> $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.
You're forgetting that when that gallon of oil set out from Kuwait, the entire Iraqi army was trying to stop it from going to Baghdad. When you even out the cost of changing the regime of an entire country, that's really not that expensive.
Still, can't help wondering if the US military's next project will be seeing how much they can make it cost to transport coal to Newcastle...
That's a very peculiar perspective; most people I know only ever trigger caps lock by accident - typically by a misplaced leap for the tab key - and would never consider activating it just for the duration of typing NASA. The thing is, caps lock punishes you badly for mistaken use (especially if you're not a touch typist, but the kind of typist who follows their hands on the keyboard and only occasionally looks up at the screen) - if you forget to turn it off, you can enter whole streams of text that simply have to be retyped, unless you have easy access to a 'change case' operation or can quickly activate a macro to substitute A-Z with a-z in the environment in which you're working.
You see, caps lock is an inherently bad piece of human interface design. It's modal, to begin with - your brain needs to track what caps-lock state the keyboard is in, in addition to whatever other tasks you're handling at the time (coding in C, writing an operatic libretto, emailing your resignation, etc.). This is an unnecessary burden on your brain, which is forced to keep a pointer somewhere, once it's selected caps-lock, reminding it to unset caps lock again when it's finished with doing stuff in caps. The indicator on the keyboard telling you that caps lock is enabled is a small LED, typically, a long way from where your focus of attention is located; on laptops, it can be somewhere really useless like below the spacebar, or even hidden beneath your wrists, so you can't even see it peripherally.
On the other hand, holding down the shift key while typing allows the physical state of your body to store the current 'caps or no caps' mode of the computer - your brain needs no additional register to be devoted to storing that fact. The fact that you're applying constant pressure with your littlest finger to one or other shift key is a reminder. It's very hard to continue typing and type something you don't mean to be in all caps in caps because you forgot to lift your little finger from the shift key.
Num lock is equally guilty, especially because it's so rarely used, and on laptops can be a real source of frustration where it activates a numeric keypad overlayed on the conventional alphabetic keys. As for insert/overwrite - without there even being an indicator on the keyboard to tell you that you've entered a mode that will destroy what you've already typed, frankly this is one of the most evil modal interfaces ever created.
Modality is always bad, and human interfaces are better for avoiding it. The only excusable modality is the kind where the mode is immediately apparent to you continuously because it is precisely where your attention is focused (e.g. whether the car you are driving is moving or stationary - a mode which affects what will happen if you steer, brake, or accelerate - is generally apparent because that's precisely what your attention is on) - or if the mode is made continuously apparent by some sort of external indicator that is extremely obvious to you, such as a sound, a physical sensation, or a strong change in lighting conditions (so if caps lock being active was indicated by the computer dimming all the lights in the room and activating a flashing red warning beacon, whilst a constant siren sounded, that would be okay because your brain would have a continuous external reminder of the current system mode). Most interaction problems people have with any kind of device come from mode errors - assuming that performing one action using the item will have one result, but because the device is in an unexpected mode, it having another consequence entirely. This is as true of a corkscrew as it is of a car, or a computer. What's the one mistake experienced drivers still make (at least when driving a car with a manual stick)? Easy - pulling away in the wrong gear. That's because gears are modal, and the car provides little feedback about what gear you're in when idling at a junction.
So, no, caps lock is not a good interface. Holding down shift is easily the best way to type capital letters, unless you have motor control problems. A footpedal might make a better control for operating it in that case.
1) Be very wary of judging the apparent size of things in photos taken on another planet. The density of the atmosphere, the nature of the camera lenses used on space missions, and the scale of features your brain uses to guess at size may not all be what they seem.
2) the area around the landing site was deliberately selected to contain as few large rocks that could smash a lander to pieces as it came down as possible. Drop onto really rocky terrain, and you're looking at doing what I believe is technically known as 'a Beagle'.
Well, limestone would also be a pretty clear indicator of the presence of life in the past, too, since it's normally produced on Earth by the deposit of the remains of tiny organisms, which concentrate calcites in their shells or other structural elements. Okay, there's other ways to make limestone, but I think if there were limestone deposits on Mars, we'd see it as a lot closer to finding life in itself than just seeing it as evidence of ancient water..
> Many make it far too easy to set the wrong time (the AM/PM dot hell)
You're seriously telling me that sometimes you wake up, look at your alarm clock, and think "CRAP!!! It's 7 in the evening already! MAN did I oversleep... Oh wait - 7 a.m. Phew!".
Okay - I will admit to having set an alarm clock to wake me up at 6 a.m. and accidentally set it to 6 p.m. instead - so I guess you do have a point. Easily fixed by getting an alarm clock that supports 24-hour clock, although I understand many Americans find that a little confusing unless they were in the military. I guess that might be because they don't use public transport much - in Europe we get indoctrinated with 24 hour times from an early age by bus and train timetables.
