Having read the whole paper, the history part is great, and the legal part is speculative. The key point that comes out is that Sealand was just too small to be taken seriously as a country. The population ranged from 1 to 4. That was the big problem.
If you wanted to start a data haven, Nauru is probably the place.
Nauru, population about 9000, is a moderately successful financial haven.
Nauru is recognized as a country by all the relevant organizations.
It's been a popular location for "High Yield Investment Programs".
The country was once supported by phosphate mines, and had a very high income per capita until the phosphate ran out in the 1980s. 90% of the land area is now a useless wasteland. 90% of the people are unemployed. GDP of the whole country is $60 million and dropping. Only aid from Australia keeps the place going. If someone was looking for a microstate to buy, Nauru would be the choice.
A Better Place has gotten very little traction for their electric car with replaceable batteries concept...
Better Place is starting to look like a scam. They've been at this for five years now, have raised $700 million, and haven't deployed anything other than demos. Shai Agassi talks a good game, (I've heard him speak) but doesn't deliver. Better Place has been making Real Soon Now announcements since 2008, but nothing happens other than demos with heavy PR.
Recharging is still a big problem. Tesla put in enough charging stations from SF to LA to allow making that trip. But it takes an hour of charging per 50 miles of driving.
I'm kind of disappointed. When I started watching the video, I thought someone had built this with moving parts in Minecraft But it's just a big collection of wired logic. It's not like you can see the parts move.
So hook up a VHDL compiler to the Redstone 2 Minecraft compiler. There are CPU designs available in VHDL. Generate a real CPU in Minecraft.
The cool CPU I'm waiting for is Babbage's Analytical Engine. The guy who says he's building a replica hasn't made much progress yet. Babbage's design had about a dozen instructions. But it was designed with 50-digit arithmetic (unclear why) and 100 memory locations (reasonable). The memory part would have been bulky, but the CPU is comparable to a mechanical desk calculator. It will be expensive to build, but as a CAD modeling job, not so bad, because it's mostly repeated instances of the same components.
Interleaf had that in 1984, on Sun workstations. The markup was in a column alongside the text, and lined up with it. The markup display didn't show the text, just the formatting commands.
Interleaf had a technology that was way ahead of its time. Because of that, they had a terrible business model - Interleaf's main product was a set of four Sun workstations and a laser printer, branded with the Interleaf name. The software alone was thousands of dollars per workstation. They couldn't sell many copies, since you needed a $10,000 workstation to run it.
GPS systems use rotating maps because Etak, the first car navigation system, introduced in 1985, did. Etak originally didn't have it. The original map display did not rotate, and always had north at the top. This was consistent with nautical practice, and Stan Honey, Etak's CEO was a notable yachtsman.
Etak discovered that about 20% of the population could not comprehend a map that was oriented differently from the real world. So they made the map rotate with the car, which seemed strange at the time.
Crowdsourcing in general is illegal because of hucksters tricking people out of their investment dollars.
Right. There is a long, long history of investment scams, from John Law's bank to Florida real estate to "High Yield Investment Plans. The current big scam thing is "distressed real estate". That's why we have SEC registration and mandatory disclosures. Here are some recent scams of that type.
"Crowdfunding" is about selling unregistered securities to individuals. This usually ends badly.
If anything, the rules on who is a "qualified investor" and can invest in private placements should be tightened up. At present, pension funds are considered "qualified investors", which means they can invest in hedge funds. That didn't work out too well around 2008.
Here's a once widely used machine few have seen or heard.
This is a Teletype Model 14 printer designed in 1924 and built in 1929. This was the technology used for telegrams from 1925 to 1959. Every Western Union office had a few of these. After cleaning, oiling, a new case, and some minor repairs, this 80-year old machine works reliably. We usually have it connected to a news RSS feed, or get messages via SMS through an SMS gateway.
We'll have this, and some of our other gear, at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention.
"To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for
them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all
nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all
crimes." - Undershaft
You can't copyright a functional part in the US. That was settled years ago, which is why there's a third party auto parts industry. Some other countries allow that, but not the US. Patents may apply, but patents only cover the "invention" part, whatever that may be. Unless someone has a new method of connecting things, a patent isn't likely to cover an adapter.
As far as I can find, there's has never been a US lawsuit over replicating a part with stereolithography.
Exactly. Linux was a lot better than Windows 95/98. Windows 7 is better than Linux. The "day of Linux on the desktop" should have come when Windows XP was late. That opportunity was missed.
