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Mars Rover Technology Used to Make Better Maps
Cal writes "An article on the O'Reilly Radar site discusses a new street mapping technology by a company in Berkeley called earthmine. They are using technology developed by the Jet Propulsion Lab for the Mars Exploration Rover missions for reconstructing three-dimensional data of the street-scape. 'The licensed software and algorithms are used to create a 3D representation of the local terrain, allowing autonomous routing of the MERs through the Martian environment. earthmine has combined this JPL technology with its unique, capture hardware and web delivery technology to deliver 3D data with unprecedented density and accuracy.'"
Just wait until they realize how detailed the actual streets are, and how terrorists could use them for planning. They'll issue orders that the actual streets be blurred.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
This is one of the best ways of appropriating your tax dollars next to guns and drugs.
Cue the rightwingers who always leap in to claim that company X needs to have a monopoly over product Y to recoup their costs for R&D which were actually paid by someone else, most likely the public.
Have a look at all the wonderful medication you financed that is being sold back to you at twice the price compared to any other civilized country because you're dumb enough to eat up every word bigCo tells you. The market is always right and is always the most efficient solution to everything.
The government can in theory pay less to have something developed by not also buying the results outright but simply the ability to freely use the results itself (as the university can finance the rest itself due to it's potential future worth). This is slightly akin to paying someone partially in stock instead of cash.
Let's say the government wants a shiny new fighter jet. It can on one hand pay 100% of the R&A costs and production costs at $100 billion total for the full run then release the (non-classified) results to the public. It can on the other hand pay $50 billion but let the company own the resulting technology which it then incorporates into it's civilian planes. I'm sure you'd be bitching about the government wasting money if it went with the first option.
Your posit is that our governmental expenses would go up. I say the exact opposite would happen, if the results were "open sourced", a variety of different people and businesses could take advantage of the new knowledge, expanding jobs and opportunities many fold over just the one company who would have exclusive "license" to use this new knowledge for x-years. I don't care how big your company is, it isn't as large as "everyone". "Everyone" will always have more points of view and a larger collective intelligence to tap into. And all these companies and people would pay taxes based on an increase of wealth production. Governmental expenses could theoretically go *down*, or they could take the new additional monies created, at the same exact previous percentile parity, and fund more research than what they could previously, the compounding effect.
Closed source is a valid model, but open source allows for faster development and more "wealth production", even if it is initially just more IP. Heck, even the heart of capitalism agrees now, look at the next article, NYSE goes open source. It works with code, it can work with a variety of other types of new research as well. A group of Nobel Laureates just called for more international collaboration with scientific advances, because they think it would work better,a free exchange of results, rather than stricter and more closed-off research. Other smart guys are calling for dropping the economic barriers to expensive peer reviewed articles. I would agree there as well.
Me, I am gonna trust the smart guys on this one. When you have both the planet's leading and honored professional smart guys AND the planet's leading professional and quite well compensated shrewd big money guys actually agreeing on something, a simple basic premise...well..you wanna bet against the house? The uni can make more by sharing (long run), because as you and others all give out-share- "you" the uni in this case- get to take back as well, because everyone's efforts can be "force multiplied", and that multiplied force down the road can and will turn into money, along with other things, these research results we all want to see.
Youtube is success. There are winners and stinkers mixed up in the huge offering there, just as you would expect, but overall it is successful. Open source software is a success, winners and stinkers, but so it goes. People are free to look at what doesn't work and what does and improve on it. Closed source you get winners and stinkers, but it is much harder to get to the nitty gritty details to see how to improve it, you have to wait for the limited set of eyeballs to do it.
Really, if you want an historical example, just look back in history with closed guilds, commoners being disallowed the ability to read, etc. The called it the dark ages for several reasons.
As to "risk", with closed source you are relying on faith, a cult like behavior model, to insure your product you are getting is "good quality" and depending on their word alone for that. that's like believing the used car salesman in the seersucker suit. Nuts. Which means they have every economic incentive to push to you the strangest crappiest stuff imaginable and lead you to believe that is the "best" that can be done. My comment there is Orly? For some reason I am just not trusting the snakeoil-caveat emptor model, which is what closed source and closed knowledge is, you have to have "faith" that what you are getting is the best and will work. I say that is much riskier than being able to actually see and verify (in some fashion) all the ingredients.
I run linux now because I can get the most and best code out there for the best price and least effort. I could run windows I guess..and I have.... in the past, along with a lot of macs/apple code..but no way am I going to pay serious folding scratch to run inferior code, not in 2007 where there are so many great open source avenues to explore. I'm not a dev or a coder, hyst a regular normal computer criver, I've used all three, for me, linux works the best for a variety of reasons cost/quality/usefulness/ease of use, etc. I can get the most bang for my total hardware/software buck, and it just so happens it is "open" mostly, and I don't think that is purely a coincidence.
I contend that same concept can work with most any research, in fact, I think this is why when you read academic papers you'll see cross university collaboration with the authors so much, because *it just works*. And like I pointed out, the nobel guys say the same, and the hard nosed wall street bean counters just analyzed it and came up with the same. The NYSE guys don't give a rats ass on the social implications, they just looked to see where the best bottom line was, and switched to open linux over closed unix. I am not in their league, chances are you aren't either. I'll defer to the smarter guys on this one. Open knowledge just works better, closed off walled knowledge-gardens are not only last years models, they are last millenium's model.
You can be ahead of the curve, behind it, or try to stay on top, pick one that suits you the best.