Actually, if the game is of no value to Sony any more, they should sell the rights to someone who wants to keep running the game servers, even if that's players who just want to keep playing. In that sense, Crytek offering Community Dedicated Servers ( http://www.crydev.net/dm_eds/download_detail.php?id=5 ) makes their game worth more, since people can keep playing as long as someone wants to host the server.
The same thing that will happen to any "cloud" service. Think of this as an early warning about the future of the "cloud". If you are wise, keep personal copies locally, and use the cloud for extra backup or convenient access. Otherwise when someone else's server goes down for whatever reason (leap day, no profits, etc.), you are fucked.
The Internet community is in the process of creating the "Universal Library". I'm a librarian at heart, and want to see all of mankind's knowledge available to everyone, everywhere, instantly. The benefit of having that far outweighs the loss to particular people who want to keep knowledge enslaved to their ownership. The last decade has seen enormous progress towards that goal.
Libraries and publishers have always been at odds, but they don't prevent publishers from making money. It's when the publishers get too greedy and restrict the circulation of knowledge that it causes brain damage to civilization. This is why libraries are funded by governments, donations, and universities - on the whole they are a good thing.
Organizations like the RIAA are simply going to be roadkill on the way to the Universal Library. Excuse me while I go work on it some more...
You should have asked who to contact to license the supposed music, followed the trail as far as possible, documented it, and then exposed them for fraud.
In economics terms, file hosting is close to perfect competition. It does not take much money to rent a server at some colo, set up a web page, and upload and download files. So if one host decides to have crappy service, there are plenty of others to step in and replace them. There are also two other major forms of competition at the moment. One is P2P networks such as BitTorrent, and the other is "Sneakernet", ie local distribution. Make online distribution hard enough, and people will pass around burned disks, portable hard drives, or set up LAN parties or wifi parties. Where I used to work, we had a DVD loan system in place. It was just a shared spreadsheet with what everyone had, and you asked directly to borrow a disk. Local distribution sets a limit on how hard you can crack down.
Oh, I forgot to mention, if you ride up the cable somewhere between the tip and the center, and time when you let go, you can inject into any transfer orbit you want. Also the Moon is a lot smaller than Earth, so a rotating cable in Lunar orbit can reach all the way to zero velocity. That makes getting up and down from the Moon very easy.
Aerospace engineer who has worked on orbital tether design speaking here.
A cable with a tip velocity of 30% of orbital speed is feasible with existing materials. Since the center of the cable is at orbital velocity by definition, the tip is then at 70% of orbital velocity at the bottom of it's rotation. A vehicle coming from the ground then needs half the kinetic energy as a full ground-to-orbit one does (Kinetic energy goes as 0.5 times velocity squared). That makes single stage launch vehicles very feasible. If the tip is at 1 gravity, then the cable radius is 516 km, and the center would be at an altitude of 750 km or thereabouts, so it does not see too much drag at the low point. Half a rotation later (12 minutes) at top of the rotation, you can let go, and now be going at 130% of orbit velocity, which is nearly GEO transfer or escape. Escape is 141% of orbit velocity.
If you wanted to get to zero g, then it's a 516 km ride, which beats the fuck out of a stationary elevator. The elevator will be heavy relative to the vehicles coming up and down, but you need onboard propulsion to make up for traffic differences. Anything going up tends to lower the elevator orbit, anything going down tends to raise it. Whatever is left over you need to make up, preferably with an efficient electric thruster. Arrival means landing on a platform that is at one gee. With modern GPS and laser navigation, that should be fairly easy. Make the platform hundreds of meters wide if you need a bigger target. Missed landings just means the vehicle heads back down sooner than it was supposed to. It should not present a safety problem.
Building something like this is a bootstrapping task. Start with a small rotating station, and extend cables from it. Keep adding sections of cable one at a time. Get your cable from near earth asteroids which have carbon, so you don't have to launch the whole thing from Earth. As the thing grows, the velocity to reach it from the ground goes down, so the payload a vehicle can carry goes up.
