CBS... has threatened to stop all HDTV broadcasts unless the broadcast flag is approved.
Wouldn't it be nice if:
"FCC, acting today in response to extortionist threats from the CBS network, decreed that all CBS affiliate broadcast licenses would be suspension in 30 days unless all programming was available in the new, mandated, HDTV format. The suspension will last until all programming is digitally available."
Now, I'm not sure that it completely flies, however. Are robots truly functional for all of agriculture? Are they as efficient as humans, or do you get waste from product that isn't picked...or bad product that's tossed in with the good.
Beyond that, while the energy savings argument seems to work for agriculture (less energy used to pick a crop with robots than with humans) I'm pretty sure you don't get a net energy savings from retailbots. And either way, the proposal from the original article is o sustain the human population + the robot population. The human population becomes, in the end, less energy effective because it produces no energy, just consumes.
My end point remains the same. To become more efficient we may or may not need more robots...but we certainly need less humans.
It seems to me that the big limitations of the proposed workless economy is it's energy sources.
Can agriculture really be made laborless? How many people can you feed with robot farms? Or do we have two classes of people, berrypickers and artists?
And what about raw energy generation? We're already at the end of our rope with oil. How do you run 6 billion robots to serve 6 billion people? Somebody got a fusion plant handy? Cause I don't. And at what point to the environmental impacts of even fusion kick in? How much waste heat can the biosphere absorb?
The only way I can see a robot economy beginning to work is in the way Asimov envisioned so many years ago. In a world with 20,000 total human population, everyone can live like a king. In a world with 1 million total human population, everyone is a prince. In a world with 6 billion (8 billion...10 billion....12 billion) total population, everyone is a serf.
.
.
....as a totally unrelated aside, I'd like to see an analysis of the income distribution numbers that normalizes for population growth. Does the upward trend of income distribution simply mean that there are more people to be poor? Does the fact that the US uses such a high % of the world's resources per population just describe the fact that india can't seem to stop making more and more people to live on the sidewalk?
Hey beavis. It's like funny and stuff when countries have wierd power problems and stuff after american corporate interests try and cripple their economies by instituting a lock-out, calling it a strike, and trying to overthrow their democratically elected president.
The question suffers from a lack of definition. What source of video is being used (CATV|DirectTV|Broadcast Satelite Feed)? What quality are we looking for (D1|DV|320x240)? How much programming is being recorded (24/7 per channel|Selected scheduled programs)? What is the destination for the recorded media (Direct View|Streaming|DVD Archive|MPEG-4 Sharing)?
The solutions would result from the answers to these questions. Sony makes an excellent line of MPEG video servers for broadcast environments. It costs big bucks, but you can put together a video capture/agregation/distribution setup worthy of a DBS broadcaster that way. That's the high road.
Middle of the road, and for the poorer video sources (DirectTV and CATV) would probably be best served by a half-rack of 1U systems with MPEG-2 or -4 capture cards. I would avoid using 4 cards per system becaue the cost/density/stability equation doesn't work. Why get raid or extra hdd controllers to make a system work when you can have a nice stable single-stream system? And no worries about PCI bandwidth/latency/conficts. Depending on output format you can have the systems encode directly or share to a separate encoder / dvd mastering system. Also, consider using professional pre-filtering hardware to reduce noise and improve video quality before the capture/encoding phase in order to reduce the load on general purpose processors that have trouble handling the full datarates of video in real time.
If your goal is just to get it done and do it cheap (and your goal isn't 24/7 or real-time streaming) I would suggest that a stack of DirectTivos would be the best bet. At $500 for 2 simultaneous recordings, I doubt you'll beat the price point, stability, and program guide availability, and using a control box and some scripting with available TivoWeb and mpeg offloading utilities, you'll get good results without having to do all the engineering yourself.
That's just a couple of ways to do it. Probably as many routes as there are users of such systems. And we haven't even scratched the thorny stuff like de-interlacing, multi-system (PAL/SECAM), HDTV and HDCP!
It looks like the archos only is intended to record songs off the radio. What if I want hour-long programs? Can it handle that, or does it time out. What about scheduling? I don't want to babysit my radio-tivo. And bummer about the FM-only reciever.
Are there good ways to make your own hydrogen? Can one use renewable energy sources to cheaply create and store hydrogen for later use in a generator such as this?
