The RC plane one was good too though - since it kind of went with the music.
I haven't found a video of a heli competition where you had to sync with music (i've heard of it though - but far fewer people can do heli stunts in time to music than just do heli stunts alone ).
There certainly are some things a "3D" RC heli can do that would be harder for an RC plane to do.
Yeah, I found it strange so many people were so confident that Lamarckian style inheritance does not happen.
Yes the naive Lamarckian stuff doesn't happen. But to me it seems rather advantageous for a species that some sort of Lamarckian style inheritance could occur at least in some circumstances - randomized a bit so that there's just a "higher chance". You don't want to "guarantee" changes are passed down since the environment might change in the future, so randomizing it a bit across the offspring will be better.
e.g. time dd if=/dev/sda bs=131072 conv=noerror | lzop -c >/mnt/backupdrive/20081111-machine1-sda.img.lzo
(WARNING!!! Achtung!!! Do NOT typo the if=/dev/sda and make it of=/dev/sda there is a very big difference;) )
gzip might be fast enough on modern CPUs to give near max disk speeds. But I still only get about 33-35MB/sec with gzip on my core 2 duo for the first 1000 blocks of my drive (even cached!). lzop is much faster.
The conv=noerror is to tell dd to ignore read errors. If you are getting read errors, that's the time when you probably want to try to get as much data from the drive before it stops working, rather than try again from scratch and add the conv=noerror flag;).
bs=131072 gives me OK enough speeds. Figure out what works best for your system - may be different for RAID etc.
time is to help you figure out if something fishy happened - e.g. it finished a bit too quickly;).
Nvidia has a monopoly only in the sense that people would rather pay more $$$ per performance for Nvidia rather than put up with ATI.
But that's not a monopoly, that's just ATI being crap - if ATI was much better or Nvidia started becoming worse, Nvidia would rapidly lose market share.
Games and apps in theory can run on both ATI cards and Nvidia cards. In practice you might have driver problems, but that's not a "market stranglehold" problem.
At most it is closer to an oligopoly of ATI and Nvidia for discrete cards.
Look at the video games, they keep trying to add flaws and blemishes everywhere to make it look real.
In X years they won't be able to compete with perfect skin from virtual actors. So why bother?
Given the porn market has people going for strange stuff, I'm sure there would be a fair number who would actually prefer their porn stars to have a tiny bit of hair stubble, slight blemishes etc.
For the "perfect" stuff, they'll probably still have jobs providing original motion capture stuff.
You can have a virtual actor sit still and look pretty, but I think it'll be a while before a computer can figure out how to make it "move sexy" even "move humanly" seems hard - they often just use motion capture.
I believe humans have age old instincts in rapidly distinguishing from "moving healthily" to "moving not so healthily", and so on. Maybe in a decade or so the research will be done, and a product actually made. Even then I think they might have jobs just for voice overs - and voices are important.
And not least Brand names are important.
Looking at Hollywood movies and you can see some actors who just look pretty and are good candidates for replacement by virtual actors...
Upcoming actors of that sort who aren't already established Brandnames are the ones who should worry.
The only reason why nvidia has better market share is because ATI was crappier than nvidia.
They only recently got somewhere with their 4xxx series. However I _still_ see more complaints about their drivers - even the recent ones, compared to nvidia's.
I sometimes look at programming as a form of Compression. In this case it's decision/rule/logic compression.
You can express any program with an infinite list of "IF THEN"s, but that's not very useful (and way too much typing).
So that's where programming languages come in. Not all compression algorithms are great for all sorts of data and situations, similarly not all programming languages are good at all things. Of course there are some compression algorithms which are just plain crap:).
A language that's powerful for a certain field will have good defaults so that a programmer does not have to do as much work to compress the rules. Typical faxes will compress very well using the standard fax compression method.
While a lot of CS academics like languages that are powerful for the code you have to write (which is a good reason), do not be surprised when programmers in the real world pick languages that are powerful for the code they don't have to write (aka modules/libraries).
