Last I heard, sometime this year, the biggest supercomputers (thousands of nodes) were just now starting to approach the operational complexity of the human brain, as measured in switches per second and cross-connection capability.
a humanoid could only have fake emotions (whether it is bluffing you or not...)
By what authority do you say that? Unless you understand the exact physical mechanism by which emotions exist, and can say that it can only happen in wetware, I don't see how you can say this.
I do not argue for the absolute possibility of machine intelligence, I argue that it's not possible to rule it out (currently). Maybe someday we'll know how brains work and will be able to say "we can't duplicate this." But not today.
Also, it's entirely arguable that nothing but a full human will have HUMAN emotions. But that doesn't mean that a created being can't have its own emotions, which may or may not have similar human emotions.
Certainly, nothing that we have built or even conceived of is capable of having any kind of emotions, human or not, but since we have very little clue how our own emotions or thoughts work, there's no basis for saying that they couldn't be done some other way.
There is an argument that could win the "none but humans" side, the same one that argues that alien life cannot exist: religion. If you have a religious belief that self-awareness and true intelligence comes only from a soul granted by a supernatural force, then all bets are off. But that's a matter of faith and is outside the realm of argument; you can believe whatever you want when you waive the need for proof.
Unfortunately, we don't really have the first clue about what sentience really is; we are self aware, but we don't know why or what it really means. If we can't even describe what being sentient means for ourselves, it's going to be tough to define it for a new form of intelligence, if/when one ever comes about.
I've not heard anyone, even in the AI field if they're being truthful, that will even say that we have any clue that we're even going in the right direction, because we don't really know in which direction sentience lies.
Every AI we have now is fake, and AFAIK no AI that we're working on (for those who haven't given up yet) shows any real promise of ever becoming anything BUT fake.
But since we don't really know how self-aware-ness works in our own brains, it's not really possible to discount the possibility that a true machine intelligence is possible. But for the same reason, we don't really have any chance of building a real AI from any technology that springs from our current (lack of) understanding.
But making a running robot isn't even a PRETEND step in the right direction.
Sure, when we start getting towards sentience. Anything that is self-aware and capable of higher level communications should be granted some level of rights. The rights of a sentient creature should not be based on whether they think with water and carbon, or silicon, or whether they have testicles or a certain skin color.
But this is just a clever toy. It's no more aware of itself than Eliza is. They aren't even TRYING to go for AI, just fun toys.
The first AI (if/when) will probably NOT be in a robot; it'll be too large to be mobile, perhaps it'll even be a distributed supercomputer. Nevertheless, it also should be granted rights. Even if that day ever comes, it'll still probably be a long time, if ever, that the machinery necessary would be small enough to put inside a humanoid robot. I could see a humanoid robot being under the control of a machine intelligence via remote link, if the link is clever enough, it might even feel the body as it's "self."
There are many people and small research companies that invent things but can't, or are not interested in, exploiting the patents themselves. Universities are a good example; they invent tons of stuff, and most are not legally allowed to directly own for-profit industries, so they sell the rights or spin off a separate legal entity to exploit the invention.
Your proposal steals directly from the people who are doing the inventing by reducing the value of the goods they have to sell without compensating them in any way. It does not discourage the buyers from buying, it simply lowers the sale price.
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
I like to do offsite backup, and an easy way to do it is to have a hard drive sitting on a machine somewhere else, and just RSync it periodically. I start it up, it runs for many hours, but what do I care?
This can easily saturate a cable connection for > a day at a time, though usage goes down if I haven't changed much recently.
Most of my traffic takes place on port 22, and good luck figuring out what it is, unless you know a good exploit against SSH. I paid for bandwidth and it's not their f'in business what I do with it.
In fact, they don't WANT to make it their business to know what it is. As soon as they demonstrate the ability or willingness to police based on perceived legality of the material, the cease becoming common carriers, and they become RESPONSIBLE for the materials they carry. If they do so, then RIAA/MPAA/whoever is fully able to expect them to do their policing for them, or to be taken to court for trafficing in stolen goods.
Here's the reason: The image sensor on the Digital Rebel is smaller than a 35mm frame. This means that much of the outer edges of the image painted by a 35mm lens is wasted; it falls outside the edge of the chip. Moreover, keeping distortion and vignetting down in the outer edge of the lens is the most expensive part of making a lens. By building a lens especially for the Rebel, they were able to make the lens smaller, lighter, and more compact than if it had to be able to fit a film camera.