Firefly was rumored to be up for a cutting even before they aired an episode. Fox has provided no support for the show since initially buying it and has it buried on friday night where they are unlikely to get ratings for a sci-fi/joss whedon show anyway. Haven't they heard? Young people like to go out on fridays.
Ah well. Add it to the stack of incredible shows that Fox has cancelled with little or no chance, despite the love of many viewers. I weep for Parker Lewis can't lose. The Adventures of Brisco County Junior is gone, and I still don't know what's going on with the Orbs. Guess that show wasn't The Coming Thing. Space: Above and Beyond was a show I avoided it because I didn't trust Fox to keep a show I liked on the air....but when a friend made me watch a tape full of it, I was a convert. Fox announced the cancellation the next week. Anybody remember Adrian Pasdar as Jim Profit? Profit was replaced by re-runs of When Animals Attack with four more episodes ready to run. You can buy the whole set from Amazon France (but not here in the U.S.). I'm sure there are more worthy examples....Fox rarely lets worthwhile programming last. X-Files and Simpsons. Everything else gets the hook.
And now Firefly. A show from a guy who makes nothing but gold....but Fox can't wait for word of mouth to spread, let alone give the show a time slot that works. One of these days we'll all learn our lesson and stop tuning in.
Yes, we do....By having preventative means such as this, we protect intellectual property. Prior restraint is not a method for protecting property. Prior restraint is an authoritarian measure to keep people down. You're the type that believes that we shouldn't allow people outside after dark, because they might commit crimes. What are you defending here?
Who's the convicted felon, again? Admiral John Poindexter. Try and keep up.
Further, you aren't providing any argument that indicates such a database wouldn't help protect people. You may think its a fair assumption, but no trained thinker would agree. Your argument is that I haven't presented a proof. Since I didn't claim to, you're poking at the air. Thanks for writing, though.
So I'm not clear, are you saying that the FBI should be unable to seize evidence in a criminal investigation of theft? I'm saying that deliberate theft of equipment that was unrelated to the investigation and that, under our legal regime is used for the PROFIT of the law enforcment agency involved, whether there is a conviction or not, is wrong. They took the VCR! And were thinking of taking the guy's X-Box.
Wake up, just because a big company complains, doesn't mean they're being immoral. In fact, the perpetrators here were being immoral, if not outright criminal. Although in this case it was clearly so. But let's not get the facts involved.
Habeas Corpus wasn't violated for a single person. No one (literally zero individuals) have reported that they were held for any innapropriate amount of time.....despite there being no evidence. How many people were arrested? How long were they detained? What are their names? Our government withholding all information about legal proceedings is a violation of the basic principals of american law. Please. Defend it some more.
Now as to the targets of the CIA: they're not American citizens! Again, try and keep up. An AMERICAN CITIZEN was killed by the CIA using a rocket launched from an unmanned drone. Without due process. (Not to mention that the constitution has typically been interpreted to apply to the actions of the government whether the government is acting towards citiziens or non-citizens. Morality is a constant, not just something we apply towards the 'good guys')
Bush wasn't elected by fraud at all. I wish I could wear the rose-colored glasses too, but I keep informed instead. Here's some links about the last two elections. If you care to look, you'll find the fraud. http://www.gregpalast.com/ http://www.tal ion.com/election-mistakes.html
Grow up buddy, Done. Real adults pay attention to the world. stop whining about things that didn't happen, Done. Now will you stop defending the injustices that do happen? Or do you need it all to go away so you can sleep at night? and start working towards fixing these massive problems you find with the world Wouldn't it be nice if we all would. Then we wouldn't have to worry about being arrested without cause, our property stolen, our voice silenced, our friends blown up with rockets, and our future compromised by the devaluation of our involvement in the political process.
Plenty of ways of campaigning against it: Our target is a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.
But thanks for the positive comment. I think it's funny that I got modded one, but a shorter post is currently 5-insightful with the same content. Oh well.
We have laws in this country which allow prior restraint of publication for materials which a company claims it has a copyright for. The government is building a database of information about you, run by a convicted felon, in order to protect your "safety". The FBI confiscates the computers of your neighbors when the cable company accuses them of service theft. Habeas Corpus is suspended for U.S. citizens who are accused of 'terrorism', while the C.I.A. uses unmanned drones firing missiles to assassinate 'terrorists' that have been tried in no court of law. The country is run by a man who was elected purely by fraud, and the news media doesn't bother to report that in the 2002 elections (this month!) more than 100,000 legal ballots weren't counted in Florida (again!).
