Since most of the replies so far have either been disparaging or been references to other scifi works, I will do my best to actually answer your question.
For the sake of accuracy, I am going to assume the following:
The mission is 1 way. There will be no resupply operations. The colony must supply itself with infrastructue and supplies.
That out of the way, here it goes.
First, your crew must be over 500 people, and totally unrelated to each other. This is the bare minimum required for a stable breeding population. Any smaller, and you end up with an unviable population, a la the nazi eugenics colony experiments.
Your crew cannot all be officers, administration, tech heads, et al. You positively have to include blue collar workers. Machinists, assembly workers, etc.
In addition to this, you cannot presume to find food on the planet you are sending the colony ship to. At our distance from the nearest goldilocks planet, we can't even get a gross atmospheric spectrograph, let alone a detailed list of possible lifeforms. This means you have to not only take whatever food your mission needs for the trip through space, but also the means to produce food when you get there. Frozen domesticated animal embryos, collections of edible seeds and plantforms, etc. The works. It also means you have to take horticultural experts and farmers with you.
In addition, there is a lot that can go wrong on such a mission. The colony ship will be in transit for over a hundred years to reach the nearest starsystem using the fastest possible forms of propulsion currently available to us. This *will* be a multigeneration voyage, and shit breaks. You have to be able to fix things and make spare parts. That means you need a complete factory and refinery complex built into the colony ship.
In short, think of a space vessel with the combined cubic footage of new york state, comprising manufacturing, housing, environmental, and food cultivation systems, in addition to propulsion, power generation, water reclamation, and administration systems. You will be launching a small country into space. If it isn't at time of launch, it will be by the time it reaches its destination.
The colony ship will be too large to land on the destination planet. It will need small craft to deposit transplanted lifeforms, colony site construction equipment and supplies, and ground personel on the surface. These craft need to be reusable. The colony ship would BE the supply line for the new planetary colony site. It would stay in orbit, produce and deploy any gps or com system satelite networks, and ensure the viability of the ground based colony as it develops.
In addition to the lander craft, the colony ship would need service and resourcing craft to help keep the colony ship operational. The ship would be too large for unassisted spacewalks for repairs, so some form of space only maintenance and cargo tug craft would be necessary as well.
This means the colony ship needs cargo bays, and docking bays, distributed around the ship.
Due to the size of the ship, some form of internal rapid transit system for the crew will be necessary.
The psychological integrity of the hermetically bottled colony ship population needs to be maintained. Recreational fascilities need to be available, including botanical gardens which serve no other purpose. (This means you need people to maintain them. Some bit of crossover in functionality can be possible with the horticultural experts developing new domestic plant varieties enroute in the botanical gardens.) It needs musicians, artists, poets, movie stars... the works.
The colony ship has to contain epic shittons of water and biomass. It has to be able to reliably handle a growing population while in transit without overloading the environmental systems. It also has to be able to deflect cosmic energy for hundreds of years.
The colony ship has to produce artificial gravity. This means it has to rotate in some fashion, as no other means of simulating gravity is currently known.
If you are going to write a story about such a voyage, you have to explain how the earth managed to fund such an operation, and also why they did it.
If all the image needs to do is hold the basic OS and a single game deployment, why not pxe the whole image to a dedicated hardware ram drive, that can make full use of the sata controller?
There are quite a few other devices of this type on the market as well.
Using these in the systems, you could still netload the system images to the game rigs with pxe, but when the image has finished being pushed, just reboot them and you have a bitchin fast row of locally booting systems. Power them off when they need a new configuration pushed.
You do realize that it is extraordinarily easy to install cat5e wall plates and drops in most modern homes, right?
You can use powertools, have an rj45 modular crimping tool, and know where to buy bulk cat5e right? (If not, can I please verify your geek card...)
All you need is hidden utility closet to house the punchblock and local switch hardware, and you are golden. With how small some of this hardware has gotten, you might even be able to get away with a breakerbox enclosure from lowes, assuming you put some ventilation in it.
My current home was once refit as a beauty salon by the previous owners, and has so may utility hookups in the living room that I could have a christmas tree made entirely of christmas lights and not blow any fuses (hookups for dryer chairs have beefy amp ratings). If I wasn't such an antisocial recluse, and actually had lan party friends to come over I could really do crazy shit with my place too.
But I don't, so I haven't and won't. But if you want to run cat5e in your house, the only thing stopping you is inertia, since as far as I know you don't need an electrician to run the stuff, being so low voltage.
If those are running older firmware (if the drives are dead, then I presume you are not playing games, which forces you to use newer fw.) Then you can install HBC using banner bomb from the sdcard. No game disc required.
A little more tlc, and you can get usbloader set up, and still have a functional game system, despite the broken optical drive.