Actually, I find Nastro Azzuro's an excellent refreshment after a hot day's traipsing round Roman ruins. Italy has enough German tourists that it's paid them to learn how to make a reasonable beer.
That would require your body to metabolize enbough calories to raise the temperature of the air, internal brickwork and interior fittings by about 17K. I'm not sure of the specific heat capacities of those things, but I imagine it takes a fair few Joules. Presumably about the number of Joules released by a candle burning up all of its fuel....
Paraffin wax has a heat of combustion of about 43 kJ/g. Ordinary carbohydrates have a heat fo combustion of about 17 kJ/g. So, you'd have to consume (allowing for a little inefficiency in human metabolism compared to a candle, on the basis that human beings are generally more orderly about how they use the energy products of oxidised chemicals than candles are) about the equivalent mass of three candles of pure refined sugar - and then actively metabolise that mass (i.e., not just let your body turn it into fat deposits).
So, I guess over time, you'd raise the temperature to that level, but each time you opened the door and brought in another packet of sugar to eat, you'd reduce the temperature again...
Actually, the best advice for what to do if you're in a car that's sinking is 'get the hell out'. Open the door before it goes more than a couple of inches below the waterline, and you might be able to not only escape yourself, but also have a chance of diving down to get your kids out of the back seat. Waiting for the water to come up to the window line and then fill the car up is a great way to kill off your electrics, bung up your locks, drown your children, short out your airbags, and make damned sure you'll never wind the window down or get the door open.
Oh, come on. It's a film - an adventure story, set in a historical context, but which makes no claims to being a documentary. You know, Nazis never actually found the ark of the covenant in egypt, only to be foiled by a plucky american archaeologist, either...
U-571 is a fun old world war II adventure story, and Jon Bon Jovi gets killed in an amusing way in it, so I think it's alright.
Well, traditionally, when we use the word 'professional', we mean somebody who has undergone a period of academic training in a field, followed by a number of years real experience in a recognised professional firm. That's how lawyers, doctors and engineers get to be professional. Or are you suggesting that it's unfair that to become a professional doctor you have to go through all that medical school crap, when you could just go and dig up a few dead bodies from the graveyard and practice anatomy at home?
Professional experience - that is, experience gained in work for a professional firm - is frankly the only way you'll get to experience the real power of the full, professional edition of Photoshop; unless you have access to full commercial proofing printers, and a hexachrome offset printing press at home, you're really not going to be able to take advantage of the facilities.
If all you want to do is mock up spoof album covers for the web with kittens and wacky osama bin laden photos montaged in, then frankly you don't need photoshop - although elements will do you nicely, or an equivalent low proce package like Paintshop Pro, or, obviously, Gimp.
How about Tivo stick more than one TV demodulator in the box? Then you could record more than one program at once...
In the UK, Sky+ is a Sky satellite decoder with a built-in digital video recorder - it takes two feeds from the satellite dish, so you can watch one channel and record another simultaneously. In December, they downloaded a software update to Sky+ that lets you simultaneously record two programs, and even watch an existing recording while those two shows are being streamed onto the disk. But most importanty, if you're out for the night, and there's two shows on you want to catch at the same time, you don't have to miss either of them.
With Sky+, you need a separate cable from the satellite dish for each of the feeds - there's actually two wires coming out of the dish to the box. Tivo wouldn't actually need to do that, since it does its own TV tuning. So, you could theoretically stick five demodulators in the box and be able to simultaneously record five TV channels.
I guess one difference is that Sky+ is recording a digital satellite stream, so doesn't have to dedicate any encoding effort to streaming the incoming broadcasts to disk (they're already digital), whereas Tivo is encoding analogue signals, so might not have the horsepower to encode multiple signals simultaneously.
Not long after the BBC took a chance on giving Douglas Adams the go ahead to try to make a science fiction comedy radio series that sounded like a pink floyd album, Disney were taking a chance on a couple of little known animators who wanted to make a feature length movie set inside a computer using live action and a completely untried rotoscope technique called backlight compositing. That film was, of course, Tron, and it shows that Disney's perfectly capable of innovative science fiction moviemaking. Don't assume that just because it's a disney film, it'll feature an Elton John soundtrack and a cute sidekick. But of course it could be terrible...
Imagine visiting Disney World after the Disney Corp marketing guys have got their teeth into the H2G2 franchise, to find some poor out of work actor wandering round the park dressed as a robot, moaning about a pain in all the diodes down his left side... Still, I wouldn't mind a posable slartibartfast figurine cum alarm clock.
'Come along now, or else you'll be late. It's a sort of a threat, you see. Oh, I never was any good at them.'