Apparent travel time if you go as photons is zero. Why send your atoms if you can send a description of your atoms? It's way more efficient that way. If you have already uploaded your mind to software, then the atoms are irrelevant, just occupy an appropriate robot body as needed.
Besides, why can't you have intermediate stations in the Oort clouds or on rogue planets between stars? Interstellar space is far from empty by the latest thinking.
Thus you join a long line of people who said something is impossible, and were wrong.
First, technically 5 man-made objects are on their way to interstellar space (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2, and New Horizons). They are slow, but leaving the Solar System nonetheless.
Second, we have nuclear power. That is sufficient for "generation ships". Those travel only a small fraction of the speed of light, but with a nuclear power source you can keep a community going for generations until you arrive.
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required. Sending photons describing which atoms takes about a million times less energy than sending the atoms themselves at near light-speed, so this method is vastly more efficient, and would be the first choice over antimatter or very big solar powered lasers. Those are the only ways to get more energy/kg in the vehicle than fusion that we know of, which is what you need to get substantial fraction of speed of light.
Fourth, perhaps cryostasis or life extension via cloning stem cells or some such will get developed, so even with a slow starship you can still get there.
Fifth, there is plenty to do expanding into the Solar System, including the Oort Cloud, before worrying about interstellar trips. How about we figure out how to mine the Near Earth asteroids first? They are closer in energy terms than the Moon, and it's mission energy which costs you in space, not physical distance. We can practice by mining space junk in orbit, which also helps fix the orbital debris problem.
90MB isn't the whole site, just a scraped list of the titles and magnet links, but that is enough to allow torrenting to continue. The whole site would include the descriptions and user comments.
The interesting part of that 90MB index is *it is also a torrent*. It has it's own magnet link, so that short string of text is sufficient to get the index, from which you can get anything else. Such meta-torrents make it possible to dispense with websites entirely. The Pirate Bay numbers it's pages, so you can issue a base index, and then tweet updates on a regular basis as magnet links. Future torrent indexes can contain more info than just the title and magnet link. They would be larger, but also more useful.
You mean aside from the site's name? And the fact that it has defied several shutdown attempts, and even taunts the authorities?
Besides, it's a good thing they focus on TPB exclusively. That leaves the other 999 tracker sites alone. It's a useful distraction while better technology gets developed.
What I did with BS clauses was write "NoThankYou" backwards with the opposite hand I normally sign with on the signature space, fast enough to look like a typical sloppy signature. I have yet to have anyone question it, but if it came to a legal issue, I can say that is not my signature.
Alternate idea: tell them that all reproduction rights have already been signed over to your literary agency, and they will have to contact them to get access.
What you are really saying is "I don't believe in bitcoin". Other people do, however, to the tune of $40 million USD.
If you treat BitCoin as an experiment in electronic currency without a central bank, I would say it is worth it just to learn what works and does not work. Money has been getting ever more electronic over time, and we should have some idea how the fuck it works. Second Life is another experiment in electronic currency. It has a total money supply worth $27 million, convertibility back and forth to dollars, and a large market of goods people buy and sell. It may be a toy sized economy compared to the rest of the world, but it's better to experiment and make mistakes on one of those, than, say, Greece.
Actually, yes it is, and I say that as a contractor who worked at the Johnson Space Center for a while. The old mission control (pre-1995) was set up to only handle the Space Shuttle, and they had 602 civil service staff working there. The new mission control replaced all the old consoles with newer ones based on DEC alpha computers to run the displays, and was set up to run both the Shuttle and Space Station, which was going to fly a few years later. Know how many jobs there were in the new mission control? 602, exactly the same. They designed it on purpose to preserve civil service jobs. That is pork.
