When these discussions about probability of life come up, I always think of the massive amount of parallel processing that is provided by the surface area of an entire planet, and the large amount of processing time that is available for the task.
Especially regarding the probability that life will start in a puddle... Or in some wet clay, just as well... but taking puddles as an example:
Take a square mile of earth. Picture a kind of primordial earth, the surface seething with puddles. Maybe, say, one square foot of puddle for every four square foot of earth. That's 6,969,600 puddles per square mile. There are 197,000,000 square miles on earth; assume 1/10 of these are land, so multiply 6.9 million by 1.97 million: 13,730,112,000,000 puddles. Oh, then multiply that by 365 billion or so days, to yield the number of daily heating/cooling cycles provided by the rising and setting of the sun. That's 5,011,490,880,000,000,000,000,000, right? So maybe I've overestimated the surface area, or the number of viable puddles. OK, divide that by 10 to the third or fourth; it's still a pretty darn big number.
Next time some Creationist lectures you about how improbable it is that life started in a puddle, be sure to multiply whatever probability they provide by that number.
Of course there's that detail about cells, and multiple cells, and the "sudden" leap to intelligence (forgetting a few billion years here and there). Well, that would require... evolution! But then, this is starting to look like a troll, and I didn't mean it that way.
This book is apparently on back order everywhere, in stock nowhere. My local Barnes and Noble had it on order well before the release date, and almost a week later, they say they won't be getting it until their distribution center gets some, and the distribution center is still waiting for 20,000 copies.
For reference, usually new books hit the stores *on* the day of release.
Ironic, it's been the Amazon number 1 seller six days running, but my local bookstore ordered only six copies. And this in a high tech area!
Right you are, there were two earlier in the year. But I was thinking more of the summer, after Davis put in place his fixes (the exhortation to conserve, combined with discounts/rebates for conservation). Even though the chock-full-o-blackouts summer didn't materialize, the rest of the country was left with (and still has) the impression that we were rolling in the blackouts, when it was actually over as soon as it started.
Those "ensuing blackouts" that everyone assumes occurred, didn't. At least I never saw one, and I was in California all summer.
I'm wondering if this point will dawn on the republicans before they invest millions in anti-Davis advertising that attacks him for something that didn't happen.
I think the calls for conservation worked, contrary to Cheney's expert opinion.
BTW, talk about being scared: replying to CmdrTaco with my meagre karma, now that is scary.
Ob DSL: Now if only we could get bandwith-saver rebates like those energy-saver rebates the California government gives us for buying efficient lights and appliances. Lynx (and Links) usage would surge.
>Until they under the same conditions: >1) create a protein >2) create a cell >3) make it a living cell.
One thing to keep in mind about that argument is that the earth's surface is around 509,600,000,000,000 square meters. Some significant fraction of these square meters would contain pools or patches of primordial soup, mud, or a nice combination of these, and from time to time some of them would exchange fluids. If you think of the emergence of life-supporting materials, leading to membranes, then a kind of, shall we say, embellished membranes, then to cells, then to life, as a brute force search, this many pools gives you a lot of processing power. Then you let the process run for a billion years or so; that is a lot of processing time.
Granted, you're not going to have Cleopatra springing perfectly formed out of one of these pools just as you reach the one billion year mark, but it's highly likely that something interesting will happen given all that time with all that parallel processing.
I think some people underestimate the significance of a billion years.
I would make cool content and give it away. And I would support myself with other work. And I would encourage others to do the same. And I would insist on my right to do so.
You make good points, and there are also security concerns, but remember the early internet had its naysayers, too. One thing they said would never fly was the idea of computer installations actually sharing bandwidth with each other, forwarding packets for each other. Who would ever want someone else's traffic burdening their resources, they asked.
BTW I didn't have in mind buddies, but anyone in range. Some of the security and care-of-forwarding issues that are being worked on by the IETF for mobile ad-hoc networks could be applied here.