It's not about cost, either. Linux has had the effect of reducing the price of Windows on desktops. Microsoft had to cut their price to counter the Linux netbooks.
Tybejee suggests several ways to entice consumers to embrace m-wallets, including making targeted offers as part of the mobile wallet experience based on a consumer's prior purchasing history; tying in mobile wallets with loyalty cards and programs...
Right. The Google Wallet is an end run around banking privacy and security laws.
If the mobile wallet systems were coming from real banks, they might be trusted more. Not from "indemnify us against our mistakes and don't sue us" Google. "You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless GPC, Google, and their subsidiaries and other affiliates, and its and their directors, officers, owners, agents, co-branders or other partners, employees, information providers, licensors, licensees, consultants, contractors and other applicable third parties (including without limitation Paymentech, L.P. and relevant Customers) (collectively "Indemnified Parties") from and against any and all claims, demands, causes of action, debt or liability, including reasonable attorneys fees, including without limitation attorneys fees and costs incurred by the Indemnified Parties arising out of, related to, or which may arise from: (i) your use of the Services; (ii) any breach or non-compliance by you of any term of these Terms of Service or any GPC Party policies; (iii) any dispute or litigation caused by your actions or omissions; or (iv) your negligence or violation or alleged violation of any law or rights of a third party."... "GPC may delay payment processing of suspicious transactions or transactions which may involve fraud, misconduct, or violate applicable law, these Terms of Service, or other applicable GPC policies, as determined in GPC's > sole and absolute discretion."
Those are much worse terms than banks are allowed to offer. They're more at the level of PayPal, which is notorious for delaying the release of customer funds. No contract with a financial institution should have a "sole discretion" clause like that.
The classic remark by Dreyfus, "No computer can play a decent game of chess", has been inverted. Today's commercial chess programs, running on ordinary desktop machines, or even laptops, can beat any human. No grandmaster has won a tournament against a chess program since 2005. Pocket Fritz 4 on a phone now plays at the grandmaster level.
It turns out that, even at the grandmaster level, about 1 human move in 10 is clearly suboptimal. So, one computers got close to the grandmaster level, they could beat humans just by not making mistakes.
It's a great time to build electronics. Digi-Key and Mouser will sell you a huge range of parts and get them to you overnight. Lots of places will make your PC boards for $50-$75 for a small board. Oscilloscopes are cheaper than they used to be. DVMs are really cheap.There are whole ecosystems like the Arduno, with free, user-friendly tools. Even most of the micro controller vendors now offer free compilers. There are useful web sites, IRC channels, and hacker spaces. You can afford to dedicate a PC or a phone to controlling or displaying out from whatever you're building.
None of that existed 20 years ago. I had to struggle to convince Hamilton-Avnet to let me buy from them, and they required a credit check. Having a PC board made meant drawing it in AutoCAD, having litho films made by one shop, and getting them to another shop to make the board. It wasn't cheap. A C compiler for the 68HC11 microcontroller cost thousands of dollars. Getting an RF link to a mobile device was a huge headache.
So quit whining that you're having trouble opening the box on portable devices built to be extremely thin, and actually learn how to build your own stuff.
To most people, and to Google, SEO means designing pages and metadata so it's easy for the search engine to figure out what the page is actually about...
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
First off, there's no place Apple can park that cash that provides a return anything like what their own operations generate. So a dividend is appropriate.
Second, the big threat to Apple is lower prices. Apple has great margins, but that only lasts if the competition can be fended off. Hence the litigation.
The computer industry in general had this problem. For a while, it looked like the future of personal computing was $99 netbooks, sold in bubble-packs in the stationery section of drugstores. This had the industry terrified. The mobile industry saved them, by creating a direct connection between the customer's wallet and the cell phone network operator. Apple saved them by offering a premium product at a higher price point. Microsoft saved them by crushing the Linux netbook industry. What we have now are mobile personal computers that cost $3000 over the 3 years of the phone contract.
Sorry. The tunneling is done. The roadway has been laid. Now it's interior work. Power, ventilation, lighting, interior finish, landscaping, etc. Opening may be in November 2012.
A degree in psychology sounds like a win for mobile development. Mobile apps are mostly about the interface. Under the hood, most don't do much. (There are spectacular exceptions, but they are rare.)
With a psych degree, you know how to conduct experiments with people. That's what real usability testing looks like. You give somebody a device and a list of tasks, you record what they do, and you go through the video carefully, noting where people got stuck, where they had to back up, and where they got frustrated or angry. Then you have an idea of what needs to be fixed.
