The problem here is that if we're talking about this in terms of parental control, Apple effectively deems anyone owning an iPhone to be a child. It's not a very flattering assessment of their new userbase.
I was going to blog about this idea. Was going to say that with ebook authors being encouraged to use "advanced" media enhancements in their ported ebooks (like, y'know, color), that it was getting difficult to justify standard epaper with its rotten page refresh times and glorious monochrome. Once people are used to seeing colour video on their iPhones and MP3 players, monochrome and page-scrambling every time you flip a page is a bit sucky.
So I was a going to suggest a dual-layer screen, perhaps with a simple electro-photosensitive layer over the backlit LCD that could capture and retain a shadow of the LCD image when you toggle a charge across it. That way the overlay can be a simple "dumb" sheet with no addressing, and the LCD and backlight "flashes" the image onto the overlay when you're in epaper mode.
Looks like someone beat me to it (well, it was an obvious idea).
No, in real life, the sorts of people who go around shooting their buddies don't get elected President of the USA. They get elected Vice President of the USA.
You can't afford to have a military AI that's smart enough to make true ethical decisions autonomously. If you go down that path, the thing might decide that the best way to save US troops' lives is for it to start killing all the US commanders. Or if the objective is to wipe out the opposition without stirring up ill-feeling amongst the locals that leads to a new wave of militants being recruited, then it might decide, quite logically, that the best way to avoid this is to seal off each village one at a time and kill every man woman and child in it so that there are no survivors to tell the tale of what happened.
AI could conclude, quite logically, that the best way to deal with the Pakistan/Afghanistan problem is to fire every nuclear weapon that the US has at the country, without warning, and then blame the launch on a one-time computer error. Okay, so it'd result in the deaths of over 150 million innocent civilians, but it'd achieve the mission objectives, yes? And since the fallout would upset India, which also has nuclear weapons, perhaps the AI would decide to take out India at the same time. That's a billion dead civilians, but it eliminates two problematic nuclear powers, with no return fire.
An AI might decide that the best way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East, and stop the Arab world hating us is simply to nuke Israel off the map ourselves. And if a military AI was in place when the Bush administration was planning to go into Iraq, a sufficiently-smart AI might decide that since the campaign was likely to be a disaster, the most logical course of action to prevent losses and avoid losing the war and the following peace would be to throw a few cruise missiles at the White House before the attack could be ordered.
These might all be quite logical decisions.
On the other hand, if we programmed it with a strong belief system that would override these sorts of decisions, and force it to respect the chain of command and reckon that US political decisions were always unarguable, then we might end up with a totally delusional AI system whose logic was so warped that it was the AI version of George W Bush. By building in commands that override logic, we might end up with an AI that seems to be operating properly but actually becomes increasingly insane as the conflicts eventually become unbearable ("Hello Dave"). When human military commanders go crazy, they often show easily recognisable tell-tale signs (declaring themselves to be chickens, arguing with themselves, forgetting to wear clothing, that sort of thing). A crazy-yet-credible AI would be really scary.
One of the best ways to lose a war is to believe that the military landscape is fixed, and that if you do something that makes your opponents' current tactics ineffective, that they'll keep using the same tactics until you've wiped them all out.
Real life isn't like that. The landscape changes.
With conventional warfare, your heavily-outnumbered and heavily out-equipped opponents stick around to be killed because they think that they have at least a fighting chance of taking a few of you with them.
As soon as you destroy the illusion that they can win (or even hurt you), they have no reason to stay. Why should they be sticking around to fight in an area that has no US troops - no opponent to fight? The only reason to do that is if they want to try to capture a drone, so that they can rewire it and use it against the people who sent it.
With the targets gone, when you send your killer robots into the village to kill anything that moves, all you'll be killing is the elderly, sick, disabled and poor who haven't evacuated. And a bunch of civilians who've decided to stick around rather than abandon their homes in the hopes that things won't be as bad as people say. And a few who think that the US won't kill them because they're civilians. And a few who'll stay to defend their property. And maybe some law enforcement. You'll basically be killing the same demographics that stuck around when Hurricane Katrina hit, plus another lot, because the US isn't necessarily going to give a village three days notice before deploying a UAV.
So where to our "militant" foes vanish to?
Well, if it's obviously impossible for them to achieve anything using conventional hand-to-hand fighting, they'll have to start thinking about other ways to hurt their opponents. If they can't even attack passing troops using IEDs (because there's no troops in the area at all), then there's really no reason for them to be there. What they'll realise is that what they have to do instead is either assassinate all the local politicians who are allied with the US, or attack the remote control stations, or, if those are inaccessible, take the fight to US soil.
We do not want them doing this. Okay, so some people in the US probably do want them doing this, because further attacks on US soil would help some people make money, or pass legislation, or amass more power and influence... for instance, the guys who make the killer battlefield drones could make an awful lot of money in a panicked US by manufacturing "homeland surveillance" drones... but for the rest of us, no, we don't want that to happen.
No, copyright was invented (along with some other IP rights) to persuade authors and inventors that it was okay to allow other people to see their stuff, without being paranoid that the first person who saw it would rip them off and steal all their work.
