All the posts on here are stating the obvious such as how cloning is just a scientific tool, or how twins are clones, or making silly jokes. Everyone has missed the REAL social issue at work here. Clones WILL be created, and when they are, the world will hate them and shun them! Clones will be just as human as you and I, but they will be outcast and feared by society at large. It's the new wave of discrimination, and there will be a whole new debate about whether they are "real" people. And no one will think to ask the clones...
I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers
Shouldn't consumers get to decide for THEMSELVES what's a valuable service to them? The point of the spam debate isn't over whether your business is legitamite or not, it's over the question of who should initiate a transaction. There are a few companies I choose to receive information from that I have specifically told them to send, but I have no desire to receive information from you or your company.
Hypothetically, how would you feel if 20 to 30 people rang your doorbell every evening to tell you all about the wonderful widgimigadget they're selling? It's not hard to receive that many spam mails in an evening, even if you've been careful with your email address.
I shall use a giant "L-a-s-e-r" to drill through the surface of the Earth, extract crude oil, distribute it to an unsuspecting population, and slowly destroy the environment!!
Uhm, that's already been done...
Throw me a fricken bone here, I've been frozen for 30 years...
(1) If software is delivered via the web, you will require someone else?s computing power at the other end of the line. Someone has to pay for this. As the recent experience of the dotcoms shows, business models based on giving stuff away free almost invariable don?t work. Software provides will have to be paid for the service they provide. So an end to the free beer aspect of software.
Actually, I see this as a great benefit to free software. The reason is that the remote application market provides a clear distinction between free software and commercial software. Any software which is distributed is easily pirated, simply because by "nature" such software has no intrinsic value or cost overhead to reproduce, other than what we artificially assign to it. Remote applications however are not so much SOFTWARE as SERVICES. And it is this service that people will be willing to pay for, because it DOES have intrinsic value and cannot be reproduced at no cost.
So while with the exclusion of donations or advertisement funded services (such as, in simple form, we are seeing with freshmeat, google, download.com, etc), remote applications will provide a commercial market in the areas where corporate coordination is necessary, such as say an application that automatically gives you access to almost every academic paper in existence (a service, while the papers themselves have no "intrinsic" value since they can be copied), it still leaves the free software market wide open for all the applications you run on your pc.
In the software testing community, SOUP degradingly refers to "Software Of Unknown Pedigree"
Re:Quantum computers and Moore's law
on
Quantum Computers
·
· Score: 2
Quantum computers will likely mark the end of Moore's law. They don't scale the same way as conventional computers. Think of a quantum computer as being able to process 2^n values (where n is the bits per item being processed) for every single value processed in a conventional computer. If we can keep the same kind of mojo going for quantum computers that we've kept going for classical computers, then we might rougly experience computing power squaring every 18 months or so. (Of course, there are a whole new set of challenges facing us in the field of quantum computing that we've never seen in classical computers.)
Aren't they making a HUGE assumption here, that all the moths already in the wild are going to want to do it with a bunch of freaky glow-in-the-dark moths??
They talk about people buying dozens of niche devices to service every need they have? Nonesense, I want a laptop that makes coffee and toasts my bagel in the morning.
I haven't read the book, but the review was very well written. Good writing, Timothy. Don't fret over anything you hear on here calling/. second rate journalism, because that there is first rate writing.
If napster itself doesn't survive all this attention, I can guarantee you that the napster idea will survive beyond all this legislation. There is far too much consumer interest in the idea of napster for it to die off, no matter how much the business execs might be afraid of it. Wherever there is extreme mindshare, there will be success.
If Napster doesn't have a workable business model, one will be created by market demand that serves the same need.
While neat science which probably has applications elsewhere, I really don't see this being at all beneficial to quantum computing. While the article doesn't state whether it is nuclear spin or electron spin that Hiura suggests using as the quantum bit (qubit), neither one would work well. Nuclear spin is an unpopular choice because it does not scale well to large-scale quantum computers. It is too difficult to engineer the exchange interactions between qubits to perform any reasonably sized calculations. As for electronic spin, being enclosed in this silicon cage would create a nightmare of interference. Not interference from outside particles, but interference between all the possible energy levels present due to the molecular bonds. As you get extra energy levels in a qubit, you find that the superposition from overlaying a large number of nearby energy levels creates an extremely irregular Hamiltonian that's not at all as nice as that for a single isolated electron spin. It is possible to emulate a single isolated electron spin in a complex system if you can distance (on the energy scale) the nearby energy levels sufficiently, but this is not always easy to do.
So there would be a lot of work and a lot of calculations to be done before anyone could even reasonably talk about using such a cage for a qubit.
