Its more likely that we will get DRM free WMA first.
I think we might as well just have everything play mp3,ogg (yes, yes thats the container not the codec I know),aac and wma and pick whatever bloody format you want. I think we should just have DAP players compete on price and actual features rather than artificially based on what formats they support (though it'd be fun to have a good DAP that only supported royalty free formats to bring down the price). This way you could get your DRM free music from iTunes, Yahoo, Napster, ZuneStore or EMusic or next big thing and use it on any player you like.
Even better, Allofmp3 allowe(d|s) you to select what bitrate and format you wanted and really that should be standard for any online music store.
Alternatively if they were just selling DRM free music and HAD to pick a format for some reason then I wish they'd just stick to mp3 because its compatible with everything sold thus far (except some Sony players IIRC) and at 256kpbs I (and I suspect most people) cannot hear the difference between the different formats, and I really wish Apple would do this - yes I know AAC is a great standard and if you can decode mp3 you can likely decode AAC but there are more players out there that support mp3 than AAC and I doubt that most of them are going to get a firmware upgrade (maybe w/ Rockbox). I do want DRM free music but my DAP doesn't support AAC and I hate iPods.
Even if we do have a law that forces bloggers to disclose who pays them does anyone seriously think that will reduce paid blogging? Deals will still happen - discounts or free test units/samples "encourage" blogging about your product, just paid for with cash or heck farmed out to India blog center that does not have laws about paid opinions. The article mentions someone being paid $12 for a post about a movie - heck thats less that a price of a dinner. There is no way to enforce any law that requires disclosure of paid for blogging because its hard to follow the money to begin with and worse its impossible to reliably tell the difference between what paid opinions and actual opinions.
Worse there is plenty of incentive to have paid blog posts - they can be more effective, more detailed than a regular ad, cheaper, and as the number of people blocking regular flash and banner ads increases this method of advertising is basically guaranteed to become more widespread. The only way this law will be of any use is if there are really astronomical penalties for failure to disclose paid for opinions anywhere(yeah right that will happen). Right now all that happens is you get bad publicity.
Excessive advertising has this effect of making me abandon the media through which its being delivered. With radio, magazines and TV thats been possible but I don't think it will remain possible to successfully avoid the www much longer. I'm guessing in the interim we will see spam-blocking type software for webpages but that won't work forever (if at all). I think the result will be that people are just vastly more skeptical and we will each have our own trusted sources of information (however you want to define trusted - objective tests, no anonymity, an effective moderation system, majority opinion from several different sites...) And this is entirely useless against things like slashvertisments or the woman accepting $12 just to mention a movie. There isn't a right answer or a good way of dealing with this. The internet is just going to end up being less useful and there isn't much we can do about it.
I'm with you on the buttons and I like phones that have replaceable batteries. These uber converged devices also come with another worry - theft or damage of a single device will mean losing a lot more of your data. A lot of my friends have ended up with busted iPods and had to restore their music from their HDD - however if your iPod is also your camera and you have a bunch of photos that aren't backed up yet then those are just gone. Companies are really going to have to work on improving failure rates before these can replace multiple devices.
click on vieos. click on All Time under Time. click on Top Rated on Most Viewed. Lets all look for Viacom clips shall we. Hmm, there are a few that *might* be infringing - I'm going on Video names here alone. Hardly depends on viacom here.
The overwhelming majority of stuff looks like the standard youtube crap. AHHHH!! I understand Viacom's problem - they cant distinguish their crap from the rest of the crap.
Gah that article is awful. They link to pretty pictures and blurbs mostly and never really explain what these things are, why they are important or give you any real sense of scale. So since I like to beat on the drum of better communication of science, here is a little more detail to add to the good einhverfr's post.
The progenitors of SNIa are most likely white dwarfs composed of carbon nitrogen and oxygen, probably with a companion star from which they are stripping matter. They are very compact on the order of a few thousand kilometers at most, and really dense - more than the mass of the sun. They aren't hot enough to support fusion - they are supported by Pauli pressure; quantum mechanics doesn't allow two electrons in the same state at the same time so though gravity tries to compact these objects there is a Pauli pressure outward to balance it.
This can't go on forever in these progenitor systems however, and if the white dwarf strips enough matter of its companion to get to ~1.4 solar masses (the Chandrashekar limit) then Pauli pressure isn't strong enough to balance gravity and the star begins to collapse and when that happens pressure and temperature rises and somewhere a nuclear fusion flame ignites. Details about what happens near collapse, and where and how the flame ignites, and how many there are and how they progress are still debated. In this particular model they are considering only a single flame (so far) and its a "gravitationally confined detonation" (GCD - the name of this particular model).
