The class of gadgets that the iPhone..[is in,].. is something we don't really have a name for yet. Calling it a "smart phone" seems somehow inadequate. For one thing, we're used to our mobile phones being switched on, or off (at least, in standby mode). This gadget is never off -- it is in constant communication with the internet. It knows where it is, and it knows which way up it is (it's orientation sensitive). It can see things you point it at, and it can show you pictures. (Oh, and it does the smartphone thing as well, when you want it to.)
Over the years users must have downloaded the content of the site many times over. Appeal to your users to re-upload content. All the files must be out there somewhere, you'll get the most popular content back first.
Magic spell. You'll never be able to sue every last pirate and recover any tangible revenue, likely not enough to pay your lawyers, and you won't have made a dent in piracy. It's never been shown to work.
The good news is pirates never intended to pay for anything anyway, and usually just pirate crap because they can, it's there and it's easy, it'll likely sit in a downloads folder, never be read, and eventually be deleted. So you haven't really lost real world sales, at least 90% of the time.
If you feel you need to send out takedown notices, do so, but you have to accept it's going to do very little.
If I may suggest, give away your content for free on the web.
Watch revenue roll in and piracy dry up.
Ok I skipped a step in the middle there: Put the content of your book online as a interactive reference site (where it can be expanded and include interactive content and down loadable things) and slap some advertising and sponsored links on it to pay the bills. Oh and a link to the book version on Amazon.
People will always buy books, there are always scenarios where it's indispensable to have a physical book, and these people will always be paying customers.
The free online content will appease those who won't pay. Basically this business model is pretty much the only way you'll ever get any revenue from freeloaders outside the courtroom. Oh and you'll sell a load of books too.
Get rid of the BIOS all together please, on my ASUS based machine it now takes longer for the BIOS to hand over to the bootloader than it does for Windows 7 to start!
Have you Hurd the one about the Microkernel in firmware?
Regardless, I got his point. A spacecraft with a closed soil ecology, isolated from earth, with only plants to feed the crew, would not be viable in the long term.
I guess biosphere 2 proved your point.
But this and many of the posts here are all assuming growing plants in soil.
This is completely ignoring the existence of hydroponics. Not only do you then only need basic chemical nutrients (calcium, phosphorous, sulfates and nitrates etc) to feed plants but you can get about 3 times more rate of growth and massive yield for weight volume and energy expenditure. In terms of spaceflight, hydroponics is the only practicable option. It also has a chance of working in microgravity.
Importantly the mineral solution is fairly basic, it could be produced easily (relatively speaking) from waste raw materials ranging from sewage to waste food to corpses of the deceased even. Also a stop by a comet in the kupier/oort cloud would top things up nicely.
Not so long ago I pulled out a box of books (sci-fi novels, comics, nat geo, adventure books) and records that my Dad had growing up. It occurred to me, how exactly are my kids going to inherit anything from me? This for me is the primary reason DRM is evil, and that the ebooks phenomena is possibly evil also.
So what? If P2P declines people may go back to piracy by swapping hard drives. Bittorrent et al has been successful for the convenience of kicking off downloads coming back a later and they are all done. Before bittorrent the majority of stuff was shared on writable CD/DVDs. All the while portable storage has been going up in capacity and down in price. We're a few years away from cheap thumb drives and flash cards in the 100gb and 1TB range. Suddenly your collection of blu ray rips is going to get a lot more portable.
Do not underestimate the bandwidth of carrying a 1TB external drive in your pocket.
The first rule about Swap Club is you don't talk about swap club...
Big Brother has the power to take away all that from "little brother".
You only need the government to realise every young person totting around with cellphone cameras etc is a threat and then your main point starts to fall down. You also misunderstand that these things can also become part of the surveillance mechanism itself. Just what is happening to those pictures you send over a mobile network?
George Orwell did paint a fanciful worst case scenario, but very few academics come out and say it's outright poppycock, because it still has some plausibility. I also think you forget history, Gestapo, Cold war anti-communism in the united states. Yes the west has spent some time scrabbling for traction on the slippery slope.
Today's CCTV + Wiretapping world is far removed from Big Brother, yes, and a lot would have to go wrong for it become reality, but that doesn't make it OK nor not worth fighting.
Agent: "Sir, I have an idea"
Boss: "What's that Jenkins?"
Agent: "Lets do a big budget reality TV show called Big Brother, that way the term Big Brother is further misunderstood by the general public and they'll stop calling us that"
Boss: "That's brilliant Jenkins!"
Mobile Cell chips could be simply the lower-grade chips with just one or a few DSPs working, but otherwise superfast
(3.2GHz PPC, wicked fast bus, etc).
