Biased or not they do have a point - the technology is not going to magically go away. Whatever the value of the content is, once its on the network its just data and can be treated the same as any other data. The movie industry constantly blames piracy for dropping profits and this is not the whole story.
This was from Todd Flournoy, a VP at MPAA from a year and a half ago and I doubt the numbers have changed much -
The average cost of producing and marketing a movie, Flournoy said, is $103 million. About one out of 10 films make enough at the box office to cover those costs. The rest must recoup costs through rentals, DVD sales, premium television channels and, later, cable TV.
So fun numbers - I saw six movies in the theatre this summer (Xmen, Superman, Pirates, Nacho, Snakes, and unfortunately Lake House) and downloaded three summer releases (Da Vinci, MI3, Devil wears Prada unfortunately). Anybody have similar statistics? So I watched more movies in the theatre than I downloaded. Moral of the story - people are still seeing movies in the theatres. Yet as of 2005 for the third straight year movie ticket sales are down.
So why are people going to the movies less 1) it could be they are pirating movies 2) it could be they want to see them in the comfort of their home 3) it could be that people are going to see the blockbuster movies and nothing else
I vote 3) mostly. Go see a blockbuster and its packed. Theres several other movies from this summer that I did not go see that will fail at the boxoffice. Maybe thats the problem Todd - maybe you guys put out several crappy movies that no one is going to go see. Remarkably those aren't going to be the ones that people download either - go through the list of summer movies on Yahoo - there some that I didn't even know had been made. Here a statistic I'm going to pull out of thin air but is probably true - the most downloaded movies are blockbusters or movies that were supposed to be blockbusters but flopped. Maybe if you train a generation to want blockbuster movies and MTV/VH1 style music you shouldn't complain if anything else fails.
What about the three I downloaded - they were blockbuster material - I could have gone and seen them - but they were shit, they were reviewed as shit online and by people that went and saw them and were in fact shit. Remarkably if they were out as rentals at the same time I'd not have downloaded them. If most movies do badly at the box office you've your directors and producers to blame for making a shit movie. There will be a few posters who will argue that I could have simply done without - I did do without didn't I - I didn't think wow thats a great movie I'm going to go buy it on DVD or watch it on the bigscreen. I watched a crappy telecine copy on my computer and deleted it beacause it was crap. I downloaded LOTR back in the day after I saw it in the theatres and bought the Collectors edition DVDs. I'd bet a lot of you have done something like that.
If your movies cost so much then maybe you should try cutting costs - find some new actors who will work for less - people saw Superman with no name guy. Remarkably you can make a movie good without having recognizable stars - they had to start somewhere too after all - once your star talent realizes this you might have to pay them less. Maybe you management types need a cut in your 7 figure salary - that will pull the price down a tidy bit. Maybe you should cut the price of some of your DVDs so more people buy them. I tend to buy DVDs either very early because I want them or very late after their price goes down. Maybe you should try releasing them on DVD, and pay per view at the same time as in the box office so people who want to stay at home can enjoy them. Maybe you recognize that you have no god given right to make as much as you do and be satisfied that the new industry is just less profitable.
My housemate had BBQ yesterday - I went in to the toilet this morning after him and I was sure he was launching chemical warfare against me! And he'd blocked it up! WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! Much worse than any iPod! ITS ILLEGAL IN CANADA! People if you ever get on the plane with David Fowler inform the authorities! Even if only the name matches because thats good enough for Western Union and eBay! Hes white - you may not even suspect him of being such a vile and noxious agent of destruction! Tell the TSA! Think about the children!
These e-textbooks are not books in the customary sense. Sandi Kirshner, chief marketing officer for Pearson's higher-education group, says the e-textbook is offered only on a "subscription basis," which means that a student buys access for a defined period, like a semester, and cannot resell access to the book to others.
This itself kills the value of these things - I've kept most of my textbooks and all my physics textbooks and frequently refer to them later. I'm going to trust anything that is advertising supported less because I'm going to wonder if its unbiased.
This is going to be useless for mathematics too because there are so many free math textbooks out there. Physics is going this way and you can find lecture notes on some advanced topics on arxiv. Sean Carroll's lecture notes for GR are still online and form the basis of his textbook. Gould and Tobochnik have stat thermo notes online. I've used both in classes. Google lecture notes physics for a sample of whats out there. These guys cannot compete with this.
And even if I could have online lecture notes I use the free printing (2up and duplex so give me a break) because they are more readable and I need to be able to right notes on them. And still buy the textbooks because I don't mind having the references. I don't whine about the price of *most* of the textbooks I need because they are valuable references. These guys are probably going to be yet another failed web 2.0 phenomenon.
Unfair example using Jackson as an illustration of low version numbers.
No complaints about the price of Jackson or any of my physics textbooks. I buy the hardback ones used from Amazon or Abebooks. I'm keeping all of them and I want them to last. I atually buy some Indian textbooks for friends when I go back home every other year but they tend to fall apart at the seams during the semester. I wish all of them were hardback - Misner, Thorne, Wheeler isn't and its like Jackson for GR.
The point about the low version numbers with Jackson is not even he reads it which is why we have such few editions. Its sort of the trial by fire as you enter grad school. Occasionally you can look up stuff and I was using it look up skin depth yesterday with the talk about RF shielding. All the stuff I'd really want from Jackson are "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader." I've been taught EM by two generations of professors and they both used Jackson when they were grad students. And they both hate it.
There is certainly a lot of editions with something like Young and Freedman (upto v.11) or Serway and (Faughn|Bichner|Jewitt) (upto 6 I think) and the only thing that ever changes is the problems and page numbers. That said I don't really consider these physics books - I hate the intro physics plug and chug philosophy and whats with the ridiculous colour figures with smiling kids - black and (white|blue) figures with terse captions or none at all! That will lower the price!
I remember there was this outcry against Monsanto in India quite a few years (4-5) ago. The plan was to release designer seeds with much better characteristics than natural varieties but these seeds would feature a "Terminator" gene (no I promise it was called that I don't have a very large tin foil hat). The gene would prevent future seeds produced by the crop to be viable. Their buisness model was thus that you bought the seeds from Monsanto every year.
Most farmers in India are poorer than most of you can imagine and save some of the seeds from one years crop to reuse the next. There was also some concern that the Terminator gene would find its way into the natural crop varieties and render them useless. This in particular reeks of a company creating something principally to safeguard its profits without there being any actual value added to the farmer.
I think the result of the mess was Monsanto stopped testing it and I think later stopped developing it. That a company would try to develop something like this makes me actively distrust them and its no wonder that a lot of people are scared of genetic engineering. A lot of these groups also tend to be very secretive treating some of their research as trade secret. This is definetly what I'm used to in physics and its definetly not how science should be done. Perhaps its just me but I'm much more skeptical of research done by groups that seem primarily motivated by profit.