Its a little difficult to get a sense of scale from those videos, though there are numbers in the bottom corner. The flame starts of near or just of center and becomes bubble/mushroom shaped through a Rayleigh-Taylor instability and breaks the stellar surface in under a second. Its less than another second before the ash and flame from the bubble collides at the opposite end of the star. This flame crashing into itself (see video 1) causes compression and a detonation.
Theres been a lot of debate as to whether its a deflagration or a detonation or whether it transitions from one to the other and how and when that happens and us poor graduate students just hope they don't go crazy over details of the progenitors during our qualifying examinations. This is notable because there appears to be a growing number of voices who are saying that a detonation is necessary. These events are so standard because they all become SNIa if they get near 1.4 solar masses. There is a fair bit of diversity (and some just crazy objects) and most of that probably arises from details during the explosion which is why modeling them is partly why the models are so important.
There is still a lot of modeling left to do. This flame is producing a lot of heavy elements (there is O, S, Ca, Mg and Si in the early spectra - the silicon feature is around 6150 angstrom in the rest frame and is the marker of a Ia at low to moderate redshifts). As the outer layers expand and become more transparent you see more of the material produced during the explosion and a lot of this is Nickel (Ni-56) which decays to cobalt and powers the light curve so you get this typically 2 week rise and then a slow fall off. Later times most of the Ni has become cobalt which is decaying to iron and you see these elements in the spectrum. The energies we are talking about here are about 10^45 Joules. A H bomb by contrast is 10^15 Joules so 30 order of magnitude. Unless you can picture 10^30 H bombs going off its hard to get a feeling for this number but thats generally the case with numbers in cosmology.
There are a lot of empirical relations you see from the lightcurve, which are exploited to standardize them (for instance the brighter the supernova, the slower its rate of decline, and there are relations for the colour...) and if a model can replicate them and match the observed lightcurves and spectra then this is a very impressive accomplishment. I skim
Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly's right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website. Funny how they seem to be paying no attention whatsoever. In fact if you look at their site its just business as usual... I wonder if this constitutes phishing now.
Really all I want to know is what happened to th $6000 chihuahua and if someone will manage to pick up Michael Jackson's website because the news is always exactly 758.34% more entertaining when Whacko Jacko and chihuahuas are involved.
No. This does not make any sense to a business period. It also defeats one of the biggest gains that Dell adopting Linux will have, which is to set a standard that a lot of other distros will begin to follow. There is nothing wrong with diversity but before Linux can be reasonably adopted on the desktop there needs to be more homogeneity than there is now. I want click n'run to be a standard cross distro. Standard media suite. Standard game suite. Standard guis for anything system related and dare I say it a standard window manager.
You raise a great point but its even harder than that.
Until we figure that out, it will be near impossible to tell if a robot is sentient or just really well programmed. Is there a difference? For humans even? What if in the process of creating sentient robots we find that we aren't really all that free thinking (I'm not implying any kind of design here but someone is going to raise that issue as well).
I argued this for a hypothetical cleverly programmed machine that could pass a Turing test. Strictly, it would simulate human conversation based on some clever programming, which my professors claimed did not amount to machine intelligence. The counter being how do you prove that human conversation is not based on some clever rules.
It might be possible to define a set of rules for conversation between humans in restricted circumstances - I wonder if anyone has actually tried doing this. I'm fairly certain a lot of/. would like the rule set for conversation with pretty girls in bars.
Number of annual cd sales is ~500 million. Watch as they increase prices by a buck to "cover losses due to piracy." 12.5M is chicken feed for these guys, and even if equally distributed is under 10c per person. Its a nifty de facto tax.
The laws of physics are a model to describe "how objects behave" and that we can write down such "laws" is a statement that nature appears to behave consistently. We certainly revise the model if we see new behavior. We always look for new behavior because we can't actually ever prove that our model is right, but we can rule it out. If most people believe in the laws of physics most of the time they do it because the model is damn good over a range of length scales and can be very useful. That does not make the model right. Nothing does.
What all of us believe in really is that nature is consistent (physicists are the worst - we believe they are consistent over the entire universe - of course if it isn't we are out of jobs). You do not need to know a single physical law to believe this. You don't need a genetic disposition to believe this. Its being tested every day when you do absolutely anything. If all of us believe nature is consistent its because we have a lot of experience telling us that it is, individually and as a species. Is there a genetic predisposition to believe that nature is consistent? Maybe weak.
