Before you dump a bunch of dough on hardware synths, have you checked out the quality of software synths? (VSTs for Linux appear to be hit or miss, but the ones for Windows are amazing).
Ah, crap. You can encode nearly 20 bits on one photon using a 1 megapixel array. (How long before we have cogni-check in addition to spell-check?) Now, if your array were a light-year on a side...
Imagine having a photon-detector array where each cell is one square millimeter in area, while the entire detector array is, say, one square meter, giving a total of one million discrete cells. By precisely controlling the angle of one photon, one can encode a million bits on this photon by pointing it at exactly the right cell in the photon-detector array.
Their FAQ answers questions like "Is Fortress intended as a replacement for Java?" (ans: NO) But nowhere do they even mention FORTRAN. From the example code, it looks a whole lot more like APL to me.
Even more complex than determining whether a particular investment is a net negative for a culture, is whether money spent in philanthropy provides a greater net gain for its target than simply investing in the economy of the region. One way to combat AIDS is to subsidize drugs for the afflicted. Another is to help the people of Africa create comparable wealth to that of G7 nations, so that AIDS treatment is as accessible for them as for us. Considerations of net good/harm often fail to consider secondary and tertiary effects. Like the banning of DDT, which (arguably) may have reversed the decline of some species, but demonstrably caused the deaths of millions of humans by increased malaria infection.
Since this is the discovery phase, I'd ask plaintiff to produce documentation substantiating the validity of the copyright for each claimed infringement, along with a complaint from each rights-holder or designated representative for each instance of alleged infringement.
I'd ask for specific evidence that establishes the defendant as the perpetrator of the alleged infringements, especially evidence that excludes the possibility of defendant's computer having been used, perhaps unknowingly, by an outside party - friends, hackers, etc. The presence of an 802.11 connection could make this especially tricky. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with numerous examples of people's PCs being taken over for illegal purposes, thus decreasing the strength of the 'preponderance' that shows defendant committed alleged infringements.
I'd ask for information supporting plaintiff's allegations of damage. Given the high likelihood that all of the infringed properties are available anytime, from any internet connection, by any subscriber willing to pay $6/month to Yahoo! Music Unlimited, any claims for damages beyond $6 per month total (or, more precisely, whatever fraction of the $6 the rights-holders would actually receive from Yahoo), are obviously egregious.
Did you actually chase the Y2K bogeyman? I did. The Fortune 500 company I contracted at invested insane amounts of overtime to have myself and many like me chase through millions of lines of non-critical, non-realtime code to attempt to find and fix Y2K issues. All to enable management to prove that they were "responsible" and effective in handling a crisis. (Never mind the fact that shareholder's money was being spent like water on a problem that mostly didn't need fixing). Other developers I've spoken with shared much the same story. I suspect a study of the overall effectiveness of Y2K remedial efforts would reveal that, in most cases, there really wasn't much of a problem. The primary benefit reaped by Y2K remediation was a general spotting and fixing of previously unseen bugs, not an avoidance of the much-hyped Y2K meltdown.
As so many have observed, there's no real profit incentive for Microsoft to sue Linux users/distributors. This is all about giving Microsoft's corporate sales force a talking point that hits home with executives. Corporate management is very risk averse. (Remember the Y2K fiasco? Uncounted billions were spent chasing a software bogeyman that, in most cases, wasn't much of a threat.) As such, one of the strongest arguments a salesguy can use is that their competitor, though appearing cheaper, nevertheless poses hidden costs in the form of legal threats. After all, what if a company decided to have their whole corporate enchilada depend on Linux, and then a lawsuit comes along that renders their entire IT infrastructure invalid? Even a short-term court order that bars use of Linux until infringing code can be repaired would be disastrous. If the salesguy can persuade even a reasonable doubt on that point, it becomes a no-brainer for corporate management.
The problem for Linux evangelists is there is no real way to counter that line of argument.