I'd worry that a lab environment is just too controlled and the nature has a lot of unplanned for scenarios which may end up producing unintended consequences. I've some respect for their ability to identify what a particular gene as they are doing in the present articles research - I'm more skeptical of their ability to predict what that gene will do if it is suddenly found in another species say. And no matter how extensive your lab trials become they do not address very slow processes which may well occur with GE crops. This selective breeding is less controversial but I'm no biologist and I can already see that there might be a risk with a lack of genetic diversity and that leading to an increased susceptability to disease.
There shouldn't be a problem if you had unshielded windows as long as long as we are not talking about a building with all glass on one side. The Faraday cage wil shield pretty effectively even if there are some gaps. This is why you can get away with using a mesh rather than putting everything inside solid metal boxes. If you've even seen the lightning demos with people in cages being completely unaffected while a big Van de Graff shoots sparks around the place (MOS in Boston has this - its fun).
This seems like its overkill - be more sensible to have some encryption and maybe a system where you have to login to get access to the web is more practical. This way you get to keep what few bars you have on the cell.
With respect to the RFID in passports or on cards, yeah you might want a Faraday cage in your wallet but I wonder how long it is before that becomes classified as suspicious behaviour. I can just see those TSA officials getting red in the face that you'd dare question their authority by using a shielded wallet and having you detained for an hour - just enough to miss your flight.
I'd agree with the posters that say we'd need an accurate classification - as the BBC article points out this adopted classification is ridiculous. So was the previous one which was mostly a) b) and c). Let me elaborate -
The new definition has that a planet is (a) in orbit around a star or stellar remnants, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) is not massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion of deuterium in its core, and (d) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
Where do the problems begin - with a) what happens when we find systems that are orbiting tight binaries - they are not a single star, could satisfy b), c) and d) but wouldn't classify as planets. What about a system with objects satisfying b) c) and d) but around a brown dwarf. A black hole can be a stellar remnant - I'd not call something that satisfies b) c) and d) orbiting a black hole a planet. I'd call it mostly doomed.
b) is terrible and it features in both defintions - an object with a high spin or a large system of moons can be in hydrostatic equilibrium, and can satisfy a) c) and d) but deviate from being spherical by a respectable amount. Atleast here you can define some quantitative deviation from being a sphere. An artifical limit on how spherical an object is stupid because there will be border line systems. You can still kida work with this one atleast.
c) is fine and sensible and corresponds to well defined physical conditions and is the dividing line between brown dwarfs and stars - which makes me wonder what happens to brown dwarfs with this definition.
d) As the BBC article points out the earth hasn't cleared its orbits and there are plenty of NEOs, all the Jovians have moons and rings (if anything these are more in the neighborhood of the planets orbit than asteroids), Jupiter has Trojans and Damocloids. If Pluto crosses Neptunes object last I checked yes Pluto hasn't cleared its object but neither has Neptune. Do you select which one remains a planet on the basis of mass. What if the less massive object was more spherical?
Only a limit based on hydrogen fusion in the core is clean. You can atleast qualify how spherical an object is even if a hard limit above which we call something spherical enough and below not spherical enough is stupid. Since its quantitative its more useful. I don't see any particular reason to limit things to a single star or stellar remnants. This is flaky - make it in orbit around a system thats actively undergoing nuclear fusion or something. Theres just no way to use this neighborhood definition so toss it.
I think the problem here is the IAU is hell bent on saving what we traditionally think of as planets without adding too many.
Professor Iwan Williams, the IAU's president of planetary systems science, commented: "Pluto has lots and lots of friends; we're not so keen to have Pluto and all his friends in the club because it gets crowded.
Sounds vaguely racist...er planetist.
The point is that planets are not that special and there are probably a lot of them out there. The only thing special about this one is that we are in it. Sorry if that seems anthropic. Stars are definetly not special and there are probably a lot of planetary systems out there. If the worry is that we have to change what we have to teach kids and we don't want them to memorize 100 objects then I'd argue that they ought to be learning a consistent defintion of what a planet and a star is instead. If they can name any 10 in our solar system they get ten points and can move on to the next question. Which is can than name a few other planetary systems. I don't think you are going to lose interest in astronomy by not emphasizing the nearest planet - not as long as you can take them to an 8 inch scope even and show you Jupiter's moons and Saturns rings.
Yes any statistic or defintion of violence that that rates Pac-Man as being 62% "violent" is a statistic that clearly not a statistic that would not reflect the general opinion of violence in video games. A poster pointed out the inadequacy of her statistic with Hitman. Consider Carmageddon for instance - you can entirely legitimately finish the game by actually racing the courses and coming first and not slamming into anyone. If you do not think Carmageddon is violent you are off your rocker. Also "psuh it to the limit" has sexual overtones!!! Lady, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
She does make a point though. I'm stunned that the ESRB doesn't play the game significantly before they rate it - you'd figure that would be obvious. In that respect I have to agree with her - if you are going to rate the game on its content then actually experience a representative random sample of the content.
Ofcourse as we all know many parents think video games are for kids and ignore the ESRB ratings anyway but thats no excuse for not rating the damn thing properly!
No playback at all or will the content be downgraed? The "No full" leads me to believe that the content will just be downgraded 720p or 480p but the article seems to say no playback whatsoever. I still suspect many people will be happy to rip something downgraded to DVD quality and encode it with Xvid or whatever. The quality now isn't as good as the original DVD but that doesn't seem to bother movie pirates now. No apparently people are willing to sacrifice some quality for getting their movies for free. I seriously think these guys have completely overestimated how much people care about HD content. A full HD rip is going to be several gigabytes larger and thats more of a headache over p2p anyways.
How many people will be using 32bit in 5 years - how many people will will have HDTVs in 5 years??? The cheapest ones are still 2000 bucks and higher! They have been for a while. And if its just a matter of time before there is widespread adoption of HD I think its seriously a matter of time before someone breaks HDCP convincingly.
Theres always going to be some people who do not agree with embryonic stem cell research and perhaps rightly so because these issues do raise difficult questions about life and its value. You don't have to be religious either to recognize this. I think most scientists would admit there are very touchy phlosophical questions here. I think most would admit there are touchy issues with cloning and late term abortion too.
This is what seperates these issues from the science vs religion issues dating from heliocentric/geocentric to evolution vs creation/ID or old earth vs young earth today. Essentially those are only issues if you are religious - or in fact Christian because there are a whole bunch of other religions out there for which these "debates" don't matter one whit. Science did not care what the general opinion on heliocentric vs geocentric models are and it certainly ignores the ID/creationist arguments.
That is the distinction and it makes all the difference even if it isn't much of one.
Science does not take values into consideration because there isn't an right and wrong in science and it isn't a democracy. Scientists do though. This developement is great - it effectively sidesteps a lot of thorny issues of when life begins, and what value it has. It will satisfy a lot more people who were queasy about embyonic stem cell research though not necessarily because of religious arguments. I think it will satisfy a lot of people who opposed it on religious grounds but are perhaps more moderate. Hopefully there will be some beneficial research that will come out of this.
