So we need some standardisation for EULAs, just like foods must list their ingredients in some standard way.
Analyze the available EULAs, 90% of it boils probably down to the same few terms. Make a list of these terms, label each with a descriptive short name, and maybe a symbol. Then make a regulation that companies must use those labels if they want to describe terms equivalent to those labels in their EULA.
Every year, make a survey of EULAs to find parts that are not covered by any existing label to find wich new labels need to be added to the system.
Discourage companies from using terms not covered by labels, for example by a tax.
Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?
Should work, but font design is more thant that. For starters, a font is not simply scaled down for lower resolutions, there are some manual adjustments neccessary, and you would have to do kerning right.
But IIRC some fonts were basicaly designed this way
An omnipotent being could very well make it so that all religions are correct at the same time, even the mutually exclusive ones. Omnipotency is weird like that.
Even worse than that, it costs them MORE bandwidth this way. Now, all of their users will be transferring news articles from the internet to them, each one taking their share of bandwidth from the internet pipes. By disabling most of usenet the provider saves about 3.8 TB per day for the whole usenet feed plus the maintenance and repair cost for servers to store this much data locally for several days.
They would only need more bandwith if all their customers who use usenet combined now download much more than that from external providers. I am sure they have done the numbers
My mistake, when I looked on the authors homepage for the right paper about tracking mobile phones, I came upon "Uncovering individual and collective human dynamics from mobile phone records".
I missed the paper "Understanding individual human mobility patterns" by the same author. Both have a map as the first image.
Sorry for the confusion, your explanation makes much more sense now.
The data is definitely centered around Germany, but tracks reach to Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Cech Republic. Hmm, the blog you linked only suggests that cou could search for the right location by matching maps, but the author has apparently not yet found it.
What makes you say that the data is centered on Germany? Have you found the actual place that matches the cell phone tower locations? could you tell the coordinates?
sure, but there are loads of other options: for example house-building robots that use cheap pre-fab components to build a house.
heck, even robots that build the whole house out of brick and mortar should be far easier to build and more economical than self-assembling robot bricks.
My point is that self-assembly is not relevant for house-building, robots may still be useful
Here are the guys that create a partial vacuum in their drop tower. I thought they also used some sort of rail system, but that might have been another tower.
But if you are using the robots as blocks for your house then you can only use them for one house at a time, and building an ordinary house is several orders cheaper than building those robot bricks.
I do not see that change any time soon - In the foreseeabe future building a house out of self-assembling robots will continue to be much much more expensive and resource-consuming than the regular way.
so, while those self-assembling robots may be more interesting (and much more complicated) than atlantic-crossing robots, both are pretty much equally usefull for building houses for people to live in.
Terminal velocity can be overcome by generating a partial vacuum in the tower, and by accelerating the falling cabin downwards past terminal velocity, on some sort of rail system.
I think there is one free-fall tower for scientific experiments that does both of these already but I do not remember where I read that.
The short duration of freefall for any realistic height for a tower remains thought
there are probably hundreds of ways to solve spam "if everyone was doing it"
There is just no way a significant enough fraction of the billions of domains, most of them simply registered and parked or forgotten, will publish SPF records
Surely if your principle holds, it should be illegal for your parents to leave you anything in their will right? If not, explain to me the difference. The difference is that inheritance is not payment for anything, and never was intended as such. This is quite obvious, after all your children do not have an inherent right to the money: you are free to spend it all before you die. (althought your laws may retrict you totally disowning them of what is left AFTER you died)
Inheritance is a donation. Therefore children are of course not "paid", and it does not matter whether they did anything to earn it.
Just as you are free to donate any amount you want to an artist, you can donate any amount you want to your children, in case of your demise. Neither has an inherent right to this donation.
Now we could argue why donating to your children after you death is taxed differently than other forms of donation. My guess would be because 1) the state is specifically supporting families with all sort of privileges. That is a goal in most countries. 2) Tax-free or low-tax donations are open to abuse: you could classify any payment as donation to avoid taxes. Since you have to die to do the same with inheritance, abuse is strongly limitet.
but that is ouf course a matter entirely unrelated to the "People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done" discussion.