The reason it doesn't physically fit a film camera is that it protrudes into the camera past the lens mount; remember, it doesn't have to paint as big an area in the back of the camera, so they can shift the whole lens back a bit, the rear part of it coming into the camera body a bit.
If you wanted to take a film EOS body and mill it out so that the lens would fit, it would work, but the edges of the image would be vignetted, and the distortion would probably be bad.
All in all, it was a good move. I own a digital rebel, and the kit lens is pretty nice for $100, especially for those of us just getting started in the SLR world (my previous SLR was an all-manual T-mount from the 70's).
Also, since that lens is not available for sale without the camera, it's not really much of an issue. Canon has stated that they don't really intend to make any more EF-S lenses, this was just a clever, cheap hack that let them comfortably hit the $1000 price point. This has been a huge win for them; I personally know 5 other people who have picked up digital rebels in the last 2 months.
While this may make sense in Scotland, does it really make sense in places where broadband is more readily available?
Maybe not, but that still leaves out the U.S.
There are HUGE areas of the US where broadband is not available. Heck, the town where I grew up still doesn't have an ISP within 30 miles of it; it's long distance for dial-up.
When I was going to college in the '80s, it was the golden age of BBSs; and there was not ONE in the entire AREA CODE where I grew up.
Certainly these days broadband is available in some cities there, but it's far from ubiquitous.
Libraries are an important part of levelling the playing field for the disadvantaged; rich folks could just go buy whatever materials they want. Sure "anyone who's anyone" can get broadband "if they don't live in the sticks." But it's just the people who "aren't anyone" or who do live in the sticks that libraries are most able to help.
Author states that it's important to use only pressed CDs for just this reason.
Also, the author is in Scotland and states that broadband penetration is 5 to 10% there, which means 90 to 95% of the population is NOT going to be able to download these in a reasonable manner.
Even in the US, there are large chunks of the population where broadband is not available, even just a few miles out of large cities, sometimes.
Of course, after reading about the credit card prank, I realized that anyone stealing the card would just sign it themselves and not get checked. Guess I'll write PLEASE CHECK ID on it.
Starting about a year or two ago, merchants around here (SE Michigan) started checking sigs on cards. Since then, I have NOT ONCE had anyone NOT check my signature. Drones in every place from the gas station to Best Buy to bookstores to grocery stores, they ALL ask for the card, and they check, and when they see that I haven't signed my card, they ask for ID. BTW, they actually RECOMMEND not signing the card, because then the bearer WILL be asked for ID; it's an anti-fraud measure.
I have all the video that I own in a database, if that's what you mean. A certain (to remain unnamed) percentage is porn. When you get to the point where you have thousands of VCD/DVD discs in binders on the shelf, you need some way to know what you already have.
Heck, on a couple of occasions where I forgot to bring my palm pilot with me with a copy of the database, I've wound up buying duplicates of DVDs I already owned. At least I caught it before I opened them and was able to return them.
This means that you can take almost any Pentax lens on the market, new or used, and make it work on most modern pentax bodies. Can't say that for Canon, can we?
No, but the current, all-electronic Canon mount has been around for some time, and they are all interoperable.
Yes, Pentax lenses are interchangeable back to the 70's, but that also means that they have been unable to take advantage of the benefits that going to an all-electronic mount would gain them. This means that, even though you could theoretically go buy a lens from 1981 and use it on your Pentax body, even if you go out and buy a brand new lens for it, it's not going to perform as well as a nice shiny Canon USM lens.
The ISA slot is a standard going back a long time, too, and there are a few people that still want to use some crufty old data-aquisition board or something and want an ISA slot, but at some point you need to just give up and say "to hell with it, just buy new equipment, including this ancient standard costs money on every mainboard and practially nobody uses it."
I use zmodem every day in a production environment, and probably will for several years to come. See, I have to build systems that talk to the IRS and other (state) DORs, over dial-up. Yes, they're working on a VPN solution, but you know, this is the IRS...
I agree that if I were to learn photography again from scratch, ONE of the tools I'd have would be a full manual SLR, and the K1000 is one of the best, though I'd look into Nikon F bodies and Olympus OM-2s as well, and see what you like. Also talk to the people at the store and see if there are any SLRs in your price range that will allow you to preserve your investment in lenses/strobes/etc when you trade up your camera body. A full manual SLR may not have that as a reasonable option, so you may want to go with something like a Canon Rebel, which can still be used perfectly well as a manual camera when you want to.