Sure there are going to be arguments about the sanctity of the soul in a process like this one. I'd suspect most scientists will ignore them.
The X5L is 30gb and the battery lasts about 27 hrs - yes I love its features and the fact that the people on the iAudio forums actually listen to the firmware requests. A lot of people don't like the file-folder based navigation system but a lot of my mp3s dont have id3 tags and I've already sorted the lot my genre>artist>album so the file-folder system actually works better for me. FM and recording are absolutely superb.
Its around $300 this side of the atlantic so I'm surprised you only find it for 400 Euros. I think even with shipping it should work out a lot cheaper. If your familiar with the the M3 (I had one until some fucker stole it in NYC) then you might wonder about the remote - you won't need it and it makes only a marginal difference with the battery life especially with the X5L.
Also following this discussion I've been looking into putting RockBox on it - http://www.rockbox.org/ - it looks very cool.
I think if you buy it from the COWON website they usualy throw in some free stuff like the nicer dock. When I got the M3 it came with the CW200 a small 128mb player which I use if I go biking.
As you can tell I'm pretty loyal to COWON because the damn thing is built like a tank (dropped I don't know how much) and both the M3 and the X5L have already served me really well. Also look at the Toshiba and Sansa players - they have comprable features and I've heard good perosnal reviews on the Toshiba ones. iRiver ain't bad and I'm actually kinda waiting to see what happens with the Zune. Moral of the story is there is more out there than the iPod especially if you like having more features.
DISCLAIMER : I will not claim at any point that this is the best player out there. I do wish to point out some of its features though to people who criticize players that have interfaces that aren't the same as the iPod.
Nice iPodish menu, yes it has software hich is as simple as drag and drop. You cant complain about the player interface. What about the software? My karma has gone through the wringer before because of Apple fanboys who complain that players don't work with iTunes.
No it doesn't work with iTunes because iTMS is DRMed so nothing is going to work with iTMS except iPod unless Apple gets bashed for anti-competetive practices. Seriously people how do you expect anything to work with iTunes when Apple prevents anything from working with iTMS. if you are going to compare electronics compare them on features that both devices can reasonably implement. You might as well complain that square pegs do not fit in round holes. You are entirely allowed to have iTunes compatability be your killer feature. Just recognize that this does lock you into Apple. And that you'd whine if it was Microsoft instead of Apple.
Yes it has pretty decent video - Nano does not have video and its screen is smaller. No it doesn't support every video/audio codec out there but it gives you good variety. Other things it beats the Nano at, user replaceable battery, FM and voice recording, plus the micro SD card to take the e280 from 8 to 10 gb. No rob me headphones but you can buy some lovely white headphones to work with it if you really want. So if you want a player that has a lot more features and you happen a non-DRMed music library then this is easily as good as the iPod.
If you don't mind the interface and I for one don't mind a slightly more clunky interface for more features then there are several other players out there. Might I recommend the Cowon iAudio line. I've already lost some karma arguing that the interface isn't the be all and end all so I'm not claiming that these features will make something an iPod killer. If the iTMS compatability is that important to you stick with iPod. Your call and you are entirely entitled to it. Good for you. I'll chuckle as I record my next semesters lectures and recall that I paid less for a player for a player with more storage, and a bigger battery that has already lasted longer than a couple of my friends iPods:-P
I have an orkut account - some of the information like an gmail address is necessary to sign in. The rest of the information on your profile is entiely optional. They don't even have to ask google for the profile information - make a fake account and stick up a photo of some girl in a swimsuit and get a freind request and you get to see it as soon as its approved.
The stupid thing is they expect criminals to be providing orkut with any legit info - for a long time my address was in Svalbard and the Jan Mayen Islands. This violates your TOS but really meh.
I don't know if orkut keeps a record of what IP address you login from but its also probably useless with people login in from random places or using TOR. Sure there is google search info linked to your gmail account and we all know about googles 2038 cookie but delete your cookies after each session and search from the the main google page or the firefox bar or use a public computer or whatever and you avoid that.
So I'm seriously confused by what data these guys are asking google for. The profile info which is likely to be the most useful if there is some accurate information is public or easy to get once you get authorized as a friend. I suspect they just want anything they can get their hands on and want to sort through it later. This is probably more work than they realize, and they will more than likely end up buried in a mound of data. They are probably better of doing some actual on the ground detective work.
Also do Googlenauts define targeted advertising as enhancing the user experience - because my definition tends to lean more towards Adblock.
Oxyrubber I was not referring to the box/EDR and the engine controller - I was *speculating* that some technology that could passivley monitor your driving and actively take control of the entire car when it detected erratic driving - a driving control unit/DCU - if you could make such technology reliable enough it would reduce/eliminate insurance payments because your erratic drving would be a risk mitigated by reliable technology. I do not think we have the technology to do this yet. At the beginning of the 20th century we did not have powered, heavier than air flight either. Its just a matter or time.
Yes I agree with you that people don't like telling them to drive better and like losing control of their car to a computer even less (a look at Lance_Denamrk's post will reassure you of that) - from a technology POV if you can mitigate the risk posed by bad drivers with a DCU - again not EDR/ECU - then like it or not such technology will probably be legislated into cars. Thats why I speculated that the technology would perhaps be designed in such a way as to leave you in control of your car while you are obeying the speed limit and take control above it or if you are drving erratically. Certainly its not entirely terrible and you can imagine something driving your car for you to be very useful on a long trip.
Yes you are right I was overthinking it with respect to the building your own car and you could certainly buy used cars - for a time. Eventually its going to be very hard to avoid technology like this though.
Yes you are right that we have little to no recourse to fight the data given by the black box at present and you are right that if the callibration is off then you are in trouble if you have an accident. One would hope that a check of the sensors after you have a collision would be standard and a periodic check on their callibration say every year also be standard. This is an engineering problem though and again its a matter of time. One would hope they'd put redundant sensors in as well. Yes you are right that there are privacy concerns because any DCU would probably need some sort of GPS and thats information thats just begging to be tracked if you use some service like onStar (aren't stand alone GPS units not nearly as much a risk) - if anything this, the recent AOL brouhaha, the EA privacy policy disaster and X other things is telling us that we need some sort of new law about data retention.
Essentially I am claiming that given time and the development of technology people will lose the level of control over their cars that they previously had - wether they like it or not - because technology will eventually do a better job of driving their car than they can. I'm also putting my karma out there despite the Lance_Denmark's of the world to claim this is not necessarily a bad thing.
The devices are virtually impossible to disable because their functioning is so tightly integrated with vehicle safety systems such as airbags and anti-lock brakes.
