I would love to be wrong in this case but I'm just not sure. I agree that the tag is often posted humourously, but it is ussually as a dig towards the commenters already expressing that sentiment. Like I said, I would love to be wrong, I'm just not conviced I am.
I remember a similar argument being used a while back by people convicted of drunk driving. They argued that their defense required access to the technical information about the breath-a-lizer, including the source and testing documentation.
If I remember right the judge in the case (Florida AFAIK) ruled in favor of the defendent. If the Breath-a-lizer company didn't turn over the requested documents, the defendent was off the hook. Don't know if the case has been overturned though.
Well in that case why are we bothering with HD media at all? Why not just put HD content onto a regular DVD at higher compression? Could it be because quality goes down?
You also can't tell me that the current infrustructure can support every HD home downloading HD content on a regular basis. For example, everynight at midnight, my cable company's cable box downloads the next days schedule.
The internet crawls to a halt for almost a half hour while all the cable boxes get updated. This is probably a 1 meg file to each of their customers. Compare that to even a small percentage of people trying to download an HD movie on a saturday night, even at the 2 gig figure that you claim.
And finally... sorry about the lack of paragraphs, forgot to switch it to Plain Old Text.
*sigh* I'm waiting for the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag to show up.
I know it's been said before but it seems like lately there has been a lot of fear mongering going on in the world. I understand when I see it on TV; all the soccer moms of the world need to know the latest threat to their little angels.
But Slashdot should be better than this. Every time an article comes up that mentions AI, virusses, bacteria, censorship, anything remotely threatening it gets the fear mongering going.
Here, we have a developement that could save millions of dollars worth of launch costs; yet we fear it because... why exactly? It might spontaneously gain intelligence and attack the human race? Someone might hack it and tell it to attack? Attack using what exactly? I hope that the poster was joking, but honestly, I doubt it.
To summarize, we will adapt our behavior to not do things that we don't want others to know about, eventually making a more moral and ethical society.
Unfortunatly, not everything that we want to keep private is unethical or a detriment to society. Change for the better often comes from things that are at the time considered improper/unethical that today we have no problem with.
Holding socialist ideals in the during the cold war would got many people blacklisted, unable to find employment or charity; today we are seriously considering a government sponsered health system. Anti-war protesters were hounded and harrased during the Vietnam war, despite the fact that today most people would agree that Vietnam was a mistake at atleast some level. Certain bedroom practices have been outlawed in states such as Texas, and have subsequently been ruled uncostitutional. You could even argue that masterbation is a net gain for society since it releases sexual tension that might only lead to more dangerous behavior later.
The point is, just because our laws are (reasonably) fair and just at the moment, doesn't mean that they always will be. We must protect our privacy if for no other reason than the fact that we need a recourse if our government goes completely out of control.
I just don't buy that people are going to download HD content. You can't really compress it any more than it is on the disk without having lossy compression, which kind of negates the whole "HD" concept.
I think people tend to view downloads differently from disks. They expect to be able to go online, find a movie, download it and watch it almost immediatly. I have a 5 Meg connection, which I will grant is pretty typical right now (yes there are people with more, but there are a lot of people with less). In reality, my 5 meg connection actually gets about 1.5 megs/s on a good day which means that for a 20 gig movie, it will take just about 4 hours to download, which means that I can't start watching the moview for about 2-2.5 hours. And that assumes current usage by everyone else thats sharing my cable bandwidth.
If you have every household suddenly downloading 100+ gigs a month in movies, the current infrustructure will collapse. You'll be begging the ISP's to manage the data and bandwidth which will just give the the opportunity to manage for everything else while their at it.
Ask yourself, do you really see every household in america paying for a 15 meg connection ($100+ in my location) just so they can watch movies? Or do you think that the telcos will suddenly decide to upgrade thier infrustructure, not just to your neighborhood but also to every rural area in the US (still more than 45% of the population).
Throw in the fact that you physically have the disc. That you can take it easily to a friends house or let them borrow it. Not to mention how few people are really prepared to buy/build/maintain a dedicated media server in their home. I just don't see HD downloads as viable withing the next 5 years, probably not for the next 10 with the speed the infrustructure is being upgraded.
