Sure a $10,000 super-hifi system is better than a 128kbps mp3 on stock iPod earbuds, but neither one is going to approximate actually listening to live music. Imagine an ABX test of a live orchestra versus the best hifi setup money can buy. I would rather get decent but inexpensive audio equipment and save my money for live performances.
Of course, this is probably more significant for me than to most people because I listen to jazz and classical music, which are designed to be played live. Most recorded music, as many commenters have pointed out, is mixed for listening on a typical consumer setup in a typical living room, or on mobile devices. The only time you're really going to benefit from very high-end audio equipment is when you have a recording designed for that type of setup. If you listen to a lot of "contemporary classical" electronic music designed for stereo speakers, then more power to you. But even in this genre, many of these pieces are really designed for specific setups using dozens of speakers in very specific arrangements, which cannot realistically be replicated in the home.
Yes, the US has rather slow broadband compared to many similarly-situated countries. Consider this ranking: http://speedtest.net/global.php#0
Interestingly, according to speedtest.net the US is slightly faster than Canada. I could speculate that the US's lag in broadband speed is due to the large size of the country and difficulty in providing broadband to rural areas, but I am sure that Russia has an even bigger problem in that regard and they are significantly faster (on this list). Also, this does not explain why even urban areas have embarrassingly slow broadband.
Yes, I can't actually see anywhere on that page where it claims that it is a nationwide outage. According to the poster, someone at Clear said that the company was "experiencing outages nationwide." It's not clear whether this is an accurate quote or an embellished paraphrase. Several unrelated outages across the United States is not the same as a pervasive, related, unified outage affecting all customers. It appears that several people (15 to be exact) are posting unrelated signal problems in the same thread. Actually, make that 14, because one of the replies is just mentioning that the thread got posted on Slashdot. It is really ridiculous that Slashdot has claimed a "Nationwide Outage" when the actual post is not even alleging, but ASKING whether there is a nationwide outage. There is a question mark in the title, for goodness sake.
Yes, the study does actually have a reasonable basis to claim causality. It also does say that people with this kind of mental health problems are likely to become addicted to video games. It only claims exacerbation of existing mental health problems, not creation of the problems.
Exactly; if you replace "gaming" with "playing alone in your treehouse," I'm sure the results would be the same. These are both things that you should do after you finish your homework.
Once again, a misleading Slashdot headline. The study does not claim that gaming causes mental problems. It claims that it can exacerbate existing depression, anxiety, and social phobia.
If you spend all your time living in a fantasy world, ignoring all your friends and social responsibilities, your social skills will suffer. When you finally confront your ignored responsibilities, you will perform badly. The more you ignore your depression, anxiety, and social phobias in favor of escapism, the worse they will get.
I'm not trying to say that these results are trivial; I'm just saying that they confirm things that seem obvious and widely accepted, even among gamers. I myself am a gamer and I see no reason to disagree with these results.
I can't imagine anyone is expecting this to accurately predict the future. To me, the interesting thing will be seeing how the simulation fails, despite the fact that we input the totality of our knowledge.
Video performance is totally unimportant when using monitors for word processing or anything else where portrait mode is preferable. I use two monitors in portrait mode at work because I work with documents all day. Any difference in performance is undetectable to my human eyes. Even if I could notice a difference, I can rotate my screen back to landscape mode at any time if I want to do anything other than word processing.
If you like "new music" you should really check out Mode Records at:
www.moderecords.com
Lots of Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, etc., etc. I think they are physical media only, but I know that at least some of their albums (e.g. the JACK quartet's recording of Xenakis's string quartets) are available on iTunes and Amazon.
"In 2007 scientists, including Pierce and his team, found genes related to photosynthesis in the slugs, and these genes, apparently originally from the algae, were even found in unhatched slugs that had never eaten algae. In the latest research Pierce found more algal genes, and some of them were for enzymes required for the chemical process manufacturing chlorophyll."
I played Far Cry 2 for a couple of hours last night. When I watched the video, those guys clearly looked like they had assault rifles and maybe an RPG. Even the cameras looked like weapons to me. That's probably because I spent several hours yesterday training my eye to pick out hostile targets carrying weapons, and demolishing them with mounted machine guns. I had trained myself to expect enemies with guns, so I saw enemies with guns. This really surprised me, because I generally consider myself to be a peaceful and level-headed person.
But this video was not of a video game, and it illustrates why one's instinct to demolish scores of people with mounted machine guns should be obeyed only with the greatest caution. Rules of Engagement exist precisely because civilians often appear threatening but are not in fact threatening. I could understand why these people may have had an impulse to fire on the group, but impulse and actuality must be mediated.
That said, I could not understand, and simply could not watch, them firing on the van. I stopped the video immediately after they said "Engage" because I felt physically ill. This is after a night of killing unsuspecting men with sniper-shots to the head, blowing up civilian Jeep Liberties with grenade launchers, emptying entire machine-gun clips through car windshields, hacking people to death at close range with my machete, burning people alive with my flamethrower, and shooting wounded combatants in the back of the head with my pistol.