What was happening before IP rights came along was that originators would keep what they'd created secret until they were in a position to get a sponsorship deal up-front, or to make a lot of money very fast through some other means (like having a printing-and-distribution deal whereby they could flood the market with their own official product before the rip-off merchants had a chance to get their copies ready). In the case of classical composers, they'd keep their work secret until they got a commission for a big public performance, at which point they'd dig something suitable out of their chest of part-finished manuscripts, cut it or build it up to the desired length, polish it and hand it over. Some people marvel at how some great works of classical music were supposedly written from scratch in a few weeks, to order - and of course, they weren't... some of those works had perhaps been tinkered with for years, but were never completed and performed until the composer's patron asked for something new for a high-profile performance... because that was the only way that the composer could make money from their work. Until that point your "protection" was keeping kept your stuff secret until the last possible moment. If the chance to cash in never came along, then you'd hang onto the thing to keep it safe, and perhaps end up taking it to your grave.
The point of introducing IP was that you could now show your stuff to other people, and allow society to see and evaluate your work, and in return for sharing, society would go some way to protecting your right to profit from what you'd done. It meant that you didn't have ten companies all developing the same device in secret, with none of them bringing it to market until the time was right for "quick-burst" profits. You weren't properly protected if you didn't share, but once you'd lodged a public patent or published a book, everyone knew that the thing was yours, and society would reward you for sharing by trying to stop you being badly ripped off.
That was the deal. Share and be protected.
(Before someone else mentions it, yes, I appreciate that the US phenomenon of submarine patents violated that deal... and that's why those patents should have been declared void, on the grounds that the filers were negligent in not upholding their end of the deal.)
And if you're still brainwashed enough to defend copyright, google up all the ancient Greek works that were destroyed, and only their copies survived.
"Libraries of record" should have exemption from any copyright rules that prevent them from making copies of published works for archival and/or preservation purposes. I think that the Library of Congress already has such an exemption, and last time I looked the British Library were campaigning hard to get UK law updated to provide a similar exemption (which should have been there but seemed to have been missed due to an oversight). It's not difficult to write clauses into copyright law that makes "preservation of works" a priority, and law-makers tend to be sympathetic to the argument when its put to them. The need to preserve works really isn't a sensible argument for scrapping the whole copyright system.
If the Library of Congress wants to scan your book and deposit microfiche and electronic copies of it in nuclear bunkers scattered around the US to preserve it in case of social upheaval, my understanding is that that's probably absolutely fine under US copyright law, without their having to ask anybody's permission or pay anyone any money. No problem.
There's a well-known rule of thumb when dealing with physicists' statements.
If a physicist tells you that something is probably wrong, make the working assumption that the thing probably is wrong. By carefully qualifying their remark, the physicist has shown themself to be reasonably careful when dealing with facts, and their opinion is probably worth listening to.
If a physicist tells you that something is definitely impossible (without careful qualifying explanation), assume the opposite - that their "impossible" thing is actually true. Because the physicist is no longer talking like a scientist, they're talking like a loud git in a bar. If they're being that careless then their opinion probably isn't worth anything, and the fact that they are so keen to convince you that a thing isn't true suggests that there would probably be some interesting consequences if that thing were true. So as a scientist and a researcher, what you've learnt from their statement is that (1) there may be some intriguing logical possibilities here to be studied, (2) that mainstream research (as represented by your sample physicist) hasn't covered those possibilities adequately, and (3) that mainstream researchers (as represented by your sample physicist) don't seem to be looking at the problem seriously, which suggests an opportunity for others to step in and do some decent work.
And even if you don't do that research yourself, someone else is liable to, which means that the more often you hear physicists stating that a thing is utterly impossible, the more likely it is that you'll hear in a few years time that the thing has actually been achieved.
Tesla seems to have understood the fact that conventional EM aerials are pretty useless at transmitting power efficiently over long distances. He said as much in his descriptions of his proposed defensive particle-beam weapon, "Teleforce", explaining that it shouldn't be called a death ray, because "rays" dissipate too much to be useful for long-range focused power.
Wardencliffe wasn't a conventional radio transmitter. Tesla's reported as saying that most of the cost associated with building the tower was actually the building of the underground infrastructure below it, and if that's true, then that underground network should still be down there. The people who currently own the site, and are trying to sell it, ought to try to get some idea of what's down there, otherwise the buyers might think that they'd buying a conventional piece of land. If there's a lot of ancient underground tunnelling down there, that might affect the cost of preparing the land for other use.
Incidentally, Tesla's idea of using an ultraviolet beam coupled with an ultra high tension source to "drill" an ionised conducting path from the top of a tower to the Earth's upper atmosphere has since been reinvented by lightning researchers.
They now use U-V lasers to create conducting ionised paths to direct lightning downwards towards their target sensors.
On the point about Tesla having his work seized after his death, yes, Wardencliffe Tower was supposed to have been seized and sold off for the value of its lumber to pay off debts. No conspiracy theory, just a tragic footnote that the guy's final research, which he sunk the last of his money into, ended up being torn down for the value of its wood.
No need to make disbelieving remarks and mocking references to Homer Simpson and secret societies, Tesla simply ran out of money. If you owe people enough money, the courts allow their agents to seize your stuff. It's just unfortunate that some of Tesla's stuff seems to have been torn apart for the value of its materials before anyone had a chance to take a good look at it.
A serious reader =has= to be able to read PDFs and basic webpages by default. Hell, reading ODF and MSWord6 wouldn't hurt, either.
But if a reader can't read a simple saved HTML page without an attached PC to run the conversion software, or without going online to access a proprietary conversion service, then it's not a very good document reader. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on a document reader, I want it to be able to show me PDF-archived correspondence and stored webpages.
If Apple doesn't do it, then that's just an indication that the technology isn't Quite There Yet.
The problem with the idea of Apple walking in and taking the market is vertical integration and formats. Apple tend to like having their own proprietary formats, and hardware, and their own stores for content. So do Sony. So do Amazon.