The only sony device I own (and use) is a second hand psp1001, (aka, psp fat), running cfw. I use it as a portable retro gaming platform.
The whole "itsy bitsy teeny tiny thumbnails" thing smacked of "you should use a bravia 70 inch 1080p with 3d for best viewing experience!" Type design decision for the native netflix client. No thank you sony. Your dream of owning my entire livingroom entertainment center is absurd and nightmarish to me. Go fuck yourselves, and your intrusive tos and eula as well.
I already own a wii, and do use it for casual gaming from time to time. I don't have blazing fast internet (lucky to get crippled dsl where I live.......) so I doubt I could stream 1080p from netflix anyway. 720p would be a nice option though, nintendo. Please think about it.
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
It does not work with either of those aluminum alloys, because they are not.
Sintering of aluminum does not work, for the same reasons an ordinary welder cannot weld aluminum (any aluminum). Aluminum oxidation is greatly catalyzed by heat, and instead of producing 2024 aluminum in situ, you would instead produce an exotic mix of aluminum and copper oxides in situ. Double plus ungood, citizen.
To even hope to do this, you would have to introduce another consumable in the form of inert gas, and a hermetically sealed build chamber to fill it with. This is of course, on top of the annealing oven and solution heat treat systems.
Even then, you would have problems with spalling and gas microbubbles being present, since the melting temp for aluminum is very low.
In short, you can do that with steel, but not aluminum.
This toy, in its original incarnation, had a one way only electric motor which turned a textured cylender inside the doll's mouth, which would activate if something (anything) was inside it. Fingers? OM NOM NOM! Hair? OM NOM NOM! Bits of earlobe and other bits of tender skin? OM NOM NOM!
Essentially, a doll with an insatiable hunger for human flesh.
All the while, its voice circuit would coo about it being yummy.
"What, our multimillion dollar RC aeroplane with super special awesome shooty bits on it got STOLEN? I thought those people were a bunch of camel riding nomads that didn't even have electricity! How did they spoof our GPS and jam our command and control feeds!?"
"Well sir, yes, the drone was actually stolen and not shot down. As for their offensive technical abilities sir, they *are* developing nuclear weapons, and most of their population is not comprised of nomadic camel riders, sir."
"Are you mockin' me son?! I've served in this god-blessed nation's armed forces muh entire life! And now you intend to tell me, that some turban wearin camel humpers not only defeated state of the art tactical surveylance like it was child's play, and didn't knock it down with rocks or summat', but that their so called nuclear program is actually viable, AND that my assessment of their "society" is plain and simply 'wrong'?!"
"No sir, I am not mocking you sir, but the rest of what you said is true sir."
"Get out of here private! I don't know who assigned you to technical liason, but they obviously picked a mo-ron. If I could demote you any lower than private, rest assured the orders would go through expediently!"
[I am probably (hopefully) wrong about this caricature, but this sure looks like how things are being run.]
A cnc machine is built heavier than big momma's fat ass, and for a good reason! They are built to be as heavy as possible, so that the accoustic vibrations and mechanical actuator movement inside will not jack with table and spindle positioning in a meaningful way. (They weigh so much that it takes epic shittons of energy to move them. That's the point.)
They are made that way so the machine can have the.001 inch and tighter machine tolerances required for aerospace.
They weigh several tons, even for a small one like a D500.
Even then, they are messy. They are designed to flood coolant on the cutting tool, to keep the tool from losing its tempering, and to keep the milled part from melting. (Especially true of aluminum.) Some systems use forced air, but the vast majority use liquid coolant, that presumes gravity will be present.
Also, CNC systems are not fully automated "load it and forget it" systems. A lot can go wrong during operation, which is why they have full time operators. (And between you and me, cnc operators tend to be joe sixpack.)
I realize that with the activities of the "for the children!" Groups out there that it is easy to presume everything is made of plastic these days, but this simply isn't true.
I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of the innards of the ISS's superstructure is mostly made from 2024 or 7075 aluminum alloy, sprayed with hexavalent cromium primer.
Those are the two most commonly used aluminum alloys used in aerospace fabrication (I make prints citing them all the time at work), and for strength reasons these need to be heat treated in most circumstances after being formed or milled. A powder or paste based prototype printer just won't be able to produce these alloys, because the desired mechanical properties are a result of the metalurgical crystaline structures present in them after annealing and heat treating. That is, unless you want to ship a whole annealing oven and solution heat treatment system up there... (just so you know, that equipment isn't light.)
For composite materials, conventional heat shaped plastics are not common either. Usually a thermally cured resin material is used, such as with phenolic, or with carbon fiber composite. Doing thse in space would be a nightmare, since not only do you deal with a sticky, honey like liquid with toxic fumes, and the curing oven, you also need a vacuum bag machine and the finished product must be sanded, creating tiny (toxic) particles to float around the ventilation system.