A comment though; I actually think that digital has a real place in learning photography. Maybe the best setup would be a combination of a film SLR and a relatively cheap digital. Digital is FANTASTIC in that you can shoot a TON and get a lot of feedback. I'm not talking necessarily about the LCD either; they're too small and inaccurate for a really accurate look at the photo; they're mainly good to see if someone's eyes were closed, the framing is about what you intended, and to check the histogram if you have that feature.
But any pro (in any endeavour) will tell you that the best way to get good is to practice, a hell of a lot. Most pros shoot thousands to tens of thousands of frames a year. I used to as a teenager, but that was because I was shooting black-and-white, bulk loaded film which cost far less than a buck a roll, and I was developing it myself, again for less than a buck a roll.
That's still an option; you can still shoot black and white and develop yourself, and honestly, you can probably learn as much or more about most things with B&W than with color; I still love B&W though I rarely shoot it anymore.
But honestly, darkrooms are messy and smelly and expensive to set up, and many folks are shutting theirs down and using photoshop, which most agree can do more than a chemical darkroom.
You can get the same quantity of practice for practically no per-shot cost with a point-and-shoot digital. Some, such as the Canon A-series digitals, are actually quite full-featured cameras, and even have full manual modes. There's nothing magical about an SLR; sure, it's eminently versatile, and should be the #1 choice, but you can get plenty of work done with a small camera as well.
Also, you'll want a small camera anyway. An important rule to remember is "you can't take pictures if you don't have a camera." Any pro or serious amateur I've talked to may have a half dozen SLR bodies, but you can bet he's got a point-and-shoot to drop in his coat pocket when walking around the park, and I've seen plenty of nice photos in online galleries where the caption says "I saw this great photo waiting to be taken, sure glad I put my little point-and-shoot in my pocket that day!"
I think it would be well worth picking one up eventually, though perhaps after an SLR; old Canon 2mp or 3mp A series digitals should be down around $200 or so if you can find one.
A few suggestions on reading materials, at the risk of slashdotting the servers: photo.net and luminous-landscape.com - read everything you can find there, push the shutter button 20,000 times or so in the next 12 months, and you should be on your way.
I think you can learn either way. I learned photography basics as a 12-year old with a full manual SLR. By the time I was 15 I had a darkroom and was teaching other kids. Full manual is not that hard to deal with.
That said, my current camera is a Canon digital rebel; but I often shoot in either a priority mode or even full manual. But my wife's camera is a K1000, and I really like it as well.
Autofocus, especially when done right, is very nice; the Canon can focus better than I can most of the time, and the rest of the time I can turn it off and turn the ring myself.
What you really have to worry about is mid-energy stuff coming from the sun during a flare; that will bake you in a couple of hours. Luckily you just need a meter of water or so and you're good, so you can have a hidey-hole in the core of the ship to duck into for a few hours during flares, which you can get a warning of.
There's not much you can do about cosmic rays in a ship; you can't economically carry that much shielding, but luckily it's pretty low flux; a Mars mission would, by the estimates I've seen, raise a participant's lifetime chance of dying of cancer by 2%.
Heck, if you're going that way, I picked up a GPX cheapo at a discount store. I paid $70 for the player w/FM radio and 64M built in. Dropped in a 512M card for another $110. 512M.
OK, probably the audio quality isn't the best, but hell, I'm wearing $20 headphones and just listening to crap while I clean house, so what the hell.
And it would have to be durable. By many accounts I've heard/read, the iPod is a brick, and the Karma is rather fragile, particularly its front panel buttons. Too bad, because it looks sweet other than that. If they'd spend another $5 making it durable, I'd probably buy one, but I'm not going to spend hundreds on player that has flimsy buttons.
In fact, you don't even need a dish. The first radio telescopes were just dipoles. You can google around and find tons of descriptions of how to build radio telescopes on the cheap. It's particularly easy now with computers interfaced to radios.
a large portion of 'traffic noise' is due to bad road surfaces...mending the roads would be a better solution
I'm with you. There are some highway surfaces that are miserable to drive on. I've been cruising on the interstate and come to a newer, much quieter section, and only then realized how incredibly loud the road noise was; my ears ring afterwards. Can't be good for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard, sometime this year, the biggest supercomputers (thousands of nodes) were just now starting to approach the operational complexity of the human brain, as measured in switches per second and cross-connection capability.
a humanoid could only have fake emotions (whether it is bluffing you or not...)