DNA profiles are more like an md5 hash of your data DNA profiles are a lot more than that. Depending on the type of profile, you could for example calculate blood relationship between people. You do not need tthe whole dna for that, close relatvies will also have close matches for the indicators used for profiling.
Some ways to abuse this:
"The crime DNA does not match this person exactly, but he is probably a close relative of the criminal, detain and question him!"
"This person is closely related to several convicted criminals, keep watching him"
"This person is related to a charged terrorist, deny him the goverment job"
"This person is related to several people who died early, let's raise his health premiums and offer him life insurances"
Actually, no. The rotation of the earth would cause the ribbon to wrap around the earth in an easterly direction If what you propose were true, a pin balanced on its end would always fall over to the east as well, as would a perfectly symmetrical tree, or a falling skyscraper.
There is no tipping or balancing involved here
The top of an intact space elevator in orbit would move eastwards, just like the ground under it does. The top would move at a much greater speed than the ground, since it is further from the center of the earth and has to cover a greater distance for a full circle.
As any part of this elevator falls towards earth, it would keep its greater eastward speed and therefore overtake its anchor point quickly.
I think you are mistaken. It has been a while, but I remember NP like this:
What you described is the property "NP-hard". For a problem to qualify as NP-complete, it is also neccessary that an algorithm that can solve this problem can also be used to solve every other NP-hard problem, with only an additional transformation of its input and output in polynomial time.
Prime factoring is not NP-complete. There is as far as I know no transformation for the input and output of a prime-factoring algorithm, that would allow it to solve other np-hard problems as well.
If prime factoring was np-complete, then since a quantum algorithm is known for it, it would be certain that a quantum computer could also solve all other np-hard problems.
As far as I know, no quantum algorithm with polynomial time has been found for any NP-complete problem. So we do not know whether a quantum computer could do this
I do not think you would find ATP outside of a cell. IIRC ATP acts as a pain signal if found outside of cells, since that would indicate some ruptured membranes. So this bot would have to drill into fresh cells and suck them out.
If it was not for the pain thing, and the difficulty in getting it into cells, I would market an ATP energy drink. Guaranted to give you back energy instantly, whitout any sugars and fats!
If you are using sugars from the blood as a power source (possible, but I think beyond current technology) then you are definitely not recharging by "using the owner's body heat", which was the point of this thread.
2. No, chemical reactions that are endothermic will occur at any temperature that supplies the necessary activation energy to the physical reagents.
But unless you have a source of new reactants, and a place to dump your product, your reaction will soon reach chemical equilibrum. Essentially that is a battery.
You really need some sort temperature gradient to convert body temperature into work. I do not see how a device inside the body could do that with any efficiency.
On a serious note, let me ask, to what end is this pursuit? Of what practical use is it?
For one thing, what he does is by any metric infinitely more useful than us complaining and arguing about it on slashdot.
I'm in my 40s now, and time is so precious and I just see something like this as a sad waste. Here's a guy who is obviously intelligent but he devoted an amount of his finite time on planet earth doing something basically useless to himself and others. Were his energies properly "self-directed" think what he could have done for himself!! Think about the lost potential in the form of dedication, intelligence, and time!!!
Ok, now you are obviously trolling.
A "sad waste" would be if you lived your life without ever doing anything just because you liked doing it. And dedication or intelligence is not some limited resource that gets less each time you use it on something you enjoy, quite the opposite. Same for time, unless you somehow manage to live your live without any free time (which brings us back to the "sad waste")
I might be missing the joke and taking this way to seriously, but I really cannot stand that attitude. I guess it's easy to push my buttons.
In wich deranged moral system is there some sort of duty that forces smart guys to spend all their available time on things useful for society?
(And who decides what is beneficial for society anyway?)
If his hoby was playing chess or collecting stamps or climbing mountains, would you say that he should spend his time on more useful things? If he could afford to spend a lot of time on those hobbies, why shouldn't he?
So why is it that every time someone does something cool and strange and for all purposes harmless, someone else always has to say "THIS GUY HAS WAY TOO MUCH FREE TIME"? Someone who, I might add, spends his time on slashdot?