I have only the Sony PRS-505, and have never used any other e-reader. I like it very much because it supports so many open/common formats, such as PDF, RTF, and EPUB. There is a good third-party FOSS app for it as well (Calibre). In addition to being good for public domain texts, it is also great for viewing your own documents. I used it to study my bar exam outlines, which I merely saved in RTF format and copied to the reader. Again, I can't compare it to other e-readers because I haven't tried any, but it's good for what I like to do with it. The interface is pretty clumsy, but that really doesn't get in the way too badly.
Presumably you want to experience the place to which you are traveling. To that end, get off the internet, and leave your phone at home too. The "real world" will be scary at first, but you'll like it.
If the goal is to reproduce live music, then everything fails miserably. I realize that much music is designed primarily for listening through headphones/speakers, and for this there may be an argument for "fidelity," i.e. being faithful to the recording engineer's concept. However, I listen to mostly classical and jazz music, and in this case the "fidelity" involves faithfulness to the sound of a live performance. Nothing -- not the $10,000 headphones, not the most pristine lossless recording -- comes close. Even if lossless encoding were 10% better than lossy encoding (which it certainly is not), it would still be 60% worse than a live performance. I use decent headphones (circa $90) and lossy encoding, and I save my time and money for live performances.
So eventually people won't be able to sing or listen to horrible pop tunes that are written only for monetary gain. This is what I've been hoping for my whole life.
But you can't use it to commute or go shopping. We need regional rail systems, like the New York MTA, which people can use to travel around their local areas. That's the only thing that will replace cars, and it will only work in urban areas. The suburbs as carsville, and that's not going to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure a $10,000 super-hifi system is better than a 128kbps mp3 on stock iPod earbuds, but neither one is going to approximate actually listening to live music. Imagine an ABX test of a live orchestra versus the best hifi setup money can buy. I would rather get decent but inexpensive audio equipment and save my money for live performances.
Of course, this is probably more significant for me than to most people because I listen to jazz and classical music, which are designed to be played live. Most recorded music, as many commenters have pointed out, is mixed for listening on a typical consumer setup in a typical living room, or on mobile devices. The only time you're really going to benefit from very high-end audio equipment is when you have a recording designed for that type of setup. If you listen to a lot of "contemporary classical" electronic music designed for stereo speakers, then more power to you. But even in this genre, many of these pieces are really designed for specific setups using dozens of speakers in very specific arrangements, which cannot realistically be replicated in the home.
Xfinity is Comcast. In case you weren't being sarcastic.
Yes, the US has rather slow broadband compared to many similarly-situated countries. Consider this ranking: http://speedtest.net/global.php#0
Interestingly, according to speedtest.net the US is slightly faster than Canada. I could speculate that the US's lag in broadband speed is due to the large size of the country and difficulty in providing broadband to rural areas, but I am sure that Russia has an even bigger problem in that regard and they are significantly faster (on this list). Also, this does not explain why even urban areas have embarrassingly slow broadband.
Yes, I can't actually see anywhere on that page where it claims that it is a nationwide outage. According to the poster, someone at Clear said that the company was "experiencing outages nationwide." It's not clear whether this is an accurate quote or an embellished paraphrase. Several unrelated outages across the United States is not the same as a pervasive, related, unified outage affecting all customers. It appears that several people (15 to be exact) are posting unrelated signal problems in the same thread. Actually, make that 14, because one of the replies is just mentioning that the thread got posted on Slashdot. It is really ridiculous that Slashdot has claimed a "Nationwide Outage" when the actual post is not even alleging, but ASKING whether there is a nationwide outage. There is a question mark in the title, for goodness sake.
At this point, I just ignore Slashdot posts about cold fusion -- except, of course, for the time it takes to tell everyone that I ignore them.
Yes, the study does actually have a reasonable basis to claim causality. It also does say that people with this kind of mental health problems are likely to become addicted to video games. It only claims exacerbation of existing mental health problems, not creation of the problems.
Exactly; if you replace "gaming" with "playing alone in your treehouse," I'm sure the results would be the same. These are both things that you should do after you finish your homework.
Once again, a misleading Slashdot headline. The study does not claim that gaming causes mental problems. It claims that it can exacerbate existing depression, anxiety, and social phobia.
If you spend all your time living in a fantasy world, ignoring all your friends and social responsibilities, your social skills will suffer. When you finally confront your ignored responsibilities, you will perform badly. The more you ignore your depression, anxiety, and social phobias in favor of escapism, the worse they will get.
I'm not trying to say that these results are trivial; I'm just saying that they confirm things that seem obvious and widely accepted, even among gamers. I myself am a gamer and I see no reason to disagree with these results.