I wise man once said "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it". If cyberwarfare ever becomes a reality, how do we respond to the fact that is isn't "terrible"?
The direct damage from such warfare would be primarily economic or data security related (rather than a cost in human lives) how do you feel we can prevent it from becoming a monthly, yearly, or daily occurance?
I completely agree with you that copyright and patents are broken, something does need to be done sooner rather than later. On the other hand, I kind of think that the situation will eventually fix itself anyway. Look at the RIAA trying in vain to control rampant piracy.
More important that IP being broken is the current economic models being broken. Market economy works based on supply and demand, when supply is infinite (as it virtually is with anything digital) the system breaks down.
I didn't mean to say that I disagreed with your sentiment my final paragraph; rather that posts tend to get modded up if they are against IP regardless of whether they respond to their parents post at all. Not a comment against you personally, more a comment on the moderation(to be fair I agree with the crowd, but the moderation system is supposed to be more than a popular vote).
No, I'm sorry, but that's wrong. Diminishing returns only works on real goods, not state-supported monopolies. That's because in a free market the producers are "price-takers" - they accept the price the market sets based on supply and demand. Goods protected by copyright exist in monopoly markets, not free markets. Microsoft owns the monopoly on Vista, and thus are the "price-setter". If they say it's $400, it's $400. Sorry, but this is just economics 101. This is quite simply incorrect and illogical even. You say that Microsoft has a monopoly on Vista, this is true currently only because copyright law protects their monopoloy. The Grand-Parent Post was refering to if copyright didn't exist...
Assuming you've made the copies legally (i.e. copyright law doesn't exist) If copyright doesn't exist, Microsoft is no longer the only producer of valid Vista copies. There are now millions of people with the hardware, software, and legal rights needed to distrubute Vista.
It's kind of sad that a post completely ignores its parent post's premise, promotes an illogical argument, and still gets modded up to +5 insightful; simply because it takes the anti-IP stand.
Very true, in fact the article brings up the fact that there is very little software that utilizes four cores, let alone eight.
On the other hand, I know that Blender atleast lets you specify the number of threads to use while rendering. I would hope that the OS would be smart enough to put each thread on a different core but don't know for sure.
It's not so much a question of if it's happened before as much as it is a question of if it could happen in the future. I'm not necissarily saying that there are two fully developed drugs sitting side by side, but perhaps one avenue of research gets more funding than the other, or more prominant researchers.
Probably the closest examples that I can think of are probably more along the lines of the effectiveness of drugs. We've been giving our sick children infant cough syrup for years while just recently publicly funded research found that it was not only innefective but quite possibly dangerous as well.
I am not a pharmiciutical hating Nazi for the record. I have comments in support of the Biotech firms on several slashdot pages. Like I said, they've done great things (Merck's campaign to eleminate river blindness comes to mind), but it seems like this is one area that public founds could be used to form a safety net and encourage research in directions that aren't necissarily profitable.
Example: Biotech company developes two new treatments for diabetes. One is administered daily in pill form and costs $10 a pill to make but can be sold at $100 a pill comercially. The other is a one time treatment that would cost $200, most of which would go to the doctors performing the procedure.
Quiz: Which do you think will be released to the public?
For the record, biotech companies are not all evil, all the time. They have done great things and not always just for the bottom line. But to have no public funding for public medical research seams extremely dangerous to me.
Well, atleast your sig is accurate.:)
Of course all research has some inherent risks to those involved as well as all of humanity. The question is whether those risks outweigh the benifits.
And, as the rest of my above comment already states, I support all stem cell research. I believe that to be human is based in the human mind, something that a clump of undeveloped cells cannot possibly have.
Finally, playing the devils advocate back to you. If the greater good is all that is really important to you, why aren't you volounteering for medical experiments. After all, your sacrifice could save the lives of countless others.
Actually, your comments about apple give me an idea. The real problem is that 95% of their customers are probably getting what they think is a break but it will come back to haunt them when the high data usage services go mainstream.
