intagible, has intagible value, the vanishing marginal cost of reproduction (nowadays) is a side effect. Yup, guess what, something that has near zero scarcity (i.e. transport media for reproducing musical art) is gonna have near zero value. Welcome to the free market. You know what IS scarce, though? Good art. Just like good science. There will always be a demand, people will always pay for artists to CREATE (not necessarily to distribute!). Shit, science is a great analogy: Academics give it away, every day, for free, to journals everywhere. They get paid. They're not living like rock stars, granted, but who says rock stars should live like rock stars? Industrialists? They go and patent their shit and it complicates everything (patents on methods? strategies? algorithms? intagibles? ideas?!)
And ironically enough, scientists, as the last bastion of free information, are the group most obsessed with proper citation, reference, and general acknowledgement of credit.
Intellectual property is an illusion. The sooner we come to grips with this unshakeable truth to sooner we can get over this next hurdle of human development.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? means "Who watches the watchers?"
And, aside from being cool 'cause it's latin, the most significant thing about the question is that its been around for millenia, and we still don't have an answer.
Yeah we do...the watched watch the watchers.
This is called a representative democracy.
It has nothing to do with watching you in your house, or in your neighbourhood. It has nothing to do with people watching random cameras.
Slippery slope.
Privacy is a right, and it means that noone may force you to reveal stuff you want to keep hidden, if its none of their bussiness.
Homeland security is everyone's business, comrade.
And it's all homeland security.
(Warning: for those interested in late 80s gaming, there's some U4 spoilers below):
I know people who became so enthralled with the completeness of Ultima IV's philosophy that it became a religion of sorts for them. People I know actually wore ankh's around their necks...NOT to signfiy a taste for Egyptian mythology (where the ankh originates), but rather because it was adopted as the spiritual symbol of the Ultima series....Similarly, the notion of an "avatar" from hinduism was badly bastardized to represent a morally enlightened being in the game's world.
Anyway...putting aside the mixed metaphor world of English medievalism/Hinduism/Egyptology/Pseudo-Latin spells aside, the systematicity of Ultima IV's philosophy hung together so well that's it was profound. Seriously, for an adolescent, it was remarkably profound. Eight virtues, each symbolized by a color, were derived from a mixture of the three overarching "Principles:" Truth, Love, and Courage (a la three primary [pigment] colors, red yellow and blue). Each virute exemplified by a character class, each character class with its own "home" city...with a natural, face valid correspondence of the character classes with their virtues (Mages valuing truth and honesty, the scientists of the game....Fighters valuing valor....The artsy Bard valuing compassion..etc.). And with one symbol that captured the whole interconnection.
And your job in the game was basically to discover this system. Though you start out a particular character class (not chosen on your whims, but rather based on a psychological battery of sorts of moral dillemas..more fun than it sounds), your quest was to become a master of all virtues...and enlightened avatar..while, you know, fulfilling the plot points of the game as well.
The face validity of this system just made SENSE even in "real life", at a time when most kids (especially geeks) value imposing an order and meaning on the organization of the world...Here was a mythos that was at once undogmatic and common sensical yet tantalizingly mystical...It set out a remarkably self-consistent framework for how the moral world was organized, and how to be an upstanding person in it.
The way the game climax brought all these concepts together...oh yeah it affected me when I was 13, believe me.
I never got so into it that I started carrying an ankh, but the game did develop a trekkie-like cult following. It was a world you could feel good about immersing yourself in. But it definitely had its place and time. There was a "critical period" of both target audience (disenfranchised adolescents) and technological innocence (when it was still OK that imagination had to fill out some of the graphical details). Now games and gamers are far too cynical for a game like Ultima IV. If you weren't that age at that time playing U4, you missed out on an incredible gaming experience.
Actually, iTunes has it built in alread. I just ripped a CD to AAC, and then used iTunes to convert the AAC to MP3.