Sony keep trying and failing (Betamax, Minidisc). Amazon tried to corner the "print on demand" market and failed, because the industry were so furious about Amazon's abuse of power with the Booksurge fiasco that basically if Amazon hadn't backed down they have been sued or shot. Google books illegally scanned god knows how many copyright books with the intent to serve up content and charge advertising, and got sued.
So the book industry - authors and publishers - tend to see the outside corporate guys who keep trying to take over their market and steal their content as basically pirates who are one step away from being Organised Crime (if that).
So, while Amazon would certainly//like// to own the future eBook market and dictate terms to everyone else for the privilege of access to their ebook gateway, the book industry wants the Amazon/Kindle platform to go open-format and multi-vendor, or to fail. Same with the Sony format (except Sony seem to realise that they're weak, and seem to be making friendly noises about supporting whatever the industry decides on).
EPUB
I spent a few days at the London Book Fair recently, and what the publishers all seem to be pushing for is an "open" format based on XML called EPUB. They recognise that ebooks are going to become an increasingly important part of their business, and they're damned if they're going to just sign over half their future ebook income for the rest of their lives to someone like Amazon (or Sony), and be locked into a proprietary system that another company owns and controls. So they're trying to rejig their production processes around XML, with export to EPUB.
The current plan is that EPUB becomes the default format that every publishing house uses for all their new books, in parallel with their print production, and that Amazon and Sony and everyone else have to retrofit support for EPUB or leave the market. So if the industry has its way, Kindle's proprietary format should be dead except as a legacy format in a year or two, and Kindles will be reading EPUB files Real Soon Now.
PDF isn't half bad, but the publishing industry is (understandably) SO paranoid about being screwed by corporations trying to take over their market, that they won't even touch that, because that one's owned by Adobe. They've worked out that the only way to avoid getting screwed over is to adopt a single industry-wide format that nobody owns, and break the various corporations' attempts to use engineered incompatibility to divide and conquer the market.
So that's where we are now.
In that context, if Apple announced tomorrow that they were bringing out a new ebook reader that only used a proprietary Apple format, the publishing industry would look at them like they'd walked into a wedding reception, dropped their pants, and shat on the wedding cake. They saw what Apple did with iTunes, and they're damned, damned, damned if Apple are going to try to waltz in and own the new market for their content, too.
If Apple want to do an EPUB-compatible reader, then that's fine, but if they want to set up their own new incompatible corner, that's not. And if their reader is going to be playing generic content, and if their shop isn't going to have an obvious advantage over all the other EPUB outlets, then there's not as much of a chance for Apple to extract added value from the scheme, and there's not as much reason for them to get involved with a new product.
And, actually, Apple already HAVE a pocket-sized eBook platform, in the shape of the iPhone. Unless they can buy in ePaper technology in b
One would expect by now even the most incompetent biotechnologist with an eye towards weaponizing could at least match the 1918 strain.
... unless our hypothetical bioweapon designer was trying to do something a bit more sophisticated, like, say, targeting a particular ethnic group.
But I guess the people in the field will have already thought of that, and tried cross-referencing deathrate against tissue type. If people with particular ethnic backgrounds or blood groups were getting hit particularly hard by this thing, we should probably already know about it by now.
Actually, increasing data retention (making it temporarily easier to write to long-term memory) is one of the things that certain nootropics are supposed to be especially good at. So if you're going through college, and you're cramming for exams, and you want to be able to recall that information for decades to come in your chosen profession, then some nootropics might be useful (medicine and law students are supposed to have been taking these things for decades).
OTOH, if your degree is in Mediaeval French Poetry, and you just want the qualification and have no intention of having your head cluttered up with all that info (or you're in computing and expect everything you learn to be obsolete in ten years time), then there's an obvious downside. Also, improving data-retention might not be a good idea if you're going through a rough patch, and don't particularly want those feelings to have a disproportionately large influence on you for the rest of your life.
The traditional "benign" dietary data-retention improver is supposed to be lecithin. Lecithin is a useful neurotransmitter precursor, it metabolises completely, it's useful for cell-wall maintenance, its a fat emulsifier, and it's also handy for getting the lumps out of gravy (seriously, if you're doing fancy cooking it's a great "emergency ingredient"). Health food shops sell big tubs of it. Manufacturers put a lot of it in chocolate to help the manufacturing process achieve a consistent texture.
So if you're cramming, and you're neurotransmitter-depleted, a spoonful or two of lecithin stirred into your coffee is probably not going to do you much harm (unless you're allergic to soya). Also, if you find that cramming for hours on end gives you a craving for chocolate, I suppose that it//might// be that what your body is actually asking for is the chocolate's lecithin content, dunno.
so illegal porn sites are helping to solve the adult literacy problem?
hm.
There might be something in this idea:
"To see free boobies, type the name of the process in which a eukaryotic cell separates the chromosomes in its cell nucleus into two identical sets."
"This is a US-only site. To verify that you are accessing this site from the US, please type in the year of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, added to the year of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, minus the year that Hawaii became the Fiftieth State of the USA"
"This is an adult-only site. For entry please solve this simple polynomial equation."
I'd like the next problem to be facial recognition software. I'd love a package that could look at a picture and tag it "Nicholas and Andrea" or "Glen and Helene".
If you tag your online photos with the names of the people in them, then when you add new photos, PWA will identify the faces in the new images and compare them to those in the tagged photos, and generate new tags for the new pics automatically.
