Hm. I wonder if we perhaps need to rethink the difference between communication and documentation. The current rule seems to be that in regulated industries, any electronic document is subject to documentation/retention requirements. However this comes from an old model, where documents were somehow "official". So things like face-to-face conversations, or telephone calls, were not required to be recorded and archived. But anything written on paper was supposed to be archived to create a paper-trail, and because these were the "official documents".
In a modern world, some electronic documents (PDFs, word processor documents, emails, etc.) have taken the place of "official paper documents", and other electronic communications (instant messaging, social networking sites, etc.) have taken the place of the less-formal communication modes. (Obviously phones and face-to-face conversations still exist, also.)
On the one hand, it seems like the more documentation we can retain in regulated industries, the better off we are. (In case of negligence or malfeasance, it makes it possible to assign blame, bring people to justice, avoid repeating mistakes, etc.) On the other hand, as long as we are allowing some communication modes to be informal or undocumented, then allowing other modes that are also undocumented doesn't seem to change much. (People who want to have secret conversations will surely find a way to do it.)
I'm not sure what the right answer is. But I'm not convinced that making all electronic modes of communication subject to the same level of recording/documentation/archiving really makes sense.
the gadgetry itself and the triviality it promotes is absorbing so much time and attention that we're ignoring other things that might be more important to our civic lives.
Do we have any evidence for that, though? Sure, gadgetry can be a time-sink. But the implication when one says something like "gadgets are diverting attention away from our civic lives" is that we would otherwise spend more time on our civic lives, if not for the gadgets. I'm not convinced this is true. If people didn't have gadgets and YouTube cat videos to divert their attention, would they focus on politics or would they instead watch more sports on TV? And if TV didn't exist, would they then spend most of their time in municipal town-hall debates, or would they instead spend the time at local baseball games?
It's gotten to the point where kids (in particular) aren't even coming up for air sometimes.
Again, the implication is that before we got to this point, kids were spending their times fruitfully on things of civic importance. I'm not convinced this is the case.
Gadgets, technology, knowledge, and pretty much anything else, can be used for good purposes (disseminating information, fruitful debate, etc.), for bad purposes (misinformation, hate speech, etc.), or for silly purposes (cat videos, TV shows, etc.). In all cases focusing on the technology itself, or even the deluge of information itself, is missing the point. Instead we need to find ways to encourage people to participate, to care about democracy, to think critically, and so on. And we need to accept that people will spend quite a bit of their time/effort/money on the "silly" category. (Which is fine, so long as they are spending some time on civic issues as well.)
Indeed. There are many fonts that have been around for a very long time and have no doubt fully recouped the design cost, yet are still quite expensive to license. Like other digital items (music, movies, etc.) fonts can be copied easily; but unlike entertainment, we don't need new fonts to be created so frequently (of course new fonts are needed, but the rate at which new ones are needed is fairly slow). Given the incredibly high ratio usage ratio in fonts, the per-use cost should be very, very small. And indeed many fonts are freely distributed or licensed so cheaply that they are just bundled up in other products. But other fonts (which didn't really require that much more effort) are incredibly expensive.
The status quo may be reasonable in the sense that people are paying how much fonts are worth to them. But it seems ineffective to me in the sense that fonts are only protected through government-enforced monopoly (copyright). Whereas a copyright of, say, 15 years on a book may be easy to justify, I find it hard to justify it for fonts. Probably even with only a 3-year protection period, fonts would still be produced in sufficient quantities (and with sufficient diversity) to satisfy all our needs. And overall, society could conceivably be much better off, since all the small players could use the great variety of fonts that exist. (Even taking into account that the variety might be slightly reduced because of the shorter protection period.)
My point is only that the "fonts are expensive to design" argument needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because fonts become so widely used. It seems to me that it would only require very small payments from all users (or a few medium-sized payments from big players who want immediate access to new fonts that other people are not using yet) to fully-fund font development.
Actually despite the fact that the summary and article talk about this as though it is an SSD technology, I think it is more likely to be implemented in a conventional spinning-disk hard drive first.
As I recently commented, the hard-drive industry is having a hard time shrinking the magnetic domains on conventional hard drive platters, which use a magnetic thin film. (You can make domains smaller, but they start interacting with one another and not maintaining their magnetization properly.) One proposed solution is to actually pattern disks with individual magnetic dots. The separated dots would interact less and should maintain magnetic orientation better.
There are challenges involved in tracking such small dots in a conventional hard drive, but those challenges are being addressed. In the short term it would be quite a bit easier to integrate a new magnetic-nano-dot technology with existing spinning-disc technology, rather than trying to invent a whole new read/write system. This would also help the nanodot technology be refined/matured. According to this press release, this new technique is a pulsed-laser-deposition technique that is compatible with conventional silicon wafers. In other words, it is compatible with existing chip-making processes, and so we can imagine a later stage where the magnetic dots are memory elements integrated directly into microchips (thus, SSD).
The problem is that the IR-to-visible conversion doesn't maintain directionality of the light. Normally a visible light photon hits the windshield, travels through it, and comes out the other end going in the same direction (well, slightly shifted due to refraction). But with this upconversion film, an IR photon would hit the film, and be converted into a visible-light photon... but that visible light photon will now be traveling in a totally different (effectively random) direction.
Since each "pixel" on your windshield would be hit by IR light coming from a variety of directions, you would in fact just see a total blur on the windshield.
Obviously it would be awesome to come up with a material that could convert the frequency of light without altering direction. In practice this is not easy to do. (Any kind of conversion is going to require a photon to be absorbed by the material, promoting to some high-energy state, and then the material will re-emit a photon of a different frequency. The problem is that the re-emission is basically isotropic.)
Novel infrared-to-visible light upconversion devices are demonstrated by fabricating an organic light-emitting diode with an infrared-sensitizing layer. With a SnPc:C60 mixed layer as an infrared absorber and fac-tris(2-phenylpyridinato) iridium (III) (Irppy3) as an emitter, an infrared-to-green up-conversion device is demonstrated under 830-nm irradiation (see figure, ITO=indium tin oxide). The maximum photon-to-photon conversion efficiency is 2.7% at 15V.
This is good development, to be sure... but I think TFA exaggerates by saying that the device can be so thin that it can be placed on a windshield. In order to be used for something like night-vision, you'll need some kind of lens/optics as well. This material will not maintain the directionality of light as it is converted (from IR to visible), so you can't just "look through" it and see a night-vision version of the world. But you could use a lens to focus an infrared image onto the film, and look at the visible-light emission from the film. Still, this technology should be able to help make night-vision systems smaller and cheaper.
It's also disappointing how media reports of new sci/tech developments insist on focusing on one possible application. It obscures the real potential. For instance, lighter/cheaper IR-to-vis conversion would not just be cool for night driving, but also for emergency workers, home security systems, scientific instruments (the journal article also lists "semiconductor wafer inspection"), optical computing, and so on...
Moreover they may have been working on it but stopped development at some point for a legitimate reason.