So, erm, yah. Farscape Rocks! It shouldn't be canceled. I love the cute girls in tight outfits and funny muppets. And Crichton is so funny when he quotes pop culture while talking to the imaginary gimp in his head. LETS MARCH THROUGH THE STREETS! We need Farscape back on air more than anything else. It is the most important thing ever.
Ok. so we have a picture, which we then sign with a certificate of some sort. So far, so good. You can verify the picture.
But what do we do next? We corrupt our picture with the signature, tossing it's bits into the picture as noise, and degrading the picure for all the people who open it. Except for the chosen few who have the (proprietary? patented? expensive?) program which chan detect the signiture, read it, and (WOO HOO!) XOR it out of the picture.
This is not an exciting improvement over "gpg -s".
Hoorah. I totally agree. I remember using the media that CAME WITH THE DRIVE, burning it once, reloading it in the very same drive, and being unable to read it. I just use CD-Rs too.
From a few other posts here, it looks like you can Alt-Tab out of the game without crashing out. If this is true, I have a list of Windows-only gamers as long as my arm who will switch to linux in a heartbeat. Sitting in MMOs for hours without the ability to check your IMs, email, or edonkey status....it's torture. And logging out is not an option. If wine is a solution to the Alt-Tab "bug" in all the MMOs, we could find a serious 'switch' campaign topic.
Just keep those pesky imperial units away from the project
You probably meant to keep these imperial units away from the probe device. But perhaps it would be just as well to keep these imperial units away too.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. I liked them all too. It makes me sad that so many are consumed with hate.
I love living in the Future!
Can you imagine hearing in 1996 that Yahoo! was too conservative of a business culture?
CBS ... has threatened to stop all HDTV broadcasts unless the broadcast flag is approved.
Wouldn't it be nice if:
"FCC, acting today in response to extortionist threats from the CBS network, decreed that all CBS affiliate broadcast licenses would be suspension in 30 days unless all programming was available in the new, mandated, HDTV format. The suspension will last until all programming is digitally available."
Oh well. If only the government were ours.
mod this down. this is not true. the disks merely don't have an iso filesystem....don't fall for the rumors.
A good response. Thank you.
Now, I'm not sure that it completely flies, however. Are robots truly functional for all of agriculture? Are they as efficient as humans, or do you get waste from product that isn't picked...or bad product that's tossed in with the good.
Beyond that, while the energy savings argument seems to work for agriculture (less energy used to pick a crop with robots than with humans) I'm pretty sure you don't get a net energy savings from retailbots. And either way, the proposal from the original article is o sustain the human population + the robot population. The human population becomes, in the end, less energy effective because it produces no energy, just consumes.
My end point remains the same. To become more efficient we may or may not need more robots...but we certainly need less humans.
It seems to me that the big limitations of the proposed workless economy is it's energy sources.
....as a totally unrelated aside, I'd like to see an analysis of the income distribution numbers that normalizes for population growth. Does the upward trend of income distribution simply mean that there are more people to be poor? Does the fact that the US uses such a high % of the world's resources per population just describe the fact that india can't seem to stop making more and more people to live on the sidewalk?
Can agriculture really be made laborless? How many people can you feed with robot farms? Or do we have two classes of people, berrypickers and artists?
And what about raw energy generation? We're already at the end of our rope with oil. How do you run 6 billion robots to serve 6 billion people? Somebody got a fusion plant handy? Cause I don't. And at what point to the environmental impacts of even fusion kick in? How much waste heat can the biosphere absorb?
The only way I can see a robot economy beginning to work is in the way Asimov envisioned so many years ago. In a world with 20,000 total human population, everyone can live like a king. In a world with 1 million total human population, everyone is a prince. In a world with 6 billion (8 billion...10 billion....12 billion) total population, everyone is a serf.
.
.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
it hasn't ended yet....but you can read the news on narconews.com looks like the Bush people are getting routed and chavez is going to maintain power.
Hey beavis. It's like funny and stuff when countries have wierd power problems and stuff after american corporate interests try and cripple their economies by instituting a lock-out, calling it a strike, and trying to overthrow their democratically elected president.