Let's see... we want to design a neural net that predicts the summed trading behavior of, oh, several tens of millions of human brains? Beyond the obvious hardware scaling problems, we must think of the software used by these brains, each of which has different biases for selecting stocks. Some choose based on omens they call 'fundamentals'. Some choose based on some form of scrying on the shapes of squiggles of price history charts. Some trade decisions are made on how the trader's 'gut' happens to feel about it. But, in fact, everything stored in these neural nets has some contribution to the outcome of an investing choice. In a close decision, it may be that the memory of having been turned down on an offer to go to the prom might provide the unconscious final impetus to invest or not.
Kinda reminds me of a fanciful and ambitious kid who declares he's going to build an interstellar spaceship out of stuff laying around in the garage.
I received email from Dr. James Gillies of CERN on this:
Dear Gregory,
I believe that the field of the ATLAS magnet is around 2 tesla, but the volume is vastly larger than an MIR magnet. Another experiment at CERN, which has a smaller volume than ATLAS has a field that reaches 4 tesla. In the LHC particle accelerator itself, the field in the magnets is around 9 tesla.
The Big O's comments seem more an indictment of 'real' reality than of the people who avoid it. What does it say about life that some people would prefer to spend it pretending to be a brightly-colored cartoon than a stocker at Wal-Mart?
Since assembly-based nano isn't anywhere near yet, whenever news articles use the term 'nano', what they really mean is something more like 'chemical' or 'molecular'. TFA is no exception, really. So when he says 'There is some evidence that nanoparticles can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' we can easily translate this as saying 'There is some evidence that molecules can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' Yeah, some molecules can pass the blood-brain barrier. What's his point? It's all nano-FUD, IMO.
It takes 9000 tons of coal per day to run a 1000 MWe generation plant. Geoplasma says they plan to consume 3000 tons of garbage per day to generate 120 MW. That'd give garbage about 1/3rd the energy density of coal using this process, which doesn't seem preposterous. They say the plasma will consume 1/3rd of the electricity, yielding 90 MW of marketable electricity. Florida commercial average is 5.86 cents/kWh, so 90 MW ought to go for about $126 thousand per day.
Their other products are chump change:
Quarried rock goes for about $3.75/ton. Of the 9000 tons of garbage they burn, they end up with 600 tons of slag, worth about $2000/day.
Steam is worth about $10/1000 lb. The 80000 lbs of steam they'll sell to Tropicana is worth about $800/day.
They don't mention it, but they are probably able to collect tipping fees from the sewage folks and, once this landfill is gone, dumping fees for future garbage.
Still, the bottom line is electricity. If their efficiencies are off or if the market for electricity gets cheap, they may have a hard time amortizing $425 million in debt, even at favorable bond rates. $425 Million at 4.5% over 30 years would require about $2 million/month to service. Their $126K/day income gives them a gross of $3.8 million/month. Enough to service the debt and have about $1.8 million/month for salaries and other recurring costs. It might fly. But if they rack up significant maintenance costs that amount to a significant fraction of their total $425 million plant cost over the 30-year lifetime, it probably won't.
But you'd be okay using the electricity they generate to warm your soup? What's the difference? In one case they're transmitting energy as heat stored in water to drive turbines in Tropicana. In the second case, they've used the heat to drive their own turbines and send the electricity to you.
You should be asking the students what they want. They are your customers. The customer is always right. You are a vendor of educational services. Provide some service, dammit! Don't make your customers jump through hoops they don't want or need.
Another interesting business model for helping unsigned bands is SellaBand. They provide mp3's for free, and if you like a band enough to think they have a shot, you can pledge money on $10 increments called 'parts'. Once a band racks up $50K in pledges, they get real studio time, CDs pressed, etc. Then a portion of all CD sales goes back to the 'believers' who pledged. Supposedly, one can revoke their pledge at any time before it reaches $50K.
Yeah, just have really new content for advancing
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
The problem with WoW is that after a month or so, it becomes pretty much a "been there, done that" situation. Sure there are "new" areas one gains access to and "new" artifacts to raid for, but they're all just variations on a (by then very familiar) theme.
A MMOG that provides continuously new paradigms for success as the player advances would mop the floor with WoW.