I was interested in this concept about 5 years ago, and I constructed the following message as an example of how a language can construct itself by application of logic alone. It attempts to distance itself from any common experiences by using pattern to establish the "alphabet" of common experiences from which the language can be constructed. Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge.
We had this same issue (and still are having this same issue) in the computer industry. What it comes down to, is that anything with information as a product will eventually have to convert from a traditional "product-based" economy model to a "service-based" economy model. Just as the explosion of open source software reshaped the way computer companies thought about their business, so too will a corresponding change occur in music, literature, and eventually even movies.
I for one wholeheartedly welcome such a change, and remain confident that the talented artists will still find plenty of work. It's about time music became an art once again. If I consider business entertaining, I'll go listen to a steel plant, not a bunch of factory-generated music groups. Take away the product, leave the service, and you will find art and quality rising to the top in a very natural way.
If it weren't for pesky things such as mortality, you could sit on a frictionless chair in a vacuum, and by waving your arms such that you thrust them outward, fling them backward, then bring them back inward you could build up rotational velocity. It has nothing to do with air friction.
No, actually this would violate conservation of angular momentum. The angular momentum you exchange between your hands and your body when they are extended is returned by the corresponding motion in the other direction as your hands loop around closer to your body. You would need to start flinging clothes in a direction not parallel to your own radial axis to alter your angular momentum and "build up rotational velocity".
Someone (RMS maybe?) once said "Information wants to be free." That may be true, but who's going to create the information in the first place if they aren't going to see anything for their efforts?
We have this wonderful thing called "capitalism" that has a habit of being self-regulating. When the people who are making information don't get enough money for it, those who were doing it for the money will stop doing it, leaving only those who do it for self-gratification, the betterment of humanity, or other such motives. If that doesn't end up creating enough information, then suddenly there is a high demand and a low supply. Whenever such a state exists, then there will be a lot of money thrown into producing the information that people crave.
The problem with the current situation is not that they can't make enough money by selling information, it's that they're currently making MORE money than the market wants to give them, and they're trying to find artificial non-capitalistic ways to sustain their inflated income.
A lot of good scientific papers end up online for free anyway. A search in google can be as productive as a search through a library. The only difference is that the official journals have established referee systems. Well, referees don't get paid, and media distribution costs for online works are very low, so how long do you think it will be before there are refereed scientific journals that are only online?
It's only a matter of someone organizing it.
The entire idea of "right to a profit" is scary and seems to be getting more and more of a stranglehold upon our legislatures.
Amen. "Right to profit" is about the best way I've heard it put. It's a ridiculous notion, and the fact that it's even CONSIDERED by our government is a bright red glowing indicator of thorough corruption. There are reasons why our forefathers didn't want our government to take part in profitable industries, but these reasons have been tossed aside, and now we have the people who compose our government benefitting from profitable industries.
Excellent, thank you. That's precisely what I was looking for when I posted my question. I hope the company you're working with uses its security policy disclosure as a major selling point, as I would love to see such things determine customer choice and eventually become mainstream.
Let's say for a moment that a crime family has been bribing the local police for years (a situation that is known to occur). Your parents, like all "good" parents, had your DNA catalogued in the national database in case you ere kidnapped. Now suppose that when you are 35, you witness a horrible murder committed by this crime family, and you decide to testify against them. In exchange for testifying, the government places you in the witness protection program giving you a COMPLETELY new identity, including new social security numbers, credit cards, phone number, address, and even a new name. Oh, but wait, the crime family already pulled your DNA fingerprint from the database and as you start your new life is using it to track you down. Thanks to the wonderful fact that DNA is an identifier for your entire life, they track you down and brutally slaughter you and your entire family.
Oh well, it's just your family, at least it doesn't happen very often.
Whats to stop the person from saying "hey thats the asshole who cut me off this morning, lets say he looks like rapist X and have the police arrest him"
Nothing more than stops police from doing this to people they see on the street. I bet it already happens sometimes, but surveilance in areas where the cop could already be walking effectively wouldn't really change the current state of things very much.
You would certainly be crying out for DNA if you were jailed and you didn't do it...
DNA testing can always demonstrate innocence without a massive database. If law enforcement has a sample of DNA they suspect belongs to the guilty party, and you are wrongly a strong suspect, you can vindicate yourself by giving a DNA sample and demonstrating that they don't match, Databases do not help the innocent, they only threaten them.