It would be great to see these wireless
nodes forwarding packets via each other,
from node to node, not just from node to
net. Let's say your and my net connections
went down for an hour. In the meantime, my
packets could hop from my node, to yours,
to someone else's, and so on until they
reached a node that had connectivity. By
effectively combining several ISPs,
reliability and bandwidth would be boosted.
We'd still need ISPs, but we'd need them a
lot less, so they might be inclined to offer
better prices and products.
Cheap alternative: gorillarack.com (link below)
on
Rackmounting at Home?
·
· Score: 1
Gorilla Rack products are great. Really they are shelving, not racks. Metal and plywood. They have them at hardware superstores, or Costco, or Sam's club. You can get the 18" deep ones that have five sturdy shelves for $59, if you shop around. I have two spacious shelves for computers, and two closely spaced shelves for hubs, routers, wall warts, chargers, UPSs, and other small stuff,
plus the top shelf used only for storage. This totally organizes your equipment... it can be a life changing experience... I raved about how great my shelf is so much to my brother in law, he started politely pretending to actually be interested.
They are not pretty, though. The first picture
here shows a light version, probably 14 inches deep not 18, but it gives the idea. Mine is the same brand as, but not as ugly as the one in the picture. Some are textured with faux ruggedization like the one in the picture, and some are not. They are pretty easy to find. My comments are NOT referring to the wire racks (also shown) although those might also make sense.
Not to be confused with gorilla.net, which has much nicer but way more expensive stuff. I don't know if these are the same company.
I have this link on my home page (which is a file:// link on my local hard disk, not a public home page).
Heh, back in the dot-com era, you could have gotten venture capital funding for a business model where the sole functionality of your site was as a portal to opt-out links like this.
>any warkmark that doesn't interfere with the user's perception of the watermarked work can be filtered out.
Intutitively it seems true almost by definition, so I'm glad you were able to prove it.
On the other hand, digital fingerprints, which are very different from watermarks, stay almost the same for different reencodings of the data.
It seems to me maybe JonKatz is confusing these two things; at the very least he does not define a clear distinction between them. They are intended for different purposes. Fingerprints work; watermarks might not.
I'm not saying you were confusing them, just that JonKatz was. But since many people confuse these two technologies, when you diss watermarks it might be good to make clear that the criticism does not apply to fingerprints.
To really turn the tables, you would need quite a different picture:
The US would have to be an ambitious dictatorship that was threatening its neighbors (viz, the Spratley Island disputes with several countries, plus the Taiwan dispute) and it would have to have a record of slaughtering its own citizens, trampling human rights, and breaking promises not to test nuclear devices. Furthermore it would have to have a highly unstable command structure which included warmongering and nationalistic leaders of the military. In other words, the US would have to be like China.
Then China would have to be a treaty-abiding, reliable, stable, democratic, responsible country with the ability, the restraint, and the mandate to maintain security and stability in a world where other countries were not able to do so. In other words, China would have to be like the US.
If this was the picture, then, maybe, it might be conceivable that China would conduct survelliance somewhere off our coasts. Only with such a picture could we begin to talk about turning the tables.
>To quote one of my co-workers: no one should be able to patent something that could be designed by a marketing department.
This gives marketers too little credit. I'm a techie myself, not a marketer, but I've seen plenty of technical people plod along for years with blinders on, seeing only the option they are trained to see... they have a hammer, and they see only nails. Sometimes marketers come up with some pretty innovative stuff, and sometimes it can be technical, and patentable.
I'm not saying that the Amazon innovations are patentable, just that sometimes marketing people can come up with patentable ideas.
Now on to Amazon.
I really appreciate what Amazon has given us in terms of innovation, the ability to browse for books in multiple ways which were previously not available. Purchase circles, people-who-bought-x-also-bought-y, sorting options for price, availability, selling rank, average customer review, date, etc., book recommendations, user reviews, rating of reviews... the list could go on. I'm sure you could find examples where many of these have been offered before, but they hadn't been brought together with the large database of books before and presented as a useful package until Amazon. Amazon pushed the envelope and raised the standard that others had to meet, benefiting all of us, even users of competing sites. For that reason I support Amazon... and I forgive them their patent silliness because it was done as a defensive measure against the behemoth Barnes & Noble, which has been copying all along. Copying ideas is the standard model on the Internet; fine. But I still like to reward the innovator.