Thousands of people are simulatneously thinking about buy and sell decisions of the most-traded stocks. The stock price is a summation of all this thought. We can't even emulate the thinking of a single human. How on earth can anyone expect to predict what the summation of thought of several thousand people will be?
That said, it is pretty easy to statistically spot deviations caused by "irrational exuberance". Even so, a computer betting against the "new economy" rally of the late 1990's would have suffered some deep drawdown before it payed off.
And, Mechanical Investing, as it's called, is a pretty popular hobby among some fools.
It would not surprise me to see government or corporate-funded research into "intelligent buddies" - programs that are the descendendants of "Clippy" or "Bob" that are actually sophisticated enough to be more useful than annoying. Once we're immersed in ubiquitous computing, they can be active participants in any conversation or activity, chiming in with juicy morsels of pertinent trivia, jokes, gossip or actual useful information - cool enough that everybody would always want them on. They could be released free of cost, and beyond providing surveillance into the minds of these users as well as the people they interact with, they can provide a mechanism for actively steering social development. Say a troubled teen starts talking with his chums about how much of a drag everything is - his "intelligent buddy" can tell a story about some other teen, perhaps one who lives nearby, who had a similar situation and suggest setting up a meeting. Turns out the other troubled teen has been persuaded to start doing volunteer work and was surprised to find this made life less of a drag. Naturally, a corporate-funded IB would suggest the nearest place to grab a bottle of Spazzy-Cola as soon as it detects thirst.
I think the idea probably isn't so much to charge royalties or make money via litigation as to have a tempting body of IP to exchange with other companies who agree to cross-license their IP to all members in the Myrvold keiretsu. If the IP stockpile grows large enough, members could have a huge advantage over non-members. Kind of like an open-source club that's only open to members and that charges massive dues. Of course, membership is a double-edged sword, since your cohort are now also your direct competitors against which you have no IP shield. So it'd make sense for everyone in the keiretsu to buy ownership of each other. Maybe pool shares into a keiretsu mutual fund as a condition of membership?
All you have to do is say "looks like we need to reformat and reinstall windows". That seems to be the preferred solution for most internal IT support people. It's quick, it "solves" the problem, and any problems aferward are obviously not their fault. Seems like it'd work just great externally as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you dump a bunch of dough on hardware synths, have you checked out the quality of software synths? (VSTs for Linux appear to be hit or miss, but the ones for Windows are amazing).
Ah, crap. You can encode nearly 20 bits on one photon using a 1 megapixel array. (How long before we have cogni-check in addition to spell-check?) Now, if your array were a light-year on a side...
Imagine having a photon-detector array where each cell is one square millimeter in area, while the entire detector array is, say, one square meter, giving a total of one million discrete cells. By precisely controlling the angle of one photon, one can encode a million bits on this photon by pointing it at exactly the right cell in the photon-detector array.
Their FAQ answers questions like "Is Fortress intended as a replacement for Java?" (ans: NO) But nowhere do they even mention FORTRAN. From the example code, it looks a whole lot more like APL to me.
Even more complex than determining whether a particular investment is a net negative for a culture, is whether money spent in philanthropy provides a greater net gain for its target than simply investing in the economy of the region. One way to combat AIDS is to subsidize drugs for the afflicted. Another is to help the people of Africa create comparable wealth to that of G7 nations, so that AIDS treatment is as accessible for them as for us. Considerations of net good/harm often fail to consider secondary and tertiary effects. Like the banning of DDT, which (arguably) may have reversed the decline of some species, but demonstrably caused the deaths of millions of humans by increased malaria infection.
Since this is the discovery phase, I'd ask plaintiff to produce documentation substantiating the validity of the copyright for each claimed infringement, along with a complaint from each rights-holder or designated representative for each instance of alleged infringement.
I'd ask for specific evidence that establishes the defendant as the perpetrator of the alleged infringements, especially evidence that excludes the possibility of defendant's computer having been used, perhaps unknowingly, by an outside party - friends, hackers, etc. The presence of an 802.11 connection could make this especially tricky. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with numerous examples of people's PCs being taken over for illegal purposes, thus decreasing the strength of the 'preponderance' that shows defendant committed alleged infringements.