Slashdot Mirror
All the posts on here are stating the obvious such as how cloning is just a scientific tool, or how twins are clones, or making silly jokes. Everyone has missed the REAL social issue at work here. Clones WILL be created, and when they are, the world will hate them and shun them! Clones will be just as human as you and I, but they will be outcast and feared by society at large. It's the new wave of discrimination, and there will be a whole new debate about whether they are "real" people. And no one will think to ask the clones...
I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers
Shouldn't consumers get to decide for THEMSELVES what's a valuable service to them? The point of the spam debate isn't over whether your business is legitamite or not, it's over the question of who should initiate a transaction. There are a few companies I choose to receive information from that I have specifically told them to send, but I have no desire to receive information from you or your company.
Hypothetically, how would you feel if 20 to 30 people rang your doorbell every evening to tell you all about the wonderful widgimigadget they're selling? It's not hard to receive that many spam mails in an evening, even if you've been careful with your email address.
I shall use a giant "L-a-s-e-r" to drill through the surface of the Earth, extract crude oil, distribute it to an unsuspecting population, and slowly destroy the environment!!
Uhm, that's already been done...
Throw me a fricken bone here, I've been frozen for 30 years...
(1) If software is delivered via the web, you will require someone else?s computing power at the other end of the line. Someone has to pay for this. As the recent experience of the dotcoms shows, business models based on giving stuff away free almost invariable don?t work. Software provides will have to be paid for the service they provide. So an end to the free beer aspect of software.
Actually, I see this as a great benefit to free software. The reason is that the remote application market provides a clear distinction between free software and commercial software. Any software which is distributed is easily pirated, simply because by "nature" such software has no intrinsic value or cost overhead to reproduce, other than what we artificially assign to it. Remote applications however are not so much SOFTWARE as SERVICES. And it is this service that people will be willing to pay for, because it DOES have intrinsic value and cannot be reproduced at no cost.
So while with the exclusion of donations or advertisement funded services (such as, in simple form, we are seeing with freshmeat, google, download.com, etc), remote applications will provide a commercial market in the areas where corporate coordination is necessary, such as say an application that automatically gives you access to almost every academic paper in existence (a service, while the papers themselves have no "intrinsic" value since they can be copied), it still leaves the free software market wide open for all the applications you run on your pc.
In the software testing community, SOUP degradingly refers to "Software Of Unknown Pedigree"
Quantum computers will likely mark the end of Moore's law. They don't scale the same way as conventional computers. Think of a quantum computer as being able to process 2^n values (where n is the bits per item being processed) for every single value processed in a conventional computer. If we can keep the same kind of mojo going for quantum computers that we've kept going for classical computers, then we might rougly experience computing power squaring every 18 months or so. (Of course, there are a whole new set of challenges facing us in the field of quantum computing that we've never seen in classical computers.)
You can construct a rudimentary USB compatable /dev/null using a dixie cup and some salt water.
Aren't they making a HUGE assumption here, that all the moths already in the wild are going to want to do it with a bunch of freaky glow-in-the-dark moths??
They talk about people buying dozens of niche devices to service every need they have? Nonesense, I want a laptop that makes coffee and toasts my bagel in the morning.
I haven't read the book, but the review was very well written. Good writing, Timothy. Don't fret over anything you hear on here calling /. second rate journalism, because that there is first rate writing.
If napster itself doesn't survive all this attention, I can guarantee you that the napster idea will survive beyond all this legislation. There is far too much consumer interest in the idea of napster for it to die off, no matter how much the business execs might be afraid of it. Wherever there is extreme mindshare, there will be success.
If Napster doesn't have a workable business model, one will be created by market demand that serves the same need.
Josephson junctions attached to a high temperature superconductor will work at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
While neat science which probably has applications elsewhere, I really don't see this being at all beneficial to quantum computing. While the article doesn't state whether it is nuclear spin or electron spin that Hiura suggests using as the quantum bit (qubit), neither one would work well. Nuclear spin is an unpopular choice because it does not scale well to large-scale quantum computers. It is too difficult to engineer the exchange interactions between qubits to perform any reasonably sized calculations. As for electronic spin, being enclosed in this silicon cage would create a nightmare of interference. Not interference from outside particles, but interference between all the possible energy levels present due to the molecular bonds. As you get extra energy levels in a qubit, you find that the superposition from overlaying a large number of nearby energy levels creates an extremely irregular Hamiltonian that's not at all as nice as that for a single isolated electron spin. It is possible to emulate a single isolated electron spin in a complex system if you can distance (on the energy scale) the nearby energy levels sufficiently, but this is not always easy to do.
So there would be a lot of work and a lot of calculations to be done before anyone could even reasonably talk about using such a cage for a qubit.