By what authority do you say that? Unless you understand the exact physical mechanism by which emotions exist, and can say that it can only happen in wetware, I don't see how you can say this.
I do not argue for the absolute possibility of machine intelligence, I argue that it's not possible to rule it out (currently). Maybe someday we'll know how brains work and will be able to say "we can't duplicate this." But not today.
Also, it's entirely arguable that nothing but a full human will have HUMAN emotions. But that doesn't mean that a created being can't have its own emotions, which may or may not have similar human emotions.
Certainly, nothing that we have built or even conceived of is capable of having any kind of emotions, human or not, but since we have very little clue how our own emotions or thoughts work, there's no basis for saying that they couldn't be done some other way.
There is an argument that could win the "none but humans" side, the same one that argues that alien life cannot exist: religion. If you have a religious belief that self-awareness and true intelligence comes only from a soul granted by a supernatural force, then all bets are off. But that's a matter of faith and is outside the realm of argument; you can believe whatever you want when you waive the need for proof.
Well, exactly. It has to be true sentience.
Unfortunately, we don't really have the first clue about what sentience really is; we are self aware, but we don't know why or what it really means. If we can't even describe what being sentient means for ourselves, it's going to be tough to define it for a new form of intelligence, if/when one ever comes about.
I've not heard anyone, even in the AI field if they're being truthful, that will even say that we have any clue that we're even going in the right direction, because we don't really know in which direction sentience lies.
Every AI we have now is fake, and AFAIK no AI that we're working on (for those who haven't given up yet) shows any real promise of ever becoming anything BUT fake.
But since we don't really know how self-aware-ness works in our own brains, it's not really possible to discount the possibility that a true machine intelligence is possible. But for the same reason, we don't really have any chance of building a real AI from any technology that springs from our current (lack of) understanding.
But making a running robot isn't even a PRETEND step in the right direction.
Sure, when we start getting towards sentience. Anything that is self-aware and capable of higher level communications should be granted some level of rights. The rights of a sentient creature should not be based on whether they think with water and carbon, or silicon, or whether they have testicles or a certain skin color.
But this is just a clever toy. It's no more aware of itself than Eliza is. They aren't even TRYING to go for AI, just fun toys.
The first AI (if/when) will probably NOT be in a robot; it'll be too large to be mobile, perhaps it'll even be a distributed supercomputer. Nevertheless, it also should be granted rights. Even if that day ever comes, it'll still probably be a long time, if ever, that the machinery necessary would be small enough to put inside a humanoid robot. I could see a humanoid robot being under the control of a machine intelligence via remote link, if the link is clever enough, it might even feel the body as it's "self."
There are many people and small research companies that invent things but can't, or are not interested in, exploiting the patents themselves. Universities are a good example; they invent tons of stuff, and most are not legally allowed to directly own for-profit industries, so they sell the rights or spin off a separate legal entity to exploit the invention.
Your proposal steals directly from the people who are doing the inventing by reducing the value of the goods they have to sell without compensating them in any way. It does not discourage the buyers from buying, it simply lowers the sale price.
most commercial videotapes
That's not DRM, maybe you could call it ARM (ANALOG Rights Management).
As you say, compact discs have DRM; if the copy protect bit is set, it's protected.
What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?
I like to do offsite backup, and an easy way to do it is to have a hard drive sitting on a machine somewhere else, and just RSync it periodically. I start it up, it runs for many hours, but what do I care?
This can easily saturate a cable connection for > a day at a time, though usage goes down if I haven't changed much recently.
Most of my traffic takes place on port 22, and good luck figuring out what it is, unless you know a good exploit against SSH. I paid for bandwidth and it's not their f'in business what I do with it.
In fact, they don't WANT to make it their business to know what it is. As soon as they demonstrate the ability or willingness to police based on perceived legality of the material, the cease becoming common carriers, and they become RESPONSIBLE for the materials they carry. If they do so, then RIAA/MPAA/whoever is fully able to expect them to do their policing for them, or to be taken to court for trafficing in stolen goods.
I'm paying for 384/128 and they're giving me 2M/384. And I use it.
Here's the reason:
The image sensor on the Digital Rebel is smaller than a 35mm frame. This means that much of the outer edges of the image painted by a 35mm lens is wasted; it falls outside the edge of the chip. Moreover, keeping distortion and vignetting down in the outer edge of the lens is the most expensive part of making a lens.