This legitimate reason may have been a technical one... or it may have been the realization that since they cannot control whether or not it will actually be accepted onto the iPhone platform, it's an unacceptable risk to put development effort into it. For instance, they put effort into a Google Voice application for the iPhone, only to have that effort wasted. Given this, it seems not at all unreasonable (and certainly not evil) to hold back further development of iPhone software.
It is 3D in the sense that it is a 2D image with topography (a height map). Basically they are using a very sharp (nano-sized) heated stylus to desorb ("burn") away nano-sized amounts of polymer. (This is basically a variant of "scanning probe" methods like atomic force microscopy.) By carefully positioning the probe in x-y you can draw a pattern, and by controlling the stylus height and burn time, you can control the depth. In this way you can create arbitrary topography at the nano-scale.
Many of the comments in this thread seem to be fixating on the uselessness of such a small map of the world. Making a world map was just a cute proof of principle (the paper also shows test patterns so that you can judge patterning fidelity). Basically this is a new way to pattern at the nanoscale in an fairly arbitrary way. Of course raster scanning a stylus is going to be very slow compared to optical lithography, but at this stage it's better to compare to something like e-beam lithography which is the raster-scanning of an electron beam. This is also slow, but can make very high-resolution patterns and is thus great for exploratory research and for creating the masters that are then used for optical lithography. This new nano-desorbing technique could be another way to make master patterns. In fact, the papers mention that the resolution and throughput are in fact comparable to e-beam methods. And this new technique has a couple of advantages:
1. The ability to not just pattern in 2D, but control the topography could reduce the number of patterning steps in microchip construction.
2. These mechanical 'scanning tips' can in principle be built into massive arrays, allowing parallel (high-throughput) patterning. In fact IBM has been working on a project called millipede for using these arrays of tips as a data storage device. (This most recent patterning work appears to be an offshoot, where instead of melting pits to store data, they are blasting away material to pattern.)
It's always difficult to predict whether these things will become real products one day, but the proof-of-principle for both tip arrays, and now for nano-scale patterning using heated tips, means that we're actually relatively close. If IBM pursues this, it could become a new nano-patterning method in the toolbox of the microelectronics industry (which is, of course, always looking for techniques that can push patterning to ever smaller scales).
I suppose some may argue that this calls into question the wisdom of Ubuntu's release schedule. On the one hand, having a rigid release schedule means that they are always scrambling to get everything in place on time. With testing times more constrained, more bugs may creep into the release.
On the other hand, the pressure of a schedule can get people fixing problems sooner than they would otherwise have. Ubuntu is under a time constraint, so they are asking for help with testing, and they are putting pressure on the xorg people. This show-stopping bug may very well be found and fixed sooner than it would have were it not for Ubuntu's aggressive release schedule. This comes back to the old "the perfect is the enemy of the good"--if you wait until all the bugs are fixed you'll never release anything.
Ubuntu has chosen to try to stick to their release schedule, and this occasionally requires some workarounds, mitigation of bugs, and rapid (hard!) work. I think overall it's good for Linux to have a mix of aggressively-scheduled distros (like Ubuntu) and more cautious distros (like Debian).
To expand upon this. In any argument if you start really arguing about whether something "really is" something (i.e. arguing over definitions) then you need to take a step back and ask why either side cares about that particular definition (whether it be "art" or "censorship" or "natural" or whatever). You will typically find that the reason both sides are trying to fight for a particular definition is because that word carries with it a whole slew of additional meaning/emotional-baggage/etc. ("art is deep and important", "censorship is bad", "natural is good", etc.).
So instead of arguing over the definition, you should just step back and argue about the characteristics of the things itself. ("Regardless of whether this is technically censorship or not, let's discuss whether this action is a net positive or negative, whether it is immoral, and whether it should be illegal." "Regardless of whether this product is 'natural' or not, let's study whether it is a net positive or negative with respect to human health." Etc.)
In this case, I don't know exactly what ground he thinks he is defending by excluding video games from the "art" category. When he says things like:
"No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."
I can only guess that he comparing all would-be art to some theoretical perfect art (Platonic ideal?) that any person would be immediately moved by. And by his reckoning, video games don't comes close enough to qualify. I disagree with his implication that we can all agree so objectively on what makes "good art" versus "bad art". I think it's quite obvious that video games have an impact on many people--oftentimes a real emotional impact or one that produces thought and reflection. Again, regardless of whether or not you are willing to call that "art" is of little importance to me: video games have cultural impact.
Barring truly revolutionary advances in silicon device fabrication, and(I'm not sufficiently up on my physics to know for sure) possibly a change in physics, sputtering a thin metallic film with the appropriate magnetic properties will always be cheaper, per square centimeter, than fabbing a complex integrated circuit. Further, it is quite likely that the smallest possible magnetic domains will continue to be smaller than the smallest possible flash cells, so you get more bits per square centimeter, and you pay less per square centimeter with the magnetic stuff.
Apparently sputtering of magnetic films is in fact approaching a limit. As the bit density increases, the magnetic domains in the film need to keep getting smaller. The smaller domains become more and more susceptible to being randomly flipped (thermally or due to interactions between neighboring magnetic domains). Currently the envisioned solution is to create small isolated magnetic domains: basically magnetic nano-islands on a non-magnetic platter. This presents a whole bunch of new problems (e.g. getting the read/write head to repeatably track to such small locations).
But this proposed 'bit patterned magnetic media' obviously increases the cost of HDD fabrication since you're no longer just sputtering a magnetic film; you have to pattern the disk platter (albeit with a relatively simple pattern compared to a microchip or even flash storage).
This barrier is "close enough" that HDD companies are seriously researching how to make bit-patterned drives. (Hitachi is the company that I know for sure is working on it; no doubt others are, too.) Of course it's always possible that someone makes a discovery in magnetic thin films that lets us keep using simple layers for hard drives platters... (It's always difficult to predict such things!)... but currently it looks like hard drives are going to become patterned in the future.
If this happens, then it will close the gap, in a sense. With hard disks giving up one of their manufacturing advantages in order to push to greater bit densities, SSD will probably catch up and overtake.
The article fails on numerous levels.
1. It cross-compares two different rights issues: censorship and privacy (specifically contrasting Google's rhetoric against government censorship with their compliance to discovery requests under US law). It isn't necessarily inconsistent to argue against censorship but not worry about privacy.
2. Google's compliance with US legal discovery requests (under PATRIOT and other laws) is used to imply that Google advocates breaching privacy. The fact that Google complies with the law isn't evidence that they agree with the law. Indeed they specifically say (and have demonstrated, as far as I can tell) that they fight discovery requests and only deliver private data when the request is necessary/legitimate.
3. The article is also contrasting governmental policies (censorship, etc.) with policies of a private company (Google). The article states "We have far less power over Google." which is true in some sense (Google is not beholden to democracy directly... though it is controlled through laws and through consumer pressure/choice). But this "we have less power over Google" has to be counter-balanced with "Google has far less power over us". If the government mandates censorship, then every citizen and company is affected. If Google mandates censorship on its own, consumers will flock to other services. The difference is huge, and actions taken by government are far more scary because they are far further reaching.