Well, the speed of light is 3.00e8 ms-1 to three sig figs, but when you bring in that fourth significant digit, it becomes 2.998. So, if you fudged the metre (or the second) to make the speed of light a 'round' 0.3 billion ms-1, you'd start getting noticeable effects to the left of the decimal point around the 1000-10000 metre range - kilometers, in other words. You'd end up changing the number of meters in a mile from about 1609 to about 1610, for example. But the effect would be there past the third significant digit of any quantity you cared to look at.
In a vacuum, they're the same - all electromagnetic radiation will travel at c - 299792458 m/s. In the inside of a microwave oven, typically filled with air, but in this case also a certain quantity of chocolate, both will be lower. However, the higher energy wave (microwave) won't be slowed as much as the lower energy wave (light). So in actual fact, he is measuring the speed of microwave radiation in air, which is neither the same as that of light in air, nor electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum (it'll be somewhere between the two).
Well, then you'll have to define your own 'metre' or your own 'second' to your satisfaction if you don't like that definition of the speed of light, since that is the speed of light (in a vacuum) - by definition. A metre is 1/299792458 of the distance light travels in a vacuum during the time it takes the radiation produced from a particular transition of a cesium 133 to cycle 9192631770 times.
If you're making up your own units, you might as well say 'one second is the amount of time it takes the radiation produced by my microwave oven to cycle 2.4E9 times'
But of course, this experiment isn't trying to find the speed of light in a vacuum, it's trying to find the speed of light in a microwave oven (or possibly in chocolate). I think that means using the defined value for c is acceptable, if you can find a decent way of using it to derive the correct frequency of your oven. But refusing to accept c would be.... problematic, I think.
NDAs are absolutely nothing to do with patents. NDAs are for keeping trade secrets. A patent is the opposite of a trade secret - it's a publically disclosed invention, which grants a limited-time monopoly over the exploitation of the invention in exchange for that public disclosure.
If I have a trade secret, and somebody comes along and starts to do exactly the same thing, since I have no patent over the technique involved, the only recourse I would have to stop them would be to prove they actually stole the idea from me, breaching an NDA.
If I've patented it, there should be no argument, because by patenting my invention, I've made it clear to everybody that I invented it.
So, what advantage would an NDA confer on a company which was in the process of patenting an invention? None whatsoever, basically. If, ing the time the invention is covered by the NDA, someone else patents your invention, you'll have no publically available prior art to point to to show you invented first. Far better to publish detailed information immediately, in recognised trade journals, so that nobody can deny that you had the idea when you claimed to, had publically announced it, and you effectively scupper anybody's except your own right to the patent.
NDAs are most useful to large companies, and publicly traded companies in particular, where advance warning of their plans could offer unfair advantage to some particular group of competitors/clients/investors. Liberal use of NDAs in these cases is to create a level playing field, and avoid accusations of anticompetitive practice. Startups rarely have any need for NDAs, for all the reasons stated in the article, and largely because nobody is really interested in your ideas until they are proven.
Which is presumably why when you put it onto a 1.44MB floppy, which is a storage device that can be thrown through the air, a compromise is made, and they actually provide 1474560 (1440 x 1024) bytes of storage.
Face it, there was never any such logic to this alleged 'convention'.
How does your system apply to the compression rate of MP3s? Or to the read/write speed of a HD head? You can't pin everything down into one of two camps like that.
That's not a completely random reordering of the letters in each word, though. One of the key signals the brain interprets when looking at words is the shape of the outline. It looks for clusters of ascenders and descenders as clues as to what the word might be. The text above tends to preserve these groupings more than a completely random approach would (look at 'wlohe', 'tihng' for example). Some important contextual clues are also preserved, like double 't's in 'ltteers', the 'gh' in 'rghit', the 'n't' at the end of 'deosn't', and so on. And of course the process completely preserves the ordering of words of three letters or less.
I've been an editor and proofreader, and the fact that misspelled words can easily be overlooked in context because your brain imposes error correction is well known in those professions - proofreaders have to train themselves to isolate each word and look past their brain's interpretation of what it says to see what it really says.
What's amazing is that you probably don't have to be that careful a reader to pick up that 'rscheearch' and 'iprmoetnt' were spelled incorrectly - they both jar your brain a little more than every other word in the paragraph. So it's not an excuse to just start spelling words any way you please - you still need to know what letters you need in each word.
Companies have no right to privacy at all. If an act is being carried out in the name of a company, damn straight you should be able to find out about who's behind it.
Individuals ARE different from companies, though.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that the identity information wouldn't be available to law enforcement officials - just that it shouldn't be possible for companies, individuals, or government bodies (without due legal process) to find out the details of an individual behind a particular domain name.
Fairly put - I agree that it's not irrelevant to the wider debate on the validity of copyright law. On the narrower issue of where people stand who download music which is within its copyright period without paying for it, I think the theft metaphor deserves some scrutiny.
> This isn't an issue of morality, it's an issue of law.