By building a lens especially for the Rebel, they were able to make the lens smaller, lighter, and more compact than if it had to be able to fit a film camera.
The reason it doesn't physically fit a film camera is that it protrudes into the camera past the lens mount; remember, it doesn't have to paint as big an area in the back of the camera, so they can shift the whole lens back a bit, the rear part of it coming into the camera body a bit.
If you wanted to take a film EOS body and mill it out so that the lens would fit, it would work, but the edges of the image would be vignetted, and the distortion would probably be bad.
All in all, it was a good move. I own a digital rebel, and the kit lens is pretty nice for $100, especially for those of us just getting started in the SLR world (my previous SLR was an all-manual T-mount from the 70's).
Also, since that lens is not available for sale without the camera, it's not really much of an issue. Canon has stated that they don't really intend to make any more EF-S lenses, this was just a clever, cheap hack that let them comfortably hit the $1000 price point. This has been a huge win for them; I personally know 5 other people who have picked up digital rebels in the last 2 months.
While this may make sense in Scotland, does it really make sense in places where broadband is more readily available?
Maybe not, but that still leaves out the U.S.
There are HUGE areas of the US where broadband is not available. Heck, the town where I grew up still doesn't have an ISP within 30 miles of it; it's long distance for dial-up.
When I was going to college in the '80s, it was the golden age of BBSs; and there was not ONE in the entire AREA CODE where I grew up.
Certainly these days broadband is available in some cities there, but it's far from ubiquitous.
Libraries are an important part of levelling the playing field for the disadvantaged; rich folks could just go buy whatever materials they want. Sure "anyone who's anyone" can get broadband "if they don't live in the sticks." But it's just the people who "aren't anyone" or who do live in the sticks that libraries are most able to help.
Author states that it's important to use only pressed CDs for just this reason.
Also, the author is in Scotland and states that broadband penetration is 5 to 10% there, which means 90 to 95% of the population is NOT going to be able to download these in a reasonable manner.
Even in the US, there are large chunks of the population where broadband is not available, even just a few miles out of large cities, sometimes.
Of course, after reading about the credit card prank, I realized that anyone stealing the card would just sign it themselves and not get checked. Guess I'll write PLEASE CHECK ID on it.
Starting about a year or two ago, merchants around here (SE Michigan) started checking sigs on cards. Since then, I have NOT ONCE had anyone NOT check my signature. Drones in every place from the gas station to Best Buy to bookstores to grocery stores, they ALL ask for the card, and they check, and when they see that I haven't signed my card, they ask for ID.
BTW, they actually RECOMMEND not signing the card, because then the bearer WILL be asked for ID; it's an anti-fraud measure.
...and I don't care, either. POP works for me. It's not like email is secure anyway.
I have all the video that I own in a database, if that's what you mean. A certain (to remain unnamed) percentage is porn. When you get to the point where you have thousands of VCD/DVD discs in binders on the shelf, you need some way to know what you already have.
Heck, on a couple of occasions where I forgot to bring my palm pilot with me with a copy of the database, I've wound up buying duplicates of DVDs I already owned. At least I caught it before I opened them and was able to return them.
This means that you can take almost any Pentax lens on the market, new or used, and make it work on most modern pentax bodies. Can't say that for Canon, can we?
No, but the current, all-electronic Canon mount has been around for some time, and they are all interoperable.
Yes, Pentax lenses are interchangeable back to the 70's, but that also means that they have been unable to take advantage of the benefits that going to an all-electronic mount would gain them. This means that, even though you could theoretically go buy a lens from 1981 and use it on your Pentax body, even if you go out and buy a brand new lens for it, it's not going to perform as well as a nice shiny Canon USM lens.
The ISA slot is a standard going back a long time, too, and there are a few people that still want to use some crufty old data-aquisition board or something and want an ISA slot, but at some point you need to just give up and say "to hell with it, just buy new equipment, including this ancient standard costs money on every mainboard and practially nobody uses it."
Zmodem is dead
I use zmodem every day in a production environment, and probably will for several years to come. See, I have to build systems that talk to the IRS and other (state) DORs, over dial-up. Yes, they're working on a VPN solution, but you know, this is the IRS...
I agree that if I were to learn photography again from scratch, ONE of the tools I'd have would be a full manual SLR, and the K1000 is one of the best, though I'd look into Nikon F bodies and Olympus OM-2s as well, and see what you like. Also talk to the people at the store and see if there are any SLRs in your price range that will allow you to preserve your investment in lenses/strobes/etc when you trade up your camera body. A full manual SLR may not have that as a reasonable option, so you may want to go with something like a Canon Rebel, which can still be used perfectly well as a manual camera when you want to.