Almonds are not nuts. The correct term for an almond is "almond."
Crazy people are not nuts. The correct term for a crazy person is "a person with a neurological disorder."
Automobile wheels are not held in place by lug nuts. The correct term is "hexagonal wheel retainment device."
There is no such thing as a "hard nut to crack." The correct term is "a difficult problem."
You aren't scratching your nuts as you read this. The correct term is "testicles."
The only correct usage of the word "nut" is when speaking of a variety, of uknown name, of a fatty edible vegetable seed having a hard exterior shell, said seed being of such size that the volume of the portion inside the shell matches or exceeds the volume of the shell itself. If the shell has been removed, it is permissible to say "the kernel of a nut," but again, only if the true correct name of the seed is unknown.
>You've got warm puddles where various compounds are mixing together. Puddles beget some simple chemical reactions.
>...
>Complex reactions beget some self-sustaining reactions (a difficult jump that is still being explained.)
Wherever you have these difficult jumps, just remember to insert some parallel processing (say, a few trillion puddles) and give it a few years (say, a billion). The probability of getting some interesting results starts to approach 1 pretty quickly. So perhaps the jump is not so surprising after all.
Perhaps you can clarify how CDs not being used for their original purpose constitutes a loss for Sony and Philips?
At least in the case of Sony, free copying of audio is a loss to them because Sony also owns a record company. This could explain why Sony has often let viable large capacity lossless media formats, especially rewritable ones, wither and effectively die.
Don't worry, the Association of American Publishers and others are working closing up those annoying loopholes in the Net, too...
check out the Digital Object Initiative and the Handle System for two nice examples of the misuse of the word "open," unless your idea of "open" includes a $30,000 per year fee for membership.
The Motorola pagers have much better in-building penetration than the Blackberry devices. My colleagues and I with our Motorola 2-way pagers can be sending email back and forth inside a conference hall, or basically anywhere, while RIM users sitting next to us are left in the dark. I've seen this both at a conference in a hotel, and in our office.
Wheeled vehicle with latch-on capabilities
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 2
A wheeled vehicle, but with automatic
self-balancing and self-braking functions. Also
with a generic capability to latch on to other
sources of mobility, including special (probably
tracked) vehicles built for the purpose, or
horizontal or vertical conveyor belts, possibly
with a kind of slingshot action to push then
release the vehicles at higher speeds, where they
will remain stable due to electronic and
gyroscopic controls.
May have autonomous capability, so units could
be public (like the experiment with bicycles in
Amsterdam), and could be thus "borrowed" or
perhaps rented when needed and then
automatically would shunt themselves around
the city in anticipation of predicted needs.
They would initially be useful without
infrastructure, but later as infrastructure
(conveyor belts, or conveyor-bot moving vehicles
onto which these personal vehicles could latch)
became more widespread, these personal vehicles
would become more useful. City governments
would invest in huge fleets of them to
alleviate traffic and pollution problems, but
individuals would also buy them for personal use.
(Metro versus Pro, although an individual could
presumably purchase either).
The wheels have to be fairly large (over 8",
say) to allow smooth navigation over obstacles.
The vehicle will also be able to jump when
necessary, absorb bumps with an electronically
controlled damping system, and may be able to
hook together with other units to form a train.
It may have a kind of micro radar to detect and
quickly respond to obstacles such as curbs.
With its low price, the Metro will not have
the ability to recover energy during braking and
downhill... well, maybe with a flywheel. But the
Pro may have this ability.