Ah, but the two are so closely tied up. You see, plenty of people here dispute the very fact that downloading or sharing copyrighted files is actually illegal. I think it's fairly clear to anyone with even an approximately rational mind that it's definitely against the law.
Nonetheless we find ourselves dealing with two groups of people who persist in arguing in favour of downloading copied music - 1) those who refuse to admit it's illegal, and 2) those who admit it's illegal, but say that an unjust law is no law at all. Both groups however have to come up with an argument that says that it's moral - otherwise they're left on very flaky ground indeed.
I've yet to see a convincing moral argument in favour of copyright infringement. And I think the fact that the subjective marginal benefit of copyright infringement is more or less indistinguishable from that of theft, the two do merit comparison.
> Some people think killing an animal is as morally wrong as killing a person, but we don't send people to jail for life for running over a cat.
People may well do jail time if they hit the cat deliberately. Similarly, it's possible to kill someone in a car accident and not go to jail. I'm not sure what this proves - that extreme moral relativist positions are not represented by the law? I guess that includes people who think killing abortionists is right, or that copying music isn't wrong... they're moral positions of one sort or another, but they don't reflect the position taken by the law.
Tap water, which, to be fair, isn't free - you are paying for it either in your rent or in some kind of payment to your water supplier. Now, the water they supply is a particular kind of water - it has a particular taste, and some people are concerned that it might not be 100% clean and would rather not drink it. So, there's room in that marketplace for suppliers to step in with water which tastes better (or at least different), and which people believe contains less impurities. Capitalism is set up to allow this sort of competition to flourish, and flourish it indeed has.
But you're asking the music industry not to compete against free 'tap music', which is of qestionable taste and quality - that would be fine, they could indeed compete by offereng music for different tastes, and of higher quality. You're asking the music industry to compete with somebody giving away everything they produce for free. It's like if Evian discovered that some local water supply company was siphoning off a few millilitres of evian from the top of each of their bottles, and using that to make up their domestic water supplies. Nothing Evian could do to improve the quality of their water would make any difference, because the same water would end up in the free supply.
With music, the industry can't compete with the stuff that's out there for free because it is their own product. If they improve their product, as if by magic, the free product improves too. It'd be like racing your own shadow.
So yes, in general, you can compete with free. But the music industry can't compete with a free clone of itself, and value-add isn't going to help them 'create a product that consumers are actually willing to pay for' - wiping out the unauthorised free distribution of their product, on the other hand, might just do.
I disagree strongly. I think most people have a very strong sense that creators - authors, composers, inventors, poets, artists, programmers - have some sort of 'ownership' over their creations.
Imagine if I stood in the high street of a town, with a bunch of photocopies of Harry Potter books, and handed them out to anyone who wanted one. I think most people would think that was wrong - that I was taking advantage of the work of J K Rowling. Most people would expect me to have sought Ms Rowling's permission before carrying out my generous act. Why would it be any different with music? If I was handing out burnt CD copies of Madonna's last album, wouldn't people assume I'd have to seek Madge's permission before doing so?
Copyright, and patents, are a mechanism for ensuring that the general moral concept that you ought to get someone's permission before you do something with their idea has some legal force in law. They're not perfect, sure, but they're the only way society has found to express that morality in a legal framework.
And by law copyright infringement is ILLEGAL. What don't you understand about that?
Whether it can be equated to theft or not is irrelevant to the debate on whether sharing and downloading copyright songs over P2P systems is legal or not. Clearly it is not.
There are two ways of behaving - legally, and illegally. You have a choice. You can go and buy a CD, or you can steal it. You can pay for a legal music download, or you can download an unauthorized copy from Kazaa. In both situations, the person choosing the illegal act is getting the same benefit as the person choosing to stay within the law, but doesn't hand over the money that the law-abiding person does. In both situations, the subjective result is the same. So, in what way is that form of copyright infringement any different morally from theft? Even if it isn't actually the same thing?
> But I recently attended a concert of an artist my only exposure to was through mp3s that I'd downloaded
Well, applying your own strict moral code, of course, it would have been alright for you to just sneak into the concert without paying, wouldn't it? I mean, it's not like it's stealing, because nobody lost anything, right? But you didn't - like a poor sap buying a CD when he could just as easily download the tracks for free, you bought a ticket. You need to ask yourself why you broke the law in one case (and that was okay) but you didn't in the other...
Maybe, just maybe, the reason you didn't sneak into the concert was that it would be wrong, and there was a good chance of your getting caught?
You see, there's things which are still immoral even if they don't involve stealing. Are you sure downloading illegally distributed MP3s (although not stealing) isn't immoral in some other way?
a one time pad requires a random pad, by definition. A one time pad with a pseudo-random pad is called a stream cipher, and is only as secure as the prng. As I pointed out in my previous post, in fact.
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> $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.