Most programmers have no clue that this is necessary, let alone how to do it.
Yes, it's a TBM. That's how tunnels are usually dug today, where possible. There are several types, depending on the subsurface conditions. Crossrail is using mostly "earth pressure balanced" TBMs, which are for soft ground, and, for the section under the Thames out to Woolwich, a "slurry" TBM, for, well, mud. There are other types of TBMs, like hard-rock TBMs, like the ones the Swiss use to grind through the Alps.
For wet conditions, the digging is the easy part, It's propping up the tunnel walls and keeping water out that's hard. The general idea is that air pressure does the job near the face, and just behind the cutting head, ring segments are put into place to build the tunnel wall. In wet ground, the TBM drills a hole slightly larger than the ring segments, so there's never unsupported tunnel wall.
Crossrail only needs 3 years to build the tunnels. That's not bad for 21km of tunnel.
TBMs are so long because they're a construction project in a can. The front end digs. The next section assembles the tunnel rings. Then there's a section where little railroad cars take away dirt and bring up tunnel ring segments. Then there's a part that adds new track sections for the little railroad cars, which run on a two-track line. All this has to be crammed into the tunnel diameter, and it has to continue to work while the thing inches forward.
Out here in California, we recently had a non-TBM tunnel job, at Devils' Slide. This is a road tunnel through an unstable mountain, one that has repeatedly dropped the coastal road into the ocean. The mountain is essentially a big pile of loose shale and sandstone, not hard rock. Digging and stabilizing that involved a lot of steel and concrete. That's one of the worst cases.
The Channel Tunnel was in some ways, not too bad. Most of the route is in chalk, which is easy to drill and reasonably dry.
The second Crossrail TBM, incidentally, is named Ada, after Ada Lovelace.
This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".
Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.)
"Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"
Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Having read the whole paper, the history part is great, and the legal part is speculative. The key point that comes out is that Sealand was just too small to be taken seriously as a country. The population ranged from 1 to 4. That was the big problem.
If you wanted to start a data haven, Nauru is probably the place. Nauru, population about 9000, is a moderately successful financial haven. Nauru is recognized as a country by all the relevant organizations. It's been a popular location for "High Yield Investment Programs".
The country was once supported by phosphate mines, and had a very high income per capita until the phosphate ran out in the 1980s. 90% of the land area is now a useless wasteland. 90% of the people are unemployed. GDP of the whole country is $60 million and dropping. Only aid from Australia keeps the place going. If someone was looking for a microstate to buy, Nauru would be the choice.
That's the low end of microstates.
A Better Place has gotten very little traction for their electric car with replaceable batteries concept...
Better Place is starting to look like a scam. They've been at this for five years now, have raised $700 million, and haven't deployed anything other than demos. Shai Agassi talks a good game, (I've heard him speak) but doesn't deliver. Better Place has been making Real Soon Now announcements since 2008, but nothing happens other than demos with heavy PR.
Recharging is still a big problem. Tesla put in enough charging stations from SF to LA to allow making that trip. But it takes an hour of charging per 50 miles of driving.
That's too complex mechanically. And you have to decide, before you go out, how far you're going.
The Chevy Volt seems to be the right idea in hybrids. It's mostly electric, and solves the "range anxiety" problem. It just costs too much.
I'm kind of disappointed. When I started watching the video, I thought someone had built this with moving parts in Minecraft But it's just a big collection of wired logic. It's not like you can see the parts move.
So hook up a VHDL compiler to the Redstone 2 Minecraft compiler. There are CPU designs available in VHDL. Generate a real CPU in Minecraft.
The cool CPU I'm waiting for is Babbage's Analytical Engine. The guy who says he's building a replica hasn't made much progress yet. Babbage's design had about a dozen instructions. But it was designed with 50-digit arithmetic (unclear why) and 100 memory locations (reasonable). The memory part would have been bulky, but the CPU is comparable to a mechanical desk calculator. It will be expensive to build, but as a CAD modeling job, not so bad, because it's mostly repeated instances of the same components.
Interleaf had that in 1984, on Sun workstations. The markup was in a column alongside the text, and lined up with it. The markup display didn't show the text, just the formatting commands.
Interleaf had a technology that was way ahead of its time. Because of that, they had a terrible business model - Interleaf's main product was a set of four Sun workstations and a laser printer, branded with the Interleaf name. The software alone was thousands of dollars per workstation. They couldn't sell many copies, since you needed a $10,000 workstation to run it.