You can have a newfangled language which has better compression that other programming languages so that you only need 1000 lines to do X, but it still is not that attractive if you still have to write all 1000 lines yourself, in contrast to using a language which requires 2000 lines to do X, but you only have to write 500 of those lines yourself. Others have already written the other 1500 lines AND best of all have documented and are maintaining them:).
Marketing and positioning can be quite important in order to somehow convince enough people who like writing those 1500 lines to take up your new language.
You can't expect lazy crap programmers like me to write all that code:). We'd rather do stuff like:
use LWP;...
Or:
import pyrad.packet from pyrad.client import Client
Another problem with some languages favoured by CS academicians is they require very very smart people, and there are far fewer very very smart people than smart people (and far fewer smart people than stupid people).
At a certain point conciseness (compression level) isn't as significant compared to the other overheads.
So the ultrageniuses might not be much faster than the "merely smart" in writing the modules that the stupid people are likely to want to use, even if they use your superconcise language.
And if there are 10x more "merely smart" than ultrageniuses, no wonder the stupid people pick the less powerful language - there might be 3-5x more libraries that they'd want to use.
The ultrageniuses would be doing ultragenius stuff, so the modules they write might not be so useful for stupid people like me.
And that's why some crappy languages are so popular (but I could be wrong since I'm stupid).
That sort of resource sharing was pretty useful in the "village" days. Very limited resources, if not enough people were willing to work together, everyone was in big trouble.
If someone could work out a way to reduce the impact of assholes/crooks, it may well be that lot more people might be willing to share (lend) their massive trucks or other resources.
Currently there seems to be some progress in the "giving" of resources no longer used with stuff like: Freecycle- http://www.freecycle.org/
"It's damn too easy to get yourself into a road accident"
Actually that's where the real savings to the environment are. The "green" proponents don't usually mention it, since it kind of ruins their cunning plan;).
But if you have full blown AIDS, would your immune system be strong enough survive HIV and kill off a donor's marrow and its "alien" immune system at the same time?
Maybe your immune system would just get wiped out eventually and be replaced by the donor's immune system.
Quote AC: "It isn't so much a "power struggle" as a 10-year window to define a geological boundary in order to make an exclusive claim in the area, under international law. After that, the 200 nautical mile limit becomes the permanent boundary. Russia, Denmark (Greenland), and Norway have ratified the treaty, so they're in the running with Canada"
Ever see all the CA certs preinstalled in your browser? Count them.
1) Do you trust all of those CAs? Do you even really know who they are? 2) Have you bothered to remove the certs of CAs you have no good reason to trust? 3) For instance can you really trust Verisign/NS? They issue Microsoft certs to the wrong parties, hijack domains, lock domains just because you search for them.
Now, tell me how much worse is accepting a self signed cert compared to accepting a cert issued by those CAs.
I would prefer it if a browser gave me a warning if a cert changed, even if it's valid. After all it could be a "valid" CA issued cert to someone _claiming_ to be the FBI/CIA/NSA. Then later they go whoops sorry (but only if you ever notice).
A site having its cert changed from one CA to another to me is not so different in security terms from suddenly having a new self signed cert compared to an old self-signed cert.
Certs expiring after X years are just a good way for CAs to make money. If someone had enough access to a site's private key they already can do so much more, why bother with just tampering with your connections to that site. Yes in theory they might be able to crack your cert without cracking your server, but let's talk "real world".
If you really want security, browsers would be treating certs a bit differently. As it is, all a CA cert does is prevent one extra "annoying box" from appearing. There's no real added security.
Nobody cares who the CA is, how much verification they do, or what the browser people do before deciding to add a CA's certs in. Have they ever audited any of the CAs? How could they? Why would they?
Have the browser people already defined a certain level of badness for CAs, so that if they reach that level they get removed?
Believe me, most of the people involved in making browsers don't really care about security. They just talk about it. They have other higher priorities.