You're forgetting that when that gallon of oil set out from Kuwait, the entire Iraqi army was trying to stop it from going to Baghdad. When you even out the cost of changing the regime of an entire country, that's really not that expensive.
Still, can't help wondering if the US military's next project will be seeing how much they can make it cost to transport coal to Newcastle...
That's a very peculiar perspective; most people I know only ever trigger caps lock by accident - typically by a misplaced leap for the tab key - and would never consider activating it just for the duration of typing NASA. The thing is, caps lock punishes you badly for mistaken use (especially if you're not a touch typist, but the kind of typist who follows their hands on the keyboard and only occasionally looks up at the screen) - if you forget to turn it off, you can enter whole streams of text that simply have to be retyped, unless you have easy access to a 'change case' operation or can quickly activate a macro to substitute A-Z with a-z in the environment in which you're working.
You see, caps lock is an inherently bad piece of human interface design. It's modal, to begin with - your brain needs to track what caps-lock state the keyboard is in, in addition to whatever other tasks you're handling at the time (coding in C, writing an operatic libretto, emailing your resignation, etc.). This is an unnecessary burden on your brain, which is forced to keep a pointer somewhere, once it's selected caps-lock, reminding it to unset caps lock again when it's finished with doing stuff in caps. The indicator on the keyboard telling you that caps lock is enabled is a small LED, typically, a long way from where your focus of attention is located; on laptops, it can be somewhere really useless like below the spacebar, or even hidden beneath your wrists, so you can't even see it peripherally.
On the other hand, holding down the shift key while typing allows the physical state of your body to store the current 'caps or no caps' mode of the computer - your brain needs no additional register to be devoted to storing that fact. The fact that you're applying constant pressure with your littlest finger to one or other shift key is a reminder. It's very hard to continue typing and type something you don't mean to be in all caps in caps because you forgot to lift your little finger from the shift key.
Num lock is equally guilty, especially because it's so rarely used, and on laptops can be a real source of frustration where it activates a numeric keypad overlayed on the conventional alphabetic keys. As for insert/overwrite - without there even being an indicator on the keyboard to tell you that you've entered a mode that will destroy what you've already typed, frankly this is one of the most evil modal interfaces ever created.
Modality is always bad, and human interfaces are better for avoiding it. The only excusable modality is the kind where the mode is immediately apparent to you continuously because it is precisely where your attention is focused (e.g. whether the car you are driving is moving or stationary - a mode which affects what will happen if you steer, brake, or accelerate - is generally apparent because that's precisely what your attention is on) - or if the mode is made continuously apparent by some sort of external indicator that is extremely obvious to you, such as a sound, a physical sensation, or a strong change in lighting conditions (so if caps lock being active was indicated by the computer dimming all the lights in the room and activating a flashing red warning beacon, whilst a constant siren sounded, that would be okay because your brain would have a continuous external reminder of the current system mode). Most interaction problems people have with any kind of device come from mode errors - assuming that performing one action using the item will have one result, but because the device is in an unexpected mode, it having another consequence entirely. This is as true of a corkscrew as it is of a car, or a computer. What's the one mistake experienced drivers still make (at least when driving a car with a manual stick)? Easy - pulling away in the wrong gear. That's because gears are modal, and the car provides little feedback about what gear you're in when idling at a junction.
So, no, caps lock is not a good interface. Holding down shift is easily the best way to type capital letters, unless you have motor control problems. A footpedal might make a better control for operating it in that case.
Two things:
1) Be very wary of judging the apparent size of things in photos taken on another planet. The density of the atmosphere, the nature of the camera lenses used on space missions, and the scale of features your brain uses to guess at size may not all be what they seem.
2) the area around the landing site was deliberately selected to contain as few large rocks that could smash a lander to pieces as it came down as possible. Drop onto really rocky terrain, and you're looking at doing what I believe is technically known as 'a Beagle'.
Well, limestone would also be a pretty clear indicator of the presence of life in the past, too, since it's normally produced on Earth by the deposit of the remains of tiny organisms, which concentrate calcites in their shells or other structural elements. Okay, there's other ways to make limestone, but I think if there were limestone deposits on Mars, we'd see it as a lot closer to finding life in itself than just seeing it as evidence of ancient water..
> Many make it far too easy to set the wrong time (the AM/PM dot hell)
You're seriously telling me that sometimes you wake up, look at your alarm clock, and think "CRAP!!! It's 7 in the evening already! MAN did I oversleep... Oh wait - 7 a.m. Phew!".
Okay - I will admit to having set an alarm clock to wake me up at 6 a.m. and accidentally set it to 6 p.m. instead - so I guess you do have a point. Easily fixed by getting an alarm clock that supports 24-hour clock, although I understand many Americans find that a little confusing unless they were in the military. I guess that might be because they don't use public transport much - in Europe we get indoctrinated with 24 hour times from an early age by bus and train timetables.