No I like this idea. I'm not too worried about your privacy because with the EDR the system is passive - it just records your driving information - a CCTV on the road would do the same. If I may herald a guess as to the future
We have cars that park themselves.
Next innovation - monitor driving and in case of rash driving, disable driver control, have computer take over control of car and safely park car, disable engine and send out automatic alert identifying exactly where you are because your car now also comes with standard GPS. Same technology is great at preventing car thieves.
Eventually, just have a computer drive the car because again its safer for every involved. I remember seeing an article recently about how a computer could control a car at high speeds much better than any human can. If you love driving my favored compromise is you get to control the car below the speed limit with the system passively monitoring and ready to intervene should it sense a threat and have the computer control it above the speed limit when its safe to speed. You could even have wireless between cars to transmit data on traffic and road conditions ahead.
I like all of the above because they could drastically reduce the number of accidents and make car insurance completely uneeded.
All of the above tech is passive and only interfere when you are driving recklessly. So yes driving becomes less thrilling for you with the flip side of you and I are more safe. Systems like this and the fact that computers have system logs and cell phones have usage records could potentially deal with poster rkcallaghan's point about the shortcomings of EDR.
Nothing is foolproof and you could I suppose build your own car from scratch to circumvent this system. You'd still probably have a few accidents because someone ran/biked in front of a very fast moving car and the elctronics worked but simply couldn't beat the vehicles inertia. Better than nothing though.
The Commission has also used its unfairness authority to challenge information practices that cause substantial consumer injury.
Heres an information practice that could cause substantial consumer injury. EA is collecting my address, phone number, birth date, name, credit card information - usually the only other piece of information you need to charge the card is the three digit number at the back of the card. Some websites don't even require that. If you win a prize you also get to give them your SSN!!!
Do you trust your security to a three digit number? Do you trust a giant company to not have any disgruntled employees with access to the database? And a paper and pencil to circumvent the copy restrictions on the data (if they have that even). I trust EA to publish (mostly crappy sports) games and thats all. None of the other information they collect is necessary to run EA online. The very fact that they are collecting data they do not need makes me actively distrust them. This entire implictly agreeing to hand your data over smells fishy.
See that "File a complaint" link on the top of the FTC webpage. Ten minutes. Slashdot the damn thing - I'm sure the FTC will take notice. At very least they should be able to contact Microsoft and EA and be able to change what data is collected. Seriously the best way to deal with a stupid bunch of corporate lawyers is have a government agency snarl at them.
No, no - if Heisenberg approcahes the real question is where is he? BTW mods I think that parent is "Funny" as opposed to "Informative" unless we must have sigma Funny sigma Informative >= hbar/2 in which case since hes marked informative no body can ever know how funny he is....
No I know the distinction and agree with those who point out that the thumbdrive wasn't actually subject to mutch from the VW. I've dropped it quite a few times - its survived one 12 foot drop from the bleachers, several "Can't you catch idiot" tosses, and one fall through pant pocket and get stamped on. It shoudl survive usual wear and tear. It looks like shit and the cap that protects the usb connector is long mising but it still works - its a 128mb PNY thumbdrive (yeah its ancient) I picked up on sale at Walgreens. All said and done the things are certainly more useful and versatile than floppys or cds though I still sftp files, and mail them to myself just in case. I haven't tried kicking mine directly but I'll let you know when I decide to get a new one.
er... (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 or do cross terms no longer matter for calculating distances... Seriously I stared at this for a while to make sure its what TFA says... because as we all know the physicists are the sloppy ones while the mathematicians are always rigorous...
Maybe because the song is what gives the physical medium any value to us...
Also if anybody ever asked you if you had a CD of Pink Floyd do you think they cared about the physical medium or listening to the content.
A physical medium is a delivery device - an outdated one because it costs money - the great thing about digital media is that you can make N copies for effectively free - you can change its format, you can rip a section of it (either a time segment, or only the audio from a movie say) - its more versatile and powerful. It also has the nice side effect that it takes a lot more to make the data unretrievable. My grandfather used to have some recordings on tape spools - just open tape that went between two reels - player broke - no one around could convert the damn things. Media companies recognize these benefits and you can be damn sure they use it - e.g. cut out the people who make the physical film in favour of digital video recorders.
Thats also the problem with the digital medium though - if you treat things as a bunch of 1s and 0s and liberate it from a physical medium then your buisness model whcih relied on you delivering that physical medium fails. Unless they can control the hardware which is what HDCP tries to do, and is the point of all this trusted computing stuff that scares me. But really such control of the hardware is an artificial limitation of technology. What you should do is change.. or die. Theres no rule that demands that these recoding companies have to survive this century - music won't die. It might just become less corporate.
So sure let them say you have no real right to the song and all you can do is play if from the original medium you bought it on. And let people with cdrom drives and cd rippers and mp3 codecs and mp3 servers and p2p networks tell them to go take a flying leap.
YES!!! I totally forgot Ørsted - and in his case we can reel in the kiddies with music Original or a techno version
Probably not going to make it to myspace but still interesting - if you have some time you should browse the rest of the songs on the site especially the love song of the EM field. The mathematicians have better stuff - seriously its a riot. And for the computer programmers
So pshaw to those of you who say you cant find good free music on the internet;-)
(ducks)
Carl Gauss - I'm seriosuly trying hard to think of the last day I did not assume something was Gaussian... Niels Bohr Henrietta Swan Leavitt - add in a nice article on how the Cepheid calibration is absolutely vital to cosmology Emmy Noether Enrico Fermi Grace Hopper Glenn Seaborg - 10 elements - I think thats still a record and he worked on multiple Nuclear test ban treaties.
A couple of fun ones might be - Margaret Thatcher - no I kid you not she helped make soft serve ice cream mix! Fritz Zwicky - oh come on the guy though of supernovae and called people spherical bastards because they were bastards anyway he looked at them
Also given the recent brouhaha about evolution in the classroom lets give the kiddies some good old Charles Darwin and maybe even some William of Ockham.
Actually with the fun exception of Maggie Thatcher everyone on this list is dead - can we nominate people who are alive? Alan Guth - ideas on inflation very important for cosmology and still being debated.
Apologies if the list is slightly Physics/Astronomy/Math heavy.
Got my mobile which I still have at 20 and getting out of undergrad . For the longest time I fought getting the thing because I hated the thought of paying 30 bucks a month when I wouldn't use most of the minutes. I still don't use most of my minutes and they will just roll over and over and over. And now its upto almost 50 bucks. Bloody Cingular. It seems like all the prepaid options suck too so even if I get off contract I'm sorta stuck paying the same thing.
The sad difference the cell phone made - I used to memorize my friends cell numbers and five digit dorm phone numbers - now I don't have to and so while I have more peoples numbers I don't think I can recall more than 10 from memory. Sigh.
Offtopic - does anyone kno if cell phone companies have been investigated for either price fixing or being virulently anti-consumer.