GPS systems use rotating maps because Etak, the first car navigation system, introduced in 1985, did. Etak originally didn't have it. The original map display did not rotate, and always had north at the top. This was consistent with nautical practice, and Stan Honey, Etak's CEO was a notable yachtsman.
Etak discovered that about 20% of the population could not comprehend a map that was oriented differently from the real world. So they made the map rotate with the car, which seemed strange at the time.
Everybody else copied that.
That machine is a beautiful restoration,
Here's the restoration process, from "before" to "after".
His answer was that it's true that it's very hard to get OpenCV working.
It used to be quite bad, but the Willow Robotics people have taken it over, and now it's supposedly better.
Note that the censorship options do not include "advertising".
Crowdsourcing in general is illegal because of hucksters tricking people out of their investment dollars.
Right. There is a long, long history of investment scams, from John Law's bank to Florida real estate to "High Yield Investment Plans. The current big scam thing is "distressed real estate". That's why we have SEC registration and mandatory disclosures. Here are some recent scams of that type.
"Crowdfunding" is about selling unregistered securities to individuals. This usually ends badly.
If anything, the rules on who is a "qualified investor" and can invest in private placements should be tightened up. At present, pension funds are considered "qualified investors", which means they can invest in hedge funds. That didn't work out too well around 2008.
Here's a once widely used machine few have seen or heard. This is a Teletype Model 14 printer designed in 1924 and built in 1929. This was the technology used for telegrams from 1925 to 1959. Every Western Union office had a few of these. After cleaning, oiling, a new case, and some minor repairs, this 80-year old machine works reliably. We usually have it connected to a news RSS feed, or get messages via SMS through an SMS gateway.
We'll have this, and some of our other gear, at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention.
Pay per viewer is a real issue. Sports bars are supposed to purchase public performance licenses. Now the NFL can enforce that.
"To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes." - Undershaft
You can't copyright a functional part in the US. That was settled years ago, which is why there's a third party auto parts industry. Some other countries allow that, but not the US. Patents may apply, but patents only cover the "invention" part, whatever that may be. Unless someone has a new method of connecting things, a patent isn't likely to cover an adapter.
As far as I can find, there's has never been a US lawsuit over replicating a part with stereolithography.
Exactly. Linux was a lot better than Windows 95/98. Windows 7 is better than Linux. The "day of Linux on the desktop" should have come when Windows XP was late. That opportunity was missed.
It's not about cost, either. Linux has had the effect of reducing the price of Windows on desktops. Microsoft had to cut their price to counter the Linux netbooks.
Tybejee suggests several ways to entice consumers to embrace m-wallets, including making targeted offers as part of the mobile wallet experience based on a consumer's prior purchasing history; tying in mobile wallets with loyalty cards and programs...
Right. The Google Wallet is an end run around banking privacy and security laws.
If the mobile wallet systems were coming from real banks, they might be trusted more. Not from "indemnify us against our mistakes and don't sue us" Google. "You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless GPC, Google, and their subsidiaries and other affiliates, and its and their directors, officers, owners, agents, co-branders or other partners, employees, information providers, licensors, licensees, consultants, contractors and other applicable third parties (including without limitation Paymentech, L.P. and relevant Customers) (collectively "Indemnified Parties") from and against any and all claims, demands, causes of action, debt or liability, including reasonable attorneys fees, including without limitation attorneys fees and costs incurred by the Indemnified Parties arising out of, related to, or which may arise from: (i) your use of the Services; (ii) any breach or non-compliance by you of any term of these Terms of Service or any GPC Party policies; (iii) any dispute or litigation caused by your actions or omissions; or (iv) your negligence or violation or alleged violation of any law or rights of a third party." ... "GPC may delay payment processing of suspicious transactions or transactions which may involve fraud, misconduct, or violate applicable law, these Terms of Service, or other applicable GPC policies, as determined in GPC's > sole and absolute discretion."
Those are much worse terms than banks are allowed to offer. They're more at the level of PayPal, which is notorious for delaying the release of customer funds. No contract with a financial institution should have a "sole discretion" clause like that.
Google insists that if you lose a phone with Google Wallet installed, you have to contact every credit and value card vendor with data in the wallet.
There's no sex at all in the original short story. Some of the later stuff, as they grow up, has some sex, but it's not a big issue.
Actually, Ender's Game is a naive view of the political effectiveness of blogging.
The classic remark by Dreyfus, "No computer can play a decent game of chess", has been inverted. Today's commercial chess programs, running on ordinary desktop machines, or even laptops, can beat any human. No grandmaster has won a tournament against a chess program since 2005. Pocket Fritz 4 on a phone now plays at the grandmaster level.