4. Also, no evidence of Google breaching privacy is actually provided. Certainly no evidence that there is a systemic problem; merely that Google is acknowledging that they will comply with US law.
Really the article is just a weak attempt to set-up some a non-existent conflict between Google's open stance against censorship, and their grudging compliance with US discovery laws that could infringe on privacy. But the argument is laughably weak. I'm not trying to give Google a free pass here... but let's focus on the real issues and not trumped-up hypocrisy charges.
Agreed. I keep thinking I'm doing something fundamentally wrong... I can search for apps on my Droid but I can't find a website that lets me search through the apps or browse the app categories. Apparently there are roughly 30,000 Android apps, but if you click around the marketplace, you'll get a sense that there's maybe 50 or 80 apps out there. This is both a problem for Android users (who can't find what they want... doing it on the phone is okay but not as efficient) and for uptake (it makes the platform look amateurish).
On the flip side, though, I can't imagine a worse move than "hand over the entire management of the Android Market to carriers, OEMs and trusted publishers." The carriers would turn it into a painful nickel-and-dime opportunity (forget free apps!), and letting OEMs and publishers do whatever they want would make the Android platform even more fragmented. Google is (in theory) the right entity to mange the Android Market: they have a good reputation, they are really good at sorting and search, they know how to make a good web UI, etc. In fact, it's fundamentally surprising that they didn't put together a slick interface for the Android Market...
What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
I don't have a problem with patent-only companies. Or rather, I dislike patent-only companies and hate patent trolls, but that's only because of the issues I have with patents more generally. As long as patents exist and are legal, it makes perfect sense (and is completely legitimate) for companies to spring up that deal exclusively in patents. In the same way that since stocks exist, are legal, and are ascribed value, it makes perfect sense for companies to spring up that deal only in buying and selling stock, without "actually making" anything in particular. The law ascribes value to patents, so companies trading in that particular value are legitimate. In principle, secondary (non-research/non-manufacturing) companies purchasing patents is just a way that the patent system achieves its goal of incentivising invention: inventors are more likely to invent/patent when they know there is a market for their invention/patent.
So the question really becomes whether the legally-protected constructs (stocks, copyrights, patents, etc.) are really legitimate things in the first place. I think a pretty good case can be made for stocks being a good thing (within a regulated framework). I think patents are, currently, way out of control... but that's not the fault of patent-holding companies per se. Too much value is being put in to really weak patents. The law needs to tighten-up the definitions and grant far fewer patents. So let's keep up the pressure for patent reform... but direct that pressure towards the patent office and lawmakers. It's wasted effort to be mad at companies for doing what they will always do: making as much money as possible based on existing laws and regulation. (The ability of companies to actually change the law is a huge problem, mind you... but a discussion for another day.)
I have to agree. I'm a big believer in stem cell research, and think that it will play a crucial role in future life-saving medicine.
However, I also know researchers at the FDA, and these guys are not dumb. If they are cautious about approving a new procedure, it is usually because there is insufficient data to really declare it safe. In other words, more research is certainly needed before stem cell therapeutic techniques become widespread. Giving someone back their ability to walk is fantastic--but rather less so if we discover in 5 years of lethal side-effects.
TFA does link to a study published by the doctors offering these treatments. They describe that for the 227 patients studied, none had neoplastic complications. This is encouraging, but again I think more research is needed: first these kinds of results need to be double-checked by others, and secondly over longer timespans (the study in question only followed patients for ~1 year).
I use voice recognition all the time. Lots of people do. I use the voice-search on my Droid. You have to enunciate fairly clearly, but it's faster than typing. And when it's wrong, that's fine--you type it out instead. I also use Google Voice transcriptions. Are they perfectly correct? Heck no. They have tons of mistakes. But the transcription is accurate enough that one can glance it over and immediately know the general subject matter of the voicemail, which immediately tells you if you need to: (1) call the person back; (2) listen to the voicemail for more detail; or (3) ignore it. This is a huge time-saver. The transcription is also very good with numbers, which means that when people spell-out phone numbers for you to call, they show up correctly in Google Voice, and can even be clicked on to call! These features are useful.
My point is this: voice recognition doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. It's just like doing a Google search. Does it always return exactly the page you wanted? No. Are the results useful? Almost always. It's a shift in thinking, from "AI research is about creating truly thinking machines" to "let's make simply, faulty systems that give the right answer often enough that they are useful."
Things like modern search engines, voice transcription, spellcheck, predictive auto-complete, etc. are all examples of things that are inherently faulty, and yet extremely useful (as long as you're aware of their limitations).
I'd just like to echo this statement (I work in nanotech/materials science). There is undeniably a massive number of publications flowing from China. Much of it is high quality, but frankly it is drowned-out by a larger amount of uninteresting or trivial publications. In short, Chinese science funding is emphasizing quantity over quality. Thus they are making gains in the raw number of publications, but are not advancing the impact per publication at all.
It's a sad state of affairs, really... because those Chinese scientists who do solid work and publish worthwhile papers have their credibility reduced because of the larger number of sloppy papers published by other Chinese scientists.
If they truly want to be a driver of science and technology, and not just win a meaningless "# of pubs" game, they need to establish better priorities and better reward schemes. Of course this doesn't just apply to China: using publication count to measure productivity is tempting and is happening in many countries and funding agencies. This is why so many scientists are pushing for more emphasis on measuring impact, and not just raw output. (E.g. using things like h-index instead of publication count (yes, h-index has its own set of problems).)
One must also somewhat define what "free-thinking" means in this context. Consider:
1. Apple keeps their development process very secretive, so that they can release a product to much fanfare. (As compared to FOSS, where the entire process is usually open to scrutiny.) If you think about creative people like artists and musicians, many of them follow this exact same pattern: they toil in secrecy, not divulging any details of what they're working on, so that they can release a piece and shock/awe/inspire people. For some kinds of art, being aware of the creation process would disrupt enjoyment of the art itself. In this sense, the development style of Apple is very much inline with what many artists are accustomed to. Of course, some artists do not develop in secret... but within the "creative community" as a whole, this is at least a normal development mode.
2. One can then think about how tightly controlled the thing is after it is released to the public. Again it's worth noting that a great many of the creative professionals who use and evangelize Apple products are just as controlling about their products as Apple is. Many artists believe strongly in copyright, for instance, and want it to be expanded. They want control over their ideas and their products. They decry those who pervert their work by, e.g., sampling it. Again, not all artists are like this... but enough are like this that one cannot really claim that "creative people" are universally supportive of freely exchanging data/information/art...
3. "Free-thinking" as it relates to "different from the norm" or "thinking outside the box" is something that Apple does fairly well. They are willing and able to start their own trends. Of course, as others have pointing out, this isn't nearly as "non-conformist" as some seem to believe. Apple is not really breaking all conventional rules. Rather they are creating a new style/sub-culture. Similarly many "free-thinking" types are creative and come up with great ideas... but that doesn't mean that they truly buck all trends and social norms. Like everyone else, they try to find like-minded people and form a social group with them.
