You seem to using "abstract" here as something disconnected from reality, but the "idea of freedom" is an abstraction. Perhaps it is worthwhile clarifying your meaning, so as not to be misunderstood.

I'm having trouble finding any off-the-shelf machines set up (at BestBuy, at Fry's -- Dell, Gateway, Sony, HP, etc.) with 64-bit Vista Ultimate to run Media Center. I do not want to have to worry about finding drivers myself, which is why I would like to have the machine already set up that way. Is there someplace else I should be looking?

I have never actually seen her perform; she is quite lovely. The ending notes were exquisite.

YouTube sure is becoming a popular source for entertainment and the arts.

The URL for the movie became garbled above, so here is the pointer to the 300 website. (The video with Lena Headey is delightful. Thanks, Lu.)

Interesting that their An Overview of Inattentional Blindness page contains misspelled and missing words. Physician, heal thyself!

Yes. The black team had one additional player.

Thanks for providing the pointer to the DVD of the show.

Allan Chapman's Great Scientists DVD looks interesting. Do you know who are the five scientists that he focuses on?

Also, when the price is only in pounds, as it is for Great Scientists, I assume that is because the DVD is available for Region 2 only. Do you know if that is right?

Wishing a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to members RJM and Zigory.

We found a perfect gift for RJM's birthday: his own BioPhotonic Antioxidant Skin Carotenoid Scanner

And, RJM's work has earned him this year's SUPER FLY award.



Zigory seems to really enjoy the movies, so for his birthday we got him these.

Those are very nice shots, Darren. How did you capture them?

They do seem rather half-baked. Someone probably whipped them up just to get some dough.

There are three competing theories that I know of: the LM, AC, and SC theories (Lemon Meringue, Apple Crumb, and Strawberry Cream). However, I have limited knowledge in this area, so there might be other flavors theories as well.

It just means a quantity which itself has no physical units (no distance, no time, etc.). Most often, the number itself relates together various quantities that themselves do have physical units, but the relationship among the quantities is such that all the units cancel out. So, the fine structure constant relates the speed of light, Planck's constant, and the electric charge in such a way that the units cancel each other out, whatever consistent system of units they are expressed in.

A more common dimensionless quantity that almost everyone has some sense of, is a drag coefficient. Most all know that a sleekly designed car has less air resistance than a car in the shape of a box. The dimensionless quantity that expresses that relationship is known as the drag coefficient.

Ha! I found the group microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter, and a whole bunch of guys who applied the DST update to SP2 are complaining about their own one-hour-off problem. It seems that, for them, the schedule appears correctly, but the recording time is one hour off. (You can't win. )

Before I found that group, I poked around in Media Center and found that the software uses zap2it as the scheduling source. I put in my zip code at zap2it.com and viewed the same-named provider that I downloaded to Media Center. The website schedule has the correct times, but the Media Center schedule times are off by an hour.

At this point I have concluded two things:

1. Getting the 6 o'clock news at 5 o'clock should be interesting, especially for live news.

2. I'll wait until the old DST comes into effect. I suspect the problem will go away then.

I don't know anyone around my area who is using it, though some members of THE FORUM use Media Center.

Regarding Jeff's several suppositions, I have confirmed one thing: whatever is going on is independent of the local time on my computer. I set my computer time to be hours off of the actual time and when downloading the schedule everything is off by one hour, just like before.

A question: looking at the context where the word "sacrifice" is used in the movie, what meaning does it convey? Might Miller be using the proper concept but using a word that to many Objectivists conveys a different meaning?

I have had countless conversations with people who use the word "sacrifice" and upon inquiry most often it turns out that their intended meaning is not the surrender of a higher value for a lesser one. A typical conversation might go like this:

He: My uncle sacrificed his life in World War II.
Me: How did he sacrifice his life?
He: He enlisted in the army as a soldier and he died fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
Me: Why did he enlist and choose to fight?
He: Because he loved his family and his country and wanted to protect them.
Me: But didn't he love his own life?
He: Oh, yes. He had a passion for living, but he did not want to live in a world where he, his family, and his country were ruled by the Nazis.
Me: And that's why he sacrificed his life?
He: Yes.

I have found this sense of "sacrifice" to be quite common usage. In fact, in the OED, after the first two definitions of "sacrifice" (which are given in a religious context, like sacrificing sheep to the Gods) the third definition of the verb "sacrifice is:


Is this not the sense of "sacrifice" as Miller used?

That's a fascinating little piece of space history. Thanks for posting this. Apparently, even Dennis Tito, the first "space tourist," did not know of the ground work Garriot had done.

The picture of it looks beautiful. I've never actually seen anything like that.


The best I can do is M51, the magnificent Whirlpool Galaxy, which speaks for itself.

Well, at least this gives the bureaucrats something to do.

Very HAPPY BIRTHDAY wishes to member BrianReich.

Jeff, I do appreciate you trying to figure this one out.


Which server software are you referring to? Do you mean the cable provider?

Just in case I was not clear ... On the Media Center guide schedule, Lost is shown as starting at 9PM, even though it is actually scheduled for 10PM. And, the cable box guide shows Lost correctly, as scheduled for 10PM.

Sort of confusing.

I understand the UTC issue, but I thought that since Media Center downloads the schedule from a specified local source, that the schedule would be keyed to that local source. Why would my local computer time affect the time of the programming schedule?

I set the time manually and everything has worked just fine, until now. I noticed that the TV program schedules for my Media Center are listed at times an hour earlier than they are actually on. I reloaded the guide data, but still the same. The cable box itself has all programs listed at the correct times.

Anyone have a clue?

p.s. I have tried this with and without disabling "Automatically adjust clock for daylight savings changes," and nothing changed.

Well, this certainly sounds ominous. A "MASSIVE, mysterious whirlpool," a "sea 'monster'," which "[s]cientists are baffled by." And at the end of the story it seems as if a meeting was convened so that the "whirlpool will today be discussed in Hobart at a meeting of 200 Australian, European and US scientists."

But if we read the actual CSIRO announcement (CSIRO is the "Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, ... Australia's national science agency"), we learn,


Seems a bit less ominous, don't you think? And, regarding the meeting,


(Bold added.)
It seems then that with the advance of satellite imagery this not-that-unusual phenomena is now being investigated at a level of cause and effect detail not previously possible. Interesting, but not exactly a mysterious sea monster that baffles scientific inquiry.

If you never heard of him, on what basis do you question the source of his wealth?