Not precisely. It provides you with a license to use any of their patents that they used in the code in any derivative code that your produce. That's a bit more restricted then what you implied.
Note that if you make code which is not derivative, you don't have the license to use the patents in that code.
It's because it's an active medium rather than a passive medium.
If you only use the GPS to plan your route in advance, then you won't have this effect. But if you're following the GPS instructions in a minute by minute "Do it NOW!" kind of way, it acts as a form of conditioning. I'm not sure that idiot is the right term, but fool is probably reasonable.
(FWIW, most directions I've gotten from Google or MapQuest start out by telling me to drive North 1 block. I live on a one-way street. And North isn't the one way.)
That, of course, makes it quite easy for the parties in power to keep out any new comers.
Not that the US system makes starting a new party feasible. They just use different techniques.
It *might* be a trade-off worth making. But lots of parties and Condorcet or Instant-Runoff voting would seem to be a better solution. Also make lying in a campaign speech a criminal offense. (That one's tricky, though. It could so easily be misused. Maybe it isn't worth the danger.)
You are correct. We have far larger problems than just health care. But a good health care system would lessen the problems.
The basic source of the problems is a high level of "low level fear" which is nearly always in the background when decisions are made. This tends to cause paranoid and dysfunctional decisions to occur, but it's so pervasive that it's not considered either unusual or sick.
The weird thing is that a side effect seems to be lots of people arguing in against anything that would decrease other peoples level of fear. It's as if they've decided "I'm afraid, so it must be a good thing."
This, of course, is aided and abetted by various government actions (see, e.g., DHS) which increase the level of fear while doing little for security.
Re: 2) Contracts that spell out exactly what will happen if there is a change in management and that specifically prohibit anyone from accessing my data except as needed to provide it to me.
Have you been following the Apple vs. Pystar case recently? Some of Apple's information apparently ended up on the web despite a court order. There's some finger pointing going on as to exactly who is to blame for what, and whether the order actually *was* violated, but....
Have you been following SCO vs. the world? They, also, have occasionally played a bit fast an loose with their contractual obligations. Novell's been fighting them over that for over five years. It looks like they're going to get away with the theft without punishment. They're going bankrupt, but they were doing that anyway. (Only had one profitable quarter in the history of the company????)
A contract isn't all that secure. Not even if you've got a big stick and the little guy is nearly unarmed. (At one point the judge said about SCOs evidence (after over four years) "Is that all you've got?" I only saw it written, so I didn't hear the inflection...but no measurable amount of good evidence has been publicly presented.)
Wanting to do everything for yourself is reasonable if you're willing to learn. But if they expect you to teach them, your time is worth something. Charge them what you think your time is worth. If you don't want to do it, charge a bit more.
It's worth remembering that Mach numbers are dependent on the current speed of sound.
If a scramjet can reach over 7 miles/second in the very upper stratosphere, then the scramjet would clearly win....at least if it didn't need the same G forces as the rocket. And particularly if it could carry a sizable cargo. (I.e., anything better than an Apollo capsule, but the larger the better.)
A scramjet might make an admirable second stage for a rocket, but then you need a first stage to get it up to speed. Note that these first two stages are airplanes, and are expected to be built to be re-useable.
There's a bit of a question as to how feasible this is, however, given that this little test plane requires a B-52 to launch it.
For our purposes we needed samples from every census block-face to get decent error control. This would have been too expensive, and was impossible anyway, since for many kind of data the census didn't release information at that level of detail. So we used census tracts, and occasionally aggregates of census tracts.
It made things more difficult that between two censuses many of the census blocks were split, or otherwise redrawn. (Sometimes this was inevitable, say when a freeway went through.)
We also collected employment data, but that came at a different level of detail. We eventually worked with map zones, most of which were aggregates of census tracts, but sometimes we needed to split census tracts partially into one map zone and partially into another.
We verified this procedure with a smaller telephone survey to make certain, among other things, that our data handling hadn't munged anything. And to collect sample information about where people in certain places tended to work.
At that point we made multiple models of how this would work out, fit the models to the data, and then checked which models made a best projection.
And we STILL didn't have the gall to say that our guess was the truth. Merely that it was the best guess that we could make. We provided a range of models as our best guesses as to what would be the result of potential choices (where to build which freeway, what to put the bridge tolls at, etc.). After twenty years I'm pleased that our final model was approximately true. But we didn't say that we knew it would be.