Note that Bezos et al did not necessarily see
these things doing all their tricks. They did
see at least one of them "turned on." It would
be possible to demo vehicles such as this without
having the full infrastruture in place: one unit
could, in motion, catch up to and latch on to
another unit, which could then demonstrate the
slingshot action of transferring speed to the
first unit. A key technology in all of this is
the same kind of sensing and balancing that goes
on in Kamen's wheelchair replacement, but applied
in a different domain, the domain of coordinating
and connecting two moving entities (vehicle and
vehicle, or vehicle and conveyer belt).
In a time of impending energy crunch (you ain't
seen nothin yet) a more efficient transportation
tool will really take off.
I think this is it. You could build cities around
it. Cities will be retrofitted for it. It will
affect people in cities especially. It will sweep
over the world.
It won't replace cars. Weather will be an
issue. But many cities in the world have way,
way more motorcycles than we ever see in most
of the cities most of us live in, and this will
be a cleaner, cheaper, replacement for those, in
those places where weather doesn't make it
impractical. It will be interesting to see if
it can balance and travel on ice.
On one score, though, all the ideas I've seen
including this idea (I would say my idea, but it
contains parts stolen from many of the ideas of
others here) fail the test: I don't think these
ideas are bigger than the Internet. But maybe
John Doerr thinks so.
Other ideas:
Maglev: nice idea, but takes a lot of juice.
Probably impractical.
Hover: also nice, but a bit extravagent. Keep
in mind, whatever this is, if it is too over-
the-top, there will be some stigma that will
hold back its acceptance. I think these gues
are smart enough to understand that. They
did allude to a bit of a question about whether
people would be allowed to use it, but that fits
for some wheeled vehicles as well as a hover
vehicle.
Toilet: Nah. Not as big as the Internet.
Personal power station: doesn't fit with some
of the hints that are out there.
Wireless internet: Maybe, if by that we mean
ad hoc wireless networks where everyone makes
their own bandwidth available for others to
share when it's not being used, with a
resulting high bandwith network especially in
cities... But there is no tie-in with a dirty
product, in this case, unless it is obliquely
with the fact that telecommuting makes cars
less useful.
As Perens has pointed out in so many words in the past, a trademark does not have to be registered to be a trademark.
Trademark != Registered Trademark. Therefore:
(! Registered_Trademark ) != (! Trademark)
In English, that means that not having gone through with registration does not equate to having lost the trademark. It just equates to having abandoned the registration. And abandoning the registration does not invalidate a trademark.
The above comments make no judgement about whether or not "Open Source" is trademarkable. In my opinion it is too generic, but the point I wanted to make here is the one above, that (TM) is not the same as (R).
Slashdot Mirror
When these discussions about probability of life come up, I always think of the massive amount of parallel processing that is provided by the surface area of an entire planet, and the large amount of processing time that is available for the task.
Especially regarding the probability that life will start in a puddle... Or in some wet clay, just as well... but taking puddles as an example:
Take a square mile of earth. Picture a kind of primordial earth, the surface seething with puddles. Maybe, say, one square foot of puddle for every four square foot of earth. That's
6,969,600 puddles per square mile. There are 197,000,000 square miles on earth; assume 1/10 of these are land, so multiply 6.9 million by 1.97 million: 13,730,112,000,000 puddles. Oh, then multiply that by 365 billion or so days, to yield the number of daily heating/cooling cycles provided by the rising and setting of the sun. That's 5,011,490,880,000,000,000,000,000, right? So maybe I've overestimated the surface area, or the number of viable puddles. OK, divide that by 10 to the third or fourth; it's still a pretty darn big number.
Next time some Creationist lectures you about how improbable it is that life started in a puddle, be sure to multiply whatever probability they provide by that number.
Of course there's that detail about cells, and multiple cells, and the "sudden" leap to intelligence (forgetting a few billion years here and there). Well, that would require... evolution! But then, this is starting to look like a troll, and I didn't mean it that way.
Mesh Networks == bye bye telco monopolies on the last mile
This book is apparently on back order everywhere, in stock nowhere. My local Barnes and Noble had it on order well before the release date, and almost a week later, they say they won't be getting it until their distribution center gets some, and the distribution center is still waiting for 20,000 copies.