I remember reading about the visual cliff experiments back in college. They showed that babies had depth perception. What was more interesting to me is that without much experience with nature and certainly no knowledge of physical law, most babies apparently knew that crawling off a cliff is a bad thing. That to me suggested some predisposition . But it wasn't all babies - just most. Babies that don't know nature is painful apparently learn quickly enough though (the ones that do crawl of short cliffs get some negative reinforcement - and this is arguably very healthy negative reinforcement no matter what my psych prof used to say).
You can certainly choose not to believe in the laws of physics. People often do when it suits them. I've seen people praying during turbulence on airplanes. Nature is pretty powerful and its nice to believe that there is someone or something there looking out for us. You might have a harder time demonstrating that there is. Many who try get Darwin awards though.
There are many scientific reasons to care for the environment when you put humanity as a first goal, but the decision to believe in whatever supreme being is just as arbitrary and unexplainable as the decision to put the Earth first. You've defined environmentalists to be people who put the environment above all else (entirely arbitrarily) and then find fault with them. I do not think a single environmentalist would agree with your definition.
Following your choice of Wikipedia -
Environmentalism is a concern for the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions. Nothing about putting the environment first above all else. You define environmentalists to be extremists/dark greens and then criticize them for being extreme. You are either misinformed about what an environmentalist is or are a nasty little troll.
Environmentalism asks that we give more importance to the planet than you are doing currently. I'm sure you can find some environmental extremists but I assure you I can find more religious extremists. I do not claim that everybody who is religious is automatically an extremists.
A decision to give importance to the environment is not arbitrary or unexplainable. The environment measurably affects all of our lives. If you demand that an industry be sustainable (which IMHO is really a demand that you look on a longer timescale than the lifespans of your board of trustees and current shareholders) then environmentalism makes economic sense.
The universe knows itself--thus... God is everything.
Please define what the universe is, and then what knowing (forget omniscience) is, and what itself is, and what "is" is. The above sentence doesn't even have meaning.
Here is my favourite bit (edited from different sections and removing Gabriel's bloody objections to form)
Q. Based upon your examination of the hard drive which you examined in this case, what evidence did you find that supported or would support a conclusion that Marie Lindor had personally uploaded any files? A. The hard drive that I examined showed no evidence of any peer-to-peer software or MP3 music files. Q. So when you say it was defendant's computer, you don't actually have any knowledge as to whether it was defendant's computer. All you know is that the defendant's name is associated with the internet access account; is that correct? A. I know that the - yeah, the computer associated with that user account, an IP address was used. Q. But you don't know whose computer it actually was, do you? A. No.
Game Over. Even if all you need in a civil case is preponderance of evidence and not absolute proof. They can't find evidence of p2p file sharing on her computer and they can't actually even say that her computer was associated with the IP address. He also doesn't verify anything given to him by MediaSentry (IP address and files downloaded with times) and Verizon (Account information matching IP at times specified by MediaSentry on Verizon's clock), whether there were any security vulnerabilities on the PC (though a drone for p2p seems a bit out there). He teaches a class that covers spoofing IP address and MAC addresses, but at one point refers to IPv6 and then goes on to talk about reserved ranges like 192.168... . He doesn't care to record any of his findings with EnCase because he found no mp3s or p2p software, and that was all Gabriel asked him to look for. He also works and owns stock in company that sells software to combat p2p. Also Ray that was absolutely beautiful. Wow. I usually try to RTFA fully but damn did that take some work. Totally worth it.
"Microsoft has agreed that the main basis for pricing should be whether its protocols are innovative," said EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes. "The Commission's current view is that there is no significant innovation in these protocols. I am therefore again obliged to take formal measures to ensure that Microsoft complies with its obligations." Theres a couple of things that make me queasy about all this. Its dirt easy to say that something is not innovative after you see it. We all frequently go "Duh, I could have thought of that. Obvious." Point is we didn't. A lot of ideas seem obvious not because anyone could have thought of them, but because they are so clear and are at first sight the right natural way to do something. Theres no simple test for innovation because there is no simple metric for obviousness.
The other issue I had with their claim that prices are unreasonable. If I develop a patented technology, I should be allowed to price it anyway I like. You could argue that this is modified since MS is a monopoly but what if I become a monopoly thats been convicted of unfair trade practices. But what if I got a monopoly through fair dealing - the competition just wasn't good enough? Can the EC dictate what I should price my products at so as to help my failing competition out?
Microsoft rejected the EC statements, claiming that it had been fair in setting the protocol prices, and an analysis had found the proposed prices "were at least 30 percent below the market rate for comparable technology". This at least is a quantifiable statement. Look at the comparable technology and if its not priced below it then perhaps they are being unreasonable.