For those in desperate need to not have a caps have a simple solution - don't press the bloody thing...
And seriously am I the only one who uses the numeric keypad for gaming - I think its vastly better than the arrow keys because they are higher up and my palm is on the kyboard for the most part and better than the WASD because there aren't as many keys near it.
Dont get rid of the key use a software solution to rebind any key on the keyboard to whatever you want - if you have a redundant control then good for you.
I like the logitech keyboards mostly because they have more keys that I can use to bind other command to.
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This was from Todd Flournoy, a VP at MPAA from a year and a half ago and I doubt the numbers have changed much -
So fun numbers - I saw six movies in the theatre this summer (Xmen, Superman, Pirates, Nacho, Snakes, and unfortunately Lake House) and downloaded three summer releases (Da Vinci, MI3, Devil wears Prada unfortunately). Anybody have similar statistics? So I watched more movies in the theatre than I downloaded. Moral of the story - people are still seeing movies in the theatres. Yet as of 2005 for the third straight year movie ticket sales are down.
So why are people going to the movies less
1) it could be they are pirating movies
2) it could be they want to see them in the comfort of their home
3) it could be that people are going to see the blockbuster movies and nothing else
I vote 3) mostly. Go see a blockbuster and its packed. Theres several other movies from this summer that I did not go see that will fail at the boxoffice. Maybe thats the problem Todd - maybe you guys put out several crappy movies that no one is going to go see. Remarkably those aren't going to be the ones that people download either - go through the list of summer movies on Yahoo - there some that I didn't even know had been made. Here a statistic I'm going to pull out of thin air but is probably true - the most downloaded movies are blockbusters or movies that were supposed to be blockbusters but flopped. Maybe if you train a generation to want blockbuster movies and MTV/VH1 style music you shouldn't complain if anything else fails.
What about the three I downloaded - they were blockbuster material - I could have gone and seen them - but they were shit, they were reviewed as shit online and by people that went and saw them and were in fact shit. Remarkably if they were out as rentals at the same time I'd not have downloaded them. If most movies do badly at the box office you've your directors and producers to blame for making a shit movie. There will be a few posters who will argue that I could have simply done without - I did do without didn't I - I didn't think wow thats a great movie I'm going to go buy it on DVD or watch it on the bigscreen. I watched a crappy telecine copy on my computer and deleted it beacause it was crap. I downloaded LOTR back in the day after I saw it in the theatres and bought the Collectors edition DVDs. I'd bet a lot of you have done something like that.
If your movies cost so much then maybe you should try cutting costs - find some new actors who will work for less - people saw Superman with no name guy. Remarkably you can make a movie good without having recognizable stars - they had to start somewhere too after all - once your star talent realizes this you might have to pay them less. Maybe you management types need a cut in your 7 figure salary - that will pull the price down a tidy bit. Maybe you should cut the price of some of your DVDs so more people buy them. I tend to buy DVDs either very early because I want them or very late after their price goes down. Maybe you should try releasing them on DVD, and pay per view at the same time as in the box office so people who want to stay at home can enjoy them. Maybe you recognize that you have no god given right to make as much as you do and be satisfied that the new industry is just less profitable.
My housemate had BBQ yesterday - I went in to the toilet this morning after him and I was sure he was launching chemical warfare against me! And he'd blocked it up! WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! Much worse than any iPod! ITS ILLEGAL IN CANADA! People if you ever get on the plane with David Fowler inform the authorities! Even if only the name matches because thats good enough for Western Union and eBay! Hes white - you may not even suspect him of being such a vile and noxious agent of destruction! Tell the TSA! Think about the children!
This itself kills the value of these things - I've kept most of my textbooks and all my physics textbooks and frequently refer to them later. I'm going to trust anything that is advertising supported less because I'm going to wonder if its unbiased.
This is going to be useless for mathematics too because there are so many
free math textbooks out there. Physics is going this way and you can find lecture notes on some advanced topics on arxiv. Sean Carroll's lecture notes for GR are still online and form the basis of his textbook. Gould and Tobochnik have stat thermo notes online. I've used both in classes. Google lecture notes physics for a sample of whats out there. These guys cannot compete with this.
And even if I could have online lecture notes I use the free printing (2up and duplex so give me a break) because they are more readable and I need to be able to right notes on them. And still buy the textbooks because I don't mind having the references. I don't whine about the price of *most* of the textbooks I need because they are valuable references. These guys are probably going to be yet another failed web 2.0 phenomenon.
Unfair example using Jackson as an illustration of low version numbers.
No complaints about the price of Jackson or any of my physics textbooks. I buy the hardback ones used from Amazon or Abebooks. I'm keeping all of them and I want them to last. I atually buy some Indian textbooks for friends when I go back home every other year but they tend to fall apart at the seams during the semester. I wish all of them were hardback - Misner, Thorne, Wheeler isn't and its like Jackson for GR.
The point about the low version numbers with Jackson is not even he reads it which is why we have such few editions. Its sort of the trial by fire as you enter grad school. Occasionally you can look up stuff and I was using it look up skin depth yesterday with the talk about RF shielding. All the stuff I'd really want from Jackson are "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader." I've been taught EM by two generations of professors and they both used Jackson when they were grad students. And they both hate it.
There is certainly a lot of editions with something like Young and Freedman (upto v.11) or Serway and (Faughn|Bichner|Jewitt) (upto 6 I think) and the only thing that ever changes is the problems and page numbers. That said I don't really consider these physics books - I hate the intro physics plug and chug philosophy and whats with the ridiculous colour figures with smiling kids - black and (white|blue) figures with terse captions or none at all! That will lower the price!
I remember there was this outcry against Monsanto in India quite a few years (4-5) ago. The plan was to release designer seeds with much better characteristics than natural varieties but these seeds would feature a "Terminator" gene (no I promise it was called that I don't have a very large tin foil hat). The gene would prevent future seeds produced by the crop to be viable. Their buisness model was thus that you bought the seeds from Monsanto every year.
Most farmers in India are poorer than most of you can imagine and save some of the seeds from one years crop to reuse the next. There was also some concern that the Terminator gene would find its way into the natural crop varieties and render them useless. This in particular reeks of a company creating something principally to safeguard its profits without there being any actual value added to the farmer.
I think the result of the mess was Monsanto stopped testing it and I think later stopped developing it. That a company would try to develop something like this makes me actively distrust them and its no wonder that a lot of people are scared of genetic engineering. A lot of these groups also tend to be very secretive treating some of their research as trade secret. This is definetly what I'm used to in physics and its definetly not how science should be done. Perhaps its just me but I'm much more skeptical of research done by groups that seem primarily motivated by profit.