And most of the people using browsers don't care either. Nor do the CA bunch.
I personally regard self signed certs (and CA issued certs too) as usually safe - it's when they change for no good verifiable reason that you should worry. And it's in this very same scenario where you want your browser to also protect you from "strange" and "valid" CA signed certs. But AFAIK the browsers don't do that. Their "cert stuff" is not designed to protect you from that.
But they do help CAs make money and make people feel safe.
Fact is their https connections are actually quite safe. Their banks are probably more likely to go under, or screw up their transactions, or have some SQL injection/web app security problem than their https connections to their banks being subverted by some 3rd party. Why attack one user's https session when it's easier to do the whole bank, or mass install malware to get thousands of users bank usernames and passwords (and then use valid https sessions to transfer money;) )?
The world is a safer and at the same time more dangerous place than most people realize - most people have a distorted view of things. Same goes for me, but I think I've got a slightly less distorted view in this particular field than average. If you do have a clearer/better view, I'd be happy to know of it - but do provide good reasoning or evidence.
In my fantasy world, if you infringe on a trademark or plagiarize it involves deception - "bearing false witness".
That sort of thing has been considered wrong by humans for at least thousands of years.
Deceiving in order to profit, is legally considered fraud.
So even if you can copy Coca Cola's recipe, you can't call it Coca Cola. You could say it's the same recipe as Coca Cola's but you can't say it _is_ Coca Cola- because that would be lying.
As for patents, I don't see how they benefit society as a whole. The fact that big companies have started to pool their resources to fight patent trolls and submarine patents, should show you how bad things are. They have to protect themselves from companies that don't make anything at all, who just come up to them and say "You infringe" (often on something obvious) and then ask for money.
Fact is the more innovative an inventor you are the less likely you are to benefit from the current patent system, since people might only start to "get it" when the patents have long expired - example = Douglas Engelbart, way back in 1968 he and his team came up with a lot of things (of course they themselves were also inspired by others before them). You are decades ahead of everyone, even though you build it, they only come decades later (even though your work does make it easier for everyone to follow later).
If you want to reward inventiveness, perhaps there should be Prizes for Invention.
Basically inventors who want to participate - pay a registration fee and register their inventions, and every year or so X of the top inventions get a prize. You could have two super-classes of prizes - one class is awarded by so called "experts in the field" and one by votes from the public - much like those Book prizes - one type is by critics and the other type is by readers.
Prizes could be awarded 20 years later to an invention that people finally realize is useful (or actually finally noticed that it was actually invented decades ago).
It's usually easier to figure out that something was good idea in hindsight. The current situation has a bunch of nonexperts rubberstamping stuff as innovative as "cracking eggs to make an ommelette".
Vague invention claims should be disqualified. The claims must be as specific and detailed as reasonable.
With my proposal, you are more likely to win an "Invention for the Public" prize if lots more people are aware of your invention (especially if they actually benefit from it) - so with my proposal it does not benefit you to sit on your invention for 10 years and then go to a company and ask them for $$$. The more your inventions are used and the more useful they are, the more likely they are to win a prize.
In my fantasy world using someone's invention is not illegal, reinventing is not illegal, what would be illegal is claiming you invented something first when you didn't.
Lastly in copyright terms in my fantasy world if they exist at all, will get shorter and shorter as the years go by, to encourage creativity and to keep in line with improvements in technology and distribution.
It makes no sense to me that copyright terms should be getting longer and longer, when they say the pace of innovation etc is supposed to be increasing, and distribution and marketing is supposed to be more efficient and effective.
Any Creator that needs decades of copyright protection in order to earn a living from his "Creation" is not good at it, and should be getting a different job. It is bad economics for him to be trying to earn a living at that. Just do it as a hobby or something.
If we ever want virtual telepathy and augmented memory (photo/videographic memory), copyright will hobble such technologies. A penny for your thoughts? I think they'll be asking for 0.99 and no they aren't "your memories", you are just renting "IP". Go figure how well virtual telepathy and augmented memory will work with DRM everywhere.