For reference, usually new books hit the stores *on* the day of release.
Ironic, it's been the Amazon number 1 seller six days running, but my local bookstore ordered only six copies. And this in a high tech area!
How do you type email and SMS messages on a Kyocera?
Right you are, there were two earlier in the year. But I was thinking more of the summer, after Davis put in place his fixes (the exhortation to conserve, combined with discounts/rebates for conservation). Even though the chock-full-o-blackouts summer didn't materialize, the rest of the country was left with (and still has) the impression that we were rolling in the blackouts, when it was actually over as soon as it started.
Those "ensuing blackouts" that everyone assumes occurred, didn't. At least I never saw one, and I was in California all summer.
I'm wondering if this point will dawn on the republicans before they invest millions in anti-Davis advertising that attacks him for something that didn't happen.
I think the calls for conservation worked, contrary to Cheney's expert opinion.
BTW, talk about being scared: replying to CmdrTaco with my meagre karma, now that is scary.
Ob DSL: Now if only we could get bandwith-saver rebates like those energy-saver rebates the California government gives us for buying efficient lights and appliances. Lynx (and Links) usage would surge.
>Until they under the same conditions:
>1) create a protein
>2) create a cell
>3) make it a living cell.
One thing to keep in mind about that argument is that the earth's surface is around 509,600,000,000,000 square meters. Some significant fraction of these square meters would contain pools or patches of primordial soup, mud, or a nice combination of these, and from time to time some of them would exchange fluids. If you think of the emergence of life-supporting materials, leading to membranes, then a kind of, shall we say, embellished membranes, then to cells, then to life, as a brute force search, this many pools gives you a lot of processing power. Then you let the process run for a billion years or so; that is a lot of processing time.
Granted, you're not going to have Cleopatra springing perfectly formed out of one of these pools just as you reach the one billion year mark, but it's highly likely that something interesting will happen given all that time with all that parallel processing.
I think some people underestimate the significance of a billion years.
Yes, 8 is really her middle name.
The most significant difference between RIM devices and Motorola devices is that the in-building penetration of the Motorola devices is much better.
I would make cool content and give it away. And I would support myself with other work. And I would encourage others to do the same. And I would insist on my right to do so.
You make good points, and there are also security concerns, but remember the early internet had its naysayers, too. One thing they said would never fly was the idea of computer installations actually sharing bandwidth with each other, forwarding packets for each other. Who would ever want someone else's traffic burdening their resources, they asked.
BTW I didn't have in mind buddies, but anyone in range. Some of the security and care-of-forwarding issues that are being worked on by the IETF for mobile ad-hoc networks could be applied here.
It would be great to see these wireless
nodes forwarding packets via each other,
from node to node, not just from node to
net. Let's say your and my net connections
went down for an hour. In the meantime, my
packets could hop from my node, to yours,
to someone else's, and so on until they
reached a node that had connectivity. By
effectively combining several ISPs,
reliability and bandwidth would be boosted.
We'd still need ISPs, but we'd need them a
lot less, so they might be inclined to offer
better prices and products.
They are not pretty, though. The first picture here shows a light version, probably 14 inches deep not 18, but it gives the idea. Mine is the same brand as, but not as ugly as the one in the picture. Some are textured with faux ruggedization like the one in the picture, and some are not. They are pretty easy to find. My comments are NOT referring to the wire racks (also shown) although those might also make sense.
Not to be confused with gorilla.net, which has much nicer but way more expensive stuff. I don't know if these are the same company.
Heh, back in the dot-com era, you could have gotten venture capital funding for a business model where the sole functionality of your site was as a portal to opt-out links like this.
Intutitively it seems true almost by definition, so I'm glad you were able to prove it.
On the other hand, digital fingerprints, which are very different from watermarks, stay almost the same for different reencodings of the data.
It seems to me maybe JonKatz is confusing these two things; at the very least he does not define a clear distinction between them. They are intended for different purposes. Fingerprints work; watermarks might not.
