We had to learn it starting in 3rd grade and since we had a computer back home a teacher actually came home with some 5 1/2' diskettes to copy it over. I'd spend hours in front of the monitor drawing things with the little turtle and my mum never bothered about a baby sitter for me.
REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1]
SO much fun... I really should get this thing again maybe I can remember the program I did to make two spirals. Look mummy galaxy! And thus people who play with computers and love dreaming about space end up doing astrophysics.
BTW offtopic but thinking back the old 386 had a big red switch for power - something you actually flicked up and down to turn it on and off - does anyone know any cases which still have this.
1) Declare Hunting Season open 2) Invite Dick Cheney 3) Invite AOL to come dig 4) Make commemorative buttons 5) Profit - Earn more than buried treasure is worth
Thank you. The trouble it seems is the excllent independent artists don't get the publicity that the recording industry. Yet if the internet has taught us anything its that small independent voices can get a lot of attention.
Why not a Your tube style site for music. Have a system where users can mode your stuff up or down. Ad supported but if you want to download a DRM free, high quality mp3 you can for half a buck or something. There are a bunch of sites that can already guess your music tastes based on other artists you like your own mp3 collection and suggest new material. It ought to be easy to make a playlist of things you might like by independet artists. Heck its a solved problem in a limited way http://www.pandora.com/
Its not even going to use the same amount of bandwidth as yourtube because its not video. There I days I go into work and wish I could just plug my headphones into the computer to listen to something new and not on my mp3 player. emusic tries bless 'em but they need new performers. I suspect that you will stop using p2p if you can just get music easily from the source.
Well thats the point of the "I think" - by my completely subjective scale these are better players because they outperform the iPod on things like battery life, compatability with widely used formats, FM Radio and Voice recording - features that you may not care one whit for.
No its not true that the superior interface always wins - sometimes you want more features and if that comes with a more complex interface well thats the tradeoff you make.
Your analogy with the car is a bit extreme - slightly more realistic would be to compare two cars - one with automatic and one with manaul - thats about the difference that the interface on an mp3 player makes. They all have playlist support and random features. I'd guess a lot of us just use those.
The Cowon is filesystem based which is great because my mp3s are sorted by directory because they were downloaded in the days of audioglaxy and winamp 2 which didn't have a media library. The sorting I used was Genre>Artist>Filename. The iPod is id3 based and would sort this for me but a lot of my mp3s dont have any id3 info at all-and more to the point wouldn't make any difference in my case. So yes to me the interface of the iPod was not an important factor at all.
The Cowon players have one of the worst interfaces out there, and a lot of players out there still have better features than the iPod and arguably better interfaces. Apple isn't winning the mp3 player market because iPods have good interfaces, they are winning because their marketing machine has made iPod synonymous with mp3 player... I think they will lose eventually because I believe that rational consumers will one day look past marketing and compare actual products. The point of my post was theres a good number of people who have tried iPods and they've fallen short or have heard horror stories about them and are unwilling to try them any more.
That said a lot of my friends HATE the iPod. Two have had the battery die, one has had the HDD crap out and most recently one tried updating the nano's firmware and paperweighted it. I'm sure there are atleast some people who are sick of seeing everyone and their mother sporting white earphones - these will be people who buy the Zune. Maybe my experience is atypical but I seem to e witness to a rather high failure rate for iPods.
But why haven't they bought the iRivers or Creatives or Sansa's you ask? Well I have a niftly iAudio X5L from Cowon (battery life on this thing is pretty upsurb and I can personally vouch for it being atleast 25 hrs even with some Video watching) and when some of them asked me about it we just got into a discussion about the advisability of buying electronics from "unheard of" manufacturers. Yes some of them had not heard of Creative. Then again I don't think any of them ever research any electronic device they buy... and they certainly don't read Slashdot. Microsoft by contrast everyone has heard of. And honestly I don't hear complains about them outside of Slashdot though I have a lot of them myself. So don't count the Zune out yet. The Wifi is a good idea.