How many NASA centers were closed after the Apollo program ended, and NASA funding dropped by 2/3? Zero. Keeping those centers open, with an average of 400 support staff each (receptionists, the guys that mowed the lawns, etc) was more important than keeping the science and engineering people around. So the efficiency of the agency as a whole dropped dramatically. We are still paying that penalty today. They should have closed 2/3 of the centers, and cut overhead, but that would affect jobs in someone's district. You see the same resistance when it comes to military bases or post offices, anything that involves local jobs.
Developing outer space for human habitation is useful. Requiring funding of an expensive launcher based on Space Shuttle technology, which is over 30 years old at this point, is pork.
How about we make it a general rule that any new law apply to the politicians first, as an alpha test, then the rest of the government as a beta test, then after that the general population? In software development it's called "eating your own dogfood". I'm all for proper testing before general release, how about you?
The scientifically interesting distance is when it gets close enough to get better data than Hubble did. At perigee, Pluto was at a minimum distance of 28.6 AU from Earth. New Horizons has a much smaller telescope, so it gets 1/20th the resolution as Hubble gets. Therefore it needs to be that much closer, or 1.4 AU away, before it can take better photos. Until then, Earthbound equipment does a better job. That time is around the start of 2015, 6 months before flyby.
Actually, that is pretty much what the X-Prize does, except reverse the order to "do work first, then get money". You could use Kickstarter to collect money to establish a prize.
The world installed 26 GW of solar and 41 GW of wind capacity in 2011. I think that is past beta.
Before anyone makes the comment, I am aware that those sources have around a 20% capacity factor (average output/nameplate capacity), because they operate intermittently. Still, that comes to 13.4 GW average power, or 6.7 times the output of the two reactors in the story.
If you bothered to check the first link in the story, you would see they broke ground a couple of years ago. There are some nice photos of the construction progress so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if the game is of no value to Sony any more, they should sell the rights to someone who wants to keep running the game servers, even if that's players who just want to keep playing. In that sense, Crytek offering Community Dedicated Servers ( http://www.crydev.net/dm_eds/download_detail.php?id=5 ) makes their game worth more, since people can keep playing as long as someone wants to host the server.
The same thing that will happen to any "cloud" service. Think of this as an early warning about the future of the "cloud". If you are wise, keep personal copies locally, and use the cloud for extra backup or convenient access. Otherwise when someone else's server goes down for whatever reason (leap day, no profits, etc.), you are fucked.
Let's start referring to them as the "Buggy Whip Protection Association of America", since they are equally out of tune with the times (pun intended).
The Internet community is in the process of creating the "Universal Library". I'm a librarian at heart, and want to see all of mankind's knowledge available to everyone, everywhere, instantly. The benefit of having that far outweighs the loss to particular people who want to keep knowledge enslaved to their ownership. The last decade has seen enormous progress towards that goal.
Libraries and publishers have always been at odds, but they don't prevent publishers from making money. It's when the publishers get too greedy and restrict the circulation of knowledge that it causes brain damage to civilization. This is why libraries are funded by governments, donations, and universities - on the whole they are a good thing.
Organizations like the RIAA are simply going to be roadkill on the way to the Universal Library. Excuse me while I go work on it some more...
They could go to the "powered by Rumblefish" site http://www.friendlymusic.com/#nav=Lw%3D%3D
download their entire catalog, and make a torrent out of it.
Not that I suggest actually doing that. That would be wrong, Almost as wrong as claiming music you don't own.
You should have asked who to contact to license the supposed music, followed the trail as far as possible, documented it, and then exposed them for fraud.
In economics terms, file hosting is close to perfect competition. It does not take much money to rent a server at some colo, set up a web page, and upload and download files. So if one host decides to have crappy service, there are plenty of others to step in and replace them. There are also two other major forms of competition at the moment. One is P2P networks such as BitTorrent, and the other is "Sneakernet", ie local distribution. Make online distribution hard enough, and people will pass around burned disks, portable hard drives, or set up LAN parties or wifi parties. Where I used to work, we had a DVD loan system in place. It was just a shared spreadsheet with what everyone had, and you asked directly to borrow a disk. Local distribution sets a limit on how hard you can crack down.