4. At the end of the day, most "free-thinkers" and "creative types" are just as pragmatic (and non-idealistic) as anyone else. They use Apple products because they like the functionality and image that go along with those products. Many of the best tools (hardware and software) work with Apple computers and on Mac OS X, so it's a natural choice to work with that platform, which of course perpetuates the justification for the next generation. I highly doubt that many of the users of Apple products spend much time wondering whether the company's ethos truly reflects their personal views on intellectual freedom.
I think that's right. Many efforts at semantic "stuff" (on the web, on the desktop,...) don't gain traction because of "chicken and egg" problems. No one wants to tag because it's useless; but it won't be useful until many things are tagged, so that a search returns useful results, and relationships between objects can be automatically discovered.
In this case, I agree that manual tagging is a necessary precursor to more automated tagging. Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible. For instance text and word processors should be doing word frequency analysis and tagging with appropriate topics; code editors should tag with the language name; image editors should be doing crude image analysis and tagging (e.g. if it detects people in the image, this information should be saved somewhere; if the user applies red-eye correction, the location of the eyes/face should be recorded somewhere). Once this meta-data becomes more common, it's easy to see the utility. (e.g. Search: "A picture I edited last week that has three people in it...")
Even with manual tagging, the system can be fairly useful. You don't need to tag every single file for it to be useful: if you tag some group of files as "taxes 2009" then you'll be able to later find them, even if you haven't tagged much else. The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context. For instance the tagging in Apple's iPhoto is neat--but I quickly lost interest because I knew none of the tags would carry-over elsewhere. If I tag meticulously, I can search within iPhoto but nothing shows up in a desktop search using spotlight (at least the last time I checked; maybe they've since added that functionality?)... and the tags don't persist if I move the files to another system. For the user to feel like tagging is worthwhile, the tags have to be widely accessible, so that searching for them is actually useful.
Yeah these numbers just don't add up. First off, I'm going to assume that this is a million dollars a year (or somesuch), otherwise it's ridiculous on the face of it. No high-profile web company is going to sign a perpetual contract like that. Now, the top 1,000 sites depend on internet traffic. No doubt their advertising budgets are more than a million dollars. Telling them that they can get one million dollars if they give up a huge chunk of their internet visibility is ridiculous. It's worth much more than that to them.
Conversely, this whole plan would cost 1 billion dollars to pull off. Sure, Microsoft could afford that, and would pay that much to destroy Google. But this is a poor plan. If Google no longer listed the top 1,000 sites (which is a big if, since many of those sites have no particular love of Microsoft...), then would Google crash and burn? Or would the sites currently ranked 1,0001-2000 suddenly see a huge upsurge in their traffic and profitability?
Lastly, how would this work on a technical level? Sure, you can configure your server to reject all requests from googlebot, preventing them from indexing sub-pages, but you can't technically (or legally) prevent Google from returning a link to "wsj.com" when someone searches for "Wall Street Journal". So any "de-indexing" wouldn't be complete.
This "plan" fails on so many levels. I'm sure Google is not too concerned about this. Any companies that participated would be signing their own death sentence: their web visibility would drop, public opinion of the company would drop, they might open themselves to legal attacks... and all for a "cool million".
there's no real ethical or legal excuse for pirating something, simply because you don't like the price of it.
Whether true or not, it misses the point. Yes, people can be cheap... but people are also prone to frivolously spending money. The iTunes Music Store does well because people don't worry about spending a few dollars here or there, as long as it's damn convenient.
The problem with the conventional solutions to piracy (DRM, lock-in, monitoring, lawsuits) are that they makes the product less convenient. Distribution mechanisms and tools that emphasize convenience (e.g. Hulu.com, DVRs) are seeing rapid growth. People are even willing to watch commercials, as long as they start their show at a time of their own choosing, pause when necessary, and so on (convenience!).
Again, whether or not copyright infringement is moral or not is almost tangential: the fact is that people are doing it and will continue doing so. So pragmatically what matters is how to achieve a new, useful balance. Everything I've seen suggests that people are actually fully willing to pay for entertainment (whether directly through cash or indirectly through advertising) as long as you make it so simple and convenient and enjoyable that it's simply not worth their effort to seek-out the copyright-infringing copies.
I also live in the affected area. I personally wasn't affected much since I bike to work. Actually I did notice the long lines of cars at all the lights. As a cyclist it was actually nice since the gridlock of cars slowly crawling onto the highway on-ramp is easier to navigate than the usual situation where cars don't stop for pedestrians or cyclists at the cross-walk.
In any case, my coworkers sure noticed. Some of them said that their commute yesterday went from 30 minutes to 3 hours. Similarly getting into work this morning took people longer than usual.
So it's certainly having an impact. But, life goes on.
the Wall Street Journal's readership is actually going UP while their competitors are losing money right and left
According to this graph, the WSJ readership is flat (there was a surge a few years back because of online subscriptions, but that seems to be a redefinition of "circulation" as much as anything else). If that graph is correct, the WSJ is certainly doing better than the other newspapers (which are in free-fall), but their circulation doesn't seem to be going up.
It boggles my mind why Google scanning out-of-print books is kicking up a shit storm with book publishers though. I mean if the books are so marketable why are they out-of-print in the first place?
Well the publisher's positions are not necessarily totally irrational. They are worried that if people have easy access to all these out-of-print books, they will purchase fewer new titles. Even though there isn't enough profit to be made by publishing many of these individual titles, the aggregate of all out-of-print books may capture enough "mindshare" to cut into the interest in books that are in print.
Now, I don't think this is a great argument. It basically relies on copyright and old-style inefficiencies to prop-up modern sales. It also makes many assumptions about people's purchasing behaviors. Frankly I'd rather copyright terms just be shorter, so that what Google is doing is unambiguously acceptable. But the publishers are "simply" trying to protect their profits. (The irrational part is that this isn't the best way to make money. Embracing new technologies and being consumer-friendly is, I believe, a more effective strategy.)
In a PET scan, the positrons are produced as a by-product of a nuclear decay. Basically a radioactive isotope is injected into the person, and this isotope decays over time, emitting positrons. The isotopes are usually generated on-site using a cyclotron. The number of positrons emitted during a PET scan is not so large (each blip on the detector is a single decay event), and a cyclotron is relatively expensive. Producing positrons in this way might be cheaper (per particle) than producing them in an accelerator. (Similar techniques are used as a scientific probe, e.g. positron annihilation spectroscopy.)
But quotes for the "free market cost of antimatter" are based on the fantastic costs of generating it in an accelerator. The reason being that radioactive decay is suitable for producing positrons that emit from a substance (in every direction), but is not a viable way of capturing said positrons and using them for anything else. An accelerator, instead, can generate anti-particles and capture them (e.g. using magnetic fields) and "keep" them somewhere (e.g. in a storage ring). Also worth noting is that accelerators can create not just positrons (anti-electrons) but also anti-protons, and even "true antimatter" such as anti-hydrogen (positrons + anti-protons), albeit for a very, very short time.