I can't imagine anyone is expecting this to accurately predict the future. To me, the interesting thing will be seeing how the simulation fails, despite the fact that we input the totality of our knowledge.
America's government and business leaders continue to ignore the documented threat of supervillains. The article doesn't even mention the possibility of Christopher Walken causing a catastrophic "double earthquake" and simultaneous flood to wipe out all industry in the Valley. What kind of catastrophe will it take to make our leaders consider a top-hat-wearing megalomaniac in a dirigible a credible threat?
Video performance is totally unimportant when using monitors for word processing or anything else where portrait mode is preferable. I use two monitors in portrait mode at work because I work with documents all day. Any difference in performance is undetectable to my human eyes. Even if I could notice a difference, I can rotate my screen back to landscape mode at any time if I want to do anything other than word processing.
If you like "new music" you should really check out Mode Records at:
www.moderecords.com
Lots of Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, etc., etc. I think they are physical media only, but I know that at least some of their albums (e.g. the JACK quartet's recording of Xenakis's string quartets) are available on iTunes and Amazon.
"In 2007 scientists, including Pierce and his team, found genes related to photosynthesis in the slugs, and these genes, apparently originally from the algae, were even found in unhatched slugs that had never eaten algae. In the latest research Pierce found more algal genes, and some of them were for enzymes required for the chemical process manufacturing chlorophyll."
That kind of lateral gene transfer between complex multi-cellular organisms just doesn't happen.
Amazingly enough, this does happen in nature. Here is one recent example of a sea slug incorporating genes from algae:
http://www.physorg.com/news182501672.html
Granted, the algae may not be a "complex" multi-cellular organism according to your definition, but the sea slug certainly is.
They must have gotten the idea from Homer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphemus#Polyphemus_in_Homer.27s_Odyssey
Unfortunately, this method of escape does not portend an easy homeward journey.
I played Far Cry 2 for a couple of hours last night. When I watched the video, those guys clearly looked like they had assault rifles and maybe an RPG. Even the cameras looked like weapons to me. That's probably because I spent several hours yesterday training my eye to pick out hostile targets carrying weapons, and demolishing them with mounted machine guns. I had trained myself to expect enemies with guns, so I saw enemies with guns. This really surprised me, because I generally consider myself to be a peaceful and level-headed person.
But this video was not of a video game, and it illustrates why one's instinct to demolish scores of people with mounted machine guns should be obeyed only with the greatest caution. Rules of Engagement exist precisely because civilians often appear threatening but are not in fact threatening. I could understand why these people may have had an impulse to fire on the group, but impulse and actuality must be mediated.
That said, I could not understand, and simply could not watch, them firing on the van. I stopped the video immediately after they said "Engage" because I felt physically ill. This is after a night of killing unsuspecting men with sniper-shots to the head, blowing up civilian Jeep Liberties with grenade launchers, emptying entire machine-gun clips through car windshields, hacking people to death at close range with my machete, burning people alive with my flamethrower, and shooting wounded combatants in the back of the head with my pistol.
I have only the Sony PRS-505, and have never used any other e-reader. I like it very much because it supports so many open/common formats, such as PDF, RTF, and EPUB. There is a good third-party FOSS app for it as well (Calibre). In addition to being good for public domain texts, it is also great for viewing your own documents. I used it to study my bar exam outlines, which I merely saved in RTF format and copied to the reader. Again, I can't compare it to other e-readers because I haven't tried any, but it's good for what I like to do with it. The interface is pretty clumsy, but that really doesn't get in the way too badly.
Presumably you want to experience the place to which you are traveling. To that end, get off the internet, and leave your phone at home too. The "real world" will be scary at first, but you'll like it.
If the goal is to reproduce live music, then everything fails miserably. I realize that much music is designed primarily for listening through headphones/speakers, and for this there may be an argument for "fidelity," i.e. being faithful to the recording engineer's concept. However, I listen to mostly classical and jazz music, and in this case the "fidelity" involves faithfulness to the sound of a live performance. Nothing -- not the $10,000 headphones, not the most pristine lossless recording -- comes close. Even if lossless encoding were 10% better than lossy encoding (which it certainly is not), it would still be 60% worse than a live performance. I use decent headphones (circa $90) and lossy encoding, and I save my time and money for live performances.
So eventually people won't be able to sing or listen to horrible pop tunes that are written only for monetary gain. This is what I've been hoping for my whole life.
...fucktons of advanced alien civilizations...
I bet the Fuckton homeworld gets lots of tourism. Especially if they're "advanced" in the way I think they are...
Linus better start training now if he's going to defeat Cyborg Supervillain Gates in an apocalyptic showdown on his mobile island fortress.
Actually, "Don't be a dick" is a fairly accurate way of paraphrasing every law ever written.
But you can't use it to commute or go shopping. We need regional rail systems, like the New York MTA, which people can use to travel around their local areas. That's the only thing that will replace cars, and it will only work in urban areas. The suburbs as carsville, and that's not going to change.