I could see a prototype maching puking out ceramic paste parts prior to electric kilning, or plastic parts, but not the main structural parts made from alloy or composites.
I don't see the justification for the added launch expense of bringing one and its consumables along.
1) not quite correct again. I proposed submitting a recording. The definition of which is left purposefully ambiguous by the copyright office, to avoid excluding new technologies. Digital recordings are included in this class, which then includes computational representations. Eg, an mp3 file is a series of instructions for the decoder to produce a sound. It is not itself, a direct or static copy of that sound per se, but is classified as such for the convenience of the legal system. Other such representational formats are.mod,.mid, etc. It is possible to create such a digital recording that is of infinite length. The requirement for an infinite length was a rhetorical one, to fit your contrived use case. The reality of the situation is that you would have an infringement basis, using prior case history, with a far reduced subset than what you postulated: every possible combination of 4 measures of musical notation would be more than sufficient, and is considerably smaller than the rhetorically astronomical sample that you postulated in your first rebuttal. My counter argument was that even under the conditons you specified, your argument doesn't hold up.
The definition you quoted, "a computer program that produces that output" is exactly manifest by a.mod or.mid file. Further, it also has a graphic art analog in the form of a truetype font, which is a bytecode program for how to deform and display a series of closed quadratic curves. A font is both the printed output, and the program which generates that program. Both are subject to copyright protection. The logic inside such a file would be quite simple, and would defacto BE such a recording, despite your objection to the contrary. I am citing industry standard formats for phonorecordings that happen to have such protections, and which satisfy the requirements, yet you continue to assert that they don't apply, for nebulous and unstated reasons.
Now, your "does not promote" argument: the program can be part of say, a scientific analysis of the music space, in terms of human cognition. A complete but truncated example of that space (every possible combination of 4 measures) can be experimentally interesting to see what proportion of that space humans would consider music. This has obvious applications for determining how much of the useful space is allready allocated to copyright, and if current copyright is a reasonable solution or not. As a "purely serendipitious" (ahem) consequence of that sampling, the generated work would be impossible to avoid "copying" from, due to the nature of the work.
If I made such a study for money, would I not be correct in pointing out the obvious utility that copyright would offer to finance additional research? Also, by giving such a test case, do I not essentially torpedo your claim that the sequence has no intrinsic merit for which copyright would apply?
Your arguments against a static copy are torpedoed by the contrived requirements you assert as being extant: 4 measures of 4:4 time would at most, at fullest extrapolation, be a few gb in size. I could submit the recording on a usb hdd as the physical volume, and still have the desired effect. I don't have to compute entire works for there to be infringement, as established by prior court precident.
Again, not required if using a proceedural file format, like.mod
Your argument at this point is one of an appeal to authority argument "the copyright office won't let you, but I refuse to cite any prior case history. You are just wrong, stop talking."
Not quite entirely true. The work could make a very useful dataset in a fair number of cognitative studies, as well as a data generator for a more intelligent machine music program.
As for expressed in entirety, the mathematical derivation is the only way it could be so expressed. I am unaware of any restriction on length of the work, but for the bulk majority of works, a single iteration cycle of 3 bars of music should be sufficient for partial infringement, which would reduce the dataset from infinite, to one more easily bounded and possible to represent statically.
It looks to me more like you are suffering from an inherent bias against this idea, rather than being objective about it. To wit, every argument you have given about its impossibility has been contrived in such a way as to reinforce that notion.
There are all kinds of ways the resulting dataset could be used scientifically for instance, but you asserted that it could not be used in such a capacity. Why did you assert this?
Prior to that, you asserted falsely that it could be submitted, then asserted falsely that it could be easily predictive.
In all 3 examples of your rebuttles you have exhibited an intrinsic failure to even attempt to comprehend what is being suggested, and instead subbstitutes an internally generated alternative that fits a preconcieved notion.
As for the assertion made, it wouldn't be circular like you state.
It would take the form of:
Work [foo], created by artist [bar] is a nonprotected misappropriation from my work, [set of all notations], which upon examination is nothing more than a remixed version of my work. Included is a comprehensive list of timestamps illustrating the illegal appropriation from my work, which incontrovertably shows that the work [foo] is in its enirety, unoriginal, and in violation of copyright law.
The absurdity is actually part of the point. There is nothing that I can see that prevents this from being done, due to the purposefully broken definition of what a phonorecording is. If they discount algorithmic representations, then the exchange of mp3 files becomes perfectly ok. Those are just a series of codec standardized instructions for a computer. Playing them as raw pcm would result in noise.