You're forgetting just how much power cell processors chug down. Even with only 1 or 2 SPEs and a downclocked PPC core and a narrower slower bus you won't be anywhere near a 1-3 watt envelope that's tolerable in something you can hold in your hand (ie. 2 hour battery life at full load). Try more like 15watts for the most cut-down cell.
Sony is likely to not be reinventing the wheel too much. MIPS32 architecture which already works well in the PSP (which has two of these processors). We'll be something similar along those lines, with up to day specs of course.
Unfortunatley sony will be needing some new silicon if they want to get cell-compatible technology into the phone.
Offer them an exclusive non-compete contract for your services for a fixed term, but you remain a third party to the megacorp. As a contractor to their company you retain your IP, freedom and control of your company.
If they don't take this offer or at least seriously consider this as a plan B, then their plan is evil.
I was an early adopter of WAN wireless internet in my area. While reasonable download speeds *could* be achieved on average the latency was terrible. Essentially the latency of data traversing the cellphone networks with some proprietary transmission protocol was unavoidable, since these networks were never designed for Teh Internets. Indeed you don't really notice 200-300ms of unstable latency when you're on a mobile call, but you do when your trying to shunt data over it the same network. All up, I had a 5mbps connection where a minimum latency floor of 300-350ms to local servers was the norm. These days with new GPRS through to HSDPA or whatever, things are a bit better.
The same with something in flight internet.
I would have been more interested in your pings to Google.com I bet they would have been rubbish.
...will bring on radical change in the way that copyright and trademark laws are broken...
+1 if I had mod points.
As many will point out, you cannot suddenly decide to install regulated borders in a massive global network that so far has developed without meaningful borders.
If ACTA comes to pass, this may be the case. This is scary. Of course any attempt at putting up walls around the internet with interception and monitoring of traffic, will be initially trivial to circumvent with encryption and tunneling traffic and even more advanced P2P. This is already coming to pass.
Now this is where it becomes really scary.
The only way to enforce effectively such a border is to try to block technologies or constrain the use of them. It may be to demand cleartext to pass over international links unless it is authorized encryption. ISPs may block ALL peer to peer traffic between residential IP addresses. Use of secure links if your not a business or visiting a internet banking website etc may put you under automatic suspicion and harassment.
The next part is almost too scary to contemplate. The actual circumvention software that will inevitably be developed to maintain freedom will come from the free software crowd. Imagine it being illegal to possess unauthorized encryption software, stuff like Tor or I2p, or even free software itself may be targeted by legislation.
Lessig asked Clarke if DoJ had a similar proposed law, an "i-Patriot Act," to drop in the event of a "cyber-9/11." Clarke responded, "Of course they do. And Vint Cerf won't like it."
It's almost ludditism to say that machines 'will inevitability destroy humanity' or other such statements. Fears over the rise of AI makes for a good movie plot but much like the much feared 'grey goo' scenario, are unfounded. If and when indeed we have the technology level to produce a self replicating nano-machine that can be programmed to dismantle organic matter and it can exist on it's own gathering energy from it's environment rather than specific laboratory conditions (ie UV laser light as energy source a vacuum or inert gas), nano-tech would have long since transformed humanity and the world in ways we barely manage to speculate about in sci-fi. It would be as simple as coming up with a slightly improved variant of said nano-bot, programmed to go on the defensive. Mother natures nano-bots in the form of bacteria and viruses have yet to wipe us out.
The luddites turned out to be wrong about the industrial revolution, so as we stand on the precipice of the next revolution we should be wary of... well... ludditism.
Likewise strong AI if/when it emerges would likely not be a isolated entity. An uprising of pathological AI such as a skynet/cylon/roomba/robosapien (those things are scary no?) would likely be met by a greater force of co-operative force friendly AI.
Technology isn't inherently evil and the good guys always tend to win out, if only by selective pressure - destructive entities tend to not survive, co-operative compassionate ones have an advantage. The analogy with the beginning of.
Slashdot Mirror
The class of gadgets that the iPhone ..[is in,].. is something we don't really have a name for yet. Calling it a "smart phone" seems somehow inadequate. For one thing, we're used to our mobile phones being switched on, or off (at least, in standby mode). This gadget is never off -- it is in constant communication with the internet. It knows where it is, and it knows which way up it is (it's orientation sensitive). It can see things you point it at, and it can show you pictures. (Oh, and it does the smartphone thing as well, when you want it to.)
I for one welcome our Apple-branded overlords.
Link to full text on Charlie's blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html
I'd rather the space hotel I visit would have adequate shielding, than require radiation resistance plants for it's hydroponic salad.
When Does It Become OK To Make Games/Books/Movies/Art/Poems... About a War?
It's always been ok. Infact the more discussion and original media about war the better, because the alternative is censorship.
Over the years users must have downloaded the content of the site many times over. Appeal to your users to re-upload content. All the files must be out there somewhere, you'll get the most popular content back first.
Magic spell. You'll never be able to sue every last pirate and recover any tangible revenue, likely not enough to pay your lawyers, and you won't have made a dent in piracy. It's never been shown to work.
The good news is pirates never intended to pay for anything anyway, and usually just pirate crap because they can, it's there and it's easy, it'll likely sit in a downloads folder, never be read, and eventually be deleted. So you haven't really lost real world sales, at least 90% of the time.
If you feel you need to send out takedown notices, do so, but you have to accept it's going to do very little.
If I may suggest, give away your content for free on the web.
Watch revenue roll in and piracy dry up.
Ok I skipped a step in the middle there: Put the content of your book online as a interactive reference site (where it can be expanded and include interactive content and down loadable things) and slap some advertising and sponsored links on it to pay the bills. Oh and a link to the book version on Amazon.
People will always buy books, there are always scenarios where it's indispensable to have a physical book, and these people will always be paying customers.
The free online content will appease those who won't pay. Basically this business model is pretty much the only way you'll ever get any revenue from freeloaders outside the courtroom. Oh and you'll sell a load of books too.
Get rid of the BIOS all together please, on my ASUS based machine it now takes longer for the BIOS to hand over to the bootloader than it does for Windows 7 to start!
Have you Hurd the one about the Microkernel in firmware?
Is that a isotope of Beaurocratium? Element with a negative energy state that exerts a drag on the spacetime continuum.
Regardless, I got his point. A spacecraft with a closed soil ecology, isolated from earth, with only plants to feed the crew, would not be viable in the long term.
I guess biosphere 2 proved your point.
But this and many of the posts here are all assuming growing plants in soil.
This is completely ignoring the existence of hydroponics. Not only do you then only need basic chemical nutrients (calcium, phosphorous, sulfates and nitrates etc) to feed plants but you can get about 3 times more rate of growth and massive yield for weight volume and energy expenditure. In terms of spaceflight, hydroponics is the only practicable option. It also has a chance of working in microgravity.
Importantly the mineral solution is fairly basic, it could be produced easily (relatively speaking) from waste raw materials ranging from sewage to waste food to corpses of the deceased even. Also a stop by a comet in the kupier/oort cloud would top things up nicely.
Not so long ago I pulled out a box of books (sci-fi novels, comics, nat geo, adventure books) and records that my Dad had growing up. It occurred to me, how exactly are my kids going to inherit anything from me? This for me is the primary reason DRM is evil, and that the ebooks phenomena is possibly evil also.
So what? If P2P declines people may go back to piracy by swapping hard drives. Bittorrent et al has been successful for the convenience of kicking off downloads coming back a later and they are all done. Before bittorrent the majority of stuff was shared on writable CD/DVDs. All the while portable storage has been going up in capacity and down in price. We're a few years away from cheap thumb drives and flash cards in the 100gb and 1TB range. Suddenly your collection of blu ray rips is going to get a lot more portable.
Do not underestimate the bandwidth of carrying a 1TB external drive in your pocket.
The first rule about Swap Club is you don't talk about swap club...
Big Brother has the power to take away all that from "little brother".
You only need the government to realise every young person totting around with cellphone cameras etc is a threat and then your main point starts to fall down. You also misunderstand that these things can also become part of the surveillance mechanism itself. Just what is happening to those pictures you send over a mobile network?
George Orwell did paint a fanciful worst case scenario, but very few academics come out and say it's outright poppycock, because it still has some plausibility. I also think you forget history, Gestapo, Cold war anti-communism in the united states. Yes the west has spent some time scrabbling for traction on the slippery slope.
Today's CCTV + Wiretapping world is far removed from Big Brother, yes, and a lot would have to go wrong for it become reality, but that doesn't make it OK nor not worth fighting.
I suggest Cory Doctorow's Little Brother as further reading: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
Don't mess with slashdot hysteria. Oh and get off my lawn.
Agent: "Sir, I have an idea"
Boss: "What's that Jenkins?"
Agent: "Lets do a big budget reality TV show called Big Brother, that way the term Big Brother is further misunderstood by the general public and they'll stop calling us that"
Boss: "That's brilliant Jenkins!"
Mobile Cell chips could be simply the lower-grade chips with just one or a few DSPs working, but otherwise superfast (3.2GHz PPC, wicked fast bus, etc).
You're forgetting just how much power cell processors chug down. Even with only 1 or 2 SPEs and a downclocked PPC core and a narrower slower bus you won't be anywhere near a 1-3 watt envelope that's tolerable in something you can hold in your hand (ie. 2 hour battery life at full load). Try more like 15watts for the most cut-down cell.
Sony is likely to not be reinventing the wheel too much. MIPS32 architecture which already works well in the PSP (which has two of these processors). We'll be something similar along those lines, with up to day specs of course. Unfortunatley sony will be needing some new silicon if they want to get cell-compatible technology into the phone.
Only base-10 are belong to us
Offer them an exclusive non-compete contract for your services for a fixed term, but you remain a third party to the megacorp. As a contractor to their company you retain your IP, freedom and control of your company.
If they don't take this offer or at least seriously consider this as a plan B, then their plan is evil.
...but I can't find it on imdb?
I was an early adopter of WAN wireless internet in my area. While reasonable download speeds *could* be achieved on average the latency was terrible. Essentially the latency of data traversing the cellphone networks with some proprietary transmission protocol was unavoidable, since these networks were never designed for Teh Internets. Indeed you don't really notice 200-300ms of unstable latency when you're on a mobile call, but you do when your trying to shunt data over it the same network. All up, I had a 5mbps connection where a minimum latency floor of 300-350ms to local servers was the norm. These days with new GPRS through to HSDPA or whatever, things are a bit better.
The same with something in flight internet.
I would have been more interested in your pings to Google.com I bet they would have been rubbish.
They'll botch up this too, if asked about when they are shutting down they'll say 'When it does'
...will bring on radical change in the way that copyright and trademark laws are broken...
+1 if I had mod points.
As many will point out, you cannot suddenly decide to install regulated borders in a massive global network that so far has developed without meaningful borders.
If ACTA comes to pass, this may be the case. This is scary. Of course any attempt at putting up walls around the internet with interception and monitoring of traffic, will be initially trivial to circumvent with encryption and tunneling traffic and even more advanced P2P. This is already coming to pass.
Now this is where it becomes really scary.
The only way to enforce effectively such a border is to try to block technologies or constrain the use of them. It may be to demand cleartext to pass over international links unless it is authorized encryption. ISPs may block ALL peer to peer traffic between residential IP addresses. Use of secure links if your not a business or visiting a internet banking website etc may put you under automatic suspicion and harassment.
The next part is almost too scary to contemplate. The actual circumvention software that will inevitably be developed to maintain freedom will come from the free software crowd. Imagine it being illegal to possess unauthorized encryption software, stuff like Tor or I2p, or even free software itself may be targeted by legislation.
I don't see it as a conspiracy theory, I see it as logical move from looking at all the pieces on the board. Consider DMCA and now ACTA. It's on the way and Vint Cerf won't like it: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/05/220229&from=rss
Lessig asked Clarke if DoJ had a similar proposed law, an "i-Patriot Act," to drop in the event of a "cyber-9/11." Clarke responded, "Of course they do. And Vint Cerf won't like it."
Check facts (Y/N):> Y
Option not available. Please try another option.
Check facts (Y/N):> N
Publish article (Y/N):> Y
It's almost ludditism to say that machines 'will inevitability destroy humanity' or other such statements. Fears over the rise of AI makes for a good movie plot but much like the much feared 'grey goo' scenario, are unfounded. If and when indeed we have the technology level to produce a self replicating nano-machine that can be programmed to dismantle organic matter and it can exist on it's own gathering energy from it's environment rather than specific laboratory conditions (ie UV laser light as energy source a vacuum or inert gas), nano-tech would have long since transformed humanity and the world in ways we barely manage to speculate about in sci-fi. It would be as simple as coming up with a slightly improved variant of said nano-bot, programmed to go on the defensive. Mother natures nano-bots in the form of bacteria and viruses have yet to wipe us out.
... well... ludditism.
The luddites turned out to be wrong about the industrial revolution, so as we stand on the precipice of the next revolution we should be wary of
Likewise strong AI if/when it emerges would likely not be a isolated entity. An uprising of pathological AI such as a skynet/cylon/roomba/robosapien (those things are scary no?) would likely be met by a greater force of co-operative force friendly AI.
Technology isn't inherently evil and the good guys always tend to win out, if only by selective pressure - destructive entities tend to not survive, co-operative compassionate ones have an advantage. The analogy with the beginning of.
Because Windows is the market leader, the 600 pound gorilla, the team to beat in the world of desktop computer operating systems.
OH I see what you did there. Windows has lost 200 pounds over the vista debacle?
Ah, praise Be, our matyr.
BeOS died, but it's open source resurrection is still in development and will be 1.0 some decade soon.
Isn't that an oxymoron? Kinda like dry water?