Man, I want one. I don’t even know when they’re being released in the US or how I will manage to trade my old one in. Rest assured, I’ll figure something out.
On a totally unrelated note, someone plans to make Family Guy video games. Can I please be Stewie on a quest for world domination? Level 3 can be the death of Lois.
Edit: Here’s a video comparison as well as some close-up pics. That thing looks sweet.
I first saw this question posed in the Math discussion folder at work (back before the Classifieds where restricted). Then today a story from The Straight Dope (original here) showed up on Digg where there was a pretty spirited discussion about it. Simply put:
A plane is standing on a runway that can move (think of some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the wheel’s speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?
The answer seems obvious: the conveyor will keep the plane stationary, no air will move past the wings, thus no lift will be generated, and the plane will stay on the ground. The plane can’t just jump into the air. It sounds simple enough, and this was my take on it for the first few minutes I pondered the question. But the first assumption this argument is based on is wrong. All I needed was for some to frame the situation a certain way and I saw my mistake. The plane will not stand still relative to the ground.
Even the TWiTs loves this guy; they all agree he should be getting as much money as Leno or Letterman. They even invited him to be on the podcast. How sweet would that be?
I really enjoyed this article about DRM:
Here is the problem, every DRM infection is unique, patented, copyrighted, copywronged, and DMCAd ad nauseum, They protect their code in every way possible, and make it so you have to get their approval to use it. This is all done under the guise of protecting content, but that is a lie. If you are going to steal content, do you think violating another copyright on the DRM mechanism will make you lose more sleep? Not a chance.
If you are a rival company though, you can’t really violate such things and get away with it for long, Sony, MS and most people swiping GPLd code are proof of that. So, you have to license it to play ball, or at least play music and movies. That is the true nature of DRM infections, to keep other big greedy companies out.
This guy gets it. It’s not about the content and it’s not about consumers. It’s about competition, and in this case more competition is not better for us.
I understand that Nikon wants to capitalize on the success of digital photography. I love using my digital camera and being able to save just the pictures I want. The flexibility it gives you is amazing. But I don’t think they should stop making film cameras altogether. There are still certain things to be said about the quality of images you can get on film, and remembering where photography has come from. This is a sad day.
All I have to say is wow. I was at CES last year and maybe I just wasn’t in the right places, but I’ve heard about more cool things this year than anything I saw when I was there. Toshiba has released a new TV using SED Technology which sounds incredible. The coolest thing I saw last year was probably the biggest (at the time) TV ever – nothing like the stuff I’ve been hearing about this year.
It’s a pretty busy time, but it’s one I really enjoy. My parents along with my sister and her boyfriend (who I finally got to meet) were up for Thanksgiving. We sort of hosted, and I think we did pretty well with it. I gave them a (limited) tour of Madison through the snow and slick streets. We also went bowling and saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The movie was pretty good, but there is no way Dumbledore would ever grab a student like that. I think Michael Gambon really missed the target with his portrayal of the headmaster this time around. A few other changes for the movie were mildly annoying, but overall it was really good. It was also nice to talk to my family for more than 30 minutes on the phone.
My bowling team has been doing pretty well lately. After the first seven or eight weeks, they reset the standings and since then we’re right around .500. My average is still going up (six pins in the last two weeks) and we’re third in our division. Bowling in the league is fun, but I think it’s a little too competitive for my taste, at least with my current performance where it is. I’ll probably try to get into a mixed league next summer.
So after losing every single coach’s challenge for the entire season, the Chiefs finally won not one but two today, one overturning a crucial play that helped them beat the Broncos. My three Chiefs fantasy players all did pretty well too which was nice, even if the rest of my players were lousy today. Oh, and the Bears handed Green Bay one of their bigger losses of the season. I am highly amused with the Packer’s total suckage this season, especially since I’m now surrounded by fans of The Pack.
I’m about 1/3 done with my Christmas and birthday shopping (both my mom and sister have birthdays within a week of Christmas). I’m hoping to have the rest done by the end of the week. I just have to figure out how to keep Amber’s hidden away until I can wrap them. This apartment isn’t that big. It is big enough, however, for a 6 foot Christmas tree. We went and got ours yesterday at a tree farm north of Madison. The place was OK, but I’ve been totally spoiled by Prairie Pines. It took quite a while but we eventually got it inside and decorated. It’s twinkling away as I speak (although it was an adventure finding some lights that did what we wanted).
I really think Amber and I could get into GeoCaching. It’s something I heard about on TWiT while I was listening at work this week. It sounds like lots of fun. I need to do some research on GPS units…
Edit: Here’s our tree. Happy Holidays!
I guess I didn’t realize that junk faxes were a major problem, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not really any different from bulk mail or spam email. The Washington Post has a pretty humorous article about the ways people battle the junk fax.
For many home fax machine owners, the junk-fax pandemic has grown into an annoyance equivalent to telemarketing at its worst — before the National Do Not Call Registry struck a blow for privacy and sanity. These dastardly faxed commercials typically break federal law. Like spammers, junk-faxers broadcast the same message to millions of fax machine numbers at once. And more often than not, the faxes promote scams not worth the paper they’re printed on.
I particularly like the lady who taped sheets of paper together to form a loop of paper for a continuous dark fax. It’s too bad there’s not a way to cost email spammers money for their sins.
Nintendo has seen an overwhelming response to it’s first game with online multiplayer support. And why wouldn’t they?
On Nov. 14, Mario Kart DS became the first game to use Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Through the end of Sunday, more than 112,000 people in the United States had purchased the game. In the same time frame, nearly 52,000 unique users had logged onto Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play against people from all over the country.
That’s roughly 46 percent. In the first week. That’s an excellent sign for Nintendo’s Wi-Fi service; it means that even those less than tech savvy people were comfortable enough to use the service almost immediately. It also means that there are tons of people out there wanting to play Mario Kart. I know I’m looking forward to it, because for the first time I’ll be able to compete against people anywhere, not just the ones who live close enough to invite over. So watch out (Sheena, Dylan, jirkstore). It’s only a matter of time.
Can you imagine a single disc that could hold your entire music and movie libraries combined? It sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it’s not as far away as you might think. In fact, it’s already here. Maxell has introduced a new type of disc that can get it done – holographic media. The first generation discs will hold 300GB with a 20MBPs transfer rate.
“Holographic media makes it possible for millions of pages of information and high definition images to be held on one small, relatively inexpensive disc,” said Steven Pofcher, senior marketing manager at Maxell. “Imagine having a person’s entire medical history, complete with MRI images, or storing a broadcast network’s entire HD Library on a single disc. These are both possible with holographic technology, which has such large capacity that approximately a half million 300-page books can be stored on a single disc.”
Now how “relatively inexpensive” will each disc be?