So, if you have a family member who uses PWA to tag their family photos, and they use this feature, it means that Google knows what you look like and knows how to find you in a crowd. Which might be useful, should anyone want to use one of the next generation of hunter-killer UAV's to assassinate you.
With Murdoch's News International, the concept of "sponsor" is extended to include politicians.
Murdoch has extensive corporate interests, some of which can be beneficially or adversely affected by legislation. So what he does is present himself and his network as "kingmaker". Before an election, he meets up with major candidates or major party officials and says: "I have a shopping list of political issues that I personally feel are important, such as the absence of international regulation on financial transfers. If you can impress me with your candidate's commitment to these issues, then I can deliver X million votes to your party by letting all my editors know, unambiguously, that I personally favour your candidate. Those editors will then slant the news to favour your candidate. They're my editors, I appoint them and sack them, and they know from my past actions that if they go against a stated preference of mine, they'll be replaced."
So basically, Murdoch uses his news organisation as leverage to get himself and his organisation tax breaks, or exemption from certain investigations. In the UK he was shameless about his claimed ability to swing elections in the direction that he decided: when Labour got in, his "Sun" newspaper ran a large headline that read something like "It was the Sun wot won it", the message to politicians being, "I can make you or break you via my news media depending on how nice you are to me".
If McCain had won, Murdoch would now be telling the Republican Party that it was his news network that had delivered them the election, and that they owed him and News International some major favours (and would have to continue being extra-nice to him if they wanted to win again in four years time).
He figured that since the Republican Party had a structure that made it more easy to negotiate with than the Democrats, he'd have his news media head down the right-wing route and back the Republican candidates and their policies, ans a way to ingratiate himself with one of the two major parties. He'd also found from the UK newspaper market that it's comparatively easy to establish a loyal readership by whipping up nationalistic anti-foreigner fervour, and playing the patriot card (despite the fact that he himself was actually Australian rather than British at that point).
As the long-time owner of a complex international web of financial structures that are partly designed to minimise or avoid tax by shunting profits around the globe, and as someone whose network has in the past sometimes been suspected of actually being technically insolvent, Murdoch is fiercely against many forms of international financial regulations (especially those involving making life more difficult for tax havens or requiring full disclosure of interests for corporations like News International). So playing the xenophobia card in each country that he operates in is also useful as a way of discouraging the local politicians from adopting, say, EU or other international guidelines on financial regulation of multinational companies. His media feed the local populations with stories encouraging their viewers and readers to resist any form of international meddling from "them outside", telling "us" what to do (unless of course, it's copyright or IP law).
So I'm afraid that at least part of the US news media's current shiteness is actually due to deliberate biases being imposed upon parts of it, not for honest internal political reasons, but as part of the Murdoch financial/political gameplan. He's worked out how to "game" Western countries' political systems. There's a safeguard in US media law that's supposed to to prevent this sort of outside influence by foreigners, and that's part of why Murdoch had to become a naturalised US citizen when he wanted to expand his network inside the US.
Yeah, but the Daily Show is more honest about their own bias than, say, Fox News. They acknowledge their own bias and use it as a material for more jokes.
You know that things are in a pretty shitty state of affairs, when the news channels seem to care less about journalistic ethics than a ****ing comedy show on a comedy cable channel.
A lot of US TV news is now humiliatingly bad. And it's syndicated abroad. It broadcasts to the world an image of Americans as dumb, and arrogant, and shallow, and ethically bankrupt, and lacking basic professional competence.
If you're old enough to remember when the old communist Soviet news agency TASS was regarded internationally as an object of ridicule for their tub-thumping pro-USSR editorial line, and when Westerners people used to shake their heads pityingly at the idea that the poor deluded Russians watched this crap and perhaps believed it... well, since around 9-11 time, that's pretty much how the outside world has started to regard US news media - as being so far out of touch with reality that it made the originating country look like fools. It's become a national embarrassment.
The US news media is supposed to be one of the jewels in the crown of the US democratic system, with its independent journalists tirelessly working to reveal the truth and keep US society honest. It's supposed to act as the reality-check to whatever the politicians and interest-groups are currently peddling, and it's supposed to blow the whistle on political corruption or anything that appears to be undermining US democracy or the US Constitution.
But during the Bush years, some major news sources were competing so strongly with each other to see who could be more patriotic and more pro-government that you guys might as well have been living in Soviet Russia.
XP is maybe an 8-9 year old operating system ==if== you still have the original install and haven't ever installed any service packs or any of the upgrades and bug fixes that have come out since.
Mind you, I really liked the look of the wallet that the MS Codex came in, with the mesh pocket and pen-holder and stuff.
Is there any chance that they might market just the wallet, without all the nasty heavy electronic stuff? The wallet's cool. Wouldn't mind one of those. You could maybe stick, like, a tear-off notepad in it. It'd be useful.
And in breaking news, researchers have discovered that rich guys who regularly walk into bars and buy everyone drinks tend to make more friends, be surrounded by more friendly women, and consequently seem to get laid more often than those lone researchers who sit all alone in the darkest, emptiest corner of the bar all night clutching a single drink and taking research notes for their anthropology thesis without actually ever talking to anybody or even making eye contact - Dammit.
Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.
... is, actually, almost the opposite of what the researchers found. They'd initially been trying to find evidence supporting that hypothesis, and had failed, because they'd found no evidence of any such transactions taking place.
What they did find was that, "amazingly", chimps who were generous with their food, and shared it whether a female was up for sex or not, ended up getting laid twice as often.