"It's about time."
Oh, I forgot to mention, if you ride up the cable somewhere between the tip and the center, and time when you let go, you can inject into any transfer orbit you want. Also the Moon is a lot smaller than Earth, so a rotating cable in Lunar orbit can reach all the way to zero velocity. That makes getting up and down from the Moon very easy.
Aerospace engineer who has worked on orbital tether design speaking here.
A cable with a tip velocity of 30% of orbital speed is feasible with existing materials. Since the center of the cable is at orbital velocity by definition, the tip is then at 70% of orbital velocity at the bottom of it's rotation. A vehicle coming from the ground then needs half the kinetic energy as a full ground-to-orbit one does (Kinetic energy goes as 0.5 times velocity squared). That makes single stage launch vehicles very feasible. If the tip is at 1 gravity, then the cable radius is 516 km, and the center would be at an altitude of 750 km or thereabouts, so it does not see too much drag at the low point. Half a rotation later (12 minutes) at top of the rotation, you can let go, and now be going at 130% of orbit velocity, which is nearly GEO transfer or escape. Escape is 141% of orbit velocity.
If you wanted to get to zero g, then it's a 516 km ride, which beats the fuck out of a stationary elevator. The elevator will be heavy relative to the vehicles coming up and down, but you need onboard propulsion to make up for traffic differences. Anything going up tends to lower the elevator orbit, anything going down tends to raise it. Whatever is left over you need to make up, preferably with an efficient electric thruster. Arrival means landing on a platform that is at one gee. With modern GPS and laser navigation, that should be fairly easy. Make the platform hundreds of meters wide if you need a bigger target. Missed landings just means the vehicle heads back down sooner than it was supposed to. It should not present a safety problem.
Building something like this is a bootstrapping task. Start with a small rotating station, and extend cables from it. Keep adding sections of cable one at a time. Get your cable from near earth asteroids which have carbon, so you don't have to launch the whole thing from Earth. As the thing grows, the velocity to reach it from the ground goes down, so the payload a vehicle can carry goes up.
Apparent travel time if you go as photons is zero. Why send your atoms if you can send a description of your atoms? It's way more efficient that way. If you have already uploaded your mind to software, then the atoms are irrelevant, just occupy an appropriate robot body as needed.
Besides, why can't you have intermediate stations in the Oort clouds or on rogue planets between stars? Interstellar space is far from empty by the latest thinking.
Thus you join a long line of people who said something is impossible, and were wrong.
First, technically 5 man-made objects are on their way to interstellar space (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2, and New Horizons). They are slow, but leaving the Solar System nonetheless.
Second, we have nuclear power. That is sufficient for "generation ships". Those travel only a small fraction of the speed of light, but with a nuclear power source you can keep a community going for generations until you arrive.
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required. Sending photons describing which atoms takes about a million times less energy than sending the atoms themselves at near light-speed, so this method is vastly more efficient, and would be the first choice over antimatter or very big solar powered lasers. Those are the only ways to get more energy/kg in the vehicle than fusion that we know of, which is what you need to get substantial fraction of speed of light.
Fourth, perhaps cryostasis or life extension via cloning stem cells or some such will get developed, so even with a slow starship you can still get there.
Fifth, there is plenty to do expanding into the Solar System, including the Oort Cloud, before worrying about interstellar trips. How about we figure out how to mine the Near Earth asteroids first? They are closer in energy terms than the Moon, and it's mission energy which costs you in space, not physical distance. We can practice by mining space junk in orbit, which also helps fix the orbital debris problem.
90MB isn't the whole site, just a scraped list of the titles and magnet links, but that is enough to allow torrenting to continue. The whole site would include the descriptions and user comments.