What we should do is increase advertising for all the high data services in the areas they are doing their tests. iTunes, Netflix, amazon music, video game demos (I know I've downloaded probably 40 gigs worth of demos for my PS3), MMO's, flicker, picasa, youtube, porn (can't ignore the data that must be taken up by porn) and legit p2p.
When TW gets hundreds if not thousands of complaints during their test, this will quickly and quietly die. It's not enough for us to complain, if all of us drop Time Warner, they would probably be happy as we are the ones using the bandwidth. The only way to stop this is to get the other 95% of users as pissed off as you are.
Actually, assuming you believe that human life begins at conception, nothing in this anouncement is even questionable. If you agree with that statement then obviously any research that can lead to the destruction of that life is wrong; it is basically murder of a fellow, and absolutely helpless, human being.
I for one however, don't agree with that statment. There is more to being human than having human DNA and the potential for growth. Humanity is about self awareness, intelligence, and conciousness. An embryo lacks these things simply because it hasn't yet developed the required circuitry for them.
For the record IaaC (I am a Catholic), but that doesn't mean I can't think for myself.
This is a classic case of asking for more than you can get to give yourself bargaining power. They'll ask for 1.5 million then say "oh well, we'll just compromise at 750k and call it good"
I'm interested in knowing what kind of algorithm they developed to solve this problem. It seems to me like it would be an excellent application of genetic algorithms as it is essentially a giant optimization problem. I sopose that assumes that you can recognize correct results when you see them though.
This is a good example of when you can say something that is entirely true and still have people be pissed off at you. Does anyone honestly believe that IBM didn't do the things he is accusing them of? Of course IBM behaved unethically, they had to after all the shinanigans that Microsoft tried to pull first.
On the other hand, if Microsoft had squashed a format that IBM or the Open Source community had unethically pushed, we would still be pissed at Microsoft.
Sometimes I fear we have a default reaction whenever Microsoft makes a statement. In reality, we should be pissed at both Microsoft and IBM; they're both subverting a process that is soposed to be for the good of the consumers.
I have to wonder if it wouldn't be possible using this or other advances to create strains of plants that couldn't interbreed with natural ones. One of the big fears of genetic engineering crops is that the changes will get out into the wild and produce hybrids, putting those genes into the wild. Would it be possible to leverage these new pairs to create a self destruct sequence in cross breeds?
illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire This is dangerous thinking; seriously, if you want to protect your online rights you cannot allow statements like that to go unchallenged. Even given that the majority of the files being downloaded by the progroms are illegal, that does not make the services themselves illegal.
That's the brunt of the problem here anyway, these people are more than willing to disrupt every, every internet connection in the world in order to protect thier profits.
I think a more accurate description of the situation would be you see someone who has the same color skin as what you picture when you think of a terrorist. The democrat walks on by. The republican follows him to his home, thinks "maybe he has a knife in there", and attacks him without provocation.
I don't think there was a large population of American in Iraq under immediate threat from terrorists. we went there for Christ's sake.
Those won't do, we need something that can adapt... something that uses genetics to simulate a lifeform while still being able to operate disks... We can call it, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.
First, I would order the military leaders to devise an exit strategy for Iraq that would minimize military and civilian strategies. I don't know how to do it, they do so I'd leave the micromanaging up to them.
I would also defund the great wall of Mexico and use that money along with a portion of the Iraq war money to improve our nations name over seas by offering a system of grants, assistance, and loans to developing nations and nations that have a stron anti-american sentiment. If the offer is refused it will be renewed every 6 months.
At home, I would boost spending to education and sciences, especially "pure science" projects such as high energy physics. Legalize marijauna and tax the hell out of it, use this money and other vice taxes to implement a national insurance plan.
Of course in order for that to happen I'd have to thrown the insurance lobby out of Washington so while we're at it we'll just get rid of all the lobbies at once.
Finally, I would raise taxes for oil companies and on gasoline itself and use those revenues to do real developement on wind/solar/nuclear projects.