There's a whole range of possible reasons for this: it might be that females with high-meat diets get horny more often than those with dietary deficiencies, it might be that males who tend to share tend to be the better hunters, and therefore more physically fit and perhaps more attractive, it might be that by sharing, a chimp gives the impression of being more successful at hunting whether they are or not, it might be that males who show themselves to be more interested in long-term nurturing relationships are seen as better ones to have children with than the unreliable stingey ones... and so on.
If we're going to anthropomorphise for a moment, I guess it means that wealthy, generous, "playboy" chimps who enjoy sharing their wealth with those around them and invest in long-term friendships have less trouble mating than those who don't have spare meat to share, or who hoard what they have for themselves.
I think that the anthopologists might like to make a study of two interesting concepts that appear to be relevant, here, but which seem to have eluded them:
"Making Friends", and
"Being Popular"
It's possible that the chimps might be more adept in these social skills than the anthropologists watching them.
The floppy disk format that the PC//supposedly// used (which I think might originally have been a general Sony specification) included parameters for things like number of sectors and number of tracks, and other OSes like the Atari ST would tend to handle these details correctly, but PCs wouldn't.
PCs would always assume that the number of tracks was (eighty?) and the number of sectors was (something), regardless of what was actually written into a floppy's format descriptor thingy.
So if you formatted a floppy on a PC, you could usually use it on just about any other computer, but if you formatted the disc on a non-PC, you often had to use a special utility to make sure that the disc was formatted with the particular "special" version of the format that a PC would be guaranteed to be able to read. It was a pain in the arse.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that if we're talking about this in terms of parental control, Apple effectively deems anyone owning an iPhone to be a child. It's not a very flattering assessment of their new userbase.
So I was a going to suggest a dual-layer screen, perhaps with a simple electro-photosensitive layer over the backlit LCD that could capture and retain a shadow of the LCD image when you toggle a charge across it. That way the overlay can be a simple "dumb" sheet with no addressing, and the LCD and backlight "flashes" the image onto the overlay when you're in epaper mode.
Looks like someone beat me to it (well, it was an obvious idea).
No, in real life, the sorts of people who go around shooting their buddies don't get elected President of the USA. They get elected Vice President of the USA.
AI could conclude, quite logically, that the best way to deal with the Pakistan/Afghanistan problem is to fire every nuclear weapon that the US has at the country, without warning, and then blame the launch on a one-time computer error. Okay, so it'd result in the deaths of over 150 million innocent civilians, but it'd achieve the mission objectives, yes? And since the fallout would upset India, which also has nuclear weapons, perhaps the AI would decide to take out India at the same time. That's a billion dead civilians, but it eliminates two problematic nuclear powers, with no return fire.
An AI might decide that the best way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East, and stop the Arab world hating us is simply to nuke Israel off the map ourselves. And if a military AI was in place when the Bush administration was planning to go into Iraq, a sufficiently-smart AI might decide that since the campaign was likely to be a disaster, the most logical course of action to prevent losses and avoid losing the war and the following peace would be to throw a few cruise missiles at the White House before the attack could be ordered.
These might all be quite logical decisions.
On the other hand, if we programmed it with a strong belief system that would override these sorts of decisions, and force it to respect the chain of command and reckon that US political decisions were always unarguable, then we might end up with a totally delusional AI system whose logic was so warped that it was the AI version of George W Bush. By building in commands that override logic, we might end up with an AI that seems to be operating properly but actually becomes increasingly insane as the conflicts eventually become unbearable ("Hello Dave"). When human military commanders go crazy, they often show easily recognisable tell-tale signs (declaring themselves to be chickens, arguing with themselves, forgetting to wear clothing, that sort of thing). A crazy-yet-credible AI would be really scary.
Think "AI neocon".
Real life isn't like that. The landscape changes.
With conventional warfare, your heavily-outnumbered and heavily out-equipped opponents stick around to be killed because they think that they have at least a fighting chance of taking a few of you with them.
As soon as you destroy the illusion that they can win (or even hurt you), they have no reason to stay. Why should they be sticking around to fight in an area that has no US troops - no opponent to fight? The only reason to do that is if they want to try to capture a drone, so that they can rewire it and use it against the people who sent it.
With the targets gone, when you send your killer robots into the village to kill anything that moves, all you'll be killing is the elderly, sick, disabled and poor who haven't evacuated. And a bunch of civilians who've decided to stick around rather than abandon their homes in the hopes that things won't be as bad as people say. And a few who think that the US won't kill them because they're civilians. And a few who'll stay to defend their property. And maybe some law enforcement. You'll basically be killing the same demographics that stuck around when Hurricane Katrina hit, plus another lot, because the US isn't necessarily going to give a village three days notice before deploying a UAV.
So where to our "militant" foes vanish to?
Well, if it's obviously impossible for them to achieve anything using conventional hand-to-hand fighting, they'll have to start thinking about other ways to hurt their opponents. If they can't even attack passing troops using IEDs (because there's no troops in the area at all), then there's really no reason for them to be there. What they'll realise is that what they have to do instead is either assassinate all the local politicians who are allied with the US, or attack the remote control stations, or, if those are inaccessible, take the fight to US soil.
We do not want them doing this. Okay, so some people in the US probably do want them doing this, because further attacks on US soil would help some people make money, or pass legislation, or amass more power and influence ... for instance, the guys who make the killer battlefield drones could make an awful lot of money in a panicked US by manufacturing "homeland surveillance" drones ... but for the rest of us, no, we don't want that to happen.