A comment though; I actually think that digital has a real place in learning photography. Maybe the best setup would be a combination of a film SLR and a relatively cheap digital. Digital is FANTASTIC in that you can shoot a TON and get a lot of feedback. I'm not talking necessarily about the LCD either; they're too small and inaccurate for a really accurate look at the photo; they're mainly good to see if someone's eyes were closed, the framing is about what you intended, and to check the histogram if you have that feature.
But any pro (in any endeavour) will tell you that the best way to get good is to practice, a hell of a lot. Most pros shoot thousands to tens of thousands of frames a year. I used to as a teenager, but that was because I was shooting black-and-white, bulk loaded film which cost far less than a buck a roll, and I was developing it myself, again for less than a buck a roll.
That's still an option; you can still shoot black and white and develop yourself, and honestly, you can probably learn as much or more about most things with B&W than with color; I still love B&W though I rarely shoot it anymore.
But honestly, darkrooms are messy and smelly and expensive to set up, and many folks are shutting theirs down and using photoshop, which most agree can do more than a chemical darkroom.
You can get the same quantity of practice for practically no per-shot cost with a point-and-shoot digital. Some, such as the Canon A-series digitals, are actually quite full-featured cameras, and even have full manual modes. There's nothing magical about an SLR; sure, it's eminently versatile, and should be the #1 choice, but you can get plenty of work done with a small camera as well.
Also, you'll want a small camera anyway. An important rule to remember is "you can't take pictures if you don't have a camera." Any pro or serious amateur I've talked to may have a half dozen SLR bodies, but you can bet he's got a point-and-shoot to drop in his coat pocket when walking around the park, and I've seen plenty of nice photos in online galleries where the caption says "I saw this great photo waiting to be taken, sure glad I put my little point-and-shoot in my pocket that day!"
I think it would be well worth picking one up eventually, though perhaps after an SLR; old Canon 2mp or 3mp A series digitals should be down around $200 or so if you can find one.
A few suggestions on reading materials, at the risk of slashdotting the servers: photo.net and luminous-landscape.com - read everything you can find there, push the shutter button 20,000 times or so in the next 12 months, and you should be on your way.
I think you can learn either way. I learned photography basics as a 12-year old with a full manual SLR. By the time I was 15 I had a darkroom and was teaching other kids. Full manual is not that hard to deal with.
That said, my current camera is a Canon digital rebel; but I often shoot in either a priority mode or even full manual. But my wife's camera is a K1000, and I really like it as well.
Autofocus, especially when done right, is very nice; the Canon can focus better than I can most of the time, and the rest of the time I can turn it off and turn the ring myself.
What you really have to worry about is mid-energy stuff coming from the sun during a flare; that will bake you in a couple of hours. Luckily you just need a meter of water or so and you're good, so you can have a hidey-hole in the core of the ship to duck into for a few hours during flares, which you can get a warning of.
There's not much you can do about cosmic rays in a ship; you can't economically carry that much shielding, but luckily it's pretty low flux; a Mars mission would, by the estimates I've seen, raise a participant's lifetime chance of dying of cancer by 2%.
Heck, if you're going that way, I picked up a GPX cheapo at a discount store. I paid $70 for the player w/FM radio and 64M built in. Dropped in a 512M card for another $110. 512M.
OK, probably the audio quality isn't the best, but hell, I'm wearing $20 headphones and just listening to crap while I clean house, so what the hell.
And it would have to be durable. By many accounts I've heard/read, the iPod is a brick, and the Karma is rather fragile, particularly its front panel buttons. Too bad, because it looks sweet other than that. If they'd spend another $5 making it durable, I'd probably buy one, but I'm not going to spend hundreds on player that has flimsy buttons.
In fact, you don't even need a dish. The first radio telescopes were just dipoles. You can google around and find tons of descriptions of how to build radio telescopes on the cheap. It's particularly easy now with computers interfaced to radios.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marcone/bsdversuslinux.html
a large portion of 'traffic noise' is due to bad road surfaces...mending the roads would be a better solution
I'm with you. There are some highway surfaces that are miserable to drive on. I've been cruising on the interstate and come to a newer, much quieter section, and only then realized how incredibly loud the road noise was; my ears ring afterwards. Can't be good for you.