Don't those stoopid assmunches know that they are supposed to have the business candidate swept into office by keeping the ethnic minorities out of the polls?
We've gotta shush this now before it's too late. If Bill Gates hears about it he'll spend billions to run just so he can keep up.
The question suffers from a lack of definition. What source of video is being used (CATV|DirectTV|Broadcast Satelite Feed)? What quality are we looking for (D1|DV|320x240)? How much programming is being recorded (24/7 per channel|Selected scheduled programs)? What is the destination for the recorded media (Direct View|Streaming|DVD Archive|MPEG-4 Sharing)?
The solutions would result from the answers to these questions. Sony makes an excellent line of MPEG video servers for broadcast environments. It costs big bucks, but you can put together a video capture/agregation/distribution setup worthy of a DBS broadcaster that way. That's the high road.
Middle of the road, and for the poorer video sources (DirectTV and CATV) would probably be best served by a half-rack of 1U systems with MPEG-2 or -4 capture cards. I would avoid using 4 cards per system becaue the cost/density/stability equation doesn't work. Why get raid or extra hdd controllers to make a system work when you can have a nice stable single-stream system? And no worries about PCI bandwidth/latency/conficts. Depending on output format you can have the systems encode directly or share to a separate encoder / dvd mastering system. Also, consider using professional pre-filtering hardware to reduce noise and improve video quality before the capture/encoding phase in order to reduce the load on general purpose processors that have trouble handling the full datarates of video in real time.
If your goal is just to get it done and do it cheap (and your goal isn't 24/7 or real-time streaming) I would suggest that a stack of DirectTivos would be the best bet. At $500 for 2 simultaneous recordings, I doubt you'll beat the price point, stability, and program guide availability, and using a control box and some scripting with available TivoWeb and mpeg offloading utilities, you'll get good results without having to do all the engineering yourself.
That's just a couple of ways to do it. Probably as many routes as there are users of such systems. And we haven't even scratched the thorny stuff like de-interlacing, multi-system (PAL/SECAM), HDTV and HDCP!
It looks like the archos only is intended to record songs off the radio. What if I want hour-long programs? Can it handle that, or does it time out. What about scheduling? I don't want to babysit my radio-tivo. And bummer about the FM-only reciever.
The only possible appropriate punishment for crackers is being kicked out of bed.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Sorry. But really.
Are there good ways to make your own hydrogen? Can one use renewable energy sources to cheaply create and store hydrogen for later use in a generator such as this?
Firefly was rumored to be up for a cutting even before they aired an episode. Fox has provided no support for the show since initially buying it and has it buried on friday night where they are unlikely to get ratings for a sci-fi/joss whedon show anyway. Haven't they heard? Young people like to go out on fridays.
Ah well. Add it to the stack of incredible shows that Fox has cancelled with little or no chance, despite the love of many viewers. I weep for Parker Lewis can't lose. The Adventures of Brisco County Junior is gone, and I still don't know what's going on with the Orbs. Guess that show wasn't The Coming Thing. Space: Above and Beyond was a show I avoided it because I didn't trust Fox to keep a show I liked on the air....but when a friend made me watch a tape full of it, I was a convert. Fox announced the cancellation the next week. Anybody remember Adrian Pasdar as Jim Profit? Profit was replaced by re-runs of When Animals Attack with four more episodes ready to run. You can buy the whole set from Amazon France (but not here in the U.S.). I'm sure there are more worthy examples....Fox rarely lets worthwhile programming last. X-Files and Simpsons. Everything else gets the hook.
And now Firefly. A show from a guy who makes nothing but gold....but Fox can't wait for word of mouth to spread, let alone give the show a time slot that works. One of these days we'll all learn our lesson and stop tuning in.
You're an idiot. But for the record...
l ion.com/election-mistakes.html
Yes, we do....By having preventative means such as this, we protect intellectual property.
Prior restraint is not a method for protecting property. Prior restraint is an authoritarian measure to keep people down. You're the type that believes that we shouldn't allow people outside after dark, because they might commit crimes. What are you defending here?
Who's the convicted felon, again?
Admiral John Poindexter. Try and keep up.
Further, you aren't providing any argument that indicates such a database wouldn't help protect people. You may think its a fair assumption, but no trained thinker would agree.
Your argument is that I haven't presented a proof. Since I didn't claim to, you're poking at the air. Thanks for writing, though.