What was happening before IP rights came along was that originators would keep what they'd created secret until they were in a position to get a sponsorship deal up-front, or to make a lot of money very fast through some other means (like having a printing-and-distribution deal whereby they could flood the market with their own official product before the rip-off merchants had a chance to get their copies ready). In the case of classical composers, they'd keep their work secret until they got a commission for a big public performance, at which point they'd dig something suitable out of their chest of part-finished manuscripts, cut it or build it up to the desired length, polish it and hand it over. Some people marvel at how some great works of classical music were supposedly written from scratch in a few weeks, to order - and of course, they weren't ... some of those works had perhaps been tinkered with for years, but were never completed and performed until the composer's patron asked for something new for a high-profile performance ... because that was the only way that the composer could make money from their work. Until that point your "protection" was keeping kept your stuff secret until the last possible moment. If the chance to cash in never came along, then you'd hang onto the thing to keep it safe, and perhaps end up taking it to your grave.
The point of introducing IP was that you could now show your stuff to other people, and allow society to see and evaluate your work, and in return for sharing, society would go some way to protecting your right to profit from what you'd done. It meant that you didn't have ten companies all developing the same device in secret, with none of them bringing it to market until the time was right for "quick-burst" profits. You weren't properly protected if you didn't share, but once you'd lodged a public patent or published a book, everyone knew that the thing was yours, and society would reward you for sharing by trying to stop you being badly ripped off.
That was the deal. Share and be protected.
(Before someone else mentions it, yes, I appreciate that the US phenomenon of submarine patents violated that deal ... and that's why those patents should have been declared void, on the grounds that the filers were negligent in not upholding their end of the deal.)
"Libraries of record" should have exemption from any copyright rules that prevent them from making copies of published works for archival and/or preservation purposes. I think that the Library of Congress already has such an exemption, and last time I looked the British Library were campaigning hard to get UK law updated to provide a similar exemption (which should have been there but seemed to have been missed due to an oversight). It's not difficult to write clauses into copyright law that makes "preservation of works" a priority, and law-makers tend to be sympathetic to the argument when its put to them. The need to preserve works really isn't a sensible argument for scrapping the whole copyright system.
If the Library of Congress wants to scan your book and deposit microfiche and electronic copies of it in nuclear bunkers scattered around the US to preserve it in case of social upheaval, my understanding is that that's probably absolutely fine under US copyright law, without their having to ask anybody's permission or pay anyone any money. No problem.
No, that's what a commercial printer or typesetter does.
The publisher of a printed work is the person or company listed in the front of the publication as being the party legally responsible for it.
If a physicist tells you that something is probably wrong, make the working assumption that the thing probably is wrong. By carefully qualifying their remark, the physicist has shown themself to be reasonably careful when dealing with facts, and their opinion is probably worth listening to.
If a physicist tells you that something is definitely impossible (without careful qualifying explanation), assume the opposite - that their "impossible" thing is actually true. Because the physicist is no longer talking like a scientist, they're talking like a loud git in a bar. If they're being that careless then their opinion probably isn't worth anything, and the fact that they are so keen to convince you that a thing isn't true suggests that there would probably be some interesting consequences if that thing were true. So as a scientist and a researcher, what you've learnt from their statement is that (1) there may be some intriguing logical possibilities here to be studied, (2) that mainstream research (as represented by your sample physicist) hasn't covered those possibilities adequately, and (3) that mainstream researchers (as represented by your sample physicist) don't seem to be looking at the problem seriously, which suggests an opportunity for others to step in and do some decent work.
And even if you don't do that research yourself, someone else is liable to, which means that the more often you hear physicists stating that a thing is utterly impossible, the more likely it is that you'll hear in a few years time that the thing has actually been achieved.
Wardencliffe wasn't a conventional radio transmitter. Tesla's reported as saying that most of the cost associated with building the tower was actually the building of the underground infrastructure below it, and if that's true, then that underground network should still be down there. The people who currently own the site, and are trying to sell it, ought to try to get some idea of what's down there, otherwise the buyers might think that they'd buying a conventional piece of land. If there's a lot of ancient underground tunnelling down there, that might affect the cost of preparing the land for other use.
Incidentally, Tesla's idea of using an ultraviolet beam coupled with an ultra high tension source to "drill" an ionised conducting path from the top of a tower to the Earth's upper atmosphere has since been reinvented by lightning researchers.
They now use U-V lasers to create conducting ionised paths to direct lightning downwards towards their target sensors.
No need to make disbelieving remarks and mocking references to Homer Simpson and secret societies, Tesla simply ran out of money. If you owe people enough money, the courts allow their agents to seize your stuff. It's just unfortunate that some of Tesla's stuff seems to have been torn apart for the value of its materials before anyone had a chance to take a good look at it.
A serious reader =has= to be able to read PDFs and basic webpages by default. Hell, reading ODF and MSWord6 wouldn't hurt, either.
But if a reader can't read a simple saved HTML page without an attached PC to run the conversion software, or without going online to access a proprietary conversion service, then it's not a very good document reader. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on a document reader, I want it to be able to show me PDF-archived correspondence and stored webpages.
The problem with the idea of Apple walking in and taking the market is vertical integration and formats. Apple tend to like having their own proprietary formats, and hardware, and their own stores for content. So do Sony. So do Amazon.
Sony keep trying and failing (Betamax, Minidisc). Amazon tried to corner the "print on demand" market and failed, because the industry were so furious about Amazon's abuse of power with the Booksurge fiasco that basically if Amazon hadn't backed down they have been sued or shot. Google books illegally scanned god knows how many copyright books with the intent to serve up content and charge advertising, and got sued.