Of course, that isn't so much an "If if were president" as it is an "If I were dictator". The chances of any of this happening are slim to none, even if the president wants it and works for it. Many things are decided by congress and congress is heavily influenced by the lobbies. If I had to choose between getting Republicans out of the white house or getting rid of lobbiests; well, how much more damage can the republicans really do?
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to be wrong in this case but I'm just not sure. I agree that the tag is often posted humourously, but it is ussually as a dig towards the commenters already expressing that sentiment. Like I said, I would love to be wrong, I'm just not conviced I am.
I remember a similar argument being used a while back by people convicted of drunk driving. They argued that their defense required access to the technical information about the breath-a-lizer, including the source and testing documentation.
If I remember right the judge in the case (Florida AFAIK) ruled in favor of the defendent. If the Breath-a-lizer company didn't turn over the requested documents, the defendent was off the hook. Don't know if the case has been overturned though.
Well in that case why are we bothering with HD media at all? Why not just put HD content onto a regular DVD at higher compression? Could it be because quality goes down?
You also can't tell me that the current infrustructure can support every HD home downloading HD content on a regular basis. For example, everynight at midnight, my cable company's cable box downloads the next days schedule.
The internet crawls to a halt for almost a half hour while all the cable boxes get updated. This is probably a 1 meg file to each of their customers. Compare that to even a small percentage of people trying to download an HD movie on a saturday night, even at the 2 gig figure that you claim.
And finally... sorry about the lack of paragraphs, forgot to switch it to Plain Old Text.
*sigh* I'm waiting for the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag to show up.
I know it's been said before but it seems like lately there has been a lot of fear mongering going on in the world. I understand when I see it on TV; all the soccer moms of the world need to know the latest threat to their little angels.
But Slashdot should be better than this. Every time an article comes up that mentions AI, virusses, bacteria, censorship, anything remotely threatening it gets the fear mongering going.
Here, we have a developement that could save millions of dollars worth of launch costs; yet we fear it because... why exactly? It might spontaneously gain intelligence and attack the human race? Someone might hack it and tell it to attack? Attack using what exactly? I hope that the poster was joking, but honestly, I doubt it.
To summarize, we will adapt our behavior to not do things that we don't want others to know about, eventually making a more moral and ethical society.
Unfortunatly, not everything that we want to keep private is unethical or a detriment to society. Change for the better often comes from things that are at the time considered improper/unethical that today we have no problem with.
Holding socialist ideals in the during the cold war would got many people blacklisted, unable to find employment or charity; today we are seriously considering a government sponsered health system. Anti-war protesters were hounded and harrased during the Vietnam war, despite the fact that today most people would agree that Vietnam was a mistake at atleast some level. Certain bedroom practices have been outlawed in states such as Texas, and have subsequently been ruled uncostitutional. You could even argue that masterbation is a net gain for society since it releases sexual tension that might only lead to more dangerous behavior later.
The point is, just because our laws are (reasonably) fair and just at the moment, doesn't mean that they always will be. We must protect our privacy if for no other reason than the fact that we need a recourse if our government goes completely out of control.
I just don't buy that people are going to download HD content. You can't really compress it any more than it is on the disk without having lossy compression, which kind of negates the whole "HD" concept. I think people tend to view downloads differently from disks. They expect to be able to go online, find a movie, download it and watch it almost immediatly. I have a 5 Meg connection, which I will grant is pretty typical right now (yes there are people with more, but there are a lot of people with less). In reality, my 5 meg connection actually gets about 1.5 megs/s on a good day which means that for a 20 gig movie, it will take just about 4 hours to download, which means that I can't start watching the moview for about 2-2.5 hours. And that assumes current usage by everyone else thats sharing my cable bandwidth. If you have every household suddenly downloading 100+ gigs a month in movies, the current infrustructure will collapse. You'll be begging the ISP's to manage the data and bandwidth which will just give the the opportunity to manage for everything else while their at it. Ask yourself, do you really see every household in america paying for a 15 meg connection ($100+ in my location) just so they can watch movies? Or do you think that the telcos will suddenly decide to upgrade thier infrustructure, not just to your neighborhood but also to every rural area in the US (still more than 45% of the population). Throw in the fact that you physically have the disc. That you can take it easily to a friends house or let them borrow it. Not to mention how few people are really prepared to buy/build/maintain a dedicated media server in their home. I just don't see HD downloads as viable withing the next 5 years, probably not for the next 10 with the speed the infrustructure is being upgraded.