Actually, I find Nastro Azzuro's an excellent refreshment after a hot day's traipsing round Roman ruins. Italy has enough German tourists that it's paid them to learn how to make a reasonable beer.
That would require your body to metabolize enbough calories to raise the temperature of the air, internal brickwork and interior fittings by about 17K. I'm not sure of the specific heat capacities of those things, but I imagine it takes a fair few Joules. Presumably about the number of Joules released by a candle burning up all of its fuel....
Paraffin wax has a heat of combustion of about 43 kJ/g. Ordinary carbohydrates have a heat fo combustion of about 17 kJ/g. So, you'd have to consume (allowing for a little inefficiency in human metabolism compared to a candle, on the basis that human beings are generally more orderly about how they use the energy products of oxidised chemicals than candles are) about the equivalent mass of three candles of pure refined sugar - and then actively metabolise that mass (i.e., not just let your body turn it into fat deposits).
So, I guess over time, you'd raise the temperature to that level, but each time you opened the door and brought in another packet of sugar to eat, you'd reduce the temperature again...
Actually, the best advice for what to do if you're in a car that's sinking is 'get the hell out'. Open the door before it goes more than a couple of inches below the waterline, and you might be able to not only escape yourself, but also have a chance of diving down to get your kids out of the back seat. Waiting for the water to come up to the window line and then fill the car up is a great way to kill off your electrics, bung up your locks, drown your children, short out your airbags, and make damned sure you'll never wind the window down or get the door open.
Oh, come on. It's a film - an adventure story, set in a historical context, but which makes no claims to being a documentary. You know, Nazis never actually found the ark of the covenant in egypt, only to be foiled by a plucky american archaeologist, either...
U-571 is a fun old world war II adventure story, and Jon Bon Jovi gets killed in an amusing way in it, so I think it's alright.
Well, traditionally, when we use the word 'professional', we mean somebody who has undergone a period of academic training in a field, followed by a number of years real experience in a recognised professional firm. That's how lawyers, doctors and engineers get to be professional. Or are you suggesting that it's unfair that to become a professional doctor you have to go through all that medical school crap, when you could just go and dig up a few dead bodies from the graveyard and practice anatomy at home?
Professional experience - that is, experience gained in work for a professional firm - is frankly the only way you'll get to experience the real power of the full, professional edition of Photoshop; unless you have access to full commercial proofing printers, and a hexachrome offset printing press at home, you're really not going to be able to take advantage of the facilities.
If all you want to do is mock up spoof album covers for the web with kittens and wacky osama bin laden photos montaged in, then frankly you don't need photoshop - although elements will do you nicely, or an equivalent low proce package like Paintshop Pro, or, obviously, Gimp.
How about Tivo stick more than one TV demodulator in the box? Then you could record more than one program at once...
In the UK, Sky+ is a Sky satellite decoder with a built-in digital video recorder - it takes two feeds from the satellite dish, so you can watch one channel and record another simultaneously. In December, they downloaded a software update to Sky+ that lets you simultaneously record two programs, and even watch an existing recording while those two shows are being streamed onto the disk. But most importanty, if you're out for the night, and there's two shows on you want to catch at the same time, you don't have to miss either of them.
With Sky+, you need a separate cable from the satellite dish for each of the feeds - there's actually two wires coming out of the dish to the box. Tivo wouldn't actually need to do that, since it does its own TV tuning. So, you could theoretically stick five demodulators in the box and be able to simultaneously record five TV channels.
I guess one difference is that Sky+ is recording a digital satellite stream, so doesn't have to dedicate any encoding effort to streaming the incoming broadcasts to disk (they're already digital), whereas Tivo is encoding analogue signals, so might not have the horsepower to encode multiple signals simultaneously.
Not long after the BBC took a chance on giving Douglas Adams the go ahead to try to make a science fiction comedy radio series that sounded like a pink floyd album, Disney were taking a chance on a couple of little known animators who wanted to make a feature length movie set inside a computer using live action and a completely untried rotoscope technique called backlight compositing. That film was, of course, Tron, and it shows that Disney's perfectly capable of innovative science fiction moviemaking. Don't assume that just because it's a disney film, it'll feature an Elton John soundtrack and a cute sidekick. But of course it could be terrible...
Imagine visiting Disney World after the Disney Corp marketing guys have got their teeth into the H2G2 franchise, to find some poor out of work actor wandering round the park dressed as a robot, moaning about a pain in all the diodes down his left side... Still, I wouldn't mind a posable slartibartfast figurine cum alarm clock.
'Come along now, or else you'll be late. It's a sort of a threat, you see. Oh, I never was any good at them.'