I'd ask for information supporting plaintiff's allegations of damage. Given the high likelihood that all of the infringed properties are available anytime, from any internet connection, by any subscriber willing to pay $6/month to Yahoo! Music Unlimited, any claims for damages beyond $6 per month total (or, more precisely, whatever fraction of the $6 the rights-holders would actually receive from Yahoo), are obviously egregious.
Since TV and web content is free because of advertising, this means we all get free games! Right?
You could read the press release.
Did you actually chase the Y2K bogeyman? I did. The Fortune 500 company I contracted at invested insane amounts of overtime to have myself and many like me chase through millions of lines of non-critical, non-realtime code to attempt to find and fix Y2K issues. All to enable management to prove that they were "responsible" and effective in handling a crisis. (Never mind the fact that shareholder's money was being spent like water on a problem that mostly didn't need fixing). Other developers I've spoken with shared much the same story. I suspect a study of the overall effectiveness of Y2K remedial efforts would reveal that, in most cases, there really wasn't much of a problem. The primary benefit reaped by Y2K remediation was a general spotting and fixing of previously unseen bugs, not an avoidance of the much-hyped Y2K meltdown.
As so many have observed, there's no real profit incentive for Microsoft to sue Linux users/distributors. This is all about giving Microsoft's corporate sales force a talking point that hits home with executives. Corporate management is very risk averse. (Remember the Y2K fiasco? Uncounted billions were spent chasing a software bogeyman that, in most cases, wasn't much of a threat.) As such, one of the strongest arguments a salesguy can use is that their competitor, though appearing cheaper, nevertheless poses hidden costs in the form of legal threats. After all, what if a company decided to have their whole corporate enchilada depend on Linux, and then a lawsuit comes along that renders their entire IT infrastructure invalid? Even a short-term court order that bars use of Linux until infringing code can be repaired would be disastrous. If the salesguy can persuade even a reasonable doubt on that point, it becomes a no-brainer for corporate management.
The problem for Linux evangelists is there is no real way to counter that line of argument.
Let's see... we want to design a neural net that predicts the summed trading behavior of, oh, several tens of millions of human brains? Beyond the obvious hardware scaling problems, we must think of the software used by these brains, each of which has different biases for selecting stocks. Some choose based on omens they call 'fundamentals'. Some choose based on some form of scrying on the shapes of squiggles of price history charts. Some trade decisions are made on how the trader's 'gut' happens to feel about it. But, in fact, everything stored in these neural nets has some contribution to the outcome of an investing choice. In a close decision, it may be that the memory of having been turned down on an offer to go to the prom might provide the unconscious final impetus to invest or not.
Kinda reminds me of a fanciful and ambitious kid who declares he's going to build an interstellar spaceship out of stuff laying around in the garage.
I received email from Dr. James Gillies of CERN on this:
Dear Gregory,
I believe that the field of the ATLAS magnet is around 2 tesla, but the volume is vastly larger than an MIR magnet. Another experiment at CERN, which has a smaller volume than ATLAS has a field that reaches 4 tesla. In the LHC particle accelerator itself, the field in the magnets is around 9 tesla.
Regards, James Gillies
The Big O's comments seem more an indictment of 'real' reality than of the people who avoid it. What does it say about life that some people would prefer to spend it pretending to be a brightly-colored cartoon than a stocker at Wal-Mart?
Since assembly-based nano isn't anywhere near yet, whenever news articles use the term 'nano', what they really mean is something more like 'chemical' or 'molecular'. TFA is no exception, really. So when he says 'There is some evidence that nanoparticles can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' we can easily translate this as saying 'There is some evidence that molecules can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' Yeah, some molecules can pass the blood-brain barrier. What's his point? It's all nano-FUD, IMO.
Their other products are chump change:
Quarried rock goes for about $3.75/ton. Of the 9000 tons of garbage they burn, they end up with 600 tons of slag, worth about $2000/day.