You would hold, effectively, copyright over all possible music, even dischordant mismashes of chords. You could state that you would be happy to "cross license" with big content, and enforce a horrible draconian contract over them, and at the same time, destroy their business angle completely.
This is why they would not permit you to win. However, the way the laws arecurrently written and interpreted allows for this very thing to happen, since you didn't submit an algorithm (even though that is what you actually did...) you submitted a playable phonorecording of "infinite" length.
I suspect that you could get your "song" rubber stamped quite easily, given that the file size for the.mod file would be quite small.
It would force some very major copyright reforms, because current lengths for protection are "lifetime of artist, plus 70 years." That is a *very* long time to hold "all possible music" hostage for. It would force the big holders to argue for minisuculy small protection times, and or, argue that fair use is required.
It is an example of a reductio ad absurdium in action.
The musical score, and pi comparison is a faulted one.
The playback of the total music space would be incremental, like a binary counter. As such, it would more in comon with copyrighting arithmetic, than with copyrighting pi.
Eg, if you presume a standard time notation of 1 integer per second, and have a translation table to translate a score into the numerical equivilent used by the counting algorithm, the question would be laughably easy to solve for, and prove mathematically. It would be like asking "at what timestamp does the number 1234567890 occur at?" The answer, with a linear counting progression, is of course "1234567891 seconds." (Have to count the 0 at the start.)
The location as a timestamp would be solvable in polynomial time, and because it is rational, and not irrational like pi, it can be bounded and defined with precision.
The purpose of this action IS TO LOSE, but to lose by forcing the content producers to prove that the very practices they are actively engaged in are not legal, and need to be policed.
The purpose is to force them to argue against their own standard operating practices in court, win, and afterward be legally barred from continuing those practices.
By filing with a phyrric entity, the created corporation can disolve after losing and can claim chapter 13 bankruptcy. The single asset (the infinite progression, mathematically complete playback space of all possible musical notations) can be sold for a trivial sum to somebody like the eff after such loss.
The point of creating the corporate entity is that you have a non person "person" you can sacrifice, without endangering the actual people involved.
If the court goes after the individual people, it would be a much bigger and more dangerous precident to big business than the one initially sought after.
No you don't, you could play the first several millenia at least on conventional computing hardware.
The.sfc format from the snes is especially interesting, in that it already assumes infinite musical progression as the target. The hog, computation wise, would be the size of the timestamp register. The LoC does not require you to submit a player with the recording, so that isn't important.
You don't have to represent the entire space statically to produce a phonorecording of the work.
You can exploit the ambiguous language of what constitutes a phonorecording to the LoC for inclusion, and still have a "easily contained by the universe", "easily produced by humans", and "still contains every possible combination", regardless of length of the arragement.
Take for instance, the.mod format, or the.sfc format.
These contain a section for "sample" data, then a programatical sequence. Essentially, a program that generates the music, rather than a static representation of the music.
Your argument that the musical score will be near infinite in length doesn't hold if you use a phonorecording format that has infinite playback time as a target. You just seek the song to the timestamp index in the permeutation's progression, and press play. If you have all eternity to sit and listen, you can do that too.
The LoC only demands that you submit a copy of the phonorecording for inclusion to receive official copyright protection (along with the fee of course), but the wording of what constitutes such a recording is left purposefully anbiguous, so such a programatical music file would satisfy the requirement perfectly.
Then how can warner bmg file a takedown notice against someone singing or humming or arranging the music to "happy birthday"?
If the arrangement (sheet music) is not what is protected, and instead only individual phonorecordings, then license for live performances would be a nonsense enterprise.
While drastically more computationally intensive, it should be possible to create a bruteforce lyrics generator as well, using an unabridged dictionary as input.
You can narrow it down a bit if you make some simplifications, such as, 4:4 time, with maximum 8 notes per chord, 16 chords per measure.
You could do it systematically, creating "choatic symphonies", each one being a permeutation of the possible space.
I agree, it would be a set of very long arrangements, but the sequential nature of the permeutation would lend well to parallelism, since the generation processes don't really need to share data, just a mathematically derived set of entry points which can be found in polynomial time.
Theoretically, I could have my 8 core i7 "composing" 8 symphonies at a whack.
Slashdot Mirror
Interstellar travel timetables would require whole humans procreating enroute.
A trip to mars is only 6 months. A trip to kepler22b would take over 600 years.
Depending on destination, the colony ships's needed design requirements would change. Hence, the name of the op.
Since most of the replies so far have either been disparaging or been references to other scifi works, I will do my best to actually answer your question.
For the sake of accuracy, I am going to assume the following:
The mission is 1 way.
There will be no resupply operations.
The colony must supply itself with infrastructue and supplies.
That out of the way, here it goes.