This really does worry me - if the linux Dell's do come out and are cheaper with SUSE or whatever distro they go with, I'm sure your everyday Joe will buy it. I worry that everyday Joe will then get stuck if he can't get something working with a GUI. I'm not trolling. I've seen people download windows programs and expect them to run in Linux when they double click setup.exe Its worse if they call the "Windows guru" whose never touched linux and cannot help. If Joe gets really frustrated he "upgrades" to Windows and vows never to try Linux again.
Let Dell take their time because if this is going to work its going to have to be seamless and familiar. I'd actually be thrilled once Dell picks out a distro because thats a big impetus to standardize a lot of things to it, GUI, installer and package manager especially. If you can get a standard cross distro installer and package format, unfortunately like InstallShield, that correctly adds entries for menus, and just works then Linux is really ready for the desktop.
Honestly, I think your point says more about the problems of real estate pricing and the cost of living in big cities than IT salaries. Salaries aren't going to change because there is cheap foreign labor available, so the housing market won't have new buyers and prices will have to come down. I hope.
Its actually pretty damn sad - I'm a physics grad student getting a nice 25k a year stipend but I lose crap loads of it to rent (in sunny Somerville, MA), and after six years of this I will not be able to afford a house in West Gopher Hole, S. Dakota because I can't save even to make a reasonable down payment. While the kids getting MBAs or going to the law school will start in the six figures (sigh - at least I won't be in debt).
So given that I don't think Math and Science salaries are about to change because there is so much cheap foriegn labor, I don't think the problem is that companies don't pay the Math and Science grads enough, I think they pay other grads too much and so you lose the smart people to the big buck fields. These are the only people who can afford the cost of living in big cities and so the few math and science people they are aren't happy. Worse several universities see the larger number of students in business and law and invest in those departments while giving the short shrift to Math and Science. Its funny because its almost exactly the opposite of what happened in India and China, where the people taking business classes were almost second class behind those in sciences even in high school.
To be fair paying >$1000 for Mac hardware just to run the occasional Mac Universal binary is also incredibly noxious, especially since after the move to Intel there is essentially no difference between Mac hardware and your run of the mill PC.
They aren't trying to replace Office (though if they include the Google Docs and Spreadsheet and PPT thing I'd be happy) - they are trying to replace corporate mail systems. Harvard http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516036 has been looking into it and I'd be thrilled if they do use a GMail like interface because the current FAS webmail system is a piece of tripe. (I logged into it once and then went back to SSH and pine - some departments don't even have a webmail interface because the damn thing is so bad).
The added storage space and some savings you'd get from moving to Google Apps is nice but a lot of students (well in Physics,astronomy anyway) still need to be able to SSH in and start a remote X session, which I don't see happening soon, so they are still going to have to spend money on their own servers. As the article points out Google isn't without competition - Windows has Live @edu (run away) and there is.mac (which needs to allow something.edu before its going anywhere and it'd be nice to have a Windows/*nix port of Backup). Personally I think the best solution for Harvard at least is to shut up and spend money and buy additional space, and redesign the webmail client (just keep pine around).
But this bill does not seem to give anyone the power to order ISPs to start tracking users in ways they aren't already. You are not reading it carefully enough.
First note that the information they are primarily interested in is being able to tie a user to an IP address. It is trivial for an ISP to keep this information, and any responsible ISP already does so that they can investigate fraud and abuse complaints. Lets assume they only collect the data you point out - to tie a user to an IP address they'd have to eliminate every proxy server in the world, or make them all keep logs as well at very least. Theres also holes with open networks, and other people being able to use your computer, but in these cases they can tie someone to the connection, even if that person did nothing illegal. This is clearly a problem for them IF they only collect the data you point out.
Did you notice in Sec 6. it says Such regulations shall, at a minimum... To get rid of some of the holes above they really do want to log every last piece of information transmitted and received over your connection. Even then its not completely possible to prove that it was you using your connection. That at a minimum is the trap you should look for. The law gives some the Attorney General the power to issue regulations on what data is collected. The law specifies the minimum, not what the Attorney General can ask for. So if he decides that logging your emails is feasible then it will happen and you won't be able to do much about it because the law made it legal, and of course screw your privacy this is only data retention, and no one is going to look at the data without a warrant (for now) unless its in the interests of national security.
It amazes me how many people don't see the difference between photographing a single house that you think is pretty and saying its public information vs photographing every house and putting it into a database and saying its public information. No law envisioned the later happening even a few years ago. It should make you very uncomfortable and if it doesn't I think you lack imagination.
This database isn't the sort of thing that can be updated very often. So imagine if insurance companies start relying on it heavily, and the photograph they took no longer reflects your house - you added an extension or something. Then your house burns down. Insurance chooses not to cover the extension because its not in their photograph, and they really don't want to pay you anything anyway.