Already humans and animals can control stuff with t
You're either trolling or you are one of those clueless people who have no idea how much lower the cost of living is in poorer countries and so keep believing your jobs are going overseas because of child labour.
Normal labour doesn't even cost that much in China.
Even with a brain dead CD installation method I'm sure you can install Linux on more than 10 computers in one day. Low cost labour in China doesn't cost USD50/day.
A decent ready-made meal probably only costs USD1.
Yes most chinese workers can't afford two SUVs/trucks, a big house with a TV in each room (and the heating/cooling bill), a big slab of meat for every meal. But perhaps with the current energy infrastructure, maybe the world can't afford it either.
If I can get paid USD5 per PC install of Linux, bring em on, I'd easily do 100 a day, and still have lots of time to nap, post on Slashdot, play games etc.
May not be a lot of money for you, but it's good money where I am.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the stick movements required:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3nNiUStTE0&feature=related
The RC plane one was good too though - since it kind of went with the music.
I haven't found a video of a heli competition where you had to sync with music (i've heard of it though - but far fewer people can do heli stunts in time to music than just do heli stunts alone ).
There certainly are some things a "3D" RC heli can do that would be harder for an RC plane to do.
Yeah, I found it strange so many people were so confident that Lamarckian style inheritance does not happen.
Yes the naive Lamarckian stuff doesn't happen. But to me it seems rather advantageous for a species that some sort of Lamarckian style inheritance could occur at least in some circumstances - randomized a bit so that there's just a "higher chance". You don't want to "guarantee" changes are passed down since the environment might change in the future, so randomizing it a bit across the offspring will be better.
To me it's better to learn from other people's mistakes.
There isn't enough time to make all of them yourself.
Plus it's often a pain and some mistakes do impose significant constraints (the scope of future mistakes is rather limited if you die).
Actually if I were "Google's Finance Dept" that's how I'd be making some money :).
;).
You can figure out what stocks to buy before too many others buy it. And what to sell.
Of course that might not be considered as a "don't be evil" tactic.
I'm pretty sure the flu stuff works, just as I'm pretty sure it's possible for Google to make money from "investing wisely"
Sorry!
Should be conv=noerror,sync
I used to use knoppix + dd + lzop
/mnt/backupdrive/20081111-machine1-sda.img.lzo
;) )
;).
;).
e.g.
time dd if=/dev/sda bs=131072 conv=noerror | lzop -c >
(WARNING!!! Achtung!!! Do NOT typo the if=/dev/sda and make it of=/dev/sda there is a very big difference
gzip might be fast enough on modern CPUs to give near max disk speeds.
But I still only get about 33-35MB/sec with gzip on my core 2 duo for the first 1000 blocks of my drive (even cached!). lzop is much faster.
The conv=noerror is to tell dd to ignore read errors. If you are getting read errors, that's the time when you probably want to try to get as much data from the drive before it stops working, rather than try again from scratch and add the conv=noerror flag
bs=131072 gives me OK enough speeds. Figure out what works best for your system - may be different for RAID etc.
time is to help you figure out if something fishy happened - e.g. it finished a bit too quickly
Huge majority share does not mean monopoly.
Nvidia has a monopoly only in the sense that people would rather pay more $$$ per performance for Nvidia rather than put up with ATI.
But that's not a monopoly, that's just ATI being crap - if ATI was much better or Nvidia started becoming worse, Nvidia would rapidly lose market share.
Games and apps in theory can run on both ATI cards and Nvidia cards. In practice you might have driver problems, but that's not a "market stranglehold" problem.
At most it is closer to an oligopoly of ATI and Nvidia for discrete cards.
Maybe they should allow a moderator to sacrifice 5 mod points to take a -1 post to -2.
And have it take only 3 mod points to bring it from -2 to -1.
But doesn't that give them more realism?
Look at the video games, they keep trying to add flaws and blemishes everywhere to make it look real.