First, your crew must be over 500 people, and totally unrelated to each other. This is the bare minimum required for a stable breeding population. Any smaller, and you end up with an unviable population, a la the nazi eugenics colony experiments.
Your crew cannot all be officers, administration, tech heads, et al. You positively have to include blue collar workers. Machinists, assembly workers, etc.
In addition to this, you cannot presume to find food on the planet you are sending the colony ship to. At our distance from the nearest goldilocks planet, we can't even get a gross atmospheric spectrograph, let alone a detailed list of possible lifeforms. This means you have to not only take whatever food your mission needs for the trip through space, but also the means to produce food when you get there. Frozen domesticated animal embryos, collections of edible seeds and plantforms, etc. The works. It also means you have to take horticultural experts and farmers with you.
In addition, there is a lot that can go wrong on such a mission. The colony ship will be in transit for over a hundred years to reach the nearest starsystem using the fastest possible forms of propulsion currently available to us. This *will* be a multigeneration voyage, and shit breaks. You have to be able to fix things and make spare parts. That means you need a complete factory and refinery complex built into the colony ship.
In short, think of a space vessel with the combined cubic footage of new york state, comprising manufacturing, housing, environmental, and food cultivation systems, in addition to propulsion, power generation, water reclamation, and administration systems. You will be launching a small country into space. If it isn't at time of launch, it will be by the time it reaches its destination.
The colony ship will be too large to land on the destination planet. It will need small craft to deposit transplanted lifeforms, colony site construction equipment and supplies, and ground personel on the surface. These craft need to be reusable. The colony ship would BE the supply line for the new planetary colony site. It would stay in orbit, produce and deploy any gps or com system satelite networks, and ensure the viability of the ground based colony as it develops.
In addition to the lander craft, the colony ship would need service and resourcing craft to help keep the colony ship operational. The ship would be too large for unassisted spacewalks for repairs, so some form of space only maintenance and cargo tug craft would be necessary as well.
This means the colony ship needs cargo bays, and docking bays, distributed around the ship.
Due to the size of the ship, some form of internal rapid transit system for the crew will be necessary.
The psychological integrity of the hermetically bottled colony ship population needs to be maintained. Recreational fascilities need to be available, including botanical gardens which serve no other purpose. (This means you need people to maintain them. Some bit of crossover in functionality can be possible with the horticultural experts developing new domestic plant varieties enroute in the botanical gardens.) It needs musicians, artists, poets, movie stars... the works.
The colony ship has to contain epic shittons of water and biomass. It has to be able to reliably handle a growing population while in transit without overloading the environmental systems. It also has to be able to deflect cosmic energy for hundreds of years.
The colony ship has to produce artificial gravity. This means it has to rotate in some fashion, as no other means of simulating gravity is currently known.
If you are going to write a story about such a voyage, you have to explain how the earth managed to fund such an operation, and also why they did it.
If all the image needs to do is hold the basic OS and a single game deployment, why not pxe the whole image to a dedicated hardware ram drive, that can make full use of the sata controller?
Acard has a number of such devices, and while pricey, would absolutely floor disk io performance in a game rig.
There are quite a few other devices of this type on the market as well.
Using these in the systems, you could still netload the system images to the game rigs with pxe, but when the image has finished being pushed, just reboot them and you have a bitchin fast row of locally booting systems. Power them off when they need a new configuration pushed.
You do realize that it is extraordinarily easy to install cat5e wall plates and drops in most modern homes, right?
You can use powertools, have an rj45 modular crimping tool, and know where to buy bulk cat5e right? (If not, can I please verify your geek card...)
All you need is hidden utility closet to house the punchblock and local switch hardware, and you are golden. With how small some of this hardware has gotten, you might even be able to get away with a breakerbox enclosure from lowes, assuming you put some ventilation in it.
My current home was once refit as a beauty salon by the previous owners, and has so may utility hookups in the living room that I could have a christmas tree made entirely of christmas lights and not blow any fuses (hookups for dryer chairs have beefy amp ratings). If I wasn't such an antisocial recluse, and actually had lan party friends to come over I could really do crazy shit with my place too.
But I don't, so I haven't and won't. But if you want to run cat5e in your house, the only thing stopping you is inertia, since as far as I know you don't need an electrician to run the stuff, being so low voltage.
If those are running older firmware (if the drives are dead, then I presume you are not playing games, which forces you to use newer fw.) Then you can install HBC using banner bomb from the sdcard. No game disc required.
A little more tlc, and you can get usbloader set up, and still have a functional game system, despite the broken optical drive.
The only sony device I own (and use) is a second hand psp1001, (aka, psp fat), running cfw. I use it as a portable retro gaming platform.
The whole "itsy bitsy teeny tiny thumbnails" thing smacked of "you should use a bravia 70 inch 1080p with 3d for best viewing experience!" Type design decision for the native netflix client. No thank you sony. Your dream of owning my entire livingroom entertainment center is absurd and nightmarish to me. Go fuck yourselves, and your intrusive tos and eula as well.
I already own a wii, and do use it for casual gaming from time to time. I don't have blazing fast internet (lucky to get crippled dsl where I live.......) so I doubt I could stream 1080p from netflix anyway. 720p would be a nice option though, nintendo. Please think about it.
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
This works with steel, because it is weldable.
It does not work with either of those aluminum alloys, because they are not.
Sintering of aluminum does not work, for the same reasons an ordinary welder cannot weld aluminum (any aluminum). Aluminum oxidation is greatly catalyzed by heat, and instead of producing 2024 aluminum in situ, you would instead produce an exotic mix of aluminum and copper oxides in situ. Double plus ungood, citizen.
To even hope to do this, you would have to introduce another consumable in the form of inert gas, and a hermetically sealed build chamber to fill it with. This is of course, on top of the annealing oven and solution heat treat systems.
Even then, you would have problems with spalling and gas microbubbles being present, since the melting temp for aluminum is very low.
In short, you can do that with steel, but not aluminum.
The idea of these toys being dangerous is rediculous.
Want a dangerous toy?
Here's one. Sort of a cross between child of chucky and disney fantasy, to create a truly diabolical toy:
the cabbage patch 'snacktime kid' doll!
This toy, in its original incarnation, had a one way only electric motor which turned a textured cylender inside the doll's mouth, which would activate if something (anything) was inside it. Fingers? OM NOM NOM! Hair? OM NOM NOM! Bits of earlobe and other bits of tender skin? OM NOM NOM!
Essentially, a doll with an insatiable hunger for human flesh.
All the while, its voice circuit would coo about it being yummy.
Now there was a dangerous toy.
"What, our multimillion dollar RC aeroplane with super special awesome shooty bits on it got STOLEN? I thought those people were a bunch of camel riding nomads that didn't even have electricity! How did they spoof our GPS and jam our command and control feeds!?"
"Well sir, yes, the drone was actually stolen and not shot down. As for their offensive technical abilities sir, they *are* developing nuclear weapons, and most of their population is not comprised of nomadic camel riders, sir."
"Are you mockin' me son?! I've served in this god-blessed nation's armed forces muh entire life! And now you intend to tell me, that some turban wearin camel humpers not only defeated state of the art tactical surveylance like it was child's play, and didn't knock it down with rocks or summat', but that their so called nuclear program is actually viable, AND that my assessment of their "society" is plain and simply 'wrong'?!"
"No sir, I am not mocking you sir, but the rest of what you said is true sir."
"Get out of here private! I don't know who assigned you to technical liason, but they obviously picked a mo-ron. If I could demote you any lower than private, rest assured the orders would go through expediently!"
[I am probably (hopefully) wrong about this caricature, but this sure looks like how things are being run.]
No joke!
A cnc machine is built heavier than big momma's fat ass, and for a good reason! They are built to be as heavy as possible, so that the accoustic vibrations and mechanical actuator movement inside will not jack with table and spindle positioning in a meaningful way. (They weigh so much that it takes epic shittons of energy to move them. That's the point.)
They are made that way so the machine can have the .001 inch and tighter machine tolerances required for aerospace.
They weigh several tons, even for a small one like a D500.
Even then, they are messy. They are designed to flood coolant on the cutting tool, to keep the tool from losing its tempering, and to keep the milled part from melting. (Especially true of aluminum.) Some systems use forced air, but the vast majority use liquid coolant, that presumes gravity will be present.
Also, CNC systems are not fully automated "load it and forget it" systems. A lot can go wrong during operation, which is why they have full time operators. (And between you and me, cnc operators tend to be joe sixpack.)
I realize that with the activities of the "for the children!" Groups out there that it is easy to presume everything is made of plastic these days, but this simply isn't true.
I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of the innards of the ISS's superstructure is mostly made from 2024 or 7075 aluminum alloy, sprayed with hexavalent cromium primer.
Those are the two most commonly used aluminum alloys used in aerospace fabrication (I make prints citing them all the time at work), and for strength reasons these need to be heat treated in most circumstances after being formed or milled. A powder or paste based prototype printer just won't be able to produce these alloys, because the desired mechanical properties are a result of the metalurgical crystaline structures present in them after annealing and heat treating. That is, unless you want to ship a whole annealing oven and solution heat treatment system up there... (just so you know, that equipment isn't light.)