Steam is worth about $10/1000 lb. The 80000 lbs of steam they'll sell to Tropicana is worth about $800/day.
They don't mention it, but they are probably able to collect tipping fees from the sewage folks and, once this landfill is gone, dumping fees for future garbage.
Still, the bottom line is electricity. If their efficiencies are off or if the market for electricity gets cheap, they may have a hard time amortizing $425 million in debt, even at favorable bond rates. $425 Million at 4.5% over 30 years would require about $2 million/month to service. Their $126K/day income gives them a gross of $3.8 million/month. Enough to service the debt and have about $1.8 million/month for salaries and other recurring costs. It might fly. But if they rack up significant maintenance costs that amount to a significant fraction of their total $425 million plant cost over the 30-year lifetime, it probably won't.
But you'd be okay using the electricity they generate to warm your soup? What's the difference? In one case they're transmitting energy as heat stored in water to drive turbines in Tropicana. In the second case, they've used the heat to drive their own turbines and send the electricity to you.
You should be asking the students what they want. They are your customers. The customer is always right. You are a vendor of educational services. Provide some service, dammit! Don't make your customers jump through hoops they don't want or need.
Another interesting business model for helping unsigned bands is SellaBand. They provide mp3's for free, and if you like a band enough to think they have a shot, you can pledge money on $10 increments called 'parts'. Once a band racks up $50K in pledges, they get real studio time, CDs pressed, etc. Then a portion of all CD sales goes back to the 'believers' who pledged. Supposedly, one can revoke their pledge at any time before it reaches $50K.
The problem with WoW is that after a month or so, it becomes pretty much a "been there, done that" situation. Sure there are "new" areas one gains access to and "new" artifacts to raid for, but they're all just variations on a (by then very familiar) theme.
A MMOG that provides continuously new paradigms for success as the player advances would mop the floor with WoW.
That said, it is pretty easy to statistically spot deviations caused by "irrational exuberance". Even so, a computer betting against the "new economy" rally of the late 1990's would have suffered some deep drawdown before it payed off.
And, Mechanical Investing, as it's called, is a pretty popular hobby among some fools.
As if there's such a thing as real news?
It would not surprise me to see government or corporate-funded research into "intelligent buddies" - programs that are the descendendants of "Clippy" or "Bob" that are actually sophisticated enough to be more useful than annoying. Once we're immersed in ubiquitous computing, they can be active participants in any conversation or activity, chiming in with juicy morsels of pertinent trivia, jokes, gossip or actual useful information - cool enough that everybody would always want them on. They could be released free of cost, and beyond providing surveillance into the minds of these users as well as the people they interact with, they can provide a mechanism for actively steering social development. Say a troubled teen starts talking with his chums about how much of a drag everything is - his "intelligent buddy" can tell a story about some other teen, perhaps one who lives nearby, who had a similar situation and suggest setting up a meeting. Turns out the other troubled teen has been persuaded to start doing volunteer work and was surprised to find this made life less of a drag. Naturally, a corporate-funded IB would suggest the nearest place to grab a bottle of Spazzy-Cola as soon as it detects thirst.
Yeah, actually, it will - as soon as the mercury clock becomes the master timekeeper for WWV.
I think the idea probably isn't so much to charge royalties or make money via litigation as to have a tempting body of IP to exchange with other companies who agree to cross-license their IP to all members in the Myrvold keiretsu. If the IP stockpile grows large enough, members could have a huge advantage over non-members. Kind of like an open-source club that's only open to members and that charges massive dues. Of course, membership is a double-edged sword, since your cohort are now also your direct competitors against which you have no IP shield. So it'd make sense for everyone in the keiretsu to buy ownership of each other. Maybe pool shares into a keiretsu mutual fund as a condition of membership?
All you have to do is say "looks like we need to reformat and reinstall windows". That seems to be the preferred solution for most internal IT support people. It's quick, it "solves" the problem, and any problems aferward are obviously not their fault. Seems like it'd work just great externally as well.