Whats next. Since its legal to take photographs of your house, since its already public information - someone setting up a camera that can take pictures of your house at 25 fps, and putting that on the net. You had no expectation of privacy though right so its OK.
Some company, I think it was MS if memory serves, had a van going around cities with cameras sticking out of every corner, taking pictures as it drove around. What absolutely stunned me about it was how long you could follow with this thing even seeing where it pulled off and when the driver got out. Heck, the cops can even stick a GPS tracking device on your car without a warrant if they want to. No expectation of privacy right - your on a public road obviously.
Sure you had no expectation of privacy but you also had no expectation of unwanted publicity in the form of an easily searchable database available to anyone in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Its more likely that we will get DRM free WMA first.
I think we might as well just have everything play mp3,ogg (yes, yes thats the container not the codec I know),aac and wma and pick whatever bloody format you want. I think we should just have DAP players compete on price and actual features rather than artificially based on what formats they support (though it'd be fun to have a good DAP that only supported royalty free formats to bring down the price). This way you could get your DRM free music from iTunes, Yahoo, Napster, ZuneStore or EMusic or next big thing and use it on any player you like.
Even better, Allofmp3 allowe(d|s) you to select what bitrate and format you wanted and really that should be standard for any online music store.
Alternatively if they were just selling DRM free music and HAD to pick a format for some reason then I wish they'd just stick to mp3 because its compatible with everything sold thus far (except some Sony players IIRC) and at 256kpbs I (and I suspect most people) cannot hear the difference between the different formats, and I really wish Apple would do this - yes I know AAC is a great standard and if you can decode mp3 you can likely decode AAC but there are more players out there that support mp3 than AAC and I doubt that most of them are going to get a firmware upgrade (maybe w/ Rockbox). I do want DRM free music but my DAP doesn't support AAC and I hate iPods.
Even if we do have a law that forces bloggers to disclose who pays them does anyone seriously think that will reduce paid blogging? Deals will still happen - discounts or free test units/samples "encourage" blogging about your product, just paid for with cash or heck farmed out to India blog center that does not have laws about paid opinions. The article mentions someone being paid $12 for a post about a movie - heck thats less that a price of a dinner. There is no way to enforce any law that requires disclosure of paid for blogging because its hard to follow the money to begin with and worse its impossible to reliably tell the difference between what paid opinions and actual opinions.
Worse there is plenty of incentive to have paid blog posts - they can be more effective, more detailed than a regular ad, cheaper, and as the number of people blocking regular flash and banner ads increases this method of advertising is basically guaranteed to become more widespread. The only way this law will be of any use is if there are really astronomical penalties for failure to disclose paid for opinions anywhere(yeah right that will happen). Right now all that happens is you get bad publicity.
Excessive advertising has this effect of making me abandon the media through which its being delivered. With radio, magazines and TV thats been possible but I don't think it will remain possible to successfully avoid the www much longer. I'm guessing in the interim we will see spam-blocking type software for webpages but that won't work forever (if at all). I think the result will be that people are just vastly more skeptical and we will each have our own trusted sources of information (however you want to define trusted - objective tests, no anonymity, an effective moderation system, majority opinion from several different sites...) And this is entirely useless against things like slashvertisments or the woman accepting $12 just to mention a movie. There isn't a right answer or a good way of dealing with this. The internet is just going to end up being less useful and there isn't much we can do about it.
When price is a concern look to knockoffs
I'm with you on the buttons and I like phones that have replaceable batteries. These uber converged devices also come with another worry - theft or damage of a single device will mean losing a lot more of your data. A lot of my friends have ended up with busted iPods and had to restore their music from their HDD - however if your iPod is also your camera and you have a bunch of photos that aren't backed up yet then those are just gone. Companies are really going to have to work on improving failure rates before these can replace multiple devices.
click on vieos.
click on All Time under Time.
click on Top Rated on Most Viewed.
Lets all look for Viacom clips shall we.
Hmm, there are a few that *might* be infringing - I'm going on Video names here alone.
Hardly depends on viacom here.
The overwhelming majority of stuff looks like the standard youtube crap.
AHHHH!! I understand Viacom's problem - they cant distinguish their crap from the rest of the crap.
Gah that article is awful. They link to pretty pictures and blurbs mostly and never really explain what these things are, why they are important or give you any real sense of scale. So since I like to beat on the drum of better communication of science, here is a little more detail to add to the good einhverfr's post.
The progenitors of SNIa are most likely white dwarfs composed of carbon nitrogen and oxygen, probably with a companion star from which they are stripping matter. They are very compact on the order of a few thousand kilometers at most, and really dense - more than the mass of the sun. They aren't hot enough to support fusion - they are supported by Pauli pressure; quantum mechanics doesn't allow two electrons in the same state at the same time so though gravity tries to compact these objects there is a Pauli pressure outward to balance it.