Hence the cheating. About once a year, a major chess player is caught cheating.
It turns out that, even at the grandmaster level, about 1 human move in 10 is clearly suboptimal. So, one computers got close to the grandmaster level, they could beat humans just by not making mistakes.
It's a great time to build electronics. Digi-Key and Mouser will sell you a huge range of parts and get them to you overnight. Lots of places will make your PC boards for $50-$75 for a small board. Oscilloscopes are cheaper than they used to be. DVMs are really cheap.There are whole ecosystems like the Arduno, with free, user-friendly tools. Even most of the micro controller vendors now offer free compilers. There are useful web sites, IRC channels, and hacker spaces. You can afford to dedicate a PC or a phone to controlling or displaying out from whatever you're building.
None of that existed 20 years ago. I had to struggle to convince Hamilton-Avnet to let me buy from them, and they required a credit check. Having a PC board made meant drawing it in AutoCAD, having litho films made by one shop, and getting them to another shop to make the board. It wasn't cheap. A C compiler for the 68HC11 microcontroller cost thousands of dollars. Getting an RF link to a mobile device was a huge headache.
So quit whining that you're having trouble opening the box on portable devices built to be extremely thin, and actually learn how to build your own stuff.
To most people, and to Google, SEO means designing pages and metadata so it's easy for the search engine to figure out what the page is actually about...
Not "most people".
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
First off, there's no place Apple can park that cash that provides a return anything like what their own operations generate. So a dividend is appropriate.
Second, the big threat to Apple is lower prices. Apple has great margins, but that only lasts if the competition can be fended off. Hence the litigation.
The computer industry in general had this problem. For a while, it looked like the future of personal computing was $99 netbooks, sold in bubble-packs in the stationery section of drugstores. This had the industry terrified. The mobile industry saved them, by creating a direct connection between the customer's wallet and the cell phone network operator. Apple saved them by offering a premium product at a higher price point. Microsoft saved them by crushing the Linux netbook industry. What we have now are mobile personal computers that cost $3000 over the 3 years of the phone contract.
You say that like it's done.
Sorry. The tunneling is done. The roadway has been laid. Now it's interior work. Power, ventilation, lighting, interior finish, landscaping, etc. Opening may be in November 2012.
A degree in psychology sounds like a win for mobile development. Mobile apps are mostly about the interface. Under the hood, most don't do much. (There are spectacular exceptions, but they are rare.)
With a psych degree, you know how to conduct experiments with people. That's what real usability testing looks like. You give somebody a device and a list of tasks, you record what they do, and you go through the video carefully, noting where people got stuck, where they had to back up, and where they got frustrated or angry. Then you have an idea of what needs to be fixed.
Most programmers have no clue that this is necessary, let alone how to do it.
Yes, it's a TBM. That's how tunnels are usually dug today, where possible. There are several types, depending on the subsurface conditions. Crossrail is using mostly "earth pressure balanced" TBMs, which are for soft ground, and, for the section under the Thames out to Woolwich, a "slurry" TBM, for, well, mud. There are other types of TBMs, like hard-rock TBMs, like the ones the Swiss use to grind through the Alps.
For wet conditions, the digging is the easy part, It's propping up the tunnel walls and keeping water out that's hard. The general idea is that air pressure does the job near the face, and just behind the cutting head, ring segments are put into place to build the tunnel wall. In wet ground, the TBM drills a hole slightly larger than the ring segments, so there's never unsupported tunnel wall.
Crossrail only needs 3 years to build the tunnels. That's not bad for 21km of tunnel.
TBMs are so long because they're a construction project in a can. The front end digs. The next section assembles the tunnel rings. Then there's a section where little railroad cars take away dirt and bring up tunnel ring segments. Then there's a part that adds new track sections for the little railroad cars, which run on a two-track line. All this has to be crammed into the tunnel diameter, and it has to continue to work while the thing inches forward.
Out here in California, we recently had a non-TBM tunnel job, at Devils' Slide. This is a road tunnel through an unstable mountain, one that has repeatedly dropped the coastal road into the ocean. The mountain is essentially a big pile of loose shale and sandstone, not hard rock. Digging and stabilizing that involved a lot of steel and concrete. That's one of the worst cases.
The Channel Tunnel was in some ways, not too bad. Most of the route is in chalk, which is easy to drill and reasonably dry.
The second Crossrail TBM, incidentally, is named Ada, after Ada Lovelace.
This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".
Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.) "Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"
Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam.