Re:It will be economically viable, one day
on
Filling Up On Algae
·
· Score: 1
Not even then. This whole system is ran by whatever fuels the power plant (hint: that's gonna be fossil fuel based if you have these kind of emmisions.)
You're basically just spending a lot of time and energy on turning exhaust gasses into fertilizer. If you already know about peak oil, this offers nothing more than biodiesel or solar. In fact, you might as well just grow biodiesel corn for the busses or run solar for the electric power grid.
And there's no silly messing around with hybrids to get regenerative braking.
Well, regenerative braking is just a way to tweak a little more energy efficiency out of any system. It also seems that it could be almost trivial to tack this onto electric cars: Any motor is a generator. Rather than the battery pushing electrons to spin the motor which spins the tires, the tires spinning pushes on electrons which goes to recharging the batteries just a little. I don't think I'm violating any major laws of physics with this. Would just take a little work telling the system when to act as a motor and when to act as a generator. Perhaps charging capacitors would work out better than batteries for regenerative braking.
First off, diatoms are a type of algae. I believe that they are alot slower growing and have more specific environmental needs than other algae, in particular green algaes. One of the reasons that they would be so slow growing is the frustule (glass shell) that you mentioned. Making the frustule is very energy intensive, and causes a somwhat slower reproduction rate. Not to mention that as diatomaceous earth is basically powdered glass, it is quite abrasive and would lead to much higer maintenance costs.
My guess is that this method is used on land because that's where you find the power plant exhaust that you feed into the system. The whole point of this is that they are taking harmful waste products (CO2 and Nitrous compounds in smokestacks which purportedly lead to global warming and acid rain) and breaking them down. The biodiesel is just a happy side benefit that makes the whole project worthwhile. Being environmentally friendly isn't always bad for business.
I've always thought a method like this would be useful in treating sewage wastewater. I bet you could get enough energy out of this to take the water treatment plant off the electrical grid (Okay, this was just a wild guess with no actual numbers for reference, but seems reasonable.) My thoughts were to directly take energy from bacterial digestion of the waste products, but making biodiesel would help alleviate the need for petroleum in transportation.
Hmm... but then again I question what the actual environmental gain would be on this. Any pollutants eaten up to make the biodiesel would have to be chemically removed from the stream (probably prohibitively expensive) otherwise they'll just come out of the tailpipe of the bus or whatever the diesel is powering. Might be more efficient to just use the fossil fuels to power the bus and use solar energy to power the electric grid. Otherwise you would be able to use the diesel created through this to run the powerplant, and that just sounds like a violation of some of the laws of thermodynamics to me.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
Ironically if anybody is going to grow OSS, it's large businesses. Some businesses see value in using some OS code for their own use and returning some of their own code to the wild. Open Sourcing some software allows it to be developed without having to pay programmers for all of the work. Or perhaps the company views releasing their code for code they use to be a form of barter. It won't really work for all types of software, but some are very amenable to this treatment.
I suppose the other place that OSS will continue to be extended is in universities. OSS projects make the perfect starting point for many research projects, thesises, etc. And not just within comp sci. ESRI, the de-facto standard in GIS software, was originally started by a couple of landscape design students (It's definately closed source, but just shows that other academic disciplines are very computer savy and reliant.) And a school's own payroll, record keeping, accounting, etc etc seems like a good place to start rolling business oriented software, and it might make sense to make it OSS as schools really are supposed to be contributing to the general knowledge base, not fighting over every scrap of IP they can get their hands on.
I know many biology teachers, especially in the field of conservation, use and contribute to open source software in their field. Just take a look at these pieces of software. I personally like the summary for Sashimi: Looking for a way to interpret the mass spectrometry (MS) data from your last proteomic experiment? Need to quantitate proteins in your ICAT sample? Want some help choosing the correct protein/peptide assignments? What are you waiting for?!?!
Another organization that seems like they should be amenable to open source, but I personally haven't seem much of is libraries. They do a lot of behind the scenes tracking of data and just plain providing terminals for patrons to work on. I'd think that OSS would tie in brilliantly with their philosophy (and budget) but somehow most libraries just don't seem to have been infected with the meme yet.
I dunno... when I was a kid it was all AppleIIx (IIc, IIe, some macintoshes even in high school interspersed with the 3.11 machines and occasional 95) in the classrooms. Apple has always had really good educational discounts. Problem is that businesses always demanded Microsoft, as they were the heir to the throne of IBM, and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Schools started using MS products because they wanted to prepare students for the workplace.
I think there's something your forgetting about television. They are supposed to pander to the lowerst common denominator. You know why? The viewers are not the customer. The advertisers are the customer. The viewer is, get this, the actual product.
Picture the TV networks as a fisherman. The advertiser is the customer who buys the fish. The viewer is the fish, and the television shows are the net that he casts. The thing is, most diners want tasty fish, so you use the kind of net that usually gets the tastiest fish around. In the case of advertisers, tasty fish are gullible viewers, stupid people who's purchases are strongly affected by the commercials they watch. So, the television networks cast the type of net that will draw in these tasty fish, and that's why the news is so dull and trite, why sitcoms just aren't funny, and why reality TV is the king of television. Because the viewers are the product, not the customer.
I'd imagine that the story is pretty much the same with cable TV, even though the product has to pay a premium to be sold to the advertiser. Commercials are supposed to be appealing to gullible people, not intelligent and rational people. Movies are starting to head in the same direction with previews getting longer and longer, product placement, etc. As a larger portion of the studio's income is earned through advertising then the viewer becomes more and more product and less and less customer.
Radio stations, same thing. That's why any free thinking, truly rocking station quickly gets replaced with cookie cutter ClearChannel programming. Because the advertisers want tasty fish. The sort of fish who are amused by "two annoying guys with wacky sounds and their bemused female sidekick with an occasional bitter tongue in the morning."
RIAA, they're making plenty of money. And buying enough laws to make sure that the money keeps rolling in. The DIY or die indie scene has been rallying to take down the establishment ever since punk rock in the seventies, and guess what. RIAA just keeps getting more and more power by producing shittier and shittier music (but at least they are giving the consumer less choices. Seriously, most major labels are cutting back on the number of artists they are officially promoting.) Every now and then the major labels will come out with a new "artist" that looks to be a rebel, and so conforming to the teenage ideal of what a musician should be. That veneer is usually gone after a couple of albums and people start to see the strings that are really moving the puppet.
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
I've had a horrible time getting openoffice to print the right way in certain spreadsheet documents.
And I've had a horrible time getting MSoffice to print the right way in... well, many documents across the office suite. Between autoformating killing everything, and forced arbitrary margins (usually a good thing if writing a paper, but anything else... maybe not.) and whatnot I spend more time on formatting than content creation in office. If there was just one easilly accessible check box for "turn all autoformatting off" and again for turning it on, MS Office would be far more usable. Granted, I haven't used OpenOffice enough to see if it's any better and the real problem is that it isn't as trivial of a problem to fix as I think.
Or it could just be that lawnmowers fire a natural trigger that had been installed by natural forces. Many insects take wing more often when a thunderstorm is on it's way in. The thunder could become a trigger to the birds that these insects will soon take flight. The sound of a lawnmower may be similar enough in a bird to provide the reaction which is essentially pavlovian, but on an evolutionary scale rather than behavior. There are probably basic pavlovian behavior modifications going on as well, birds learning that lawnmowers kick up bugs (or simply expose them by shortening the grass, or in the case of herbivores distributing plant clippings) and so get hungry at the sound of a lawnmower. Once fixed in a bird, the behaviour could even be passed down to offspring ala memetic rather than genetic evolution.
Or it could be, as you were saying, that genetic predisposition to food search when lawnmowers are running makes birds more evolutionarilly fit in an environment where lawnmower expose food, and so "natural" selection favors these birds at this time.
But with something as complex as behavior (remembering that all biological processes, even behavior, are at their roots chemical processes) it is most likely a combination of causes that leads to birds flying when lawnmowers are turned on: genetic predisposition and triggers with previous circumstances allow the birds to become more succesfull if the respond to this stimulus, through a combination of instinct, training and learning. And for me, the simple answer is that in any complex system, the answer will most likely be complex.
Sorry about the flow of consciousness writing with no real organization or main point to make. I'm just in that kind of mood today.
The species was only proven to be maladapted for a particular period of time. And evolution isn't about conscious choices. Evolution is about trial and error. Blind trial and error can lead to trying the same mistake over and over and over. There is no record of "this didn't work, we should not try it again."
And, honestly, the only thing that makes the act of environmental destruction immoral is our ability to sit back and ask whether it is the right thing to do. I think that is one of the key aspects of humanity that puts us above the natural world. Yes, we are from the natural world, and rely on it, but have the ability to make choices about what we do to it rather than just reacting to an ever changing environment. And the ironic thing about the human experiment is that if we fail on the ecological test and devastate the environment, life is flexible and diverse enough that it will probably find a way again. Just that humans won't make it to that next do-over. So environmentalists, when viewed on a long enough time scale, are simply humanists.
Of course, this all assumes that we can't come up with a technology powerfull enough to simply end existence.
Not to mention that google can lead to articles with much more information as a whole. Granted the writing style on that one is a tad dry with a little bit of jargon, but hey. Hmm... linked page also has some fairly big pictures, so I'd better coralize the link before it goes down.
The thing that you're forgetting is that for each "generation" the non-target gender is increasing just as fast as the target gender.
Let's say we're going for male:
1. 100m 100f total: 100m 100f
parents of f try again:
2. 50m 50f total: 150m 150f
and again:
3. 25m 25f total: 175m 175f
And so on and so on, remaining a 1:1 relationship. Yes, having kids untill you have a boy will make it more likely that you eventually have a boy, but it won't increase the number of boys to girls.
There are fish that do this, and many do require the male of another species to "fertilize" the other eggs, even though no actual hybridization goes on. I believe there are hormonal triggers that are the relic of when the fish wasn't parthenogenic.
However, these subspecies of fish generally do not last very long. Parthenogenesis is a good short term strategy as it allows higher rates of reproduction than sex. However, once you get into an evolutionary timescale these parthenogenic fish are not well equipped to adapt to changes in the environment.
These clonal colonies of fish often spring up and die out in a relatively short period of time, often times taking out the original population that they were derived from, as their higher rate of reproduction allows them to compete so well that they drive the other to extinction (at least locally, such as in a given pond) In the case where they need the males to "fertilize" the eggs, this in itself is enough to prevent reproduction and cause eventual extinction.
But then again there are many types of fish which can change gender, either almost at will (at least seasonally) or are always born one gender and then change when there is a need for the other (probably all born female, then males formed as needed.) In these case there really isn't a genetic factor in sexuality, it is simply a hormonal process.
He was pretending that there are some people out there who think of copyright infringement as theft. Thus adding the "in the traditional sense" in there means that they, as well as people who generally use the term "intellectual property violations" for this sort of behavior, will both understand that what he's saying is that the act of copying, or even downloading a copied version, carries a far stiffer penalty than physically stealing the media from a store or other person.
I would guess this is in an attempt to show that the punishment does not fit the crime.
Problem with that is then every single piece of media that you buy would have to be encrypted using that key. Could no longer mass produce CDs or DVDs because, well, every single one would need to be custom. Would be cost prohibitive for most retailers (Best Buy, Walmart, etc) and doing online orders would kind of defeat the purpose of biometrics, since you have to actually be in their presence to verify that you aren't somehow faking the system. You'd essentially become limited to buying from a kiosk which encrypts the data and burns the cds or dvds on site. I really doubt most people would want to stand in front of a kiosk for 5 minutes to wait for their copy of Battlefield Earth to burn. And then wait again for any other movies they may want. And this is after waiting in line for everyone in front of you to burn their copies. Oh, and that's not even including the fact that it won't stop piracy.
And going to a fingerscan device in the keyboard just means that instead of downloading cracks and cd emulators, the kiddies'll be downloading software (and maybe even using a cheap piece of hardware) that tricks the computer into thinking that that stream of digits is coming from a fingerprint scan rather than a data file. So now you're up to an entirely redesigned hardware architecture (I.E. you must buy a new computer to run the software) in addition to that keyboard to ensure that you can't just fudge the data around. Then someone will just start making generic latex fingertip covers and allow everyone to have the same set of fingerprints.
Or they'll just get a program to capture the output of one legit copy of the media, and then distribute at will.
I really don't see how you could reasonably protect IP with biometric. Someone just has to write a patch which forces the game to think the biometric stamp or whatever has been verified. Biometrics may be useful for blocking access to your computer, or even as a seed for encrypting your private data, but once you give that key to someone else (I.E the customer) then the only thing stopping them from giving that key (or some reasonable software facsimile.)
It seems about the only reasonably uncrackable implementation of DRM is to have some level of content actually pulled from the server. Then someone would have to A)recreate the server and B)write a patch to allow the game to connect to your server. The amount of work it would take to fake the server would make you an obvious target for legal takedown. That's one reason that multiplayer games are so attractive to developers and the publishers that fund them: built in DRM.
This says nothing of the legal or moral aspects of actually implementing the DRM, but that's been rehashed many many times with no real consensus.
Or just use a method similar to the distro service used here. The largest part of video games these daysis going to be the media (don't know if there's a technical term)... music, textures, meshes, models, maps, cut-scene movies etc. Just download the core engine and enough media to get started, then the media for the later levels starts to download once you are up and playing. Or at least that's the way I picture it to work.
Yeah, it's wierd. Most virals are. Odd thing is that in this case, since it is at the top of the list, more people will click on it first, and won't get bored and just go away. Being at the top ensures that you are at the top.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even then. This whole system is ran by whatever fuels the power plant (hint: that's gonna be fossil fuel based if you have these kind of emmisions.)
You're basically just spending a lot of time and energy on turning exhaust gasses into fertilizer. If you already know about peak oil, this offers nothing more than biodiesel or solar. In fact, you might as well just grow biodiesel corn for the busses or run solar for the electric power grid.
And there's no silly messing around with hybrids to get regenerative braking.
Well, regenerative braking is just a way to tweak a little more energy efficiency out of any system. It also seems that it could be almost trivial to tack this onto electric cars: Any motor is a generator. Rather than the battery pushing electrons to spin the motor which spins the tires, the tires spinning pushes on electrons which goes to recharging the batteries just a little. I don't think I'm violating any major laws of physics with this. Would just take a little work telling the system when to act as a motor and when to act as a generator. Perhaps charging capacitors would work out better than batteries for regenerative braking.
First off, diatoms are a type of algae. I believe that they are alot slower growing and have more specific environmental needs than other algae, in particular green algaes. One of the reasons that they would be so slow growing is the frustule (glass shell) that you mentioned. Making the frustule is very energy intensive, and causes a somwhat slower reproduction rate. Not to mention that as diatomaceous earth is basically powdered glass, it is quite abrasive and would lead to much higer maintenance costs.
My guess is that this method is used on land because that's where you find the power plant exhaust that you feed into the system. The whole point of this is that they are taking harmful waste products (CO2 and Nitrous compounds in smokestacks which purportedly lead to global warming and acid rain) and breaking them down. The biodiesel is just a happy side benefit that makes the whole project worthwhile. Being environmentally friendly isn't always bad for business.
I've always thought a method like this would be useful in treating sewage wastewater. I bet you could get enough energy out of this to take the water treatment plant off the electrical grid (Okay, this was just a wild guess with no actual numbers for reference, but seems reasonable.) My thoughts were to directly take energy from bacterial digestion of the waste products, but making biodiesel would help alleviate the need for petroleum in transportation.
Hmm... but then again I question what the actual environmental gain would be on this. Any pollutants eaten up to make the biodiesel would have to be chemically removed from the stream (probably prohibitively expensive) otherwise they'll just come out of the tailpipe of the bus or whatever the diesel is powering. Might be more efficient to just use the fossil fuels to power the bus and use solar energy to power the electric grid. Otherwise you would be able to use the diesel created through this to run the powerplant, and that just sounds like a violation of some of the laws of thermodynamics to me.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
Ironically if anybody is going to grow OSS, it's large businesses. Some businesses see value in using some OS code for their own use and returning some of their own code to the wild. Open Sourcing some software allows it to be developed without having to pay programmers for all of the work. Or perhaps the company views releasing their code for code they use to be a form of barter. It won't really work for all types of software, but some are very amenable to this treatment.
I suppose the other place that OSS will continue to be extended is in universities. OSS projects make the perfect starting point for many research projects, thesises, etc. And not just within comp sci. ESRI, the de-facto standard in GIS software, was originally started by a couple of landscape design students (It's definately closed source, but just shows that other academic disciplines are very computer savy and reliant.) And a school's own payroll, record keeping, accounting, etc etc seems like a good place to start rolling business oriented software, and it might make sense to make it OSS as schools really are supposed to be contributing to the general knowledge base, not fighting over every scrap of IP they can get their hands on.
I know many biology teachers, especially in the field of conservation, use and contribute to open source software in their field. Just take a look at these pieces of software. I personally like the summary for Sashimi: Looking for a way to interpret the mass spectrometry (MS) data from your last proteomic experiment? Need to quantitate proteins in your ICAT sample? Want some help choosing the correct protein/peptide assignments? What are you waiting for?!?!
Another organization that seems like they should be amenable to open source, but I personally haven't seem much of is libraries. They do a lot of behind the scenes tracking of data and just plain providing terminals for patrons to work on. I'd think that OSS would tie in brilliantly with their philosophy (and budget) but somehow most libraries just don't seem to have been infected with the meme yet.
I dunno... when I was a kid it was all AppleIIx (IIc, IIe, some macintoshes even in high school interspersed with the 3.11 machines and occasional 95) in the classrooms. Apple has always had really good educational discounts. Problem is that businesses always demanded Microsoft, as they were the heir to the throne of IBM, and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Schools started using MS products because they wanted to prepare students for the workplace.
I think there's something your forgetting about television. They are supposed to pander to the lowerst common denominator. You know why? The viewers are not the customer. The advertisers are the customer. The viewer is, get this, the actual product.
Picture the TV networks as a fisherman. The advertiser is the customer who buys the fish. The viewer is the fish, and the television shows are the net that he casts. The thing is, most diners want tasty fish, so you use the kind of net that usually gets the tastiest fish around. In the case of advertisers, tasty fish are gullible viewers, stupid people who's purchases are strongly affected by the commercials they watch. So, the television networks cast the type of net that will draw in these tasty fish, and that's why the news is so dull and trite, why sitcoms just aren't funny, and why reality TV is the king of television. Because the viewers are the product, not the customer.
I'd imagine that the story is pretty much the same with cable TV, even though the product has to pay a premium to be sold to the advertiser. Commercials are supposed to be appealing to gullible people, not intelligent and rational people. Movies are starting to head in the same direction with previews getting longer and longer, product placement, etc. As a larger portion of the studio's income is earned through advertising then the viewer becomes more and more product and less and less customer.
Radio stations, same thing. That's why any free thinking, truly rocking station quickly gets replaced with cookie cutter ClearChannel programming. Because the advertisers want tasty fish. The sort of fish who are amused by "two annoying guys with wacky sounds and their bemused female sidekick with an occasional bitter tongue in the morning."
RIAA, they're making plenty of money. And buying enough laws to make sure that the money keeps rolling in. The DIY or die indie scene has been rallying to take down the establishment ever since punk rock in the seventies, and guess what. RIAA just keeps getting more and more power by producing shittier and shittier music (but at least they are giving the consumer less choices. Seriously, most major labels are cutting back on the number of artists they are officially promoting.) Every now and then the major labels will come out with a new "artist" that looks to be a rebel, and so conforming to the teenage ideal of what a musician should be. That veneer is usually gone after a couple of albums and people start to see the strings that are really moving the puppet.
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
Doesn't Worldcom pretty much ruin any company that it touches?
I've had a horrible time getting openoffice to print the right way in certain spreadsheet documents.
And I've had a horrible time getting MSoffice to print the right way in... well, many documents across the office suite. Between autoformating killing everything, and forced arbitrary margins (usually a good thing if writing a paper, but anything else... maybe not.) and whatnot I spend more time on formatting than content creation in office. If there was just one easilly accessible check box for "turn all autoformatting off" and again for turning it on, MS Office would be far more usable. Granted, I haven't used OpenOffice enough to see if it's any better and the real problem is that it isn't as trivial of a problem to fix as I think.
Ehh... it's an April Fool's page. A lot of the "ThinkGeek" links don't even go there. And the ones that actually do point there are to gag items.
Or it could just be that lawnmowers fire a natural trigger that had been installed by natural forces. Many insects take wing more often when a thunderstorm is on it's way in. The thunder could become a trigger to the birds that these insects will soon take flight. The sound of a lawnmower may be similar enough in a bird to provide the reaction which is essentially pavlovian, but on an evolutionary scale rather than behavior. There are probably basic pavlovian behavior modifications going on as well, birds learning that lawnmowers kick up bugs (or simply expose them by shortening the grass, or in the case of herbivores distributing plant clippings) and so get hungry at the sound of a lawnmower. Once fixed in a bird, the behaviour could even be passed down to offspring ala memetic rather than genetic evolution.
Or it could be, as you were saying, that genetic predisposition to food search when lawnmowers are running makes birds more evolutionarilly fit in an environment where lawnmower expose food, and so "natural" selection favors these birds at this time.
But with something as complex as behavior (remembering that all biological processes, even behavior, are at their roots chemical processes) it is most likely a combination of causes that leads to birds flying when lawnmowers are turned on: genetic predisposition and triggers with previous circumstances allow the birds to become more succesfull if the respond to this stimulus, through a combination of instinct, training and learning. And for me, the simple answer is that in any complex system, the answer will most likely be complex.
Sorry about the flow of consciousness writing with no real organization or main point to make. I'm just in that kind of mood today.
The species was only proven to be maladapted for a particular period of time. And evolution isn't about conscious choices. Evolution is about trial and error. Blind trial and error can lead to trying the same mistake over and over and over. There is no record of "this didn't work, we should not try it again."
And, honestly, the only thing that makes the act of environmental destruction immoral is our ability to sit back and ask whether it is the right thing to do. I think that is one of the key aspects of humanity that puts us above the natural world. Yes, we are from the natural world, and rely on it, but have the ability to make choices about what we do to it rather than just reacting to an ever changing environment. And the ironic thing about the human experiment is that if we fail on the ecological test and devastate the environment, life is flexible and diverse enough that it will probably find a way again. Just that humans won't make it to that next do-over. So environmentalists, when viewed on a long enough time scale, are simply humanists.
Of course, this all assumes that we can't come up with a technology powerfull enough to simply end existence.
Not to mention that google can lead to articles with much more information as a whole. Granted the writing style on that one is a tad dry with a little bit of jargon, but hey. Hmm... linked page also has some fairly big pictures, so I'd better coralize the link before it goes down.
Maybe now it's just tinct?
Well, that, and it would cost several times as much to get the hardware to get a "proper" cleaning pattern down. And random is fun to watch.
The thing that you're forgetting is that for each "generation" the non-target gender is increasing just as fast as the target gender.
Let's say we're going for male:
1. 100m 100f total: 100m 100f
parents of f try again:
2. 50m 50f total: 150m 150f
and again:
3. 25m 25f total: 175m 175f
And so on and so on, remaining a 1:1 relationship. Yes, having kids untill you have a boy will make it more likely that you eventually have a boy, but it won't increase the number of boys to girls.
There are fish that do this, and many do require the male of another species to "fertilize" the other eggs, even though no actual hybridization goes on. I believe there are hormonal triggers that are the relic of when the fish wasn't parthenogenic.
However, these subspecies of fish generally do not last very long. Parthenogenesis is a good short term strategy as it allows higher rates of reproduction than sex. However, once you get into an evolutionary timescale these parthenogenic fish are not well equipped to adapt to changes in the environment.
These clonal colonies of fish often spring up and die out in a relatively short period of time, often times taking out the original population that they were derived from, as their higher rate of reproduction allows them to compete so well that they drive the other to extinction (at least locally, such as in a given pond) In the case where they need the males to "fertilize" the eggs, this in itself is enough to prevent reproduction and cause eventual extinction.
But then again there are many types of fish which can change gender, either almost at will (at least seasonally) or are always born one gender and then change when there is a need for the other (probably all born female, then males formed as needed.) In these case there really isn't a genetic factor in sexuality, it is simply a hormonal process.
My favorite is the positive correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates in a given month.
He was pretending that there are some people out there who think of copyright infringement as theft. Thus adding the "in the traditional sense" in there means that they, as well as people who generally use the term "intellectual property violations" for this sort of behavior, will both understand that what he's saying is that the act of copying, or even downloading a copied version, carries a far stiffer penalty than physically stealing the media from a store or other person.
I would guess this is in an attempt to show that the punishment does not fit the crime.
Oh god... monkey boy was right?
Problem with that is then every single piece of media that you buy would have to be encrypted using that key. Could no longer mass produce CDs or DVDs because, well, every single one would need to be custom. Would be cost prohibitive for most retailers (Best Buy, Walmart, etc) and doing online orders would kind of defeat the purpose of biometrics, since you have to actually be in their presence to verify that you aren't somehow faking the system. You'd essentially become limited to buying from a kiosk which encrypts the data and burns the cds or dvds on site. I really doubt most people would want to stand in front of a kiosk for 5 minutes to wait for their copy of Battlefield Earth to burn. And then wait again for any other movies they may want. And this is after waiting in line for everyone in front of you to burn their copies. Oh, and that's not even including the fact that it won't stop piracy.
And going to a fingerscan device in the keyboard just means that instead of downloading cracks and cd emulators, the kiddies'll be downloading software (and maybe even using a cheap piece of hardware) that tricks the computer into thinking that that stream of digits is coming from a fingerprint scan rather than a data file. So now you're up to an entirely redesigned hardware architecture (I.E. you must buy a new computer to run the software) in addition to that keyboard to ensure that you can't just fudge the data around. Then someone will just start making generic latex fingertip covers and allow everyone to have the same set of fingerprints.
Or they'll just get a program to capture the output of one legit copy of the media, and then distribute at will.
I really don't see how you could reasonably protect IP with biometric. Someone just has to write a patch which forces the game to think the biometric stamp or whatever has been verified. Biometrics may be useful for blocking access to your computer, or even as a seed for encrypting your private data, but once you give that key to someone else (I.E the customer) then the only thing stopping them from giving that key (or some reasonable software facsimile.)
It seems about the only reasonably uncrackable implementation of DRM is to have some level of content actually pulled from the server. Then someone would have to A)recreate the server and B)write a patch to allow the game to connect to your server. The amount of work it would take to fake the server would make you an obvious target for legal takedown. That's one reason that multiplayer games are so attractive to developers and the publishers that fund them: built in DRM.
This says nothing of the legal or moral aspects of actually implementing the DRM, but that's been rehashed many many times with no real consensus.
Or just use a method similar to the distro service used here. The largest part of video games these daysis going to be the media (don't know if there's a technical term)... music, textures, meshes, models, maps, cut-scene movies etc. Just download the core engine and enough media to get started, then the media for the later levels starts to download once you are up and playing. Or at least that's the way I picture it to work.
Yeah, it's wierd. Most virals are. Odd thing is that in this case, since it is at the top of the list, more people will click on it first, and won't get bored and just go away. Being at the top ensures that you are at the top.
I'd imagine that would really hold true for a Spanish university. Maybe that's just me.