This can't go on forever in these progenitor systems however, and if the white dwarf strips enough matter of its companion to get to ~1.4 solar masses (the Chandrashekar limit) then Pauli pressure isn't strong enough to balance gravity and the star begins to collapse and when that happens pressure and temperature rises and somewhere a nuclear fusion flame ignites. Details about what happens near collapse, and where and how the flame ignites, and how many there are and how they progress are still debated. In this particular model they are considering only a single flame (so far) and its a "gravitationally confined detonation" (GCD - the name of this particular model).
Its a little difficult to get a sense of scale from those videos, though there are numbers in the bottom corner. The flame starts of near or just of center and becomes bubble/mushroom shaped through a Rayleigh-Taylor instability and breaks the stellar surface in under a second. Its less than another second before the ash and flame from the bubble collides at the opposite end of the star. This flame crashing into itself (see video 1) causes compression and a detonation.
Theres been a lot of debate as to whether its a deflagration or a detonation or whether it transitions from one to the other and how and when that happens and us poor graduate students just hope they don't go crazy over details of the progenitors during our qualifying examinations. This is notable because there appears to be a growing number of voices who are saying that a detonation is necessary. These events are so standard because they all become SNIa if they get near 1.4 solar masses. There is a fair bit of diversity (and some just crazy objects) and most of that probably arises from details during the explosion which is why modeling them is partly why the models are so important.
There is still a lot of modeling left to do. This flame is producing a lot of heavy elements (there is O, S, Ca, Mg and Si in the early spectra - the silicon feature is around 6150 angstrom in the rest frame and is the marker of a Ia at low to moderate redshifts). As the outer layers expand and become more transparent you see more of the material produced during the explosion and a lot of this is Nickel (Ni-56) which decays to cobalt and powers the light curve so you get this typically 2 week rise and then a slow fall off. Later times most of the Ni has become cobalt which is decaying to iron and you see these elements in the spectrum. The energies we are talking about here are about 10^45 Joules. A H bomb by contrast is 10^15 Joules so 30 order of magnitude. Unless you can picture 10^30 H bombs going off its hard to get a feeling for this number but thats generally the case with numbers in cosmology.
There are a lot of empirical relations you see from the lightcurve, which are exploited to standardize them (for instance the brighter the supernova, the slower its rate of decline, and there are relations for the colour...) and if a model can replicate them and match the observed lightcurves and spectra then this is a very impressive accomplishment. I skim
Really all I want to know is what happened to th $6000 chihuahua and if someone will manage to pick up Michael Jackson's website because the news is always exactly 758.34% more entertaining when Whacko Jacko and chihuahuas are involved.
No. This does not make any sense to a business period. It also defeats one of the biggest gains that Dell adopting Linux will have, which is to set a standard that a lot of other distros will begin to follow. There is nothing wrong with diversity but before Linux can be reasonably adopted on the desktop there needs to be more homogeneity than there is now. I want click n'run to be a standard cross distro. Standard media suite. Standard game suite. Standard guis for anything system related and dare I say it a standard window manager.
I argued this for a hypothetical cleverly programmed machine that could pass a Turing test. Strictly, it would simulate human conversation based on some clever programming, which my professors claimed did not amount to machine intelligence. The counter being how do you prove that human conversation is not based on some clever rules.
It might be possible to define a set of rules for conversation between humans in restricted circumstances - I wonder if anyone has actually tried doing this. I'm fairly certain a lot of
Number of annual cd sales is ~500 million. Watch as they increase prices by a buck to "cover losses due to piracy." 12.5M is chicken feed for these guys, and even if equally distributed is under 10c per person. Its a nifty de facto tax.
The laws of physics are a model to describe "how objects behave" and that we can write down such "laws" is a statement that nature appears to behave consistently. We certainly revise the model if we see new behavior. We always look for new behavior because we can't actually ever prove that our model is right, but we can rule it out. If most people believe in the laws of physics most of the time they do it because the model is damn good over a range of length scales and can be very useful. That does not make the model right. Nothing does.
What all of us believe in really is that nature is consistent (physicists are the worst - we believe they are consistent over the entire universe - of course if it isn't we are out of jobs). You do not need to know a single physical law to believe this. You don't need a genetic disposition to believe this. Its being tested every day when you do absolutely anything. If all of us believe nature is consistent its because we have a lot of experience telling us that it is, individually and as a species. Is there a genetic predisposition to believe that nature is consistent? Maybe weak.