Does this work with DRM protected AACs too, though? And is the mp3 then somehow drm tagged or protected as well?
Indeed, make that furnace filter the 3M Filtrete 1250 Ultra-allergen filter, and apparently you have a highly effective air purifier on the cheap. Several reports suggest this. Google for "box fan" and "filtrete"
w ww.healthhouse.org/new/press/A_guide_for_Healthie r_Home.pdf0 00088.html
e.g.
www.onlineallergycenter.com/aircleaner/
www.healthboards.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/
etc,
I love my Nex II as well...although I have to say the one most glaringly absent feature is m3u playlist support. I wrote them about this almost two years ago...they replied that it would be a major firmware overhaul. Well, there's been two new products, much less firmware releases, since then and no playlist support. The FM radio is a nice bonus, but I'm not putting my money down on any thing new from Frontier until I see playlists.
Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.
By your own admition: Saturday night, posting to Slashdot.
You may be a technical guy, but c'mon, you aren't seriously fucking. Anything.
What with identity theft being the fastest growing crime ever, how hard is it to make some one look suspicious enough to suddenly earn a "disappearing?"
For those of you who take the sheep-like "I trust my govn't, they must have good reasons" stance....what if the good reasons are contrived? What if it's the govn't that's being duped? What if there's just a mix-up that makes some unfortunate links between you and some shady others?
When the transparency of your judicial system starts getting this cloudy, you're open to all kinds of corruption and manipulation....whether or not the original impetus was well-intentioned.
8.6Mb/s is snatching it
Yeah, yeah. I meant Gb/s. Still not fast enough to get you laid.
Actually, my buddy who's a Caltech grad tells me that since their official mascot is the beaver (they're so industrious, you see) the official motto among the students is
"Beaver Fever--Snatch It!"
8.6Mb/s is snatching it, all right. But small consolation for never seeing the real thing, my dear Beavers, small consolation.
This might be an ignorant question, but what happenes if you tilt it.
Nothing, I think. These tubes will be less than the thickness of a human hair (according the article), so flow will be much more governed by capillary action and pressure gradients produced by heat differences.
Thanks for the link to that eye-opening interview on corporatemofo. The interview sums up the whole mess in K-12 texts nicely.
Plasticity is an issue. Over-simplification is an issue. Please see my earlier post on the matter.
The brute-force method is exactly why I and my colleagues have very serious doubts about this endeavor. While I myself am not a hippocampologist, I am a neuroscientist and work closely with a few specialists in the hippocampus. The article is a bit dismissive..a lot of people do have very detailed, very interesting theories about how the hippocampus does what it does. To just brute force trace anatomical connections misses the point of mechanism.
First off, the hippocampus is one of the most dynamic, plastic parts of the brain. The strong evidence is that one of its key jobs in forming memories is to associate highly unrelated representations stored somewhere out in cortex. For example, you want to rememeber where you parked your car when you go home to work, hippocampus binds the place in the lot with your car in your mind...and associates the whole configuration with quittin' time. Quickly. Dynamically. End of day comes around, hippocampus completes the scene by evoking a memory of where you parked your car. This means the cells of hippocampus subserve the binding of highly disparate representations over the course of even a single day--no way just matching inputs to outputs will capture that dynamism.
Second, what no one really does understand is how neurons communicate information in the first place. Yes, people understand that electrical impulses (action potentials) cause the release of chemical messengers (neurotransmitter) across the synapse. But how is information actually encoded? There are rate code theories (all that matters is frequency of neuron firing) and, gaining wider support, are time code theories: the time at which spikes occur carries information in and of itself, in relation to the timing of other neurons. More firing doesn't just mean "more" of whatever signal that neuron conveys. This just skims the surface of the enormous complexity of neural systems that would have to be understood and implemented by someone producing a neural prosthetic that has some hope of working. Blind black boxing isn't going to cut it in the brain.