The interesting part of that 90MB index is *it is also a torrent*. It has it's own magnet link, so that short string of text is sufficient to get the index, from which you can get anything else. Such meta-torrents make it possible to dispense with websites entirely. The Pirate Bay numbers it's pages, so you can issue a base index, and then tweet updates on a regular basis as magnet links. Future torrent indexes can contain more info than just the title and magnet link. They would be larger, but also more useful.
You mean aside from the site's name? And the fact that it has defied several shutdown attempts, and even taunts the authorities?
Besides, it's a good thing they focus on TPB exclusively. That leaves the other 999 tracker sites alone. It's a useful distraction while better technology gets developed.
Wait, are they going to save all the spam too?
What I did with BS clauses was write "NoThankYou" backwards with the opposite hand I normally sign with on the signature space, fast enough to look like a typical sloppy signature. I have yet to have anyone question it, but if it came to a legal issue, I can say that is not my signature.
Alternate idea: tell them that all reproduction rights have already been signed over to your literary agency, and they will have to contact them to get access.
What you are really saying is "I don't believe in bitcoin". Other people do, however, to the tune of $40 million USD.
If you treat BitCoin as an experiment in electronic currency without a central bank, I would say it is worth it just to learn what works and does not work. Money has been getting ever more electronic over time, and we should have some idea how the fuck it works. Second Life is another experiment in electronic currency. It has a total money supply worth $27 million, convertibility back and forth to dollars, and a large market of goods people buy and sell. It may be a toy sized economy compared to the rest of the world, but it's better to experiment and make mistakes on one of those, than, say, Greece.
Do you think Mission Control is pork?
Actually, yes it is, and I say that as a contractor who worked at the Johnson Space Center for a while. The old mission control (pre-1995) was set up to only handle the Space Shuttle, and they had 602 civil service staff working there. The new mission control replaced all the old consoles with newer ones based on DEC alpha computers to run the displays, and was set up to run both the Shuttle and Space Station, which was going to fly a few years later. Know how many jobs there were in the new mission control? 602, exactly the same. They designed it on purpose to preserve civil service jobs. That is pork.
How many NASA centers were closed after the Apollo program ended, and NASA funding dropped by 2/3? Zero. Keeping those centers open, with an average of 400 support staff each (receptionists, the guys that mowed the lawns, etc) was more important than keeping the science and engineering people around. So the efficiency of the agency as a whole dropped dramatically. We are still paying that penalty today. They should have closed 2/3 of the centers, and cut overhead, but that would affect jobs in someone's district. You see the same resistance when it comes to military bases or post offices, anything that involves local jobs.
Developing outer space for human habitation is useful. Requiring funding of an expensive launcher based on Space Shuttle technology, which is over 30 years old at this point, is pork.
How about we make it a general rule that any new law apply to the politicians first, as an alpha test, then the rest of the government as a beta test, then after that the general population? In software development it's called "eating your own dogfood". I'm all for proper testing before general release, how about you?
In other words, "hands off my pork, dammit!".
The scientifically interesting distance is when it gets close enough to get better data than Hubble did. At perigee, Pluto was at a minimum distance of 28.6 AU from Earth. New Horizons has a much smaller telescope, so it gets 1/20th the resolution as Hubble gets. Therefore it needs to be that much closer, or 1.4 AU away, before it can take better photos. Until then, Earthbound equipment does a better job. That time is around the start of 2015, 6 months before flyby.
Actually, that is pretty much what the X-Prize does, except reverse the order to "do work first, then get money". You could use Kickstarter to collect money to establish a prize.
The world installed 26 GW of solar and 41 GW of wind capacity in 2011. I think that is past beta.
Before anyone makes the comment, I am aware that those sources have around a 20% capacity factor (average output/nameplate capacity), because they operate intermittently. Still, that comes to 13.4 GW average power, or 6.7 times the output of the two reactors in the story.
If you bothered to check the first link in the story, you would see they broke ground a couple of years ago. There are some nice photos of the construction progress so far.