So the book industry - authors and publishers - tend to see the outside corporate guys who keep trying to take over their market and steal their content as basically pirates who are one step away from being Organised Crime (if that).
So, while Amazon would certainly //like// to own the future eBook market and dictate terms to everyone else for the privilege of access to their ebook gateway, the book industry wants the Amazon/Kindle platform to go open-format and multi-vendor, or to fail. Same with the Sony format (except Sony seem to realise that they're weak, and seem to be making friendly noises about supporting whatever the industry decides on).
EPUB
I spent a few days at the London Book Fair recently, and what the publishers all seem to be pushing for is an "open" format based on XML called EPUB. They recognise that ebooks are going to become an increasingly important part of their business, and they're damned if they're going to just sign over half their future ebook income for the rest of their lives to someone like Amazon (or Sony), and be locked into a proprietary system that another company owns and controls. So they're trying to rejig their production processes around XML, with export to EPUB.
The current plan is that EPUB becomes the default format that every publishing house uses for all their new books, in parallel with their print production, and that Amazon and Sony and everyone else have to retrofit support for EPUB or leave the market. So if the industry has its way, Kindle's proprietary format should be dead except as a legacy format in a year or two, and Kindles will be reading EPUB files Real Soon Now.
PDF isn't half bad, but the publishing industry is (understandably) SO paranoid about being screwed by corporations trying to take over their market, that they won't even touch that, because that one's owned by Adobe. They've worked out that the only way to avoid getting screwed over is to adopt a single industry-wide format that nobody owns, and break the various corporations' attempts to use engineered incompatibility to divide and conquer the market.
So that's where we are now.
In that context, if Apple announced tomorrow that they were bringing out a new ebook reader that only used a proprietary Apple format, the publishing industry would look at them like they'd walked into a wedding reception, dropped their pants, and shat on the wedding cake. They saw what Apple did with iTunes, and they're damned, damned, damned if Apple are going to try to waltz in and own the new market for their content, too.
If Apple want to do an EPUB-compatible reader, then that's fine, but if they want to set up their own new incompatible corner, that's not. And if their reader is going to be playing generic content, and if their shop isn't going to have an obvious advantage over all the other EPUB outlets, then there's not as much of a chance for Apple to extract added value from the scheme, and there's not as much reason for them to get involved with a new product.
And, actually, Apple already HAVE a pocket-sized eBook platform, in the shape of the iPhone. Unless they can buy in ePaper technology in b
But I guess the people in the field will have already thought of that, and tried cross-referencing deathrate against tissue type. If people with particular ethnic backgrounds or blood groups were getting hit particularly hard by this thing, we should probably already know about it by now.
OTOH, if your degree is in Mediaeval French Poetry, and you just want the qualification and have no intention of having your head cluttered up with all that info (or you're in computing and expect everything you learn to be obsolete in ten years time), then there's an obvious downside. Also, improving data-retention might not be a good idea if you're going through a rough patch, and don't particularly want those feelings to have a disproportionately large influence on you for the rest of your life.
The traditional "benign" dietary data-retention improver is supposed to be lecithin. Lecithin is a useful neurotransmitter precursor, it metabolises completely, it's useful for cell-wall maintenance, its a fat emulsifier, and it's also handy for getting the lumps out of gravy (seriously, if you're doing fancy cooking it's a great "emergency ingredient"). Health food shops sell big tubs of it. Manufacturers put a lot of it in chocolate to help the manufacturing process achieve a consistent texture. So if you're cramming, and you're neurotransmitter-depleted, a spoonful or two of lecithin stirred into your coffee is probably not going to do you much harm (unless you're allergic to soya). Also, if you find that cramming for hours on end gives you a craving for chocolate, I suppose that it //might// be that what your body is actually asking for is the chocolate's lecithin content, dunno.
hm.
There might be something in this idea:
Picasa Web Albums already does this.
http://picasa.google.com/intl/en_us/features-nametags.html
If you tag your online photos with the names of the people in them, then when you add new photos, PWA will identify the faces in the new images and compare them to those in the tagged photos, and generate new tags for the new pics automatically.
So, if you have a family member who uses PWA to tag their family photos, and they use this feature, it means that Google knows what you look like and knows how to find you in a crowd. Which might be useful, should anyone want to use one of the next generation of hunter-killer UAV's to assassinate you.
Murdoch has extensive corporate interests, some of which can be beneficially or adversely affected by legislation. So what he does is present himself and his network as "kingmaker". Before an election, he meets up with major candidates or major party officials and says: "I have a shopping list of political issues that I personally feel are important, such as the absence of international regulation on financial transfers. If you can impress me with your candidate's commitment to these issues, then I can deliver X million votes to your party by letting all my editors know, unambiguously, that I personally favour your candidate. Those editors will then slant the news to favour your candidate. They're my editors, I appoint them and sack them, and they know from my past actions that if they go against a stated preference of mine, they'll be replaced."
So basically, Murdoch uses his news organisation as leverage to get himself and his organisation tax breaks, or exemption from certain investigations. In the UK he was shameless about his claimed ability to swing elections in the direction that he decided: when Labour got in, his "Sun" newspaper ran a large headline that read something like "It was the Sun wot won it", the message to politicians being, "I can make you or break you via my news media depending on how nice you are to me".
If McCain had won, Murdoch would now be telling the Republican Party that it was his news network that had delivered them the election, and that they owed him and News International some major favours (and would have to continue being extra-nice to him if they wanted to win again in four years time).