Envy? (I know I am envious, I wish I had the time and the determination to do a lot of these things. Considering that I am wasting time on slasdot, determination is what I am lacking more of)
I completely agree. Dailight saving was one of the big things I missed. It is very depressing to have almost no light on a nice spring evening, and it is surprisingly hard to keep out the full force of the sun at 5 am even with curtains.
Slashdot Mirror
So we need some standardisation for EULAs, just like foods must list their ingredients in some standard way.
Analyze the available EULAs, 90% of it boils probably down to the same few terms.
Make a list of these terms, label each with a descriptive short name, and maybe a symbol.
Then make a regulation that companies must use those labels if they want to describe terms equivalent to those labels in their EULA.
Every year, make a survey of EULAs to find parts that are not covered by any existing label to find wich new labels need to be added to the system.
Discourage companies from using terms not covered by labels, for example by a tax.
If this leads to mass lawsuits, fix the laws.
Should work, but font design is more thant that. For starters, a font is not simply scaled down for lower resolutions, there are some manual adjustments neccessary, and you would have to do kerning right.
But IIRC some fonts were basicaly designed this way
An omnipotent being could very well make it so that all religions are correct at the same time, even the mutually exclusive ones.
Omnipotency is weird like that.
Now, all of their users will be transferring news articles from the internet to them, each one taking their share of bandwidth from the internet pipes. By disabling most of usenet the provider saves about 3.8 TB per day for the whole usenet feed plus the maintenance and repair cost for servers to store this much data locally for several days.
They would only need more bandwith if all their customers who use usenet combined now download much more than that from external providers. I am sure they have done the numbers
My mistake, when I looked on the authors homepage for the right paper about tracking mobile phones, I came upon "Uncovering individual and collective human dynamics from mobile phone records".
I missed the paper "Understanding individual human mobility patterns" by the same author.
Both have a map as the first image.
Sorry for the confusion, your explanation makes much more sense now.
The map in the paper is from inside some city, and has only cell tower locations.
What makes you say that the data is centered on Germany? Have you found the actual place that matches the cell phone tower locations? could you tell the coordinates?
I'd say ebook piracy is less prevalent than movie piracy since movie watchers far, far outnumber book readers
And since ebooks are that much smaller than video files, all pirated ebook traffic taken together is minimal
But pirated (scanned) ebooks are not realy rare, I'd estimate there are more ebooks than movies available, if you know where to look.
sure, but there are loads of other options: for example house-building robots that use cheap pre-fab components to build a house.
heck, even robots that build the whole house out of brick and mortar should be far easier to build and more economical than self-assembling robot bricks.
My point is that self-assembly is not relevant for house-building, robots may still be useful
Here are the guys that create a partial vacuum in their drop tower. I thought they also used some sort of rail system, but that might have been another tower.
But if you are using the robots as blocks for your house then you can only use them for one house at a time, and building an ordinary house is several orders cheaper than building those robot bricks.
I do not see that change any time soon - In the foreseeabe future building a house out of self-assembling robots will continue to be much much more expensive and resource-consuming than the regular way.
so, while those self-assembling robots may be more interesting (and much more complicated) than atlantic-crossing robots, both are pretty much equally usefull for building houses for people to live in.
Terminal velocity can be overcome by generating a partial vacuum in the tower, and by accelerating the falling cabin downwards past terminal velocity, on some sort of rail system.
I think there is one free-fall tower for scientific experiments that does both of these already but I do not remember where I read that.
The short duration of freefall for any realistic height for a tower remains thought
there are probably hundreds of ways to solve spam "if everyone was doing it"
There is just no way a significant enough fraction of the billions of domains, most of them simply registered and parked or forgotten, will publish SPF records
If not, explain to me the difference. The difference is that inheritance is not payment for anything, and never was intended as such.
This is quite obvious, after all your children do not have an inherent right to the money: you are free to spend it all before you die. (althought your laws may retrict you totally disowning them of what is left AFTER you died)
Inheritance is a donation. Therefore children are of course not "paid", and it does not matter whether they did anything to earn it.