As much as I despise the DMCA, the most interesting thing about this article would have to be the name "biscuit nipple"...
I was interested in this concept about 5 years ago, and I constructed the following message as an example of how a language can construct itself by application of logic alone. It attempts to distance itself from any common experiences by using pattern to establish the "alphabet" of common experiences from which the language can be constructed. Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge.
http://www.geocities.com/zcyl1/ra1_puz.txt
We had this same issue (and still are having this same issue) in the computer industry. What it comes down to, is that anything with information as a product will eventually have to convert from a traditional "product-based" economy model to a "service-based" economy model. Just as the explosion of open source software reshaped the way computer companies thought about their business, so too will a corresponding change occur in music, literature, and eventually even movies.
I for one wholeheartedly welcome such a change, and remain confident that the talented artists will still find plenty of work. It's about time music became an art once again. If I consider business entertaining, I'll go listen to a steel plant, not a bunch of factory-generated music groups. Take away the product, leave the service, and you will find art and quality rising to the top in a very natural way.
If it weren't for pesky things such as mortality, you could sit on a frictionless chair in a vacuum, and by waving your arms such that you thrust them outward, fling them backward, then bring them back inward you could build up rotational velocity. It has nothing to do with air friction.
No, actually this would violate conservation of angular momentum. The angular momentum you exchange between your hands and your body when they are extended is returned by the corresponding motion in the other direction as your hands loop around closer to your body. You would need to start flinging clothes in a direction not parallel to your own radial axis to alter your angular momentum and "build up rotational velocity".
Someone (RMS maybe?) once said "Information wants to be free." That may be true, but who's going to create the information in the first place if they aren't going to see anything for their efforts?
We have this wonderful thing called "capitalism" that has a habit of being self-regulating. When the people who are making information don't get enough money for it, those who were doing it for the money will stop doing it, leaving only those who do it for self-gratification, the betterment of humanity, or other such motives. If that doesn't end up creating enough information, then suddenly there is a high demand and a low supply. Whenever such a state exists, then there will be a lot of money thrown into producing the information that people crave.
The problem with the current situation is not that they can't make enough money by selling information, it's that they're currently making MORE money than the market wants to give them, and they're trying to find artificial non-capitalistic ways to sustain their inflated income.
A lot of good scientific papers end up online for free anyway. A search in google can be as productive as a search through a library. The only difference is that the official journals have established referee systems. Well, referees don't get paid, and media distribution costs for online works are very low, so how long do you think it will be before there are refereed scientific journals that are only online?
It's only a matter of someone organizing it.
The entire idea of "right to a profit" is scary and seems to be getting more and more of a stranglehold upon our legislatures.
Amen. "Right to profit" is about the best way I've heard it put. It's a ridiculous notion, and the fact that it's even CONSIDERED by our government is a bright red glowing indicator of thorough corruption. There are reasons why our forefathers didn't want our government to take part in profitable industries, but these reasons have been tossed aside, and now we have the people who compose our government benefitting from profitable industries.
Excellent, thank you. That's precisely what I was looking for when I posted my question. I hope the company you're working with uses its security policy disclosure as a major selling point, as I would love to see such things determine customer choice and eventually become mainstream.
The commercials must be pretty boring if we're all here pushing reload on Slashdot. :)
Let's say for a moment that a crime family has been bribing the local police for years (a situation that is known to occur). Your parents, like all "good" parents, had your DNA catalogued in the national database in case you ere kidnapped. Now suppose that when you are 35, you witness a horrible murder committed by this crime family, and you decide to testify against them. In exchange for testifying, the government places you in the witness protection program giving you a COMPLETELY new identity, including new social security numbers, credit cards, phone number, address, and even a new name. Oh, but wait, the crime family already pulled your DNA fingerprint from the database and as you start your new life is using it to track you down. Thanks to the wonderful fact that DNA is an identifier for your entire life, they track you down and brutally slaughter you and your entire family.
Oh well, it's just your family, at least it doesn't happen very often.
Whats to stop the person from saying "hey thats the asshole who cut me off this morning, lets say he looks like rapist X and have the police arrest him"
Nothing more than stops police from doing this to people they see on the street. I bet it already happens sometimes, but surveilance in areas where the cop could already be walking effectively wouldn't really change the current state of things very much.
You would certainly be crying out for DNA if you were jailed and you didn't do it...
DNA testing can always demonstrate innocence without a massive database. If law enforcement has a sample of DNA they suspect belongs to the guilty party, and you are wrongly a strong suspect, you can vindicate yourself by giving a DNA sample and demonstrating that they don't match, Databases do not help the innocent, they only threaten them.