For composite materials, conventional heat shaped plastics are not common either. Usually a thermally cured resin material is used, such as with phenolic, or with carbon fiber composite. Doing thse in space would be a nightmare, since not only do you deal with a sticky, honey like liquid with toxic fumes, and the curing oven, you also need a vacuum bag machine and the finished product must be sanded, creating tiny (toxic) particles to float around the ventilation system.
I could see a prototype maching puking out ceramic paste parts prior to electric kilning, or plastic parts, but not the main structural parts made from alloy or composites.
I don't see the justification for the added launch expense of bringing one and its consumables along.
1) not quite correct again. I proposed submitting a recording. The definition of which is left purposefully ambiguous by the copyright office, to avoid excluding new technologies. Digital recordings are included in this class, which then includes computational representations. Eg, an mp3 file is a series of instructions for the decoder to produce a sound. It is not itself, a direct or static copy of that sound per se, but is classified as such for the convenience of the legal system. Other such representational formats are .mod, .mid, etc. It is possible to create such a digital recording that is of infinite length. The requirement for an infinite length was a rhetorical one, to fit your contrived use case. The reality of the situation is that you would have an infringement basis, using prior case history, with a far reduced subset than what you postulated: every possible combination of 4 measures of musical notation would be more than sufficient, and is considerably smaller than the rhetorically astronomical sample that you postulated in your first rebuttal. My counter argument was that even under the conditons you specified, your argument doesn't hold up.
The definition you quoted, "a computer program that produces that output" is exactly manifest by a .mod or .mid file. Further, it also has a graphic art analog in the form of a truetype font, which is a bytecode program for how to deform and display a series of closed quadratic curves. A font is both the printed output, and the program which generates that program. Both are subject to copyright protection. The logic inside such a file would be quite simple, and would defacto BE such a recording, despite your objection to the contrary. I am citing industry standard formats for phonorecordings that happen to have such protections, and which satisfy the requirements, yet you continue to assert that they don't apply, for nebulous and unstated reasons.
Now, your "does not promote" argument: the program can be part of say, a scientific analysis of the music space, in terms of human cognition. A complete but truncated example of that space (every possible combination of 4 measures) can be experimentally interesting to see what proportion of that space humans would consider music. This has obvious applications for determining how much of the useful space is allready allocated to copyright, and if current copyright is a reasonable solution or not. As a "purely serendipitious" (ahem) consequence of that sampling, the generated work would be impossible to avoid "copying" from, due to the nature of the work.
If I made such a study for money, would I not be correct in pointing out the obvious utility that copyright would offer to finance additional research? Also, by giving such a test case, do I not essentially torpedo your claim that the sequence has no intrinsic merit for which copyright would apply?
Your arguments against a static copy are torpedoed by the contrived requirements you assert as being extant: 4 measures of 4:4 time would at most, at fullest extrapolation, be a few gb in size. I could submit the recording on a usb hdd as the physical volume, and still have the desired effect. I don't have to compute entire works for there to be infringement, as established by prior court precident.
Again, not required if using a proceedural file format, like .mod
Your argument at this point is one of an appeal to authority argument "the copyright office won't let you, but I refuse to cite any prior case history. You are just wrong, stop talking."
Not quite entirely true. The work could make a very useful dataset in a fair number of cognitative studies, as well as a data generator for a more intelligent machine music program.
As for expressed in entirety, the mathematical derivation is the only way it could be so expressed. I am unaware of any restriction on length of the work, but for the bulk majority of works, a single iteration cycle of 3 bars of music should be sufficient for partial infringement, which would reduce the dataset from infinite, to one more easily bounded and possible to represent statically.
It looks to me more like you are suffering from an inherent bias against this idea, rather than being objective about it. To wit, every argument you have given about its impossibility has been contrived in such a way as to reinforce that notion.
There are all kinds of ways the resulting dataset could be used scientifically for instance, but you asserted that it could not be used in such a capacity. Why did you assert this?
Prior to that, you asserted falsely that it could be submitted, then asserted falsely that it could be easily predictive.
In all 3 examples of your rebuttles you have exhibited an intrinsic failure to even attempt to comprehend what is being suggested, and instead subbstitutes an internally generated alternative that fits a preconcieved notion.
Why is that?
That's actually part of the beauty.
It would necessitate enforcement against false positives. "No, honest, we really did think we owned it!"
As for the assertion made, it wouldn't be circular like you state.
It would take the form of:
Work [foo], created by artist [bar] is a nonprotected misappropriation from my work, [set of all notations], which upon examination is nothing more than a remixed version of my work. Included is a comprehensive list of timestamps illustrating the illegal appropriation from my work, which incontrovertably shows that the work [foo] is in its enirety, unoriginal, and in violation of copyright law.