Just as you are free to donate any amount you want to an artist, you can donate any amount you want to your children, in case of your demise. Neither has an inherent right to this donation.
Now we could argue why donating to your children after you death is taxed differently than other forms of donation.
My guess would be because
1) the state is specifically supporting families with all sort of privileges. That is a goal in most countries.
2) Tax-free or low-tax donations are open to abuse: you could classify any payment as donation to avoid taxes. Since you have to die to do the same with inheritance, abuse is strongly limitet.
but that is ouf course a matter entirely unrelated to the "People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done" discussion.
Depending on the type of profile, you could for example calculate blood relationship between people. You do not need tthe whole dna for that, close relatvies will also have close matches for the indicators used for profiling.
Some ways to abuse this:
"The crime DNA does not match this person exactly, but he is probably a close relative of the criminal, detain and question him!"
"This person is closely related to several convicted criminals, keep watching him"
"This person is related to a charged terrorist, deny him the goverment job"
"This person is related to several people who died early, let's raise his health premiums and offer him life insurances"
The top of an intact space elevator in orbit would move eastwards, just like the ground under it does.
The top would move at a much greater speed than the ground, since it is further from the center of the earth and has to cover a greater distance for a full circle.
As any part of this elevator falls towards earth, it would keep its greater eastward speed and therefore overtake its anchor point quickly.
I think you are mistaken. It has been a while, but I remember NP like this:
What you described is the property "NP-hard".
For a problem to qualify as NP-complete, it is also neccessary that an algorithm that can solve this problem can also be used to solve every other NP-hard problem, with only an additional transformation of its input and output in polynomial time.
Prime factoring is not NP-complete. There is as far as I know no transformation for the input and output of a prime-factoring algorithm, that would allow it to solve other np-hard problems as well.
If prime factoring was np-complete, then since a quantum algorithm is known for it, it would be certain that a quantum computer could also solve all other np-hard problems.
As far as I know, no quantum algorithm with polynomial time has been found for any NP-complete problem. So we do not know whether a quantum computer could do this
I do not think you would find ATP outside of a cell. IIRC ATP acts as a pain signal if found outside of cells, since that would indicate some ruptured membranes.
So this bot would have to drill into fresh cells and suck them out.
If it was not for the pain thing, and the difficulty in getting it into cells, I would market an ATP energy drink.
Guaranted to give you back energy instantly, whitout any sugars and fats!
If you are using sugars from the blood as a power source (possible, but I think beyond current technology) then you are definitely not recharging by "using the owner's body heat", which was the point of this thread.
Essentially that is a battery.
You really need some sort temperature gradient to convert body temperature into work. I do not see how a device inside the body could do that with any efficiency.
Pretty sure the title was "Professor A. Donda"
If you allow no privacy for your police and congresspeople, then only people with no interest in privacy will take those jobs.
A "sad waste" would be if you lived your life without ever doing anything just because you liked doing it.
And dedication or intelligence is not some limited resource that gets less each time you use it on something you enjoy, quite the opposite.
Same for time, unless you somehow manage to live your live without any free time (which brings us back to the "sad waste")
I might be missing the joke and taking this way to seriously, but I really cannot stand that attitude. I guess it's easy to push my buttons.
In wich deranged moral system is there some sort of duty that forces smart guys to spend all their available time on things useful for society?
(And who decides what is beneficial for society anyway?)
If his hoby was playing chess or collecting stamps or climbing mountains, would you say that he should spend his time on more useful things? If he could afford to spend a lot of time on those hobbies, why shouldn't he?
So why is it that every time someone does something cool and strange and for all purposes harmless, someone else always has to say "THIS GUY HAS WAY TOO MUCH FREE TIME"? Someone who, I might add, spends his time on slashdot?
Envy?
(I know I am envious, I wish I had the time and the determination to do a lot of these things. Considering that I am wasting time on slasdot, determination is what I am lacking more of)
I completely agree. Dailight saving was one of the big things I missed. It is very depressing to have almost no light on a nice spring evening, and it is surprisingly hard to keep out the full force of the sun at 5 am even with curtains.
I always hated DST, now I am a believer.