I'd worry that a lab environment is just too controlled and the nature has a lot of unplanned for scenarios which may end up producing unintended consequences. I've some respect for their ability to identify what a particular gene as they are doing in the present articles research - I'm more skeptical of their ability to predict what that gene will do if it is suddenly found in another species say. And no matter how extensive your lab trials become they do not address very slow processes which may well occur with GE crops. This selective breeding is less controversial but I'm no biologist and I can already see that there might be a risk with a lack of genetic diversity and that leading to an increased susceptability to disease.
There shouldn't be a problem if you had unshielded windows as long as long as we are not talking about a building with all glass on one side. The Faraday cage wil shield pretty effectively even if there are some gaps. This is why you can get away with using a mesh rather than putting everything inside solid metal boxes. If you've even seen the lightning demos with people in cages being completely unaffected while a big Van de Graff shoots sparks around the place (MOS in Boston has this - its fun).
This seems like its overkill - be more sensible to have some encryption and maybe a system where you have to login to get access to the web is more practical. This way you get to keep what few bars you have on the cell.
With respect to the RFID in passports or on cards, yeah you might want a Faraday cage in your wallet but I wonder how long it is before that becomes classified as suspicious behaviour. I can just see those TSA officials getting red in the face that you'd dare question their authority by using a shielded wallet and having you detained for an hour - just enough to miss your flight.
The new definition has that a planet is
(a) in orbit around a star or stellar remnants,
(b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
(c) is not massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion of deuterium in its core, and
(d) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
Where do the problems begin - with a) what happens when we find systems that are orbiting tight binaries - they are not a single star, could satisfy b), c) and d) but wouldn't classify as planets. What about a system with objects satisfying b) c) and d) but around a brown dwarf. A black hole can be a stellar remnant - I'd not call something that satisfies b) c) and d) orbiting a black hole a planet. I'd call it mostly doomed.
b) is terrible and it features in both defintions - an object with a high spin or a large system of moons can be in hydrostatic equilibrium, and can satisfy a) c) and d) but deviate from being spherical by a respectable amount. Atleast here you can define some quantitative deviation from being a sphere. An artifical limit on how spherical an object is stupid because there will be border line systems. You can still kida work with this one atleast.
c) is fine and sensible and corresponds to well defined physical conditions and is the dividing line between brown dwarfs and stars - which makes me wonder what happens to brown dwarfs with this definition.
d) As the BBC article points out the earth hasn't cleared its orbits and there are plenty of NEOs, all the Jovians have moons and rings (if anything these are more in the neighborhood of the planets orbit than asteroids), Jupiter has Trojans and Damocloids. If Pluto crosses Neptunes object last I checked yes Pluto hasn't cleared its object but neither has Neptune. Do you select which one remains a planet on the basis of mass. What if the less massive object was more spherical?
Only a limit based on hydrogen fusion in the core is clean. You can atleast qualify how spherical an object is even if a hard limit above which we call something spherical enough and below not spherical enough is stupid. Since its quantitative its more useful. I don't see any particular reason to limit things to a single star or stellar remnants. This is flaky - make it in orbit around a system thats actively undergoing nuclear fusion or something. Theres just no way to use this neighborhood definition so toss it.
I think the problem here is the IAU is hell bent on saving what we traditionally think of as planets without adding too many.
Sounds vaguely racist
The point is that planets are not that special and there are probably a lot of them out there. The only thing special about this one is that we are in it. Sorry if that seems anthropic. Stars are definetly not special and there are probably a lot of planetary systems out there. If the worry is that we have to change what we have to teach kids and we don't want them to memorize 100 objects then I'd argue that they ought to be learning a consistent defintion of what a planet and a star is instead. If they can name any 10 in our solar system they get ten points and can move on to the next question. Which is can than name a few other planetary systems. I don't think you are going to lose interest in astronomy by not emphasizing the nearest planet - not as long as you can take them to an 8 inch scope even and show you Jupiter's moons and Saturns rings.
Yes any statistic or defintion of violence that that rates Pac-Man as being 62% "violent" is a statistic that clearly not a statistic that would not reflect the general opinion of violence in video games. A poster pointed out the inadequacy of her statistic with Hitman. Consider Carmageddon for instance - you can entirely legitimately finish the game by actually racing the courses and coming first and not slamming into anyone. If you do not think Carmageddon is violent you are off your rocker. Also "psuh it to the limit" has sexual overtones!!! Lady, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
She does make a point though. I'm stunned that the ESRB doesn't play the game significantly before they rate it - you'd figure that would be obvious. In that respect I have to agree with her - if you are going to rate the game on its content then actually experience a representative random sample of the content.
Ofcourse as we all know many parents think video games are for kids and ignore the ESRB ratings anyway but thats no excuse for not rating the damn thing properly!
No playback at all or will the content be downgraed? The "No full" leads me to believe that the content will just be downgraded 720p or 480p but the article seems to say no playback whatsoever. I still suspect many people will be happy to rip something downgraded to DVD quality and encode it with Xvid or whatever. The quality now isn't as good as the original DVD but that doesn't seem to bother movie pirates now. No apparently people are willing to sacrifice some quality for getting their movies for free. I seriously think these guys have completely overestimated how much people care about HD content. A full HD rip is going to be several gigabytes larger and thats more of a headache over p2p anyways.
How many people will be using 32bit in 5 years - how many people will will have HDTVs in 5 years??? The cheapest ones are still 2000 bucks and higher! They have been for a while. And if its just a matter of time before there is widespread adoption of HD I think its seriously a matter of time before someone breaks HDCP convincingly.
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
{ducks}
Theres always going to be some people who do not agree with embryonic stem cell research and perhaps rightly so because these issues do raise difficult questions about life and its value. You don't have to be religious either to recognize this. I think most scientists would admit there are very touchy phlosophical questions here. I think most would admit there are touchy issues with cloning and late term abortion too.
This is what seperates these issues from the science vs religion issues dating from heliocentric/geocentric to evolution vs creation/ID or old earth vs young earth today. Essentially those are only issues if you are religious - or in fact Christian because there are a whole bunch of other religions out there for which these "debates" don't matter one whit. Science did not care what the general opinion on heliocentric vs geocentric models are and it certainly ignores the ID/creationist arguments.
That is the distinction and it makes all the difference even if it isn't much of one.
Science does not take values into consideration because there isn't an right and wrong in science and it isn't a democracy. Scientists do though. This developement is great - it effectively sidesteps a lot of thorny issues of when life begins, and what value it has. It will satisfy a lot more people who were queasy about embyonic stem cell research though not necessarily because of religious arguments. I think it will satisfy a lot of people who opposed it on religious grounds but are perhaps more moderate. Hopefully there will be some beneficial research that will come out of this.
Sure there are going to be arguments about the sanctity of the soul in a process like this one. I'd suspect most scientists will ignore them.
The X5L is 30gb and the battery lasts about 27 hrs - yes I love its features and the fact that the people on the iAudio forums actually listen to the firmware requests. A lot of people don't like the file-folder based navigation system but a lot of my mp3s dont have id3 tags and I've already sorted the lot my genre>artist>album so the file-folder system actually works better for me.