The absurdity is actually part of the point. There is nothing that I can see that prevents this from being done, due to the purposefully broken definition of what a phonorecording is. If they discount algorithmic representations, then the exchange of mp3 files becomes perfectly ok. Those are just a series of codec standardized instructions for a computer. Playing them as raw pcm would result in noise.
You would hold, effectively, copyright over all possible music, even dischordant mismashes of chords. You could state that you would be happy to "cross license" with big content, and enforce a horrible draconian contract over them, and at the same time, destroy their business angle completely.
This is why they would not permit you to win. However, the way the laws arecurrently written and interpreted allows for this very thing to happen, since you didn't submit an algorithm (even though that is what you actually did...) you submitted a playable phonorecording of "infinite" length.
I suspect that you could get your "song" rubber stamped quite easily, given that the file size for the .mod file would be quite small.
It would force some very major copyright reforms, because current lengths for protection are "lifetime of artist, plus 70 years." That is a *very* long time to hold "all possible music" hostage for. It would force the big holders to argue for minisuculy small protection times, and or, argue that fair use is required.
It is an example of a reductio ad absurdium in action.
The musical score, and pi comparison is a faulted one.
The playback of the total music space would be incremental, like a binary counter. As such, it would more in comon with copyrighting arithmetic, than with copyrighting pi.
Eg, if you presume a standard time notation of 1 integer per second, and have a translation table to translate a score into the numerical equivilent used by the counting algorithm, the question would be laughably easy to solve for, and prove mathematically. It would be like asking "at what timestamp does the number 1234567890 occur at?" The answer, with a linear counting progression, is of course "1234567891 seconds." (Have to count the 0 at the start.)
The location as a timestamp would be solvable in polynomial time, and because it is rational, and not irrational like pi, it can be bounded and defined with precision.
The purpose of this action IS TO LOSE, but to lose by forcing the content producers to prove that the very practices they are actively engaged in are not legal, and need to be policed.
The purpose is to force them to argue against their own standard operating practices in court, win, and afterward be legally barred from continuing those practices.
By filing with a phyrric entity, the created corporation can disolve after losing and can claim chapter 13 bankruptcy. The single asset (the infinite progression, mathematically complete playback space of all possible musical notations) can be sold for a trivial sum to somebody like the eff after such loss.
The point of creating the corporate entity is that you have a non person "person" you can sacrifice, without endangering the actual people involved.
If the court goes after the individual people, it would be a much bigger and more dangerous precident to big business than the one initially sought after.
No you don't, you could play the first several millenia at least on conventional computing hardware.
The .sfc format from the snes is especially interesting, in that it already assumes infinite musical progression as the target. The hog, computation wise, would be the size of the timestamp register. The LoC does not require you to submit a player with the recording, so that isn't important.
An LLC requires multiple partners, so a solo man operation is still a no go. Need other people to comit
You don't have to represent the entire space statically to produce a phonorecording of the work.
You can exploit the ambiguous language of what constitutes a phonorecording to the LoC for inclusion, and still have a "easily contained by the universe", "easily produced by humans", and "still contains every possible combination", regardless of length of the arragement.
Take for instance, the .mod format, or the .sfc format.
These contain a section for "sample" data, then a programatical sequence. Essentially, a program that generates the music, rather than a static representation of the music.
Your argument that the musical score will be near infinite in length doesn't hold if you use a phonorecording format that has infinite playback time as a target. You just seek the song to the timestamp index in the permeutation's progression, and press play. If you have all eternity to sit and listen, you can do that too.
The LoC only demands that you submit a copy of the phonorecording for inclusion to receive official copyright protection (along with the fee of course), but the wording of what constitutes such a recording is left purposefully anbiguous, so such a programatical music file would satisfy the requirement perfectly.
Then how can warner bmg file a takedown notice against someone singing or humming or arranging the music to "happy birthday"?
If the arrangement (sheet music) is not what is protected, and instead only individual phonorecordings, then license for live performances would be a nonsense enterprise.
While drastically more computationally intensive, it should be possible to create a bruteforce lyrics generator as well, using an unabridged dictionary as input.
You can narrow it down a bit if you make some simplifications, such as, 4:4 time, with maximum 8 notes per chord, 16 chords per measure.
You could do it systematically, creating "choatic symphonies", each one being a permeutation of the possible space.
I agree, it would be a set of very long arrangements, but the sequential nature of the permeutation would lend well to parallelism, since the generation processes don't really need to share data, just a mathematically derived set of entry points which can be found in polynomial time.
Theoretically, I could have my 8 core i7 "composing" 8 symphonies at a whack.
All we need is an organization to operate under.
This would shield individuals from the litigation the same way that corporations shield board members.
I would happily become "employed" by such a "company."
What I lack is the knowledge of proper process to create such a sacrificial company.