These people strike me as arrogant and reckless with their claims on small amounts of data.
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way... not unless the study was rigged.
Of course, it also depends on what the purpose is. If it were for marketing, then this might be a quite acceptable procedure. In that case a large amount of error wouldn't cause significant problems to anyone. But if it's being used to lobby for laws, then it's just that it won't cause any problems for *them*. That the results have been adjusted to be something that can be released to massage public opinion. Etc. In such a case I have a much higher bar for study requirements, and it requires that either the population tested be standardized to eliminate bias (which is impossible if you don't know where bias is coming from already) or it needs to be a MUCH large random sample.
A good study in this area would first investigate the characteristics of a large population WRT standardizing their likelihood of file-sharing. This step in itself would involve many thousands of people in many different social, economic, and geographic strata. (You might want to steer clear of race or national origin. It's likely significant, but too touchy.) After you've done that, then you can standardize a random sample for study WRT characteristics associated with file-sharing. And at THAT point you might be able to establish reasonable guesses at error bars.
How did they standardize their sample? I'd guess they picked either people it was convenient to pick, or people they thought would prove their point.
And I also think the sample size was too small, even given an unbiased sample. We used lots larger numbers to guess at journey-to-work times, and we KNOW that some of our predictions were wrong. We tested.
FWIW, it's generally a good idea that prostrate cancer not be treated. Not until it starts progressing. The treatments currently available tend to have really unpleasant side effects, and most cases of prostate cancer are extremely slow growing.
N.B.: I said MOST. This needs to be determined on an individual basis, as different cancers progress differently. It also depends on the age of the patient. Patients older than 70 will usually die of something else before the prostate cancer becomes significant enough to need any treatment. Patients older than 50 need careful watching to decide what's appropriate. Often the choice is to "wait until later to do anything about it". Frequently "later" is decades later, and as the side effects are unpleasant, that's decades that you don't need to live with them. If you're younger than 50... well, your choices aren't as pleasant. The first step is usually a biopsy, but you want to be careful about that because a biopsy can spread the cancer.
Warning: I Am Not A MD. (But I had occasion to study up on this recently. Fortunately the biopsy said "non-malignant". Treatment was still necessary, and still unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as a cancer treatment would have been.)
Well, most plastic is degraded by sunlight, and as this is a layer that's predominantly VERY small pieces, I'd expect it to be thoroughly degraded fairly quickly. And when you get down to small molecules, there's almost always SOMETHING that will eat it (i.e., chemically take it apart and restructure it for energy and/or building materials). (Usually bacteria.) So I'm not very worried about it ending up in the food chain. It's not like heavy metals, after all. It's largely a complex hydrocarbon.
So, given that it's happening in a desert area it's probably not important. (That "probably" however, has a bit of a twinge of nervousness on it.)
FWIW, there *is* a difference between refusing to tell you the truth and lying to you.
That said, my presumption on any news channel is that what I'm seeing is fiction which may bear some relation to the truth. Usually it does bear some relation to the truth...but the relation certainly isn't identity. (I've been at several events which I've afterwards seen reported. This isn't an opinion formed in ignorance.)
Not quite the way to go. You build your siphon feeder, and you design it to run on solar, nuclear, or, if you can figure out how, plastic. It accumulates the gunk until it's got several cubic yards of the stuff, presses it together, and then heat it until it fuses. In the process you shape it so it has a convenient tow ring. Then you attach a rope (possibly also fused from plastic) to it and toss it overboard. A tug pulls up, picks the rope from your deck, and lugs the stuff to a recycling center on land.
I doubt the process would pay for itself, but it might come close, over time. And it would be an on-going project, designed to process the stuff just slightly faster than the area grew.
The ocean might seem "all one kind of place" to you, but it isn't to the creatures who live there. If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food. And that means its where important sea life congregates.
N.B.: I'm no oceanographer, so some of this is reasoned out from first principles, and there's some extrapolation. But this is more comparable to building a polluting factory in the middle of a rich food producing area (like, say, the Santa Clara Valley) than to building the same factory in the middle of the Sahara desert. And, yes, we were that stupid. We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land. This is doing the same stupid thing again, with even less intentionality behind it than is usual.
For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed).