I remember reading about the visual cliff experiments back in college. They showed that babies had depth perception. What was more interesting to me is that without much experience with nature and certainly no knowledge of physical law, most babies apparently knew that crawling off a cliff is a bad thing. That to me suggested some predisposition . But it wasn't all babies - just most. Babies that don't know nature is painful apparently learn quickly enough though (the ones that do crawl of short cliffs get some negative reinforcement - and this is arguably very healthy negative reinforcement no matter what my psych prof used to say).
You can certainly choose not to believe in the laws of physics. People often do when it suits them. I've seen people praying during turbulence on airplanes. Nature is pretty powerful and its nice to believe that there is someone or something there looking out for us. You might have a harder time demonstrating that there is. Many who try get Darwin awards though.
Following your choice of Wikipedia - Environmentalism is a concern for the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions. Nothing about putting the environment first above all else. You define environmentalists to be extremists/dark greens and then criticize them for being extreme. You are either misinformed about what an environmentalist is or are a nasty little troll.
Environmentalism asks that we give more importance to the planet than you are doing currently. I'm sure you can find some environmental extremists but I assure you I can find more religious extremists. I do not claim that everybody who is religious is automatically an extremists.
A decision to give importance to the environment is not arbitrary or unexplainable. The environment measurably affects all of our lives. If you demand that an industry be sustainable (which IMHO is really a demand that you look on a longer timescale than the lifespans of your board of trustees and current shareholders) then environmentalism makes economic sense.
Please define what the universe is, and then what knowing (forget omniscience) is, and what itself is, and what "is" is. The above sentence doesn't even have meaning.
Here is my favourite bit (edited from different sections and removing Gabriel's bloody objections to form)
f uckingwhitespaceseriouslyTacowhatareyouguysdoingit sonlyalargeblockquoteImeancomeontheresnotreallyall thatmuchwhitepsaceandyousortofneeditoryougetsenten cesthatlooklikethisyoubloodymorons
Q. Based upon your examination of the hard drive which you examined in this case, what evidence did you find that supported or would support a conclusion that Marie Lindor had personally uploaded any files?
A. The hard drive that I examined showed no evidence of any peer-to-peer software or MP3 music files.
Q. So when you say it was defendant's computer, you don't actually have any knowledge as to whether it was defendant's computer. All you know is that the defendant's name is associated with the internet access account; is that correct?
A. I know that the - yeah, the computer associated with that user account, an IP address was used.
Q. But you don't know whose computer it actually was, do you?
A. No.
Game Over. Even if all you need in a civil case is preponderance of evidence and not absolute proof. They can't find evidence of p2p file sharing on her computer and they can't actually even say that her computer was associated with the IP address. He also doesn't verify anything given to him by MediaSentry (IP address and files downloaded with times) and Verizon (Account information matching IP at times specified by MediaSentry on Verizon's clock), whether there were any security vulnerabilities on the PC (though a drone for p2p seems a bit out there). He teaches a class that covers spoofing IP address and MAC addresses, but at one point refers to IPv6 and then goes on to talk about reserved ranges like 192.168... . He doesn't care to record any of his findings with EnCase because he found no mp3s or p2p software, and that was all Gabriel asked him to look for. He also works and owns stock in company that sells software to combat p2p. Also Ray that was absolutely beautiful. Wow. I usually try to RTFA fully but damn did that take some work. Totally worth it.
stupidmoroniclamenessfilteranditscomplainingabout
The other issue I had with their claim that prices are unreasonable. If I develop a patented technology, I should be allowed to price it anyway I like. You could argue that this is modified since MS is a monopoly but what if I become a monopoly thats been convicted of unfair trade practices. But what if I got a monopoly through fair dealing - the competition just wasn't good enough? Can the EC dictate what I should price my products at so as to help my failing competition out? Microsoft rejected the EC statements, claiming that it had been fair in setting the protocol prices, and an analysis had found the proposed prices "were at least 30 percent below the market rate for comparable technology". This at least is a quantifiable statement. Look at the comparable technology and if its not priced below it then perhaps they are being unreasonable.
This really does worry me - if the linux Dell's do come out and are cheaper with SUSE or whatever distro they go with, I'm sure your everyday Joe will buy it. I worry that everyday Joe will then get stuck if he can't get something working with a GUI. I'm not trolling. I've seen people download windows programs and expect them to run in Linux when they double click setup.exe Its worse if they call the "Windows guru" whose never touched linux and cannot help. If Joe gets really frustrated he "upgrades" to Windows and vows never to try Linux again.
