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Julie Payette, Canadian Space Agency Perspectives from Space Julie Payette on Canadian Space Agency Perspectives from Space: Research and Diplomacy (more)
A wonderful 50 minute talk, fast paced, lots of video, informative and entertaining. Gives everyone a nice perspective on space and earth.
Those of you who download content the copyright holders don't want you to do not care about freedom and you are acting against your own best interests.
Copyright means the owner of a work can choose under what conditions copies are made. Just as with any creative work you make, copyright owners can choose when and if they allow copies, what price, and who to - eg you can decide your work can only be copied by bacon eaters for 3 cents. This is a fundamental and important freedom. Just because HBO does not want to sell you a copy of Game of Thrones at a price and conveniece that suits you does not mean you can trample over their freedoms to make those decisions.
And when you do go ahead and download anyway, you are hurting your own interests. This is because you do not pick an alternative such as reading a book, watching something else, or joining a juggling group. It is very likely that those alternatives are not as good as what you wanted. But go and do them anway. They will improve and the original copyright owner not meeting your needs will learn their lesson. To understand the mechanism how this works, read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. The alternatives always start out crappier than what they replace, but they then more rapidly adjust to meet the consumer's needs. Another example is how anybody pirating Windows is not hurting Microsft, but rather hurting the alternatives and how they adjust to that person's needs.
So seriously, do complain to let the companies know that their businesses do not meet your needs, but do not take away their freedoms by downloading, and do patronise the alternatives so they more rapidly meet your needs.
One thing you should concern yourself with is government enforced monopolies. This is when by law and with the backing of the state alternatives cannot be provided. This happens when towns sign 10 year franchise agreements with a cable company preventing any competition. It happens when patents are granted on things that do not deserve 20 years of suppressing alternatives because they are't actually innovations made public 20 years earlier than otherwise would have happened. And it happens when companies pay congress to enact laws suppressing competition in other ways. Behind all these is your vote.
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This is getting annoying. Lulu enters the field as yet another site that refuses point blank to let you buy anything unless you create yet another account with yet another username and yet another password which they call "FREE Membership". Even worse you cannot contact support until after you have done that. Email to support@lulu.com bounces. You can purchase from target.com without creating an account so no one else has an excuse.
Even worse you cannot find out if they charge California sales tax. I only purchase from online places that do so that I don't have to go through the whole use tax thing and how vindictive California's Franchise Tax Board is to the self employed.
Category: gplus – Tags: rant, registration
I've been catching up on Doctor Who recently. Saw "Blink" with the weeping angels yesterday which is a spectacularly good episode and shows just how well scary stuff can be done without the clichés.
Also been on a KLF kick, so this remix of them and Muse fits in nicely.
Category: gplus – Tags: recommendation
With the exception of cropping, any time I try to do anything with this program I cannot figure out how to do it. So like everyone else I google for answers. And I'll find lots of them because I'm not the first person trying to do whatever it is. Then begins the long march as instructions will differ in the various web pages from each other, corresponding items in my menus will be randomly non-existent or grayed out, and there will be lots of alternate ways of doing the same thing. (My guesses on how to do things don't even intersect with what the various pages say.) I rarely actually manage to achieve what I was trying to do.
Experts seem to love Gimp and the pages indicate that all the functionality is actually there. This is a classic case of a user interface design for experts and completely ignoring the perpetual intermediates.
Gimp is free software (as in freedom and cost) and they don't owe me anything, and you can easily argue the onus is on me to learn. But it is so frustrating knowing that they have all the pieces there - a dash of interaction design will go a long way. "Make the normal things easy and the hard things possible" as the saying goes, but Gimp seem to have done it the other way around.
Today I found out how old I am. The number of years since your birth isn't particularly accurate since most of your cells are considerably younger, and our life experiences don't help that much since we are all unique snowflakes. We all know people who want the kids off their lawn, to turn down that racket and stop seeking out new things and challenges because they are comfortable. Google have been closely studying my online habits and have concluded I am 25-34. Sounds about right. What about you?
Category: gplus