He didn't say that there were other, better methods. He said they used the law to set their goals...and they spent lots of extra money to meet their goals on target.
It does sound silly. Also bureaucratic. Also like an ad campaign. So it's probably true.
N.B.: How much worse off would Intel have been if it had increased it's speed at half the pace? It's hard to be sure. They might not be ANY worse off. They'd have more competition from AMD, though, and IBM might not have decided to drop out of the race, so they might be significantly worse off. But they would have saved a LOT of money. So they might be better off.
Just consider. By pushing the pace now they may keep China from expanding their fab plants. They might keep Japan in specialized markets. That could be worth more than the cost of an extra generation of fab plants.
I have a feeling that there are people at Intell and Nvidia that know more about those problems than the IEEE prognosticators. This doesn't mean they won't hit unexpected roadblocks, of course.
OTOH, when a company makes a public announcement, one must always wonder whether the tech people even had any input into what marketing wanted to say.
You could be right, but it's not *clear* that you are. So it makes sense to check.
FWIW, if you're putting the solar cells on platforms up in the air, you'd use a different kind that are more efficient and less flexible. Also more expensive. So you'd use perhaps 1/12th as many to get the same benefit, but you wouldn't save all that much money, and you'd still need to pay for resurfacing the streets periodically.
I feel that people are reacting to the word "glass" and "solar cell" in a way that's quite peculiar. Remember that glass includes fiber-glass, and glass-bricks, and many other forms. This form seems to be a specially tailored glass brick cover over a solar cell. And the solar cell isn't some dainty silicon chip, it's probably one of the plastic ones. It's not that efficient, but it's got a large absorbing area, so if the cover gets a bit scratched it doesn't really matter. Any light that gets through will hit some cell, and get absorbed. If it isn't clear, no problem. That just means that it isn't focused on any one spot, but this kind of cell has a LARGE absorbing area. So scratches aren't any problem.
P.S.: When I was four I remember seeing some glass bricks in the sidewalk that were used to let light into the basements of stores. I don't think that people have done that for a long time, because they're slippery (and electricity got cheaper) but just the other day I saw some in the sidewalk. They'd been there a long time, and someone had covered them with asphalt at some point, but the asphalt had worn away and the glass bricks were still there and still unscratched. (A couple had been shattered, but scratches weren't a problem.) They'd been walked on by men with taps and women with stiletto heels, and were essentially undamaged.
Every year some roads are totally resurfaced. Every year some roads are built. You don't need (or want!) to do this all at once, even after it gets beyond the prototype stage.
You *do* know that there are different kinds of solar cells. And that some are a LOT cheaper to make than others, though much less efficient. And that the cheap ones tend to be flexible and relatively sturdy...and can even be printed with a modified ink-jet.
I don't see anything absurd about it, and I feel your reaction is more stupid and pitiable than anything else.
I'm not at all certain that this will work, or that it's a good idea. It's not, however, self-evidently silly.
Maybe. You don't want a polished surface. No traction.
OTOH, if you mill the surface, wear might smooth the rough edges, and make it more slippery. Somebody needs to study this. Perhaps somebody has.
Also, if you're not after maximal efficiency, then one can use a translucent surface rather than a transparent one. This ameliorates the problem that you see.
I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I don't understand why you are so certain that it's a bad one.
I the context "best course of action", best is defined with respect to your own motivational structure.
If it seems like there are multiple courses of action equally good, then you need to project the results of those paths of action a few more plys ahead.
Where this really falls down is that complexity theory shows that nobody can ever make such a projection in a sufficiently complex environment. And it's a good guess that we live in such a "sufficiently complex environment".
So as a practical matter, the definition doesn't come even close to eliminating free will. And can't.
P.S.: every fiction writer is also a philosopher. And what I'm proposing is a philosophical challenge, not a scientific one. What I'm doing is claiming that the term "free will" defines a real process, but that the real process isn't what it appears to be, but is something deterministic, though unpredictable due to chaos and complexity.
(And, yes, the Pak are rather unplausible. But they are a device for examining the consequences of certain implausible occurrences.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not precisely. It provides you with a license to use any of their patents that they used in the code in any derivative code that your produce. That's a bit more restricted then what you implied.
Note that if you make code which is not derivative, you don't have the license to use the patents in that code.