So depending what kind of antimatter you want, where you need it, and whether or not you need is stored, the price can vary. But all known methods for producing any sort of antimatter require significant input of effort and energy, and are correspondingly expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm. I wonder if we perhaps need to rethink the difference between communication and documentation. The current rule seems to be that in regulated industries, any electronic document is subject to documentation/retention requirements. However this comes from an old model, where documents were somehow "official". So things like face-to-face conversations, or telephone calls, were not required to be recorded and archived. But anything written on paper was supposed to be archived to create a paper-trail, and because these were the "official documents".
In a modern world, some electronic documents (PDFs, word processor documents, emails, etc.) have taken the place of "official paper documents", and other electronic communications (instant messaging, social networking sites, etc.) have taken the place of the less-formal communication modes. (Obviously phones and face-to-face conversations still exist, also.)
On the one hand, it seems like the more documentation we can retain in regulated industries, the better off we are. (In case of negligence or malfeasance, it makes it possible to assign blame, bring people to justice, avoid repeating mistakes, etc.) On the other hand, as long as we are allowing some communication modes to be informal or undocumented, then allowing other modes that are also undocumented doesn't seem to change much. (People who want to have secret conversations will surely find a way to do it.)
I'm not sure what the right answer is. But I'm not convinced that making all electronic modes of communication subject to the same level of recording/documentation/archiving really makes sense.
the gadgetry itself and the triviality it promotes is absorbing so much time and attention that we're ignoring other things that might be more important to our civic lives.
Do we have any evidence for that, though? Sure, gadgetry can be a time-sink. But the implication when one says something like "gadgets are diverting attention away from our civic lives" is that we would otherwise spend more time on our civic lives, if not for the gadgets. I'm not convinced this is true. If people didn't have gadgets and YouTube cat videos to divert their attention, would they focus on politics or would they instead watch more sports on TV? And if TV didn't exist, would they then spend most of their time in municipal town-hall debates, or would they instead spend the time at local baseball games?
It's gotten to the point where kids (in particular) aren't even coming up for air sometimes.
Again, the implication is that before we got to this point, kids were spending their times fruitfully on things of civic importance. I'm not convinced this is the case.
Gadgets, technology, knowledge, and pretty much anything else, can be used for good purposes (disseminating information, fruitful debate, etc.), for bad purposes (misinformation, hate speech, etc.), or for silly purposes (cat videos, TV shows, etc.). In all cases focusing on the technology itself, or even the deluge of information itself, is missing the point. Instead we need to find ways to encourage people to participate, to care about democracy, to think critically, and so on. And we need to accept that people will spend quite a bit of their time/effort/money on the "silly" category. (Which is fine, so long as they are spending some time on civic issues as well.)
Indeed. There are many fonts that have been around for a very long time and have no doubt fully recouped the design cost, yet are still quite expensive to license. Like other digital items (music, movies, etc.) fonts can be copied easily; but unlike entertainment, we don't need new fonts to be created so frequently (of course new fonts are needed, but the rate at which new ones are needed is fairly slow). Given the incredibly high ratio usage ratio in fonts, the per-use cost should be very, very small. And indeed many fonts are freely distributed or licensed so cheaply that they are just bundled up in other products. But other fonts (which didn't really require that much more effort) are incredibly expensive.
The status quo may be reasonable in the sense that people are paying how much fonts are worth to them. But it seems ineffective to me in the sense that fonts are only protected through government-enforced monopoly (copyright). Whereas a copyright of, say, 15 years on a book may be easy to justify, I find it hard to justify it for fonts. Probably even with only a 3-year protection period, fonts would still be produced in sufficient quantities (and with sufficient diversity) to satisfy all our needs. And overall, society could conceivably be much better off, since all the small players could use the great variety of fonts that exist. (Even taking into account that the variety might be slightly reduced because of the shorter protection period.)
My point is only that the "fonts are expensive to design" argument needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because fonts become so widely used. It seems to me that it would only require very small payments from all users (or a few medium-sized payments from big players who want immediate access to new fonts that other people are not using yet) to fully-fund font development.
Actually despite the fact that the summary and article talk about this as though it is an SSD technology, I think it is more likely to be implemented in a conventional spinning-disk hard drive first.
As I recently commented, the hard-drive industry is having a hard time shrinking the magnetic domains on conventional hard drive platters, which use a magnetic thin film. (You can make domains smaller, but they start interacting with one another and not maintaining their magnetization properly.) One proposed solution is to actually pattern disks with individual magnetic dots. The separated dots would interact less and should maintain magnetic orientation better.
There are challenges involved in tracking such small dots in a conventional hard drive, but those challenges are being addressed. In the short term it would be quite a bit easier to integrate a new magnetic-nano-dot technology with existing spinning-disc technology, rather than trying to invent a whole new read/write system. This would also help the nanodot technology be refined/matured. According to this press release, this new technique is a pulsed-laser-deposition technique that is compatible with conventional silicon wafers. In other words, it is compatible with existing chip-making processes, and so we can imagine a later stage where the magnetic dots are memory elements integrated directly into microchips (thus, SSD).
The problem is that the IR-to-visible conversion doesn't maintain directionality of the light. Normally a visible light photon hits the windshield, travels through it, and comes out the other end going in the same direction (well, slightly shifted due to refraction). But with this upconversion film, an IR photon would hit the film, and be converted into a visible-light photon... but that visible light photon will now be traveling in a totally different (effectively random) direction.
Since each "pixel" on your windshield would be hit by IR light coming from a variety of directions, you would in fact just see a total blur on the windshield.
Obviously it would be awesome to come up with a material that could convert the frequency of light without altering direction. In practice this is not easy to do. (Any kind of conversion is going to require a photon to be absorbed by the material, promoting to some high-energy state, and then the material will re-emit a photon of a different frequency. The problem is that the re-emission is basically isotropic.)
Organic Infrared Upconversion Device, Do Young Kim, Dong Woo Song, Neetu Chopra, Pieter De Somer, Franky So. Advanced Materials 2010, 22, p.1-4. DOI 10.1002/adma.200903312
The abstract is:
This is good development, to be sure... but I think TFA exaggerates by saying that the device can be so thin that it can be placed on a windshield. In order to be used for something like night-vision, you'll need some kind of lens/optics as well. This material will not maintain the directionality of light as it is converted (from IR to visible), so you can't just "look through" it and see a night-vision version of the world. But you could use a lens to focus an infrared image onto the film, and look at the visible-light emission from the film. Still, this technology should be able to help make night-vision systems smaller and cheaper.
It's also disappointing how media reports of new sci/tech developments insist on focusing on one possible application. It obscures the real potential. For instance, lighter/cheaper IR-to-vis conversion would not just be cool for night driving, but also for emergency workers, home security systems, scientific instruments (the journal article also lists "semiconductor wafer inspection"), optical computing, and so on...
Moreover they may have been working on it but stopped development at some point for a legitimate reason.
This legitimate reason may have been a technical one... or it may have been the realization that since they cannot control whether or not it will actually be accepted onto the iPhone platform, it's an unacceptable risk to put development effort into it. For instance, they put effort into a Google Voice application for the iPhone, only to have that effort wasted. Given this, it seems not at all unreasonable (and certainly not evil) to hold back further development of iPhone software.