Discalimer-I'm an Apple hater, forget just the iPod. I hate Microsoft too but (surprise! no really) less. I'd like neither of these companies to win. I think a lot of the smaller players have a better players* and (eventually) customers will wise up to that. More competition! More features! More better!
* A lot fo them really need to work on the interface and the sync up software.
All the music piracy told me is that a lot of people will happily accept a lower quality version of some content if it comes to them free. Why - because the actual content doesn't have the right value for money - its DRM laden and doesn't respect fair use, or its not as portable as a digital file or even *gasp* the actual content is just not worth enough to merit buying outright.
Lower quality as in someone buys a nice recording setup, and a nice set of speakers and records something the completely analog way - stick one next to the other and hit record and play at the same time. If the sound reproduction in this digital era is supposed to be so damned good and we get better and better at making recordings - after all someone has to record the artists themselves at some point - then you can end up with a decent sounding copy without drm in whatever format you like with no copy protection.
And thus you defeated the audio broadcast flag.
(BTW please stop any of you who want to preach about me not needing any content I don't consider worth buying-the whole point of whats happening is that this era enables you to have things you don't aboslutely love but do want like that Phil Collins song you get in the random mood to listen to once in a year)
Thats not the answer and I don't suggest doing that though it is guaranteed to work. All I want is content thats high quality, respects fair use, and is cheap enough that its not worth my while to engage in piracy. Yes you will still get ripped CDs but that may not translate into distribution, because frankly I've better things to do with with the time I spend on my computer than hunting down Phil bloody Collings mp3s;-)
These provisions are supposed to be temporary - lets hope they remain that way but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I don't think its hard to make explosives by mixing liquids together. When I was in high school back home in India, we had complete access to a whole range of chemicals in lab, we didn't use gloves, goggles or a lab coat, and we didn't have to ask anybodys permission to enter it, take what we wanted, and mix them together. Even with dilute high school quality chemicals we could make simple explosives, and did for shits and giggles. We even had a helpful chemistry textbook to warn us about mixtures that were volatile. The benefits of a CBSE education in a private school. We were incredibly stupid. I look back at that time and marvel that I have all my fingers, though I do have a friend who is almost deaf in one year as a result of his fooling around. That particular bang cracked a large inch thick cement flower pot, and was in a bloody 500ml beaker. It is not hard to believe that with access to stronger chemicals you could make lethal explosives.
There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people with the will to blow up other people. So yes the threat is credible. Worse despite this success I don't think that security forces can change, move and keep up with the technology to counter terrorists without instituing a police state. Lots of people have pointed out that terrorists could just as easily bomb buses/trains/discos/sporting events whatever. There seems to be no way to protect everyone at everyplace. I'm pretty certain most of us/.ers don't want a police state. Increased isolationism isn't much of an answer. Killing the terrorists doesn't seem to work unless you listen to the "nuke them all" crazies and frankly I'm more scared of them than the terrorists. Giving your entire population military training seems like an even worse idea, because you just trained a whole bunch of extremists in the process. In an ideal world we could teach everyone to play nice and they would. And there would be unicorns.
Theres something very badly wrong with our global political system. I don't know how to change it but I think we are seeing the first cracks in it. I'd suspect that addressing the crazy disparities in quality of life would help matters a lot. There really is no short term fix. You need better education, you need a population whose size reflects the resources that are available. You need to have people recognize that their identity is human, not national, not religious, not political. I'm not being idealistic - I recognize how very incredibly hard this is, and how very incredbly long this is going to take. I think the problem with what we currently have is that yes things are bad but theres not much hope for things getting better even. If we don't move in that direction I'd guess we are just going to see a more polarized world with different blocs of disgruntled people blowing up each other, for causes they believe are just or for retribution.
Exactly how did this get modded to insightful rather than flamebait/troll...
how are you any better than a radical Imam preaching against "the evils of the west"
GAH! This was a long rant on how idiots like you ought not to perpetuate stereotypes and cause the lack of understanding that has brought us to this point but really theres no hope so I just erased it.
Yes the world isn't a perfect place. And I believe it'd be a lot better if all the hate-mongering lunatics, terrorists and bad people including you would just go away.
We want the universe on the largest of scales to look isotropic and be homogeneous spatially. The first means it looks the same in all directions about some point, and the second meaning that its physical properties are the same everywhere. If the universe is isotropic about one point and it is homogeous it follows that it is isotropic about every point. Straight away there is no priveleged center and it is meaningless to talk about the center of the Big Bang or some such. Insert standard dots on a balloon or raisn bread rising explanation here but neither is perfect.
We can look at galaxies and can see spectral lines and can measure their shifts and recognize that they must be moving with respect to us, and are typically moving away from us so the univsere is expanding. So the universe must look the same from every point in space but it is not static and can look different at different times. Because we want to maintain homogeneity and isotropy through time and because we believe there are no privleged directions or points in space we want this expansion to be solely a function of time. This function of time is what is called the scale factor and it is the fundamental quantity that determines what present distances in the universe are and how fast they are changing. There is no speed of light anywhere around the scale factor, and there isn't going to be.
With all this we can write down the model for the universe, and its called the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric after the smart people who came up with it. Thats fancy talk for a single line that tells you how to compute the "distance" between two events each occuring at their own space and time coordinates. Its equation 8.7 in the article. If you believe we live in a flat universe which you should because theres lots of good experimental evidence for it from studying the cosmic microwave background, even that simplifies a fair bit to something that can look like ds^2 = dt^2-a^2(t)(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2).
The second section in brackets to the right of the scale factor is the way you'd compute the distance between two events in 3d space, just the sum of the squares of their differences in position, and the dt^2 is the bit that adds on time. In any local region of the universe a(t) is constant and can be taken to be one and then you have a return to happy special relativity where the speed of light is constant to all inertial observers. Take a(t) to zero and you see the singularity in the equations which we call the Big Bang. This is where the model and the equations break down and thats all we can truly say about it. The universe (hopefully) does not break down, only our model to describe it does.
This metric, which we can write happily as a diagonal matrix even can be plugged into Einsteins equations and give you yet more equations like the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation (Carroll 8.35 and 8.36), and you can derive Hubbles law and discusses all the interesting forms of matter you can have in it including what happens in Einstein's equation has a cosmological constant term. You'll notice theres still no speed of light. Stuff in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light according to some local observer. However, the universe is sort of the fabric on which all the stuff is and that fabric can stretch faster than the speed of light. We do see object moving faster than light. See near end for an example, more information and no serious equations http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/doppler.htm
Thats become somewhat important following the studies of distant supernovae from '98 and we now know that the univer
Really, I thought when something was unfair you try and change the system. Voting with your dollars is our method of changing the system - if a company loses enough buisness its forced to change their system. No the problem is the entertainment industry is a cartel not just a company and even if people vote with their dollars and decide to go to engage in mass stealing they apparently have enough money to slow down the process. Also, I distinctly remember them being convicted for price fixing and distinctly dont remember them giving me any money back for the around 20 cds and probably many many more tapes I bought. Do you really want to argue that the price is fair...
So yes voting with your dollars is one, usually good way of changing the system. A revolution is another. And the later is remarkably much more effective when your opponent is a lot bigger than you. Thats what the p2p thing is. Voting with your dollars was a great way of punishing a local restaurant for bad service but is a tad idealistic in todays economy.
What I'd like to have happen is to buy direct from the artists. Computers and networks make distribution a lot easier, and getting a band publicity is not as hard as people think. Its really not difficult to see a social networking site with bands and users who rate them and I'd be willing to believe you could find a group of users with similar music tastes and see what bands they liked best. Theres internet radio. We already have services that can suggest new music choices based on your own choices. I think several good bands could become very popular without going anywhere near a record company. I think interacting with artists directly would mean more variety and would be a better and more personal experience. It would mean than voting with your dollars was a concept with meaning. Yes, tt might mean an end to superstars. But I can also imagine a whole gaggle of teenage girls falling over some heartthrob on the net, so maybe not. My 0.02
Also be interesting how it stiches together photos taken at different times. Then you could dive in spatially but also see something like a time lapse movie of how a structure evolves. If you have fine enough time resolution you can track how things move from frame to frame in your 3D model.
So imagine a whole bunch of webcams around St. Peters taking snaps say every 30 secs and stiching this all together. You could see birds flying, people moving all in a 3D world. Does sound computationally intensive but would be very cool, and I can already imagine quite a few uses for this in science. Micron sized particle tracking in 3D when you have multiple CCDs imaging a sample or tracking near earth asteroids (long baseline needed but in principle combine something ground based and space based...) come to mind.
I hope they do a google and release a free version and a paid pro version or something.
Smart kids defeat ham handed attempts by fuddy duddys to restrict web access by using proxy servers...
Will they ever learn... Online predators are one of the risks of being online so teach them to be street smart
Also the article does seem to be stretching it when it argues that this could been Slashdot, Amazon and other such sites will be banned. I think (hope?) that school districts and libraries, and even the FCC are more reasonable than that. Yes there are always a few extreme measures like that cell phone checking in Farmingham, MA but that never got tabled. Sanity is so important.
"...a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city."
I really don't get the MLB guy's argument that I'm stealing from the guy in Chicago. Does he expect me to pay some cable operator in Chicago to watch one game while I'm visiting? If the game is playing in a bar I could just watch it free, and my watching it doesn't add to their revenues.
The only way this makes sense is if they can sell me the rights to watch the game while I'm travelling over the web or PPV. But I've already bought the right to watch the game in SF... I paid for access to the *content*. THats where the difference in thinking is - Buisness wants me to pay for the content on a particular delivery system or a different media. Wouldn't it be just wonderful if they could charge you $5 for content on your iPod and $10 if you want your game streamed over the web to your laptop in your Chicago hotel room, $15 if you want a DVD of it.
But the whole point is irrespective of what the content I paid for is its still just data and if you put data and a computer and a network together then you are simply not going to be able to keep control over it...unless you can control what users can do with their computers and what what networks can do. Out of curiostiy whats happening with network neutrality and does anyone remember that Trusted computing/TCPA/Palladium thing...
Sure but homogenizing all the users into a few networks is a bad idea - fewer targets to take down. Also if the network has more users and they manage to find a way to defeat the anonymity the network offers, a lot more people get lawsuits.
Even if there are less places to search, I think it was easier "in those days" to find a p2p network on which you could find the music you wanted *easily* than it is today. I can still find the music I want - it just takes more searching on emusic, allofmp3 and emusic. I think this is partly because their lawsuits have been working.
I'd like a download service which gave me DRM free, high birate, cheaper than a buck (zero materials and why do tracks from the 80s cost the same as tracks tday - obviously I'm going to feel ripped off) and personally if I pay 49c per song thats low enough that I will use your service and high enough that I wont share my music on p2p. Ofcourse I'd also like to walk on the moon... the sad thing is that I'm so disenchanted by the music biz that I think a moonwalk is more likely than a high quality comprehensive customer (not consumer) friendly download service.
Slashdot Mirror
Greatest piece of software ever written - LOGO
We had to learn it starting in 3rd grade and since we had a computer back home a teacher actually came home with some 5 1/2' diskettes to copy it over. I'd spend hours in front of the monitor drawing things with the little turtle and my mum never bothered about a baby sitter for me.
REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1]
SO much fun... I really should get this thing again maybe I can remember the program I did to make two spirals. Look mummy galaxy! And thus people who play with computers and love dreaming about space end up doing astrophysics.
BTW offtopic but thinking back the old 386 had a big red switch for power - something you actually flicked up and down to turn it on and off - does anyone know any cases which still have this.
1) Declare Hunting Season open
2) Invite Dick Cheney
3) Invite AOL to come dig
4) Make commemorative buttons
5) Profit - Earn more than buried treasure is worth
(ducks)
Thank you. The trouble it seems is the excllent independent artists don't get the publicity that the recording industry. Yet if the internet has taught us anything its that small independent voices can get a lot of attention.
Why not a Your tube style site for music. Have a system where users can mode your stuff up or down. Ad supported but if you want to download a DRM free, high quality mp3 you can for half a buck or something. There are a bunch of sites that can already guess your music tastes based on other artists you like your own mp3 collection and suggest new material. It ought to be easy to make a playlist of things you might like by independet artists. Heck its a solved problem in a limited way http://www.pandora.com/
Its not even going to use the same amount of bandwidth as yourtube because its not video. There I days I go into work and wish I could just plug my headphones into the computer to listen to something new and not on my mp3 player. emusic tries bless 'em but they need new performers. I suspect that you will stop using p2p if you can just get music easily from the source.
Well thats the point of the "I think" - by my completely subjective scale these are better players because they outperform the iPod on things like battery life, compatability with widely used formats, FM Radio and Voice recording - features that you may not care one whit for.
No its not true that the superior interface always wins - sometimes you want more features and if that comes with a more complex interface well thats the tradeoff you make.
Your analogy with the car is a bit extreme - slightly more realistic would be to compare two cars - one with automatic and one with manaul - thats about the difference that the interface on an mp3 player makes. They all have playlist support and random features. I'd guess a lot of us just use those.
The Cowon is filesystem based which is great because my mp3s are sorted by directory because they were downloaded in the days of audioglaxy and winamp 2 which didn't have a media library. The sorting I used was Genre>Artist>Filename. The iPod is id3 based and would sort this for me but a lot of my mp3s dont have any id3 info at all-and more to the point wouldn't make any difference in my case. So yes to me the interface of the iPod was not an important factor at all.
The Cowon players have one of the worst interfaces out there, and a lot of players out there still have better features than the iPod and arguably better interfaces. Apple isn't winning the mp3 player market because iPods have good interfaces, they are winning because their marketing machine has made iPod synonymous with mp3 player... I think they will lose eventually because I believe that rational consumers will one day look past marketing and compare actual products. The point of my post was theres a good number of people who have tried iPods and they've fallen short or have heard horror stories about them and are unwilling to try them any more.
Gizmodo had some speculation about the Zune being audio only atleast at launch. If thats founded then I doubt its going to be any kind of threat to the iPod.l -probably-be-audioonly-at-launch-192166.php
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/microsoft/zune-wil
So good for Apple.
That said a lot of my friends HATE the iPod. Two have had the battery die, one has had the HDD crap out and most recently one tried updating the nano's firmware and paperweighted it. I'm sure there are atleast some people who are sick of seeing everyone and their mother sporting white earphones - these will be people who buy the Zune. Maybe my experience is atypical but I seem to e witness to a rather high failure rate for iPods.
But why haven't they bought the iRivers or Creatives or Sansa's you ask? Well I have a niftly iAudio X5L from Cowon (battery life on this thing is pretty upsurb and I can personally vouch for it being atleast 25 hrs even with some Video watching) and when some of them asked me about it we just got into a discussion about the advisability of buying electronics from "unheard of" manufacturers. Yes some of them had not heard of Creative. Then again I don't think any of them ever research any electronic device they buy... and they certainly don't read Slashdot. Microsoft by contrast everyone has heard of. And honestly I don't hear complains about them outside of Slashdot though I have a lot of them myself. So don't count the Zune out yet. The Wifi is a good idea.
Discalimer-I'm an Apple hater, forget just the iPod. I hate Microsoft too but (surprise! no really) less. I'd like neither of these companies to win. I think a lot of the smaller players have a better players* and (eventually) customers will wise up to that. More competition! More features! More better!
* A lot fo them really need to work on the interface and the sync up software.
All the music piracy told me is that a lot of people will happily accept a lower quality version of some content if it comes to them free. Why - because the actual content doesn't have the right value for money - its DRM laden and doesn't respect fair use, or its not as portable as a digital file or even *gasp* the actual content is just not worth enough to merit buying outright.
;-)
Lower quality as in someone buys a nice recording setup, and a nice set of speakers and records something the completely analog way - stick one next to the other and hit record and play at the same time. If the sound reproduction in this digital era is supposed to be so damned good and we get better and better at making recordings - after all someone has to record the artists themselves at some point - then you can end up with a decent sounding copy without drm in whatever format you like with no copy protection.
And thus you defeated the audio broadcast flag.
(BTW please stop any of you who want to preach about me not needing any content I don't consider worth buying-the whole point of whats happening is that this era enables you to have things you don't aboslutely love but do want like that Phil Collins song you get in the random mood to listen to once in a year)
Thats not the answer and I don't suggest doing that though it is guaranteed to work. All I want is content thats high quality, respects fair use, and is cheap enough that its not worth my while to engage in piracy. Yes you will still get ripped CDs but that may not translate into distribution, because frankly I've better things to do with with the time I spend on my computer than hunting down Phil bloody Collings mp3s
These provisions are supposed to be temporary - lets hope they remain that way but I'm not going to hold my breath. I don't think its hard to make explosives by mixing liquids together. When I was in high school back home in India, we had complete access to a whole range of chemicals in lab, we didn't use gloves, goggles or a lab coat, and we didn't have to ask anybodys permission to enter it, take what we wanted, and mix them together. Even with dilute high school quality chemicals we could make simple explosives, and did for shits and giggles. We even had a helpful chemistry textbook to warn us about mixtures that were volatile. The benefits of a CBSE education in a private school. We were incredibly stupid. I look back at that time and marvel that I have all my fingers, though I do have a friend who is almost deaf in one year as a result of his fooling around. That particular bang cracked a large inch thick cement flower pot, and was in a bloody 500ml beaker. It is not hard to believe that with access to stronger chemicals you could make lethal explosives. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people with the will to blow up other people. So yes the threat is credible. Worse despite this success I don't think that security forces can change, move and keep up with the technology to counter terrorists without instituing a police state. Lots of people have pointed out that terrorists could just as easily bomb buses/trains/discos/sporting events whatever. There seems to be no way to protect everyone at everyplace. I'm pretty certain most of us /.ers don't want a police state. Increased isolationism isn't much of an answer. Killing the terrorists doesn't seem to work unless you listen to the "nuke them all" crazies and frankly I'm more scared of them than the terrorists. Giving your entire population military training seems like an even worse idea, because you just trained a whole bunch of extremists in the process. In an ideal world we could teach everyone to play nice and they would. And there would be unicorns.
Theres something very badly wrong with our global political system. I don't know how to change it but I think we are seeing the first cracks in it. I'd suspect that addressing the crazy disparities in quality of life would help matters a lot. There really is no short term fix. You need better education, you need a population whose size reflects the resources that are available. You need to have people recognize that their identity is human, not national, not religious, not political. I'm not being idealistic - I recognize how very incredibly hard this is, and how very incredbly long this is going to take. I think the problem with what we currently have is that yes things are bad but theres not much hope for things getting better even. If we don't move in that direction I'd guess we are just going to see a more polarized world with different blocs of disgruntled people blowing up each other, for causes they believe are just or for retribution.
Exactly how did this get modded to insightful rather than flamebait/troll...
how are you any better than a radical Imam preaching against "the evils of the west"
GAH!
This was a long rant on how idiots like you ought not to perpetuate stereotypes and cause the lack of understanding that has brought us to this point but really theres no hope so I just erased it.
Yes the world isn't a perfect place. And I believe it'd be a lot better if all the hate-mongering lunatics, terrorists and bad people including you would just go away.
-------------
Stop wasting my oxygen.
There are several posts that mention that the universe can expand faster than light. They are right but let me see if I can expand on it some.
If you have taken a fair bit of math skip this and and go here http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/ to Chapter 8 in particular.
We want the universe on the largest of scales to look isotropic and be homogeneous spatially. The first means it looks the same in all directions about some point, and the second meaning that its physical properties are the same everywhere. If the universe is isotropic about one point and it is homogeous it follows that it is isotropic about every point. Straight away there is no priveleged center and it is meaningless to talk about the center of the Big Bang or some such. Insert standard dots on a balloon or raisn bread rising explanation here but neither is perfect.
We can look at galaxies and can see spectral lines and can measure their shifts and recognize that they must be moving with respect to us, and are typically moving away from us so the univsere is expanding. So the universe must look the same from every point in space but it is not static and can look different at different times. Because we want to maintain homogeneity and isotropy through time and because we believe there are no privleged directions or points in space we want this expansion to be solely a function of time. This function of time is what is called the scale factor and it is the fundamental quantity that determines what present distances in the universe are and how fast they are changing. There is no speed of light anywhere around the scale factor, and there isn't going to be.
With all this we can write down the model for the universe, and its called the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric after the smart people who came up with it. Thats fancy talk for a single line that tells you how to compute the "distance" between two events each occuring at their own space and time coordinates. Its equation 8.7 in the article. If you believe we live in a flat universe which you should because theres lots of good experimental evidence for it from studying the cosmic microwave background, even that simplifies a fair bit to something that can look like ds^2 = dt^2-a^2(t)(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2).
The second section in brackets to the right of the scale factor is the way you'd compute the distance between two events in 3d space, just the sum of the squares of their differences in position, and the dt^2 is the bit that adds on time. In any local region of the universe a(t) is constant and can be taken to be one and then you have a return to happy special relativity where the speed of light is constant to all inertial observers. Take a(t) to zero and you see the singularity in the equations which we call the Big Bang. This is where the model and the equations break down and thats all we can truly say about it. The universe (hopefully) does not break down, only our model to describe it does.
This metric, which we can write happily as a diagonal matrix even can be plugged into Einsteins equations and give you yet more equations like the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation (Carroll 8.35 and 8.36), and you can derive Hubbles law and discusses all the interesting forms of matter you can have in it including what happens in Einstein's equation has a cosmological constant term. You'll notice theres still no speed of light. Stuff in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light according to some local observer. However, the universe is sort of the fabric on which all the stuff is and that fabric can stretch faster than the speed of light. We do see object moving faster than light. See near end for an example, more information and no serious equations http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/doppler.htm
Thats become somewhat important following the studies of distant supernovae from '98 and we now know that the univer
All the world will be your enemy, Prince With a Thousand Enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you...
*ducks*
Really, I thought when something was unfair you try and change the system. Voting with your dollars is our method of changing the system - if a company loses enough buisness its forced to change their system. No the problem is the entertainment industry is a cartel not just a company and even if people vote with their dollars and decide to go to engage in mass stealing they apparently have enough money to slow down the process. Also, I distinctly remember them being convicted for price fixing and distinctly dont remember them giving me any money back for the around 20 cds and probably many many more tapes I bought. Do you really want to argue that the price is fair...
So yes voting with your dollars is one, usually good way of changing the system. A revolution is another. And the later is remarkably much more effective when your opponent is a lot bigger than you. Thats what the p2p thing is. Voting with your dollars was a great way of punishing a local restaurant for bad service but is a tad idealistic in todays economy.
What I'd like to have happen is to buy direct from the artists. Computers and networks make distribution a lot easier, and getting a band publicity is not as hard as people think. Its really not difficult to see a social networking site with bands and users who rate them and I'd be willing to believe you could find a group of users with similar music tastes and see what bands they liked best. Theres internet radio. We already have services that can suggest new music choices based on your own choices. I think several good bands could become very popular without going anywhere near a record company. I think interacting with artists directly would mean more variety and would be a better and more personal experience. It would mean than voting with your dollars was a concept with meaning. Yes, tt might mean an end to superstars. But I can also imagine a whole gaggle of teenage girls falling over some heartthrob on the net, so maybe not. My 0.02
Also be interesting how it stiches together photos taken at different times. Then you could dive in spatially but also see something like a time lapse movie of how a structure evolves. If you have fine enough time resolution you can track how things move from frame to frame in your 3D model.
So imagine a whole bunch of webcams around St. Peters taking snaps say every 30 secs and stiching this all together. You could see birds flying, people moving all in a 3D world. Does sound computationally intensive but would be very cool, and I can already imagine quite a few uses for this in science. Micron sized particle tracking in 3D when you have multiple CCDs imaging a sample or tracking near earth asteroids (long baseline needed but in principle combine something ground based and space based...) come to mind.
I hope they do a google and release a free version and a paid pro version or something.
Smart kids defeat ham handed attempts by fuddy duddys to restrict web access by using proxy servers...
Will they ever learn... Online predators are one of the risks of being online so teach them to be street smart
Also the article does seem to be stretching it when it argues that this could been Slashdot, Amazon and other such sites will be banned. I think (hope?) that school districts and libraries, and even the FCC are more reasonable than that. Yes there are always a few extreme measures like that cell phone checking in Farmingham, MA but that never got tabled. Sanity is so important.
"...a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city."
I really don't get the MLB guy's argument that I'm stealing from the guy in Chicago. Does he expect me to pay some cable operator in Chicago to watch one game while I'm visiting? If the game is playing in a bar I could just watch it free, and my watching it doesn't add to their revenues.
The only way this makes sense is if they can sell me the rights to watch the game while I'm travelling over the web or PPV. But I've already bought the right to watch the game in SF... I paid for access to the *content*. THats where the difference in thinking is - Buisness wants me to pay for the content on a particular delivery system or a different media. Wouldn't it be just wonderful if they could charge you $5 for content on your iPod and $10 if you want your game streamed over the web to your laptop in your Chicago hotel room, $15 if you want a DVD of it.
But the whole point is irrespective of what the content I paid for is its still just data and if you put data and a computer and a network together then you are simply not going to be able to keep control over it...unless you can control what users can do with their computers and what what networks can do. Out of curiostiy whats happening with network neutrality and does anyone remember that Trusted computing/TCPA/Palladium thing...
Sure but homogenizing all the users into a few networks is a bad idea - fewer targets to take down. Also if the network has more users and they manage to find a way to defeat the anonymity the network offers, a lot more people get lawsuits.
Even if there are less places to search, I think it was easier "in those days" to find a p2p network on which you could find the music you wanted *easily* than it is today. I can still find the music I want - it just takes more searching on emusic, allofmp3 and emusic. I think this is partly because their lawsuits have been working.
I'd like a download service which gave me DRM free, high birate, cheaper than a buck (zero materials and why do tracks from the 80s cost the same as tracks tday - obviously I'm going to feel ripped off) and personally if I pay 49c per song thats low enough that I will use your service and high enough that I wont share my music on p2p. Ofcourse I'd also like to walk on the moon... the sad thing is that I'm so disenchanted by the music biz that I think a moonwalk is more likely than a high quality comprehensive customer (not consumer) friendly download service.
Might help. Works a bit more like the original mozilla though FF gets confused if your search term has a period or slash in it (understandably)
e arch
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#beh_s