I wise man once said "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it". If cyberwarfare ever becomes a reality, how do we respond to the fact that is isn't "terrible"?
The direct damage from such warfare would be primarily economic or data security related (rather than a cost in human lives) how do you feel we can prevent it from becoming a monthly, yearly, or daily occurance?
I completely agree with you that copyright and patents are broken, something does need to be done sooner rather than later. On the other hand, I kind of think that the situation will eventually fix itself anyway. Look at the RIAA trying in vain to control rampant piracy.
More important that IP being broken is the current economic models being broken. Market economy works based on supply and demand, when supply is infinite (as it virtually is with anything digital) the system breaks down.
I didn't mean to say that I disagreed with your sentiment my final paragraph; rather that posts tend to get modded up if they are against IP regardless of whether they respond to their parents post at all. Not a comment against you personally, more a comment on the moderation(to be fair I agree with the crowd, but the moderation system is supposed to be more than a popular vote).
Sorry, but this is just economics 101. This is quite simply incorrect and illogical even. You say that Microsoft has a monopoly on Vista, this is true currently only because copyright law protects their monopoloy. The Grand-Parent Post was refering to if copyright didn't exist... Assuming you've made the copies legally (i.e. copyright law doesn't exist) If copyright doesn't exist, Microsoft is no longer the only producer of valid Vista copies. There are now millions of people with the hardware, software, and legal rights needed to distrubute Vista.
It's kind of sad that a post completely ignores its parent post's premise, promotes an illogical argument, and still gets modded up to +5 insightful; simply because it takes the anti-IP stand.
Very true, in fact the article brings up the fact that there is very little software that utilizes four cores, let alone eight.
On the other hand, I know that Blender atleast lets you specify the number of threads to use while rendering. I would hope that the OS would be smart enough to put each thread on a different core but don't know for sure.
It's not so much a question of if it's happened before as much as it is a question of if it could happen in the future. I'm not necissarily saying that there are two fully developed drugs sitting side by side, but perhaps one avenue of research gets more funding than the other, or more prominant researchers.
Probably the closest examples that I can think of are probably more along the lines of the effectiveness of drugs. We've been giving our sick children infant cough syrup for years while just recently publicly funded research found that it was not only innefective but quite possibly dangerous as well.
I am not a pharmiciutical hating Nazi for the record. I have comments in support of the Biotech firms on several slashdot pages. Like I said, they've done great things (Merck's campaign to eleminate river blindness comes to mind), but it seems like this is one area that public founds could be used to form a safety net and encourage research in directions that aren't necissarily profitable.
Example: Biotech company developes two new treatments for diabetes. One is administered daily in pill form and costs $10 a pill to make but can be sold at $100 a pill comercially. The other is a one time treatment that would cost $200, most of which would go to the doctors performing the procedure.
Quiz: Which do you think will be released to the public?
For the record, biotech companies are not all evil, all the time. They have done great things and not always just for the bottom line. But to have no public funding for public medical research seams extremely dangerous to me.
Well, atleast your sig is accurate. :)
Of course all research has some inherent risks to those involved as well as all of humanity. The question is whether those risks outweigh the benifits.
And, as the rest of my above comment already states, I support all stem cell research. I believe that to be human is based in the human mind, something that a clump of undeveloped cells cannot possibly have.
Finally, playing the devils advocate back to you. If the greater good is all that is really important to you, why aren't you volounteering for medical experiments. After all, your sacrifice could save the lives of countless others.
Actually, your comments about apple give me an idea. The real problem is that 95% of their customers are probably getting what they think is a break but it will come back to haunt them when the high data usage services go mainstream.