I'm not saying you were confusing them, just that JonKatz was. But since many people confuse these two technologies, when you diss watermarks it might be good to make clear that the criticism does not apply to fingerprints.
The US would have to be an ambitious dictatorship that was threatening its neighbors (viz, the Spratley Island disputes with several countries, plus the Taiwan dispute) and it would have to have a record of slaughtering its own citizens, trampling human rights, and breaking promises not to test nuclear devices. Furthermore it would have to have a highly unstable command structure which included warmongering and nationalistic leaders of the military. In other words, the US would have to be like China.
Then China would have to be a treaty-abiding, reliable, stable, democratic, responsible country with the ability, the restraint, and the mandate to maintain security and stability in a world where other countries were not able to do so. In other words, China would have to be like the US.
If this was the picture, then, maybe, it might be conceivable that China would conduct survelliance somewhere off our coasts. Only with such a picture could we begin to talk about turning the tables.
This gives marketers too little credit. I'm a techie myself, not a marketer, but I've seen plenty of technical people plod along for years with blinders on, seeing only the option they are trained to see... they have a hammer, and they see only nails. Sometimes marketers come up with some pretty innovative stuff, and sometimes it can be technical, and patentable.
I'm not saying that the Amazon innovations are patentable, just that sometimes marketing people can come up with patentable ideas.
Now on to Amazon.
I really appreciate what Amazon has given us in terms of innovation, the ability to browse for books in multiple ways which were previously not available. Purchase circles, people-who-bought-x-also-bought-y, sorting options for price, availability, selling rank, average customer review, date, etc., book recommendations, user reviews, rating of reviews... the list could go on. I'm sure you could find examples where many of these have been offered before, but they hadn't been brought together with the large database of books before and presented as a useful package until Amazon. Amazon pushed the envelope and raised the standard that others had to meet, benefiting all of us, even users of competing sites. For that reason I support Amazon... and I forgive them their patent silliness because it was done as a defensive measure against the behemoth Barnes & Noble, which has been copying all along. Copying ideas is the standard model on the Internet; fine. But I still like to reward the innovator.
<sarcasm>
Almonds are not nuts. The correct term for an almond is "almond."
Crazy people are not nuts. The correct term for a crazy person is "a person with a neurological disorder."
Automobile wheels are not held in place by lug nuts. The correct term is "hexagonal wheel retainment device."
There is no such thing as a "hard nut to crack." The correct term is "a difficult problem."
You aren't scratching your nuts as you read this. The correct term is "testicles."
The only correct usage of the word "nut" is when speaking of a variety, of uknown name, of a fatty edible vegetable seed having a hard exterior shell, said seed being of such size that the volume of the portion inside the shell matches or exceeds the volume of the shell itself. If the shell has been removed, it is permissible to say "the kernel of a nut," but again, only if the true correct name of the seed is unknown.
</sarcasm>
>...
>Complex reactions beget some self-sustaining reactions (a difficult jump that is still being explained.)
Wherever you have these difficult jumps, just remember to insert some parallel processing (say, a few trillion puddles) and give it a few years (say, a billion). The probability of getting some interesting results starts to approach 1 pretty quickly. So perhaps the jump is not so surprising after all.
At least in the case of Sony, free copying of audio is a loss to them because Sony also owns a record company. This could explain why Sony has often let viable large capacity lossless media formats, especially rewritable ones, wither and effectively die.
Don't worry, the Association of American Publishers and others are working closing up those annoying loopholes in the Net, too... check out the Digital Object Initiative and the Handle System for two nice examples of the misuse of the word "open," unless your idea of "open" includes a $30,000 per year fee for membership.
The Motorola pagers have much better in-building penetration than the Blackberry devices. My colleagues and I with our Motorola 2-way pagers can be sending email back and forth inside a conference hall, or basically anywhere, while RIM users sitting next to us are left in the dark. I've seen this both at a conference in a hotel, and in our office.