It is 3D in the sense that it is a 2D image with topography (a height map). Basically they are using a very sharp (nano-sized) heated stylus to desorb ("burn") away nano-sized amounts of polymer. (This is basically a variant of "scanning probe" methods like atomic force microscopy.) By carefully positioning the probe in x-y you can draw a pattern, and by controlling the stylus height and burn time, you can control the depth. In this way you can create arbitrary topography at the nano-scale.
Many of the comments in this thread seem to be fixating on the uselessness of such a small map of the world. Making a world map was just a cute proof of principle (the paper also shows test patterns so that you can judge patterning fidelity). Basically this is a new way to pattern at the nanoscale in an fairly arbitrary way. Of course raster scanning a stylus is going to be very slow compared to optical lithography, but at this stage it's better to compare to something like e-beam lithography which is the raster-scanning of an electron beam. This is also slow, but can make very high-resolution patterns and is thus great for exploratory research and for creating the masters that are then used for optical lithography. This new nano-desorbing technique could be another way to make master patterns. In fact, the papers mention that the resolution and throughput are in fact comparable to e-beam methods. And this new technique has a couple of advantages:
1. The ability to not just pattern in 2D, but control the topography could reduce the number of patterning steps in microchip construction.
2. These mechanical 'scanning tips' can in principle be built into massive arrays, allowing parallel (high-throughput) patterning. In fact IBM has been working on a project called millipede for using these arrays of tips as a data storage device. (This most recent patterning work appears to be an offshoot, where instead of melting pits to store data, they are blasting away material to pattern.)
It's always difficult to predict whether these things will become real products one day, but the proof-of-principle for both tip arrays, and now for nano-scale patterning using heated tips, means that we're actually relatively close. If IBM pursues this, it could become a new nano-patterning method in the toolbox of the microelectronics industry (which is, of course, always looking for techniques that can push patterning to ever smaller scales).
For anyone interested (and with subscription access), here are the papers:
"Nanoscale 3D Patterning of Molecular Resists by Scanning Probes" by D. Pires, J. L. Hedrick, A. De Silva, J. Frommer, B. Gotsmann, H. Wolf, M. Despont, U. Duerig and A. W. Knoll was published by Science on the Science Express website on April 22, 2010, DOI: 10.1126/science.1187851
"Probe-based 3-D Nanolithography Using Self-Amplified Depolymerization Polymers" by A. Knoll, D. Pires, O. Coulembier, P. Dubois, J. L. Hedrick, J. Frommer and U. Duerig was published in Advanced Materials, advanced online publication on April 23, 2010, DOI: 10.1002/adma.200904386
I suppose some may argue that this calls into question the wisdom of Ubuntu's release schedule. On the one hand, having a rigid release schedule means that they are always scrambling to get everything in place on time. With testing times more constrained, more bugs may creep into the release.
On the other hand, the pressure of a schedule can get people fixing problems sooner than they would otherwise have. Ubuntu is under a time constraint, so they are asking for help with testing, and they are putting pressure on the xorg people. This show-stopping bug may very well be found and fixed sooner than it would have were it not for Ubuntu's aggressive release schedule. This comes back to the old "the perfect is the enemy of the good"--if you wait until all the bugs are fixed you'll never release anything.
Ubuntu has chosen to try to stick to their release schedule, and this occasionally requires some workarounds, mitigation of bugs, and rapid (hard!) work. I think overall it's good for Linux to have a mix of aggressively-scheduled distros (like Ubuntu) and more cautious distros (like Debian).
So instead of arguing over the definition, you should just step back and argue about the characteristics of the things itself. ("Regardless of whether this is technically censorship or not, let's discuss whether this action is a net positive or negative, whether it is immoral, and whether it should be illegal." "Regardless of whether this product is 'natural' or not, let's study whether it is a net positive or negative with respect to human health." Etc.)
In this case, I don't know exactly what ground he thinks he is defending by excluding video games from the "art" category. When he says things like:
I can only guess that he comparing all would-be art to some theoretical perfect art (Platonic ideal?) that any person would be immediately moved by. And by his reckoning, video games don't comes close enough to qualify. I disagree with his implication that we can all agree so objectively on what makes "good art" versus "bad art". I think it's quite obvious that video games have an impact on many people--oftentimes a real emotional impact or one that produces thought and reflection. Again, regardless of whether or not you are willing to call that "art" is of little importance to me: video games have cultural impact.
Barring truly revolutionary advances in silicon device fabrication, and(I'm not sufficiently up on my physics to know for sure) possibly a change in physics, sputtering a thin metallic film with the appropriate magnetic properties will always be cheaper, per square centimeter, than fabbing a complex integrated circuit. Further, it is quite likely that the smallest possible magnetic domains will continue to be smaller than the smallest possible flash cells, so you get more bits per square centimeter, and you pay less per square centimeter with the magnetic stuff.
Apparently sputtering of magnetic films is in fact approaching a limit. As the bit density increases, the magnetic domains in the film need to keep getting smaller. The smaller domains become more and more susceptible to being randomly flipped (thermally or due to interactions between neighboring magnetic domains). Currently the envisioned solution is to create small isolated magnetic domains: basically magnetic nano-islands on a non-magnetic platter. This presents a whole bunch of new problems (e.g. getting the read/write head to repeatably track to such small locations).
... but currently it looks like hard drives are going to become patterned in the future.
But this proposed 'bit patterned magnetic media' obviously increases the cost of HDD fabrication since you're no longer just sputtering a magnetic film; you have to pattern the disk platter (albeit with a relatively simple pattern compared to a microchip or even flash storage).
This barrier is "close enough" that HDD companies are seriously researching how to make bit-patterned drives. (Hitachi is the company that I know for sure is working on it; no doubt others are, too.) Of course it's always possible that someone makes a discovery in magnetic thin films that lets us keep using simple layers for hard drives platters... (It's always difficult to predict such things!)
If this happens, then it will close the gap, in a sense. With hard disks giving up one of their manufacturing advantages in order to push to greater bit densities, SSD will probably catch up and overtake.
The article fails on numerous levels.
1. It cross-compares two different rights issues: censorship and privacy (specifically contrasting Google's rhetoric against government censorship with their compliance to discovery requests under US law). It isn't necessarily inconsistent to argue against censorship but not worry about privacy.
2. Google's compliance with US legal discovery requests (under PATRIOT and other laws) is used to imply that Google advocates breaching privacy. The fact that Google complies with the law isn't evidence that they agree with the law. Indeed they specifically say (and have demonstrated, as far as I can tell) that they fight discovery requests and only deliver private data when the request is necessary/legitimate.
3. The article is also contrasting governmental policies (censorship, etc.) with policies of a private company (Google). The article states "We have far less power over Google." which is true in some sense (Google is not beholden to democracy directly... though it is controlled through laws and through consumer pressure/choice). But this "we have less power over Google" has to be counter-balanced with "Google has far less power over us". If the government mandates censorship, then every citizen and company is affected. If Google mandates censorship on its own, consumers will flock to other services. The difference is huge, and actions taken by government are far more scary because they are far further reaching.