What we should do is increase advertising for all the high data services in the areas they are doing their tests. iTunes, Netflix, amazon music, video game demos (I know I've downloaded probably 40 gigs worth of demos for my PS3), MMO's, flicker, picasa, youtube, porn (can't ignore the data that must be taken up by porn) and legit p2p.
When TW gets hundreds if not thousands of complaints during their test, this will quickly and quietly die. It's not enough for us to complain, if all of us drop Time Warner, they would probably be happy as we are the ones using the bandwidth. The only way to stop this is to get the other 95% of users as pissed off as you are.
Actually, assuming you believe that human life begins at conception, nothing in this anouncement is even questionable. If you agree with that statement then obviously any research that can lead to the destruction of that life is wrong; it is basically murder of a fellow, and absolutely helpless, human being.
I for one however, don't agree with that statment. There is more to being human than having human DNA and the potential for growth. Humanity is about self awareness, intelligence, and conciousness. An embryo lacks these things simply because it hasn't yet developed the required circuitry for them.
For the record IaaC (I am a Catholic), but that doesn't mean I can't think for myself.
This is a classic case of asking for more than you can get to give yourself bargaining power. They'll ask for 1.5 million then say "oh well, we'll just compromise at 750k and call it good"
I'm interested in knowing what kind of algorithm they developed to solve this problem. It seems to me like it would be an excellent application of genetic algorithms as it is essentially a giant optimization problem. I sopose that assumes that you can recognize correct results when you see them though.
Perhaps "Astronomers Use Hologram-Like Effect to Determine Dust Cloud Structure" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
This is a good example of when you can say something that is entirely true and still have people be pissed off at you. Does anyone honestly believe that IBM didn't do the things he is accusing them of? Of course IBM behaved unethically, they had to after all the shinanigans that Microsoft tried to pull first.
On the other hand, if Microsoft had squashed a format that IBM or the Open Source community had unethically pushed, we would still be pissed at Microsoft.
Sometimes I fear we have a default reaction whenever Microsoft makes a statement. In reality, we should be pissed at both Microsoft and IBM; they're both subverting a process that is soposed to be for the good of the consumers.
I have to wonder if it wouldn't be possible using this or other advances to create strains of plants that couldn't interbreed with natural ones. One of the big fears of genetic engineering crops is that the changes will get out into the wild and produce hybrids, putting those genes into the wild. Would it be possible to leverage these new pairs to create a self destruct sequence in cross breeds?
That's the brunt of the problem here anyway, these people are more than willing to disrupt every, every internet connection in the world in order to protect thier profits.
I think a more accurate description of the situation would be you see someone who has the same color skin as what you picture when you think of a terrorist. The democrat walks on by. The republican follows him to his home, thinks "maybe he has a knife in there", and attacks him without provocation.
I don't think there was a large population of American in Iraq under immediate threat from terrorists. we went there for Christ's sake.
Those won't do, we need something that can adapt... something that uses genetics to simulate a lifeform while still being able to operate disks... We can call it, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.
It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
First, I would order the military leaders to devise an exit strategy for Iraq that would minimize military and civilian strategies. I don't know how to do it, they do so I'd leave the micromanaging up to them.
I would also defund the great wall of Mexico and use that money along with a portion of the Iraq war money to improve our nations name over seas by offering a system of grants, assistance, and loans to developing nations and nations that have a stron anti-american sentiment. If the offer is refused it will be renewed every 6 months.
At home, I would boost spending to education and sciences, especially "pure science" projects such as high energy physics. Legalize marijauna and tax the hell out of it, use this money and other vice taxes to implement a national insurance plan.
Of course in order for that to happen I'd have to thrown the insurance lobby out of Washington so while we're at it we'll just get rid of all the lobbies at once.
Finally, I would raise taxes for oil companies and on gasoline itself and use those revenues to do real developement on wind/solar/nuclear projects.
Of course, that isn't so much an "If if were president" as it is an "If I were dictator". The chances of any of this happening are slim to none, even if the president wants it and works for it. Many things are decided by congress and congress is heavily influenced by the lobbies. If I had to choose between getting Republicans out of the white house or getting rid of lobbiests; well, how much more damage can the republicans really do?