Let Dell take their time because if this is going to work its going to have to be seamless and familiar. I'd actually be thrilled once Dell picks out a distro because thats a big impetus to standardize a lot of things to it, GUI, installer and package manager especially. If you can get a standard cross distro installer and package format, unfortunately like InstallShield, that correctly adds entries for menus, and just works then Linux is really ready for the desktop.
Ramanujan was already a complex guy.
Trying to Wick rotate him would be a pretty negative thing to do.
Honestly, I think your point says more about the problems of real estate pricing and the cost of living in big cities than IT salaries. Salaries aren't going to change because there is cheap foreign labor available, so the housing market won't have new buyers and prices will have to come down. I hope.
Its actually pretty damn sad - I'm a physics grad student getting a nice 25k a year stipend but I lose crap loads of it to rent (in sunny Somerville, MA), and after six years of this I will not be able to afford a house in West Gopher Hole, S. Dakota because I can't save even to make a reasonable down payment. While the kids getting MBAs or going to the law school will start in the six figures (sigh - at least I won't be in debt).
So given that I don't think Math and Science salaries are about to change because there is so much cheap foriegn labor, I don't think the problem is that companies don't pay the Math and Science grads enough, I think they pay other grads too much and so you lose the smart people to the big buck fields. These are the only people who can afford the cost of living in big cities and so the few math and science people they are aren't happy. Worse several universities see the larger number of students in business and law and invest in those departments while giving the short shrift to Math and Science. Its funny because its almost exactly the opposite of what happened in India and China, where the people taking business classes were almost second class behind those in sciences even in high school.
That old thing... I sold that on eBay years ago. And made a profit. (And then they set the IRS on you for not paying income tax on it).
Also, try changing your MAC address to something like 66-75-6B-6F-66-66.
run it in a VM.
we used to call this the price of stupidity.
To be fair paying >$1000 for Mac hardware just to run the occasional Mac Universal binary is also incredibly noxious, especially since after the move to Intel there is essentially no difference between Mac hardware and your run of the mill PC.
They aren't trying to replace Office (though if they include the Google Docs and Spreadsheet and PPT thing I'd be happy) - they are trying to replace corporate mail systems. Harvard
.mac (which needs to allow something.edu before its going anywhere and it'd be nice to have a Windows/*nix port of Backup). Personally I think the best solution for Harvard at least is to shut up and spend money and buy additional space, and redesign the webmail client (just keep pine around).
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516036 has been looking into it and I'd be thrilled if they do use a GMail like interface because the current FAS webmail system is a piece of tripe. (I logged into it once and then went back to SSH and pine - some departments don't even have a webmail interface because the damn thing is so bad).
The added storage space and some savings you'd get from moving to Google Apps is nice but a lot of students (well in Physics,astronomy anyway) still need to be able to SSH in and start a remote X session, which I don't see happening soon, so they are still going to have to spend money on their own servers. As the article points out Google isn't without competition - Windows has Live @edu (run away) and there is
Did you notice in Sec 6. it says Such regulations shall, at a minimum... To get rid of some of the holes above they really do want to log every last piece of information transmitted and received over your connection. Even then its not completely possible to prove that it was you using your connection. That at a minimum is the trap you should look for. The law gives some the Attorney General the power to issue regulations on what data is collected. The law specifies the minimum, not what the Attorney General can ask for. So if he decides that logging your emails is feasible then it will happen and you won't be able to do much about it because the law made it legal, and of course screw your privacy this is only data retention, and no one is going to look at the data without a warrant (for now) unless its in the interests of national security.
Documents open you!
Yeehah!
It amazes me how many people don't see the difference between photographing a single house that you think is pretty and saying its public information vs photographing every house and putting it into a database and saying its public information. No law envisioned the later happening even a few years ago. It should make you very uncomfortable and if it doesn't I think you lack imagination.
This database isn't the sort of thing that can be updated very often. So imagine if insurance companies start relying on it heavily, and the photograph they took no longer reflects your house - you added an extension or something. Then your house burns down. Insurance chooses not to cover the extension because its not in their photograph, and they really don't want to pay you anything anyway.
Whats next. Since its legal to take photographs of your house, since its already public information - someone setting up a camera that can take pictures of your house at 25 fps, and putting that on the net. You had no expectation of privacy though right so its OK.
Some company, I think it was MS if memory serves, had a van going around cities with cameras sticking out of every corner, taking pictures as it drove around. What absolutely stunned me about it was how long you could follow with this thing even seeing where it pulled off and when the driver got out. Heck, the cops can even stick a GPS tracking device on your car without a warrant if they want to. No expectation of privacy right - your on a public road obviously.
Sure you had no expectation of privacy but you also had no expectation of unwanted publicity in the form of an easily searchable database available to anyone in the world.