4. Also, no evidence of Google breaching privacy is actually provided. Certainly no evidence that there is a systemic problem; merely that Google is acknowledging that they will comply with US law.
Really the article is just a weak attempt to set-up some a non-existent conflict between Google's open stance against censorship, and their grudging compliance with US discovery laws that could infringe on privacy. But the argument is laughably weak. I'm not trying to give Google a free pass here... but let's focus on the real issues and not trumped-up hypocrisy charges.
Agreed. I keep thinking I'm doing something fundamentally wrong... I can search for apps on my Droid but I can't find a website that lets me search through the apps or browse the app categories. Apparently there are roughly 30,000 Android apps, but if you click around the marketplace, you'll get a sense that there's maybe 50 or 80 apps out there. This is both a problem for Android users (who can't find what they want... doing it on the phone is okay but not as efficient) and for uptake (it makes the platform look amateurish).
On the flip side, though, I can't imagine a worse move than "hand over the entire management of the Android Market to carriers, OEMs and trusted publishers." The carriers would turn it into a painful nickel-and-dime opportunity (forget free apps!), and letting OEMs and publishers do whatever they want would make the Android platform even more fragmented. Google is (in theory) the right entity to mange the Android Market: they have a good reputation, they are really good at sorting and search, they know how to make a good web UI, etc. In fact, it's fundamentally surprising that they didn't put together a slick interface for the Android Market...
What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
I don't have a problem with patent-only companies. Or rather, I dislike patent-only companies and hate patent trolls, but that's only because of the issues I have with patents more generally. As long as patents exist and are legal, it makes perfect sense (and is completely legitimate) for companies to spring up that deal exclusively in patents. In the same way that since stocks exist, are legal, and are ascribed value, it makes perfect sense for companies to spring up that deal only in buying and selling stock, without "actually making" anything in particular. The law ascribes value to patents, so companies trading in that particular value are legitimate. In principle, secondary (non-research/non-manufacturing) companies purchasing patents is just a way that the patent system achieves its goal of incentivising invention: inventors are more likely to invent/patent when they know there is a market for their invention/patent.
So the question really becomes whether the legally-protected constructs (stocks, copyrights, patents, etc.) are really legitimate things in the first place. I think a pretty good case can be made for stocks being a good thing (within a regulated framework). I think patents are, currently, way out of control... but that's not the fault of patent-holding companies per se. Too much value is being put in to really weak patents. The law needs to tighten-up the definitions and grant far fewer patents. So let's keep up the pressure for patent reform... but direct that pressure towards the patent office and lawmakers. It's wasted effort to be mad at companies for doing what they will always do: making as much money as possible based on existing laws and regulation. (The ability of companies to actually change the law is a huge problem, mind you... but a discussion for another day.)
I have to agree. I'm a big believer in stem cell research, and think that it will play a crucial role in future life-saving medicine.
However, I also know researchers at the FDA, and these guys are not dumb. If they are cautious about approving a new procedure, it is usually because there is insufficient data to really declare it safe. In other words, more research is certainly needed before stem cell therapeutic techniques become widespread. Giving someone back their ability to walk is fantastic--but rather less so if we discover in 5 years of lethal side-effects.
TFA does link to a study published by the doctors offering these treatments. They describe that for the 227 patients studied, none had neoplastic complications. This is encouraging, but again I think more research is needed: first these kinds of results need to be double-checked by others, and secondly over longer timespans (the study in question only followed patients for ~1 year).
I use voice recognition all the time. Lots of people do. I use the voice-search on my Droid. You have to enunciate fairly clearly, but it's faster than typing. And when it's wrong, that's fine--you type it out instead. I also use Google Voice transcriptions. Are they perfectly correct? Heck no. They have tons of mistakes. But the transcription is accurate enough that one can glance it over and immediately know the general subject matter of the voicemail, which immediately tells you if you need to: (1) call the person back; (2) listen to the voicemail for more detail; or (3) ignore it. This is a huge time-saver. The transcription is also very good with numbers, which means that when people spell-out phone numbers for you to call, they show up correctly in Google Voice, and can even be clicked on to call! These features are useful.
My point is this: voice recognition doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. It's just like doing a Google search. Does it always return exactly the page you wanted? No. Are the results useful? Almost always. It's a shift in thinking, from "AI research is about creating truly thinking machines" to "let's make simply, faulty systems that give the right answer often enough that they are useful."
Things like modern search engines, voice transcription, spellcheck, predictive auto-complete, etc. are all examples of things that are inherently faulty, and yet extremely useful (as long as you're aware of their limitations).
I'd just like to echo this statement (I work in nanotech/materials science). There is undeniably a massive number of publications flowing from China. Much of it is high quality, but frankly it is drowned-out by a larger amount of uninteresting or trivial publications. In short, Chinese science funding is emphasizing quantity over quality. Thus they are making gains in the raw number of publications, but are not advancing the impact per publication at all.
It's a sad state of affairs, really... because those Chinese scientists who do solid work and publish worthwhile papers have their credibility reduced because of the larger number of sloppy papers published by other Chinese scientists.
If they truly want to be a driver of science and technology, and not just win a meaningless "# of pubs" game, they need to establish better priorities and better reward schemes. Of course this doesn't just apply to China: using publication count to measure productivity is tempting and is happening in many countries and funding agencies. This is why so many scientists are pushing for more emphasis on measuring impact, and not just raw output. (E.g. using things like h-index instead of publication count (yes, h-index has its own set of problems).)
One must also somewhat define what "free-thinking" means in this context. Consider:
1. Apple keeps their development process very secretive, so that they can release a product to much fanfare. (As compared to FOSS, where the entire process is usually open to scrutiny.) If you think about creative people like artists and musicians, many of them follow this exact same pattern: they toil in secrecy, not divulging any details of what they're working on, so that they can release a piece and shock/awe/inspire people. For some kinds of art, being aware of the creation process would disrupt enjoyment of the art itself. In this sense, the development style of Apple is very much inline with what many artists are accustomed to. Of course, some artists do not develop in secret... but within the "creative community" as a whole, this is at least a normal development mode.
2. One can then think about how tightly controlled the thing is after it is released to the public. Again it's worth noting that a great many of the creative professionals who use and evangelize Apple products are just as controlling about their products as Apple is. Many artists believe strongly in copyright, for instance, and want it to be expanded. They want control over their ideas and their products. They decry those who pervert their work by, e.g., sampling it. Again, not all artists are like this... but enough are like this that one cannot really claim that "creative people" are universally supportive of freely exchanging data/information/art...
3. "Free-thinking" as it relates to "different from the norm" or "thinking outside the box" is something that Apple does fairly well. They are willing and able to start their own trends. Of course, as others have pointing out, this isn't nearly as "non-conformist" as some seem to believe. Apple is not really breaking all conventional rules. Rather they are creating a new style/sub-culture. Similarly many "free-thinking" types are creative and come up with great ideas... but that doesn't mean that they truly buck all trends and social norms. Like everyone else, they try to find like-minded people and form a social group with them.
4. At the end of the day, most "free-thinkers" and "creative types" are just as pragmatic (and non-idealistic) as anyone else. They use Apple products because they like the functionality and image that go along with those products. Many of the best tools (hardware and software) work with Apple computers and on Mac OS X, so it's a natural choice to work with that platform, which of course perpetuates the justification for the next generation. I highly doubt that many of the users of Apple products spend much time wondering whether the company's ethos truly reflects their personal views on intellectual freedom.
Don't you need manual before you can go automatic
I think that's right. Many efforts at semantic "stuff" (on the web, on the desktop, ...) don't gain traction because of "chicken and egg" problems. No one wants to tag because it's useless; but it won't be useful until many things are tagged, so that a search returns useful results, and relationships between objects can be automatically discovered.
In this case, I agree that manual tagging is a necessary precursor to more automated tagging. Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible. For instance text and word processors should be doing word frequency analysis and tagging with appropriate topics; code editors should tag with the language name; image editors should be doing crude image analysis and tagging (e.g. if it detects people in the image, this information should be saved somewhere; if the user applies red-eye correction, the location of the eyes/face should be recorded somewhere). Once this meta-data becomes more common, it's easy to see the utility. (e.g. Search: "A picture I edited last week that has three people in it...")
Even with manual tagging, the system can be fairly useful. You don't need to tag every single file for it to be useful: if you tag some group of files as "taxes 2009" then you'll be able to later find them, even if you haven't tagged much else. The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context. For instance the tagging in Apple's iPhoto is neat--but I quickly lost interest because I knew none of the tags would carry-over elsewhere. If I tag meticulously, I can search within iPhoto but nothing shows up in a desktop search using spotlight (at least the last time I checked; maybe they've since added that functionality?)... and the tags don't persist if I move the files to another system. For the user to feel like tagging is worthwhile, the tags have to be widely accessible, so that searching for them is actually useful.
Yeah these numbers just don't add up. First off, I'm going to assume that this is a million dollars a year (or somesuch), otherwise it's ridiculous on the face of it. No high-profile web company is going to sign a perpetual contract like that. Now, the top 1,000 sites depend on internet traffic. No doubt their advertising budgets are more than a million dollars. Telling them that they can get one million dollars if they give up a huge chunk of their internet visibility is ridiculous. It's worth much more than that to them.
Conversely, this whole plan would cost 1 billion dollars to pull off. Sure, Microsoft could afford that, and would pay that much to destroy Google. But this is a poor plan. If Google no longer listed the top 1,000 sites (which is a big if, since many of those sites have no particular love of Microsoft...), then would Google crash and burn? Or would the sites currently ranked 1,0001-2000 suddenly see a huge upsurge in their traffic and profitability?
Lastly, how would this work on a technical level? Sure, you can configure your server to reject all requests from googlebot, preventing them from indexing sub-pages, but you can't technically (or legally) prevent Google from returning a link to "wsj.com" when someone searches for "Wall Street Journal". So any "de-indexing" wouldn't be complete.
This "plan" fails on so many levels. I'm sure Google is not too concerned about this. Any companies that participated would be signing their own death sentence: their web visibility would drop, public opinion of the company would drop, they might open themselves to legal attacks... and all for a "cool million".
there's no real ethical or legal excuse for pirating something, simply because you don't like the price of it.
Whether true or not, it misses the point. Yes, people can be cheap... but people are also prone to frivolously spending money. The iTunes Music Store does well because people don't worry about spending a few dollars here or there, as long as it's damn convenient.
The problem with the conventional solutions to piracy (DRM, lock-in, monitoring, lawsuits) are that they makes the product less convenient. Distribution mechanisms and tools that emphasize convenience (e.g. Hulu.com, DVRs) are seeing rapid growth. People are even willing to watch commercials, as long as they start their show at a time of their own choosing, pause when necessary, and so on (convenience!).
Again, whether or not copyright infringement is moral or not is almost tangential: the fact is that people are doing it and will continue doing so. So pragmatically what matters is how to achieve a new, useful balance. Everything I've seen suggests that people are actually fully willing to pay for entertainment (whether directly through cash or indirectly through advertising) as long as you make it so simple and convenient and enjoyable that it's simply not worth their effort to seek-out the copyright-infringing copies.
I also live in the affected area. I personally wasn't affected much since I bike to work. Actually I did notice the long lines of cars at all the lights. As a cyclist it was actually nice since the gridlock of cars slowly crawling onto the highway on-ramp is easier to navigate than the usual situation where cars don't stop for pedestrians or cyclists at the cross-walk.
In any case, my coworkers sure noticed. Some of them said that their commute yesterday went from 30 minutes to 3 hours. Similarly getting into work this morning took people longer than usual.
So it's certainly having an impact. But, life goes on.
the Wall Street Journal's readership is actually going UP while their competitors are losing money right and left
According to this graph, the WSJ readership is flat (there was a surge a few years back because of online subscriptions, but that seems to be a redefinition of "circulation" as much as anything else). If that graph is correct, the WSJ is certainly doing better than the other newspapers (which are in free-fall), but their circulation doesn't seem to be going up.
It boggles my mind why Google scanning out-of-print books is kicking up a shit storm with book publishers though. I mean if the books are so marketable why are they out-of-print in the first place?
Well the publisher's positions are not necessarily totally irrational. They are worried that if people have easy access to all these out-of-print books, they will purchase fewer new titles. Even though there isn't enough profit to be made by publishing many of these individual titles, the aggregate of all out-of-print books may capture enough "mindshare" to cut into the interest in books that are in print.
Now, I don't think this is a great argument. It basically relies on copyright and old-style inefficiencies to prop-up modern sales. It also makes many assumptions about people's purchasing behaviors. Frankly I'd rather copyright terms just be shorter, so that what Google is doing is unambiguously acceptable. But the publishers are "simply" trying to protect their profits. (The irrational part is that this isn't the best way to make money. Embracing new technologies and being consumer-friendly is, I believe, a more effective strategy.)
In a PET scan, the positrons are produced as a by-product of a nuclear decay. Basically a radioactive isotope is injected into the person, and this isotope decays over time, emitting positrons. The isotopes are usually generated on-site using a cyclotron. The number of positrons emitted during a PET scan is not so large (each blip on the detector is a single decay event), and a cyclotron is relatively expensive. Producing positrons in this way might be cheaper (per particle) than producing them in an accelerator. (Similar techniques are used as a scientific probe, e.g. positron annihilation spectroscopy.)
But quotes for the "free market cost of antimatter" are based on the fantastic costs of generating it in an accelerator. The reason being that radioactive decay is suitable for producing positrons that emit from a substance (in every direction), but is not a viable way of capturing said positrons and using them for anything else. An accelerator, instead, can generate anti-particles and capture them (e.g. using magnetic fields) and "keep" them somewhere (e.g. in a storage ring). Also worth noting is that accelerators can create not just positrons (anti-electrons) but also anti-protons, and even "true antimatter" such as anti-hydrogen (positrons + anti-protons), albeit for a very, very short time.
So depending what kind of antimatter you want, where you need it, and whether or not you need is stored, the price can vary. But all known methods for producing any sort of antimatter require significant input of effort and energy, and are correspondingly expensive.