In X years they won't be able to compete with perfect skin from virtual actors. So why bother?
Given the porn market has people going for strange stuff, I'm sure there would be a fair number who would actually prefer their porn stars to have a tiny bit of hair stubble, slight blemishes etc.
For the "perfect" stuff, they'll probably still have jobs providing original motion capture stuff.
You can have a virtual actor sit still and look pretty, but I think it'll be a while before a computer can figure out how to make it "move sexy" even "move humanly" seems hard - they often just use motion capture.
I believe humans have age old instincts in rapidly distinguishing from "moving healthily" to "moving not so healthily", and so on. Maybe in a decade or so the research will be done, and a product actually made. Even then I think they might have jobs just for voice overs - and voices are important.
And not least Brand names are important.
Looking at Hollywood movies and you can see some actors who just look pretty and are good candidates for replacement by virtual actors...
Upcoming actors of that sort who aren't already established Brandnames are the ones who should worry.
Uh what monopoly does nvidia have?
The only reason why nvidia has better market share is because ATI was crappier than nvidia.
They only recently got somewhere with their 4xxx series. However I _still_ see more complaints about their drivers - even the recent ones, compared to nvidia's.
I sometimes look at programming as a form of Compression. In this case it's decision/rule/logic compression.
:).
:).
:). We'd rather do stuff like:
...
You can express any program with an infinite list of "IF THEN"s, but that's not very useful (and way too much typing).
So that's where programming languages come in. Not all compression algorithms are great for all sorts of data and situations, similarly not all programming languages are good at all things. Of course there are some compression algorithms which are just plain crap
A language that's powerful for a certain field will have good defaults so that a programmer does not have to do as much work to compress the rules. Typical faxes will compress very well using the standard fax compression method.
While a lot of CS academics like languages that are powerful for the code you have to write (which is a good reason), do not be surprised when programmers in the real world pick languages that are powerful for the code they don't have to write (aka modules/libraries).
You can have a newfangled language which has better compression that other programming languages so that you only need 1000 lines to do X, but it still is not that attractive if you still have to write all 1000 lines yourself, in contrast to using a language which requires 2000 lines to do X, but you only have to write 500 of those lines yourself. Others have already written the other 1500 lines AND best of all have documented and are maintaining them
Marketing and positioning can be quite important in order to somehow convince enough people who like writing those 1500 lines to take up your new language.
You can't expect lazy crap programmers like me to write all that code
use LWP;
Or:
import pyrad.packet
from pyrad.client import Client
Another problem with some languages favoured by CS academicians is they require very very smart people, and there are far fewer very very smart people than smart people (and far fewer smart people than stupid people).
At a certain point conciseness (compression level) isn't as significant compared to the other overheads.
So the ultrageniuses might not be much faster than the "merely smart" in writing the modules that the stupid people are likely to want to use, even if they use your superconcise language.
And if there are 10x more "merely smart" than ultrageniuses, no wonder the stupid people pick the less powerful language - there might be 3-5x more libraries that they'd want to use.
The ultrageniuses would be doing ultragenius stuff, so the modules they write might not be so useful for stupid people like me.
And that's why some crappy languages are so popular (but I could be wrong since I'm stupid).
How about Instant Messaging and facebook?
;)
Seems quite popular. Lots of people go about collecting friends/"friends".
Some of the AIs involved may even surprise you once in a while and say something coherent and intelligent.
Then there's also Slashdot.
O VRY?
That sort of resource sharing was pretty useful in the "village" days. Very limited resources, if not enough people were willing to work together, everyone was in big trouble.
If someone could work out a way to reduce the impact of assholes/crooks, it may well be that lot more people might be willing to share (lend) their massive trucks or other resources.
Currently there seems to be some progress in the "giving" of resources no longer used with stuff like: Freecycle- http://www.freecycle.org/
Lending seems a bit trickier.
"It's damn too easy to get yourself into a road accident"
;).