It's because it's an active medium rather than a passive medium.
If you only use the GPS to plan your route in advance, then you won't have this effect. But if you're following the GPS instructions in a minute by minute "Do it NOW!" kind of way, it acts as a form of conditioning. I'm not sure that idiot is the right term, but fool is probably reasonable.
(FWIW, most directions I've gotten from Google or MapQuest start out by telling me to drive North 1 block. I live on a one-way street. And North isn't the one way.)
That, of course, makes it quite easy for the parties in power to keep out any new comers.
Not that the US system makes starting a new party feasible. They just use different techniques.
It *might* be a trade-off worth making. But lots of parties and Condorcet or Instant-Runoff voting would seem to be a better solution. Also make lying in a campaign speech a criminal offense. (That one's tricky, though. It could so easily be misused. Maybe it isn't worth the danger.)
You are correct. We have far larger problems than just health care. But a good health care system would lessen the problems.
The basic source of the problems is a high level of "low level fear" which is nearly always in the background when decisions are made. This tends to cause paranoid and dysfunctional decisions to occur, but it's so pervasive that it's not considered either unusual or sick.
The weird thing is that a side effect seems to be lots of people arguing in against anything that would decrease other peoples level of fear. It's as if they've decided "I'm afraid, so it must be a good thing."
This, of course, is aided and abetted by various government actions (see, e.g., DHS) which increase the level of fear while doing little for security.
You can watch the government giving an estimated Trillion dollars to the banks, and then say MediCare is going to bankrupt the country?
I think your priorities are a bit strange.
Re:
2) Contracts that spell out exactly what will happen if there is a change in management and that specifically prohibit anyone from accessing my data except as needed to provide it to me.
Have you been following the Apple vs. Pystar case recently? Some of Apple's information apparently ended up on the web despite a court order. There's some finger pointing going on as to exactly who is to blame for what, and whether the order actually *was* violated, but....
Have you been following SCO vs. the world? They, also, have occasionally played a bit fast an loose with their contractual obligations. Novell's been fighting them over that for over five years. It looks like they're going to get away with the theft without punishment. They're going bankrupt, but they were doing that anyway. (Only had one profitable quarter in the history of the company????)
A contract isn't all that secure. Not even if you've got a big stick and the little guy is nearly unarmed. (At one point the judge said about SCOs evidence (after over four years) "Is that all you've got?" I only saw it written, so I didn't hear the inflection...but no measurable amount of good evidence has been publicly presented.)
Charge them for it.
Wanting to do everything for yourself is reasonable if you're willing to learn. But if they expect you to teach them, your time is worth something. Charge them what you think your time is worth. If you don't want to do it, charge a bit more.
It's worth remembering that Mach numbers are dependent on the current speed of sound.
If a scramjet can reach over 7 miles/second in the very upper stratosphere, then the scramjet would clearly win....at least if it didn't need the same G forces as the rocket. And particularly if it could carry a sizable cargo. (I.e., anything better than an Apollo capsule, but the larger the better.)
A scramjet might make an admirable second stage for a rocket, but then you need a first stage to get it up to speed. Note that these first two stages are airplanes, and are expected to be built to be re-useable.
There's a bit of a question as to how feasible this is, however, given that this little test plane requires a B-52 to launch it.
For our purposes we needed samples from every census block-face to get decent error control. This would have been too expensive, and was impossible anyway, since for many kind of data the census didn't release information at that level of detail. So we used census tracts, and occasionally aggregates of census tracts.
It made things more difficult that between two censuses many of the census blocks were split, or otherwise redrawn. (Sometimes this was inevitable, say when a freeway went through.)
We also collected employment data, but that came at a different level of detail. We eventually worked with map zones, most of which were aggregates of census tracts, but sometimes we needed to split census tracts partially into one map zone and partially into another.
We verified this procedure with a smaller telephone survey to make certain, among other things, that our data handling hadn't munged anything. And to collect sample information about where people in certain places tended to work.
At that point we made multiple models of how this would work out, fit the models to the data, and then checked which models made a best projection.
And we STILL didn't have the gall to say that our guess was the truth. Merely that it was the best guess that we could make. We provided a range of models as our best guesses as to what would be the result of potential choices (where to build which freeway, what to put the bridge tolls at, etc.). After twenty years I'm pleased that our final model was approximately true. But we didn't say that we knew it would be.