Well, the speed of light is 3.00e8 ms-1 to three sig figs, but when you bring in that fourth significant digit, it becomes 2.998. So, if you fudged the metre (or the second) to make the speed of light a 'round' 0.3 billion ms-1, you'd start getting noticeable effects to the left of the decimal point around the 1000-10000 metre range - kilometers, in other words. You'd end up changing the number of meters in a mile from about 1609 to about 1610, for example. But the effect would be there past the third significant digit of any quantity you cared to look at.
In a vacuum, they're the same - all electromagnetic radiation will travel at c - 299792458 m/s. In the inside of a microwave oven, typically filled with air, but in this case also a certain quantity of chocolate, both will be lower. However, the higher energy wave (microwave) won't be slowed as much as the lower energy wave (light). So in actual fact, he is measuring the speed of microwave radiation in air, which is neither the same as that of light in air, nor electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum (it'll be somewhere between the two).
HTH.
Well, then you'll have to define your own 'metre' or your own 'second' to your satisfaction if you don't like that definition of the speed of light, since that is the speed of light (in a vacuum) - by definition. A metre is 1/299792458 of the distance light travels in a vacuum during the time it takes the radiation produced from a particular transition of a cesium 133 to cycle 9192631770 times.
If you're making up your own units, you might as well say 'one second is the amount of time it takes the radiation produced by my microwave oven to cycle 2.4E9 times'
But of course, this experiment isn't trying to find the speed of light in a vacuum, it's trying to find the speed of light in a microwave oven (or possibly in chocolate). I think that means using the defined value for c is acceptable, if you can find a decent way of using it to derive the correct frequency of your oven. But refusing to accept c would be.... problematic, I think.
NDAs are absolutely nothing to do with patents. NDAs are for keeping trade secrets. A patent is the opposite of a trade secret - it's a publically disclosed invention, which grants a limited-time monopoly over the exploitation of the invention in exchange for that public disclosure.
If I have a trade secret, and somebody comes along and starts to do exactly the same thing, since I have no patent over the technique involved, the only recourse I would have to stop them would be to prove they actually stole the idea from me, breaching an NDA.
If I've patented it, there should be no argument, because by patenting my invention, I've made it clear to everybody that I invented it.
So, what advantage would an NDA confer on a company which was in the process of patenting an invention? None whatsoever, basically. If, ing the time the invention is covered by the NDA, someone else patents your invention, you'll have no publically available prior art to point to to show you invented first. Far better to publish detailed information immediately, in recognised trade journals, so that nobody can deny that you had the idea when you claimed to, had publically announced it, and you effectively scupper anybody's except your own right to the patent.
NDAs are most useful to large companies, and publicly traded companies in particular, where advance warning of their plans could offer unfair advantage to some particular group of competitors/clients/investors. Liberal use of NDAs in these cases is to create a level playing field, and avoid accusations of anticompetitive practice. Startups rarely have any need for NDAs, for all the reasons stated in the article, and largely because nobody is really interested in your ideas until they are proven.
Which is presumably why when you put it onto a 1.44MB floppy, which is a storage device that can be thrown through the air, a compromise is made, and they actually provide 1474560 (1440 x 1024) bytes of storage.
Face it, there was never any such logic to this alleged 'convention'.
How does your system apply to the compression rate of MP3s? Or to the read/write speed of a HD head? You can't pin everything down into one of two camps like that.
That's not a completely random reordering of the letters in each word, though. One of the key signals the brain interprets when looking at words is the shape of the outline. It looks for clusters of ascenders and descenders as clues as to what the word might be. The text above tends to preserve these groupings more than a completely random approach would (look at 'wlohe', 'tihng' for example). Some important contextual clues are also preserved, like double 't's in 'ltteers', the 'gh' in 'rghit', the 'n't' at the end of 'deosn't', and so on. And of course the process completely preserves the ordering of words of three letters or less.
I've been an editor and proofreader, and the fact that misspelled words can easily be overlooked in context because your brain imposes error correction is well known in those professions - proofreaders have to train themselves to isolate each word and look past their brain's interpretation of what it says to see what it really says.
What's amazing is that you probably don't have to be that careful a reader to pick up that 'rscheearch' and 'iprmoetnt' were spelled incorrectly - they both jar your brain a little more than every other word in the paragraph. So it's not an excuse to just start spelling words any way you please - you still need to know what letters you need in each word.
Companies have no right to privacy at all. If an act is being carried out in the name of a company, damn straight you should be able to find out about who's behind it.
Individuals ARE different from companies, though.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that the identity information wouldn't be available to law enforcement officials - just that it shouldn't be possible for companies, individuals, or government bodies (without due legal process) to find out the details of an individual behind a particular domain name.
Fairly put - I agree that it's not irrelevant to the wider debate on the validity of copyright law. On the narrower issue of where people stand who download music which is within its copyright period without paying for it, I think the theft metaphor deserves some scrutiny.
> This isn't an issue of morality, it's an issue of law.