Actually that's where the real savings to the environment are. The "green" proponents don't usually mention it, since it kind of ruins their cunning plan
I'm sure you'll find other incurable sexually transmitted diseases. For example: Hepatitis B and C.
:).
So I recommend you:
a) use condoms
b) don't be promiscuous and pick a partner who isn't promiscuous
c) be abstinent
c) should be easy for most slashdotters
But if you have full blown AIDS, would your immune system be strong enough survive HIV and kill off a donor's marrow and its "alien" immune system at the same time?
Maybe your immune system would just get wiped out eventually and be replaced by the donor's immune system.
Shortage of time.
:).
And here I am wasting it on Slashdot
Nothing new - it's like any other traditional mining method.
Step #1: "That laptop is mine".
Step #2: ???
Step #3: Profit!
Seriously though - what is done to discarded laptops and other electronics is similar to mining.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/10/ewaste/
Quote AC: "It isn't so much a "power struggle" as a 10-year window to define a geological boundary in order to make an exclusive claim in the area, under international law. After that, the 200 nautical mile limit becomes the permanent boundary. Russia, Denmark (Greenland), and Norway have ratified the treaty, so they're in the running with Canada"
"Encryption without trust is bunk"
;) )?
Ever see all the CA certs preinstalled in your browser? Count them.
1) Do you trust all of those CAs? Do you even really know who they are?
2) Have you bothered to remove the certs of CAs you have no good reason to trust?
3) For instance can you really trust Verisign/NS? They issue Microsoft certs to the wrong parties, hijack domains, lock domains just because you search for them.
Now, tell me how much worse is accepting a self signed cert compared to accepting a cert issued by those CAs.
I would prefer it if a browser gave me a warning if a cert changed, even if it's valid. After all it could be a "valid" CA issued cert to someone _claiming_ to be the FBI/CIA/NSA. Then later they go whoops sorry (but only if you ever notice).
A site having its cert changed from one CA to another to me is not so different in security terms from suddenly having a new self signed cert compared to an old self-signed cert.
Certs expiring after X years are just a good way for CAs to make money. If someone had enough access to a site's private key they already can do so much more, why bother with just tampering with your connections to that site. Yes in theory they might be able to crack your cert without cracking your server, but let's talk "real world".
If you really want security, browsers would be treating certs a bit differently. As it is, all a CA cert does is prevent one extra "annoying box" from appearing. There's no real added security.
Nobody cares who the CA is, how much verification they do, or what the browser people do before deciding to add a CA's certs in. Have they ever audited any of the CAs? How could they? Why would they?
Have the browser people already defined a certain level of badness for CAs, so that if they reach that level they get removed?
Believe me, most of the people involved in making browsers don't really care about security. They just talk about it. They have other higher priorities.
And most of the people using browsers don't care either. Nor do the CA bunch.
I personally regard self signed certs (and CA issued certs too) as usually safe - it's when they change for no good verifiable reason that you should worry. And it's in this very same scenario where you want your browser to also protect you from "strange" and "valid" CA signed certs. But AFAIK the browsers don't do that. Their "cert stuff" is not designed to protect you from that.
But they do help CAs make money and make people feel safe.
Fact is their https connections are actually quite safe. Their banks are probably more likely to go under, or screw up their transactions, or have some SQL injection/web app security problem than their https connections to their banks being subverted by some 3rd party. Why attack one user's https session when it's easier to do the whole bank, or mass install malware to get thousands of users bank usernames and passwords (and then use valid https sessions to transfer money
The world is a safer and at the same time more dangerous place than most people realize - most people have a distorted view of things. Same goes for me, but I think I've got a slightly less distorted view in this particular field than average. If you do have a clearer/better view, I'd be happy to know of it - but do provide good reasoning or evidence.
It got firewire support instead of WiFi?
In my fantasy world, if you infringe on a trademark or plagiarize it involves deception - "bearing false witness".
That sort of thing has been considered wrong by humans for at least thousands of years.