These people strike me as arrogant and reckless with their claims on small amounts of data.
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way ... not unless the study was rigged.
Of course, it also depends on what the purpose is. If it were for marketing, then this might be a quite acceptable procedure. In that case a large amount of error wouldn't cause significant problems to anyone. But if it's being used to lobby for laws, then it's just that it won't cause any problems for *them*. That the results have been adjusted to be something that can be released to massage public opinion. Etc. In such a case I have a much higher bar for study requirements, and it requires that either the population tested be standardized to eliminate bias (which is impossible if you don't know where bias is coming from already) or it needs to be a MUCH large random sample.
A good study in this area would first investigate the characteristics of a large population WRT standardizing their likelihood of file-sharing. This step in itself would involve many thousands of people in many different social, economic, and geographic strata. (You might want to steer clear of race or national origin. It's likely significant, but too touchy.) After you've done that, then you can standardize a random sample for study WRT characteristics associated with file-sharing. And at THAT point you might be able to establish reasonable guesses at error bars.
How did they standardize their sample? I'd guess they picked either people it was convenient to pick, or people they thought would prove their point.
And I also think the sample size was too small, even given an unbiased sample. We used lots larger numbers to guess at journey-to-work times, and we KNOW that some of our predictions were wrong. We tested.
That was, indeed, once true. The last time I saw a comparison it wasn't true anymore.
Another thing that wasn't true anymore: Apple's EULAs are now just as bad as those from MS. Forget both of them.
FWIW, it's generally a good idea that prostrate cancer not be treated. Not until it starts progressing. The treatments currently available tend to have really unpleasant side effects, and most cases of prostate cancer are extremely slow growing.
N.B.: I said MOST. This needs to be determined on an individual basis, as different cancers progress differently. It also depends on the age of the patient. Patients older than 70 will usually die of something else before the prostate cancer becomes significant enough to need any treatment. Patients older than 50 need careful watching to decide what's appropriate. Often the choice is to "wait until later to do anything about it". Frequently "later" is decades later, and as the side effects are unpleasant, that's decades that you don't need to live with them. ... well, your choices aren't as pleasant. The first step is usually a biopsy, but you want to be careful about that because a biopsy can spread the cancer.
If you're younger than 50
Warning: I Am Not A MD. (But I had occasion to study up on this recently. Fortunately the biopsy said "non-malignant". Treatment was still necessary, and still unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as a cancer treatment would have been.)
Well, most plastic is degraded by sunlight, and as this is a layer that's predominantly VERY small pieces, I'd expect it to be thoroughly degraded fairly quickly. And when you get down to small molecules, there's almost always SOMETHING that will eat it (i.e., chemically take it apart and restructure it for energy and/or building materials). (Usually bacteria.) So I'm not very worried about it ending up in the food chain. It's not like heavy metals, after all. It's largely a complex hydrocarbon.
So, given that it's happening in a desert area it's probably not important. (That "probably" however, has a bit of a twinge of nervousness on it.)
FWIW, there *is* a difference between refusing to tell you the truth and lying to you.
That said, my presumption on any news channel is that what I'm seeing is fiction which may bear some relation to the truth. Usually it does bear some relation to the truth...but the relation certainly isn't identity. (I've been at several events which I've afterwards seen reported. This isn't an opinion formed in ignorance.)
Not quite the way to go. You build your siphon feeder, and you design it to run on solar, nuclear, or, if you can figure out how, plastic. It accumulates the gunk until it's got several cubic yards of the stuff, presses it together, and then heat it until it fuses. In the process you shape it so it has a convenient tow ring. Then you attach a rope (possibly also fused from plastic) to it and toss it overboard. A tug pulls up, picks the rope from your deck, and lugs the stuff to a recycling center on land.
I doubt the process would pay for itself, but it might come close, over time. And it would be an on-going project, designed to process the stuff just slightly faster than the area grew.
The ocean might seem "all one kind of place" to you, but it isn't to the creatures who live there. If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food. And that means its where important sea life congregates.
N.B.: I'm no oceanographer, so some of this is reasoned out from first principles, and there's some extrapolation. But this is more comparable to building a polluting factory in the middle of a rich food producing area (like, say, the Santa Clara Valley) than to building the same factory in the middle of the Sahara desert. And, yes, we were that stupid. We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land. This is doing the same stupid thing again, with even less intentionality behind it than is usual.