= details&kw=IAX5L30BL&is=REG&Q=&O=productlist&sku=3 96390
FM and recording are absolutely superb.
Its around $300 this side of the atlantic so I'm surprised you only find it for 400 Euros. I think even with shipping it should work out a lot cheaper. If your familiar with the the M3 (I had one until some fucker stole it in NYC) then you might wonder about the remote - you won't need it and it makes only a marginal difference with the battery life especially with the X5L.
Also following this discussion I've been looking into putting RockBox on it - http://www.rockbox.org/ - it looks very cool.
Heres the link for the place I bought mine from and its still around $300/-
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A
I think if you buy it from the COWON website they usualy throw in some free stuff like the nicer dock. When I got the M3 it came with the CW200 a small 128mb player which I use if I go biking.
As you can tell I'm pretty loyal to COWON because the damn thing is built like a tank (dropped I don't know how much) and both the M3 and the X5L have already served me really well. Also look at the Toshiba and Sansa players - they have comprable features and I've heard good perosnal reviews on the Toshiba ones. iRiver ain't bad and I'm actually kinda waiting to see what happens with the Zune. Moral of the story is there is more out there than the iPod especially if you like having more features.
Good luck!
Video review of its immeadiate predecessor
:-P
DISCLAIMER : I will not claim at any point that this is the best player out there. I do wish to point out some of its features though to people who criticize players that have interfaces that aren't the same as the iPod.
Nice iPodish menu, yes it has software hich is as simple as drag and drop. You cant complain about the player interface. What about the software? My karma has gone through the wringer before because of Apple fanboys who complain that players don't work with iTunes.
No it doesn't work with iTunes because iTMS is DRMed so nothing is going to work with iTMS except iPod unless Apple gets bashed for anti-competetive practices. Seriously people how do you expect anything to work with iTunes when Apple prevents anything from working with iTMS. if you are going to compare electronics compare them on features that both devices can reasonably implement. You might as well complain that square pegs do not fit in round holes. You are entirely allowed to have iTunes compatability be your killer feature. Just recognize that this does lock you into Apple. And that you'd whine if it was Microsoft instead of Apple.
Yes it has pretty decent video - Nano does not have video and its screen is smaller. No it doesn't support every video/audio codec out there but it gives you good variety. Other things it beats the Nano at, user replaceable battery, FM and voice recording, plus the micro SD card to take the e280 from 8 to 10 gb. No rob me headphones but you can buy some lovely white headphones to work with it if you really want. So if you want a player that has a lot more features and you happen a non-DRMed music library then this is easily as good as the iPod.
If you don't mind the interface and I for one don't mind a slightly more clunky interface for more features then there are several other players out there. Might I recommend the Cowon iAudio line. I've already lost some karma arguing that the interface isn't the be all and end all so I'm not claiming that these features will make something an iPod killer. If the iTMS compatability is that important to you stick with iPod. Your call and you are entirely entitled to it. Good for you. I'll chuckle as I record my next semesters lectures and recall that I paid less for a player for a player with more storage, and a bigger battery that has already lasted longer than a couple of my friends iPods
I have an orkut account - some of the information like an gmail address is necessary to sign in. The rest of the information on your profile is entiely optional. They don't even have to ask google for the profile information - make a fake account and stick up a photo of some girl in a swimsuit and get a freind request and you get to see it as soon as its approved.
The stupid thing is they expect criminals to be providing orkut with any legit info - for a long time my address was in Svalbard and the Jan Mayen Islands. This violates your TOS but really meh.
I don't know if orkut keeps a record of what IP address you login from but its also probably useless with people login in from random places or using TOR. Sure there is google search info linked to your gmail account and we all know about googles 2038 cookie but delete your cookies after each session and search from the the main google page or the firefox bar or use a public computer or whatever and you avoid that.
So I'm seriously confused by what data these guys are asking google for. The profile info which is likely to be the most useful if there is some accurate information is public or easy to get once you get authorized as a friend. I suspect they just want anything they can get their hands on and want to sort through it later. This is probably more work than they realize, and they will more than likely end up buried in a mound of data. They are probably better of doing some actual on the ground detective work.
Also do Googlenauts define targeted advertising as enhancing the user experience - because my definition tends to lean more towards Adblock.
Oxyrubber I was not referring to the box/EDR and the engine controller - I was *speculating* that some technology that could passivley monitor your driving and actively take control of the entire car when it detected erratic driving - a driving control unit/DCU - if you could make such technology reliable enough it would reduce/eliminate insurance payments because your erratic drving would be a risk mitigated by reliable technology. I do not think we have the technology to do this yet. At the beginning of the 20th century we did not have powered, heavier than air flight either. Its just a matter or time.
Yes I agree with you that people don't like telling them to drive better and like losing control of their car to a computer even less (a look at Lance_Denamrk's post will reassure you of that) - from a technology POV if you can mitigate the risk posed by bad drivers with a DCU - again not EDR/ECU - then like it or not such technology will probably be legislated into cars. Thats why I speculated that the technology would perhaps be designed in such a way as to leave you in control of your car while you are obeying the speed limit and take control above it or if you are drving erratically. Certainly its not entirely terrible and you can imagine something driving your car for you to be very useful on a long trip.
Yes you are right I was overthinking it with respect to the building your own car and you could certainly buy used cars - for a time. Eventually its going to be very hard to avoid technology like this though.
Yes you are right that we have little to no recourse to fight the data given by the black box at present and you are right that if the callibration is off then you are in trouble if you have an accident. One would hope that a check of the sensors after you have a collision would be standard and a periodic check on their callibration say every year also be standard. This is an engineering problem though and again its a matter of time. One would hope they'd put redundant sensors in as well. Yes you are right that there are privacy concerns because any DCU would probably need some sort of GPS and thats information thats just begging to be tracked if you use some service like onStar (aren't stand alone GPS units not nearly as much a risk) - if anything this, the recent AOL brouhaha, the EA privacy policy disaster and X other things is telling us that we need some sort of new law about data retention.
Essentially I am claiming that given time and the development of technology people will lose the level of control over their cars that they previously had - wether they like it or not - because technology will eventually do a better job of driving their car than they can. I'm also putting my karma out there despite the Lance_Denmark's of the world to claim this is not necessarily a bad thing.
No I like this idea. I'm not too worried about your privacy because with the EDR the system is passive - it just records your driving information - a CCTV on the road would do the same. If I may herald a guess as to the future
We have cars that park themselves.
Next innovation - monitor driving and in case of rash driving, disable driver control, have computer take over control of car and safely park car, disable engine and send out automatic alert identifying exactly where you are because your car now also comes with standard GPS. Same technology is great at preventing car thieves.
Eventually, just have a computer drive the car because again its safer for every involved. I remember seeing an article recently about how a computer could control a car at high speeds much better than any human can. If you love driving my favored compromise is you get to control the car below the speed limit with the system passively monitoring and ready to intervene should it sense a threat and have the computer control it above the speed limit when its safe to speed. You could even have wireless between cars to transmit data on traffic and road conditions ahead.
I like all of the above because they could drastically reduce the number of accidents and make car insurance completely uneeded.
All of the above tech is passive and only interfere when you are driving recklessly. So yes driving becomes less thrilling for you with the flip side of you and I are more safe. Systems like this and the fact that computers have system logs and cell phones have usage records could potentially deal with poster rkcallaghan's point about the shortcomings of EDR.
Nothing is foolproof and you could I suppose build your own car from scratch to circumvent this system. You'd still probably have a few accidents because someone ran/biked in front of a very fast moving car and the elctronics worked but simply couldn't beat the vehicles inertia. Better than nothing though.
Heres an information practice that could cause substantial consumer injury. EA is collecting my address, phone number, birth date, name, credit card information - usually the only other piece of information you need to charge the card is the three digit number at the back of the card. Some websites don't even require that. If you win a prize you also get to give them your SSN!!!
Do you trust your security to a three digit number? Do you trust a giant company to not have any disgruntled employees with access to the database? And a paper and pencil to circumvent the copy restrictions on the data (if they have that even). I trust EA to publish (mostly crappy sports) games and thats all. None of the other information they collect is necessary to run EA online. The very fact that they are collecting data they do not need makes me actively distrust them. This entire implictly agreeing to hand your data over smells fishy.
See that "File a complaint" link on the top of the FTC webpage. Ten minutes. Slashdot the damn thing - I'm sure the FTC will take notice. At very least they should be able to contact Microsoft and EA and be able to change what data is collected. Seriously the best way to deal with a stupid bunch of corporate lawyers is have a government agency snarl at them.
No, no - if Heisenberg approcahes the real question is where is he? BTW mods I think that parent is "Funny" as opposed to "Informative" unless we must have sigma Funny sigma Informative >= hbar/2 in which case since hes marked informative no body can ever know how funny he is....
No I know the distinction and agree with those who point out that the thumbdrive wasn't actually subject to mutch from the VW. I've dropped it quite a few times - its survived one 12 foot drop from the bleachers, several "Can't you catch idiot" tosses, and one fall through pant pocket and get stamped on. It shoudl survive usual wear and tear. It looks like shit and the cap that protects the usb connector is long mising but it still works - its a 128mb PNY thumbdrive (yeah its ancient) I picked up on sale at Walgreens. All said and done the things are certainly more useful and versatile than floppys or cds though I still sftp files, and mail them to myself just in case. I haven't tried kicking mine directly but I'll let you know when I decide to get a new one.
er... (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 or do cross terms no longer matter for calculating distances...
Seriously I stared at this for a while to make sure its what TFA says... because as we all know the physicists are the sloppy ones while the mathematicians are always rigorous...
Maybe because the song is what gives the physical medium any value to us...
Also if anybody ever asked you if you had a CD of Pink Floyd do you think they cared about the physical medium or listening to the content.
A physical medium is a delivery device - an outdated one because it costs money - the great thing about digital media is that you can make N copies for effectively free - you can change its format, you can rip a section of it (either a time segment, or only the audio from a movie say) - its more versatile and powerful. It also has the nice side effect that it takes a lot more to make the data unretrievable. My grandfather used to have some recordings on tape spools - just open tape that went between two reels - player broke - no one around could convert the damn things. Media companies recognize these benefits and you can be damn sure they use it - e.g. cut out the people who make the physical film in favour of digital video recorders.
Thats also the problem with the digital medium though - if you treat things as a bunch of 1s and 0s and liberate it from a physical medium then your buisness model whcih relied on you delivering that physical medium fails. Unless they can control the hardware which is what HDCP tries to do, and is the point of all this trusted computing stuff that scares me. But really such control of the hardware is an artificial limitation of technology. What you should do is change.. or die. Theres no rule that demands that these recoding companies have to survive this century - music won't die. It might just become less corporate.
So sure let them say you have no real right to the song and all you can do is play if from the original medium you bought it on. And let people with cdrom drives and cd rippers and mp3 codecs and mp3 servers and p2p networks tell them to go take a flying leap.
YES!!! I totally forgot Ørsted - and in his case we can reel in the kiddies with music
;-)
Original or a techno version
Probably not going to make it to myspace but still interesting - if you have some time you should browse the rest of the songs on the site especially the love song of the EM field. The mathematicians have better stuff - seriously its a riot. And for the computer programmers
So pshaw to those of you who say you cant find good free music on the internet
(ducks)
A few of the biggies that get omitted...
Carl Gauss - I'm seriosuly trying hard to think of the last day I did not assume something was Gaussian...
Niels Bohr
Henrietta Swan Leavitt - add in a nice article on how the Cepheid calibration is absolutely vital to cosmology
Emmy Noether
Enrico Fermi
Grace Hopper
Glenn Seaborg - 10 elements - I think thats still a record and he worked on multiple Nuclear test ban treaties.
A couple of fun ones might be -
Margaret Thatcher - no I kid you not she helped make soft serve ice cream mix!
Fritz Zwicky - oh come on the guy though of supernovae and called people spherical bastards because they were bastards anyway he looked at them
Also given the recent brouhaha about evolution in the classroom lets give the kiddies some good old Charles Darwin and maybe even some William of Ockham.
Actually with the fun exception of Maggie Thatcher everyone on this list is dead - can we nominate people who are alive? Alan Guth - ideas on inflation very important for cosmology and still being debated.
Apologies if the list is slightly Physics/Astronomy/Math heavy.
Got my mobile which I still have at 20 and getting out of undergrad . For the longest time I fought getting the thing because I hated the thought of paying 30 bucks a month when I wouldn't use most of the minutes. I still don't use most of my minutes and they will just roll over and over and over. And now its upto almost 50 bucks. Bloody Cingular. It seems like all the prepaid options suck too so even if I get off contract I'm sorta stuck paying the same thing.
The sad difference the cell phone made - I used to memorize my friends cell numbers and five digit dorm phone numbers - now I don't have to and so while I have more peoples numbers I don't think I can recall more than 10 from memory. Sigh.
Offtopic - does anyone kno if cell phone companies have been investigated for either price fixing or being virulently anti-consumer.
For those in desperate need to not have a caps have a simple solution - don't press the bloody thing...
And seriously am I the only one who uses the numeric keypad for gaming - I think its vastly better than the arrow keys because they are higher up and my palm is on the kyboard for the most part and better than the WASD because there aren't as many keys near it.
Dont get rid of the key use a software solution to rebind any key on the keyboard to whatever you want - if you have a redundant control then good for you.
I like the logitech keyboards mostly because they have more keys that I can use to bind other command to.