Ah, but the two are so closely tied up. You see, plenty of people here dispute the very fact that downloading or sharing copyrighted files is actually illegal. I think it's fairly clear to anyone with even an approximately rational mind that it's definitely against the law.
Nonetheless we find ourselves dealing with two groups of people who persist in arguing in favour of downloading copied music - 1) those who refuse to admit it's illegal, and 2) those who admit it's illegal, but say that an unjust law is no law at all. Both groups however have to come up with an argument that says that it's moral - otherwise they're left on very flaky ground indeed.
I've yet to see a convincing moral argument in favour of copyright infringement. And I think the fact that the subjective marginal benefit of copyright infringement is more or less indistinguishable from that of theft, the two do merit comparison.
> Some people think killing an animal is as morally wrong as killing a person, but we don't send people to jail for life for running over a cat.
People may well do jail time if they hit the cat deliberately. Similarly, it's possible to kill someone in a car accident and not go to jail. I'm not sure what this proves - that extreme moral relativist positions are not represented by the law? I guess that includes people who think killing abortionists is right, or that copying music isn't wrong... they're moral positions of one sort or another, but they don't reflect the position taken by the law.
Bzzt - flawed metaphor, you lose.
Tap water, which, to be fair, isn't free - you are paying for it either in your rent or in some kind of payment to your water supplier. Now, the water they supply is a particular kind of water - it has a particular taste, and some people are concerned that it might not be 100% clean and would rather not drink it. So, there's room in that marketplace for suppliers to step in with water which tastes better (or at least different), and which people believe contains less impurities. Capitalism is set up to allow this sort of competition to flourish, and flourish it indeed has.
But you're asking the music industry not to compete against free 'tap music', which is of qestionable taste and quality - that would be fine, they could indeed compete by offereng music for different tastes, and of higher quality. You're asking the music industry to compete with somebody giving away everything they produce for free. It's like if Evian discovered that some local water supply company was siphoning off a few millilitres of evian from the top of each of their bottles, and using that to make up their domestic water supplies. Nothing Evian could do to improve the quality of their water would make any difference, because the same water would end up in the free supply.
With music, the industry can't compete with the stuff that's out there for free because it is their own product. If they improve their product, as if by magic, the free product improves too. It'd be like racing your own shadow.
So yes, in general, you can compete with free. But the music industry can't compete with a free clone of itself, and value-add isn't going to help them 'create a product that consumers are actually willing to pay for' - wiping out the unauthorised free distribution of their product, on the other hand, might just do.
I disagree strongly. I think most people have a very strong sense that creators - authors, composers, inventors, poets, artists, programmers - have some sort of 'ownership' over their creations.
Imagine if I stood in the high street of a town, with a bunch of photocopies of Harry Potter books, and handed them out to anyone who wanted one. I think most people would think that was wrong - that I was taking advantage of the work of J K Rowling. Most people would expect me to have sought Ms Rowling's permission before carrying out my generous act. Why would it be any different with music? If I was handing out burnt CD copies of Madonna's last album, wouldn't people assume I'd have to seek Madge's permission before doing so?
Copyright, and patents, are a mechanism for ensuring that the general moral concept that you ought to get someone's permission before you do something with their idea has some legal force in law. They're not perfect, sure, but they're the only way society has found to express that morality in a legal framework.
> and by law copyright infringement is NOT THEFT
And by law copyright infringement is ILLEGAL. What don't you understand about that?
Whether it can be equated to theft or not is irrelevant to the debate on whether sharing and downloading copyright songs over P2P systems is legal or not. Clearly it is not.
There are two ways of behaving - legally, and illegally. You have a choice. You can go and buy a CD, or you can steal it. You can pay for a legal music download, or you can download an unauthorized copy from Kazaa. In both situations, the person choosing the illegal act is getting the same benefit as the person choosing to stay within the law, but doesn't hand over the money that the law-abiding person does. In both situations, the subjective result is the same. So, in what way is that form of copyright infringement any different morally from theft? Even if it isn't actually the same thing?
> But I recently attended a concert of an artist my only exposure to was through mp3s that I'd downloaded
Well, applying your own strict moral code, of course, it would have been alright for you to just sneak into the concert without paying, wouldn't it? I mean, it's not like it's stealing, because nobody lost anything, right? But you didn't - like a poor sap buying a CD when he could just as easily download the tracks for free, you bought a ticket. You need to ask yourself why you broke the law in one case (and that was okay) but you didn't in the other...
Maybe, just maybe, the reason you didn't sneak into the concert was that it would be wrong, and there was a good chance of your getting caught?
You see, there's things which are still immoral even if they don't involve stealing. Are you sure downloading illegally distributed MP3s (although not stealing) isn't immoral in some other way?
a one time pad requires a random pad, by definition. A one time pad with a pseudo-random pad is called a stream cipher, and is only as secure as the prng. As I pointed out in my previous post, in fact.