For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed).
He didn't say that there were other, better methods. He said they used the law to set their goals...and they spent lots of extra money to meet their goals on target.
It does sound silly. Also bureaucratic. Also like an ad campaign. So it's probably true.
N.B.: How much worse off would Intel have been if it had increased it's speed at half the pace? It's hard to be sure. They might not be ANY worse off. They'd have more competition from AMD, though, and IBM might not have decided to drop out of the race, so they might be significantly worse off. But they would have saved a LOT of money. So they might be better off.
Just consider. By pushing the pace now they may keep China from expanding their fab plants. They might keep Japan in specialized markets. That could be worth more than the cost of an extra generation of fab plants.
I have a feeling that there are people at Intell and Nvidia that know more about those problems than the IEEE prognosticators. This doesn't mean they won't hit unexpected roadblocks, of course.
OTOH, when a company makes a public announcement, one must always wonder whether the tech people even had any input into what marketing wanted to say.
That might pull in even more money than the electricity generation. Sell moving ads in the roadway. (ARRGH!!)
You could be right, but it's not *clear* that you are. So it makes sense to check.
FWIW, if you're putting the solar cells on platforms up in the air, you'd use a different kind that are more efficient and less flexible. Also more expensive. So you'd use perhaps 1/12th as many to get the same benefit, but you wouldn't save all that much money, and you'd still need to pay for resurfacing the streets periodically.
I feel that people are reacting to the word "glass" and "solar cell" in a way that's quite peculiar. Remember that glass includes fiber-glass, and glass-bricks, and many other forms. This form seems to be a specially tailored glass brick cover over a solar cell. And the solar cell isn't some dainty silicon chip, it's probably one of the plastic ones. It's not that efficient, but it's got a large absorbing area, so if the cover gets a bit scratched it doesn't really matter. Any light that gets through will hit some cell, and get absorbed. If it isn't clear, no problem. That just means that it isn't focused on any one spot, but this kind of cell has a LARGE absorbing area. So scratches aren't any problem.
P.S.: When I was four I remember seeing some glass bricks in the sidewalk that were used to let light into the basements of stores. I don't think that people have done that for a long time, because they're slippery (and electricity got cheaper) but just the other day I saw some in the sidewalk. They'd been there a long time, and someone had covered them with asphalt at some point, but the asphalt had worn away and the glass bricks were still there and still unscratched. (A couple had been shattered, but scratches weren't a problem.) They'd been walked on by men with taps and women with stiletto heels, and were essentially undamaged.
Every year some roads are totally resurfaced. Every year some roads are built. You don't need (or want!) to do this all at once, even after it gets beyond the prototype stage.
You *do* know that there are different kinds of solar cells. And that some are a LOT cheaper to make than others, though much less efficient. And that the cheap ones tend to be flexible and relatively sturdy...and can even be printed with a modified ink-jet.
I don't see anything absurd about it, and I feel your reaction is more stupid and pitiable than anything else.
I'm not at all certain that this will work, or that it's a good idea. It's not, however, self-evidently silly.
Maybe. You don't want a polished surface. No traction.
OTOH, if you mill the surface, wear might smooth the rough edges, and make it more slippery. Somebody needs to study this. Perhaps somebody has.
Also, if you're not after maximal efficiency, then one can use a translucent surface rather than a transparent one. This ameliorates the problem that you see.
I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I don't understand why you are so certain that it's a bad one.
I the context "best course of action", best is defined with respect to your own motivational structure.
If it seems like there are multiple courses of action equally good, then you need to project the results of those paths of action a few more plys ahead.
Where this really falls down is that complexity theory shows that nobody can ever make such a projection in a sufficiently complex environment. And it's a good guess that we live in such a "sufficiently complex environment".
So as a practical matter, the definition doesn't come even close to eliminating free will. And can't.
P.S.: every fiction writer is also a philosopher. And what I'm proposing is a philosophical challenge, not a scientific one.
What I'm doing is claiming that the term "free will" defines a real process, but that the real process isn't what it appears to be, but is something deterministic, though unpredictable due to chaos and complexity.
(And, yes, the Pak are rather unplausible. But they are a device for examining the consequences of certain implausible occurrences.)