Deceiving in order to profit, is legally considered fraud.
So even if you can copy Coca Cola's recipe, you can't call it Coca Cola. You could say it's the same recipe as Coca Cola's but you can't say it _is_ Coca Cola- because that would be lying.
As for patents, I don't see how they benefit society as a whole. The fact that big companies have started to pool their resources to fight patent trolls and submarine patents, should show you how bad things are. They have to protect themselves from companies that don't make anything at all, who just come up to them and say "You infringe" (often on something obvious) and then ask for money.
Fact is the more innovative an inventor you are the less likely you are to benefit from the current patent system, since people might only start to "get it" when the patents have long expired - example = Douglas Engelbart, way back in 1968 he and his team came up with a lot of things (of course they themselves were also inspired by others before them). You are decades ahead of everyone, even though you build it, they only come decades later (even though your work does make it easier for everyone to follow later).
If you want to reward inventiveness, perhaps there should be Prizes for Invention.
Basically inventors who want to participate - pay a registration fee and register their inventions, and every year or so X of the top inventions get a prize. You could have two super-classes of prizes - one class is awarded by so called "experts in the field" and one by votes from the public - much like those Book prizes - one type is by critics and the other type is by readers.
Prizes could be awarded 20 years later to an invention that people finally realize is useful (or actually finally noticed that it was actually invented decades ago).
It's usually easier to figure out that something was good idea in hindsight. The current situation has a bunch of nonexperts rubberstamping stuff as innovative as "cracking eggs to make an ommelette".
Vague invention claims should be disqualified. The claims must be as specific and detailed as reasonable.
With my proposal, you are more likely to win an "Invention for the Public" prize if lots more people are aware of your invention (especially if they actually benefit from it) - so with my proposal it does not benefit you to sit on your invention for 10 years and then go to a company and ask them for $$$. The more your inventions are used and the more useful they are, the more likely they are to win a prize.
In my fantasy world using someone's invention is not illegal, reinventing is not illegal, what would be illegal is claiming you invented something first when you didn't.
Lastly in copyright terms in my fantasy world if they exist at all, will get shorter and shorter as the years go by, to encourage creativity and to keep in line with improvements in technology and distribution.
It makes no sense to me that copyright terms should be getting longer and longer, when they say the pace of innovation etc is supposed to be increasing, and distribution and marketing is supposed to be more efficient and effective.
Any Creator that needs decades of copyright protection in order to earn a living from his "Creation" is not good at it, and should be getting a different job. It is bad economics for him to be trying to earn a living at that. Just do it as a hobby or something.
If we ever want virtual telepathy and augmented memory (photo/videographic memory), copyright will hobble such technologies. A penny for your thoughts? I think they'll be asking for 0.99 and no they aren't "your memories", you are just renting "IP". Go figure how well virtual telepathy and augmented memory will work with DRM everywhere.
Already humans and animals can control stuff with t
You're either trolling or you are one of those clueless people who have no idea how much lower the cost of living is in poorer countries and so keep believing your jobs are going overseas because of child labour.
Normal labour doesn't even cost that much in China.
Even with a brain dead CD installation method I'm sure you can install Linux on more than 10 computers in one day. Low cost labour in China doesn't cost USD50/day.
A decent ready-made meal probably only costs USD1.
Yes most chinese workers can't afford two SUVs/trucks, a big house with a TV in each room (and the heating/cooling bill), a big slab of meat for every meal. But perhaps with the current energy infrastructure, maybe the world can't afford it either.
If I can get paid USD5 per PC install of Linux, bring em on, I'd easily do 100 a day, and still have lots of time to nap, post on Slashdot, play games etc.
May not be a lot of money for you, but it's good money where I am.
But they aren't selling very well - they're being pirated. That's what they keep saying anyway.
My friend was waiting for Spore for ages, and when he finally got it, he said it was boring.
I wonder how many copies of Spore are the local pirate stores managing to sell. Might pop by and ask one.