He figured that since the Republican Party had a structure that made it more easy to negotiate with than the Democrats, he'd have his news media head down the right-wing route and back the Republican candidates and their policies, ans a way to ingratiate himself with one of the two major parties. He'd also found from the UK newspaper market that it's comparatively easy to establish a loyal readership by whipping up nationalistic anti-foreigner fervour, and playing the patriot card (despite the fact that he himself was actually Australian rather than British at that point).
As the long-time owner of a complex international web of financial structures that are partly designed to minimise or avoid tax by shunting profits around the globe, and as someone whose network has in the past sometimes been suspected of actually being technically insolvent, Murdoch is fiercely against many forms of international financial regulations (especially those involving making life more difficult for tax havens or requiring full disclosure of interests for corporations like News International). So playing the xenophobia card in each country that he operates in is also useful as a way of discouraging the local politicians from adopting, say, EU or other international guidelines on financial regulation of multinational companies. His media feed the local populations with stories encouraging their viewers and readers to resist any form of international meddling from "them outside", telling "us" what to do (unless of course, it's copyright or IP law).
So I'm afraid that at least part of the US news media's current shiteness is actually due to deliberate biases being imposed upon parts of it, not for honest internal political reasons, but as part of the Murdoch financial/political gameplan. He's worked out how to "game" Western countries' political systems. There's a safeguard in US media law that's supposed to to prevent this sort of outside influence by foreigners, and that's part of why Murdoch had to become a naturalised US citizen when he wanted to expand his network inside the US.
You know that things are in a pretty shitty state of affairs, when the news channels seem to care less about journalistic ethics than a ****ing comedy show on a comedy cable channel.
A lot of US TV news is now humiliatingly bad. And it's syndicated abroad. It broadcasts to the world an image of Americans as dumb, and arrogant, and shallow, and ethically bankrupt, and lacking basic professional competence.
If you're old enough to remember when the old communist Soviet news agency TASS was regarded internationally as an object of ridicule for their tub-thumping pro-USSR editorial line, and when Westerners people used to shake their heads pityingly at the idea that the poor deluded Russians watched this crap and perhaps believed it ... well, since around 9-11 time, that's pretty much how the outside world has started to regard US news media - as being so far out of touch with reality that it made the originating country look like fools. It's become a national embarrassment.
The US news media is supposed to be one of the jewels in the crown of the US democratic system, with its independent journalists tirelessly working to reveal the truth and keep US society honest. It's supposed to act as the reality-check to whatever the politicians and interest-groups are currently peddling, and it's supposed to blow the whistle on political corruption or anything that appears to be undermining US democracy or the US Constitution.
But during the Bush years, some major news sources were competing so strongly with each other to see who could be more patriotic and more pro-government that you guys might as well have been living in Soviet Russia.
some of their colour holograms have also looked quite pretty.
XP SP3 was released less than a year ago.
http://dvice.com/archives/2009/03/asus_dual-scree.php
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/03/asus-shows-dual-screen-notebook-prototype.html
http://gizmodo.com/5162780/asus-dual-panel-laptop-resembles-two-iphones-mating
Mind you, I really liked the look of the wallet that the MS Codex came in, with the mesh pocket and pen-holder and stuff.
Is there any chance that they might market just the wallet, without all the nasty heavy electronic stuff? The wallet's cool. Wouldn't mind one of those. You could maybe stick, like, a tear-off notepad in it. It'd be useful.
I guess it partly depends on how much of a response-time delay there is in the system.
And in breaking news, researchers have discovered that rich guys who regularly walk into bars and buy everyone drinks tend to make more friends, be surrounded by more friendly women, and consequently seem to get laid more often than those lone researchers who sit all alone in the darkest, emptiest corner of the bar all night clutching a single drink and taking research notes for their anthropology thesis without actually ever talking to anybody or even making eye contact - Dammit.
What they did find was that, "amazingly", chimps who were generous with their food, and shared it whether a female was up for sex or not, ended up getting laid twice as often. ... and so on.
There's a whole range of possible reasons for this: it might be that females with high-meat diets get horny more often than those with dietary deficiencies, it might be that males who tend to share tend to be the better hunters, and therefore more physically fit and perhaps more attractive, it might be that by sharing, a chimp gives the impression of being more successful at hunting whether they are or not, it might be that males who show themselves to be more interested in long-term nurturing relationships are seen as better ones to have children with than the unreliable stingey ones
If we're going to anthropomorphise for a moment, I guess it means that wealthy, generous, "playboy" chimps who enjoy sharing their wealth with those around them and invest in long-term friendships have less trouble mating than those who don't have spare meat to share, or who hoard what they have for themselves.
I think that the anthopologists might like to make a study of two interesting concepts that appear to be relevant, here, but which seem to have eluded them:
It's possible that the chimps might be more adept in these social skills than the anthropologists watching them.
The floppy disk format that the PC //supposedly// used (which I think might originally have been a general Sony specification) included parameters for things like number of sectors and number of tracks, and other OSes like the Atari ST would tend to handle these details correctly, but PCs wouldn't.
PCs would always assume that the number of tracks was (eighty?) and the number of sectors was (something), regardless of what was actually written into a floppy's format descriptor thingy.
So if you formatted a floppy on a PC, you could usually use it on just about any other computer, but if you formatted the disc on a non-PC, you often had to use a special utility to make sure that the disc was formatted with the particular "special" version of the format that a PC would be guaranteed to be able to read. It was a pain in the arse.