So I'm not clear, are you saying that the FBI should be unable to seize evidence in a criminal investigation of theft?
I'm saying that deliberate theft of equipment that was unrelated to the investigation and that, under our legal regime is used for the PROFIT of the law enforcment agency involved, whether there is a conviction or not, is wrong. They took the VCR! And were thinking of taking the guy's X-Box.
Wake up, just because a big company complains, doesn't mean they're being immoral. In fact, the perpetrators here were being immoral, if not outright criminal.
Although in this case it was clearly so. But let's not get the facts involved.
Habeas Corpus wasn't violated for a single person. No one (literally zero individuals) have reported that they were held for any innapropriate amount of time.....despite there being no evidence.
How many people were arrested? How long were they detained? What are their names? Our government withholding all information about legal proceedings is a violation of the basic principals of american law. Please. Defend it some more.
Now as to the targets of the CIA: they're not American citizens!
Again, try and keep up. An AMERICAN CITIZEN was killed by the CIA using a rocket launched from an unmanned drone. Without due process. (Not to mention that the constitution has typically been interpreted to apply to the actions of the government whether the government is acting towards citiziens or non-citizens. Morality is a constant, not just something we apply towards the 'good guys')
Bush wasn't elected by fraud at all.
I wish I could wear the rose-colored glasses too, but I keep informed instead. Here's some links about the last two elections. If you care to look, you'll find the fraud.
http://www.gregpalast.com/
http://www.ta
Grow up buddy,
Done. Real adults pay attention to the world.
stop whining about things that didn't happen,
Done. Now will you stop defending the injustices that do happen? Or do you need it all to go away so you can sleep at night?
and start working towards fixing these massive problems you find with the world
Wouldn't it be nice if we all would. Then we wouldn't have to worry about being arrested without cause, our property stolen, our voice silenced, our friends blown up with rockets, and our future compromised by the devaluation of our involvement in the political process.
Plenty of ways of campaigning against it: Our target is a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.
But thanks for the positive comment. I think it's funny that I got modded one, but a shorter post is currently 5-insightful with the same content. Oh well.
We have laws in this country which allow prior restraint of publication for materials which a company claims it has a copyright for. The government is building a database of information about you, run by a convicted felon, in order to protect your "safety". The FBI confiscates the computers of your neighbors when the cable company accuses them of service theft. Habeas Corpus is suspended for U.S. citizens who are accused of 'terrorism', while the C.I.A. uses unmanned drones firing missiles to assassinate 'terrorists' that have been tried in no court of law. The country is run by a man who was elected purely by fraud, and the news media doesn't bother to report that in the 2002 elections (this month!) more than 100,000 legal ballots weren't counted in Florida (again!).
So, erm, yah. Farscape Rocks! It shouldn't be canceled. I love the cute girls in tight outfits and funny muppets. And Crichton is so funny when he quotes pop culture while talking to the imaginary gimp in his head. LETS MARCH THROUGH THE STREETS! We need Farscape back on air more than anything else. It is the most important thing ever.
Make sure you point your network settings in windows to the new root server!
All of the BMG cds I've bought. And now I never will again. It's a wierd feeling of nostalgia.
Ok. so we have a picture, which we then sign with a certificate of some sort. So far, so good. You can verify the picture.
But what do we do next? We corrupt our picture with the signature, tossing it's bits into the picture as noise, and degrading the picure for all the people who open it. Except for the chosen few who have the (proprietary? patented? expensive?) program which chan detect the signiture, read it, and (WOO HOO!) XOR it out of the picture.
This is not an exciting improvement over "gpg -s".
Hoorah. I totally agree. I remember using the media that CAME WITH THE DRIVE, burning it once, reloading it in the very same drive, and being unable to read it. I just use CD-Rs too.
From a few other posts here, it looks like you can Alt-Tab out of the game without crashing out. If this is true, I have a list of Windows-only gamers as long as my arm who will switch to linux in a heartbeat. Sitting in MMOs for hours without the ability to check your IMs, email, or edonkey status....it's torture. And logging out is not an option. If wine is a solution to the Alt-Tab "bug" in all the MMOs, we could find a serious 'switch' campaign topic.
Just keep those pesky imperial units away from the project
You probably meant to keep these imperial units away from the probe device. But perhaps it would be just as well to keep these imperial units away too.