And, of course there are scads of neurochemicals, receptors, second-messenger pathways--subtle and sublime mechanisms that fundamental impact information processing. AND, the hippocampus isn't some cluster of a few hundred cells. We're talking about 150,000 neurons in the rat, probably hundreds of millions in the human. This is a sizable strip of brain deep in your temporal lobe.
Anyway, the hippocampus is a complicated organ. Beyond motor or sensory augmentation, I just don't think any neural prosthetic is ready for R&D prime time. I hope this group proves me wrong.
Tangentially, I'd like to add that reconstructing anything bit by bit does not add to understanding. If I could reconstruct a brain atom by atom, I wouldn't understand any better how the brain works. That's why models are, by definitions, always abstractions and simplifications of the real system. That's the only way we learn.
I use MATLAB every day for my neural network simulations. MATLAB is incredibly powerful, incredibly flexible. It is also incredibly expensive. And the decision to port it to OS X was about the best decision The Mathworks has made recently.
MATLAB offers student versions for about $99 a pop, which is dirt cheap considering its $1000 price tag for the retail version. Many universities of course have dramatic discounts, but then, you have to have be affiliated with a univeristy. Even the student version requires you to attest that youre using it for course work or student-level research and not commercial gain.
MATLAB has a number of drawbacks. Price is the largest. To enforce its license, MATLAB requires you to run the onerous and clumsy FlexLM license manager. FlexLM is brought to you by GLOBEtrotter....a division of that bastion of consumer rights, Macrovision. That should speak volumes. The license manager makes doing a lot of simple things stupidly difficult, especially if you're (like me) mobile and have to authenticate with a central server running the license manager. I can get into details if people have questions.
On top of that, MATLAB requires a yearly "maintenance" fee. It's more or less software as a service. Apparently, if you let the maintenance contract lapse, you can still use MATLAB, but you get no more support and cannot apply any new updates. That may be, but the particular license my university employs will cause my copy to simply stop working after April 1 if I don't renew. (April 1 being the beginning of the Mathworks license year. I don't think they see the irony in choosing that date).
The maintenance contract does not apply, AFAIK, to the student version.
On top of THAT, the student version or the $1000 base retail installation just gets you the MATLAB core. Which, granted, is extremely powerful. But the Mathworks also has a couple dozen or so Toolboxes, each with a range of specialized functions and tools (i.e. Signal Processing, Image Processing, MATLAB-to-C Compiler, Symbolic Math, etc. etc.). Each of these comes for an additional price, and its own maintenance fees. IIRC, these are like $500-$700 more each.
Did I mention all these prices are for licenses on a per seat basis? Any institution or company thinking about MATLAB is going to shell out serious bucks for the privelage.
On the other hand...MATLAB is a serious, extensible, highly flexible platform for technical and mathematical computing. I find that I can prototype programs for solving scientific problems in MATLAB far faster than I can in any other language. And its visualization features are truly impressive...even if the Handle Graphics system it uses is SO DAMN KLUDGY to program. You can customize visualizations just about however you can imagine...ALTHOUGH, some simple customizations are going to be UNNECESSARILY tedious to program.
Another drawback to programming in MATLAB is speed. MATLAB ("Matrix Laboratory") is exceptionally optimized for handling calculations of very large matrices. However, because it's interpreted, if you have any loops, it's going to be very slow going. There often many tricks to "vectorize" operations you'd normally do iteratively in other languages, but often the only solution is the ol' for-next or while loop. These are slow. Very very slow. Yes, there's a compiler, but in my experience the compiler isn't that great at optimizing code...and, did I mention it costs extra?
Anyway, MATLAB is amazing in its breadth and depth of power. I haven't even touched on its capabilities for engineers, like the SimuLink system design simulator, and hardware interface toolboxes. I can't imagine a problem needing to use a "mix" of math packages (as the original poster asked) if you're using MATLAB. But the purchase and ownership costs are very steep.