A wheeled vehicle, but with automatic
self-balancing and self-braking functions. Also
with a generic capability to latch on to other
sources of mobility, including special (probably
tracked) vehicles built for the purpose, or
horizontal or vertical conveyor belts, possibly
with a kind of slingshot action to push then
release the vehicles at higher speeds, where they
will remain stable due to electronic and
gyroscopic controls.
May have autonomous capability, so units could
be public (like the experiment with bicycles in
Amsterdam), and could be thus "borrowed" or
perhaps rented when needed and then
automatically would shunt themselves around
the city in anticipation of predicted needs.
They would initially be useful without
infrastructure, but later as infrastructure
(conveyor belts, or conveyor-bot moving vehicles
onto which these personal vehicles could latch)
became more widespread, these personal vehicles
would become more useful. City governments
would invest in huge fleets of them to
alleviate traffic and pollution problems, but
individuals would also buy them for personal use.
(Metro versus Pro, although an individual could
presumably purchase either).
The wheels have to be fairly large (over 8",
say) to allow smooth navigation over obstacles.
The vehicle will also be able to jump when
necessary, absorb bumps with an electronically
controlled damping system, and may be able to
hook together with other units to form a train.
It may have a kind of micro radar to detect and
quickly respond to obstacles such as curbs.
With its low price, the Metro will not have
the ability to recover energy during braking and
downhill... well, maybe with a flywheel. But the
Pro may have this ability.
Note that Bezos et al did not necessarily see
these things doing all their tricks. They did
see at least one of them "turned on." It would
be possible to demo vehicles such as this without
having the full infrastruture in place: one unit
could, in motion, catch up to and latch on to
another unit, which could then demonstrate the
slingshot action of transferring speed to the
first unit. A key technology in all of this is
the same kind of sensing and balancing that goes
on in Kamen's wheelchair replacement, but applied
in a different domain, the domain of coordinating
and connecting two moving entities (vehicle and
vehicle, or vehicle and conveyer belt).
In a time of impending energy crunch (you ain't
seen nothin yet) a more efficient transportation
tool will really take off.
I think this is it. You could build cities around
it. Cities will be retrofitted for it. It will
affect people in cities especially. It will sweep
over the world.
It won't replace cars. Weather will be an
issue. But many cities in the world have way,
way more motorcycles than we ever see in most
of the cities most of us live in, and this will
be a cleaner, cheaper, replacement for those, in
those places where weather doesn't make it
impractical. It will be interesting to see if
it can balance and travel on ice.
On one score, though, all the ideas I've seen
including this idea (I would say my idea, but it
contains parts stolen from many of the ideas of
others here) fail the test: I don't think these
ideas are bigger than the Internet. But maybe
John Doerr thinks so.
Other ideas:
Maglev: nice idea, but takes a lot of juice.
Probably impractical.
Hover: also nice, but a bit extravagent. Keep
in mind, whatever this is, if it is too over-
the-top, there will be some stigma that will
hold back its acceptance. I think these gues
are smart enough to understand that. They
did allude to a bit of a question about whether
people would be allowed to use it, but that fits
for some wheeled vehicles as well as a hover
vehicle.
Toilet: Nah. Not as big as the Internet.
Personal power station: doesn't fit with some
of the hints that are out there.
Wireless internet: Maybe, if by that we mean
ad hoc wireless networks where everyone makes
their own bandwidth available for others to
share when it's not being used, with a
resulting high bandwith network especially in
cities... But there is no tie-in with a dirty
product, in this case, unless it is obliquely
with the fact that telecommuting makes cars
less useful.
As Perens has pointed out in so many words in the past, a trademark does not have to be registered to be a trademark.
Trademark != Registered Trademark. Therefore:
(! Registered_Trademark ) != (! Trademark)
In English, that means that not having gone through with registration does not equate to having lost the trademark. It just equates to having abandoned the registration. And abandoning the registration does not invalidate a trademark.
The above comments make no judgement about whether or not "Open Source" is trademarkable. In my opinion it is too generic, but the point I wanted to make here is the one above, that (TM) is not the same as (R).