I get 1080p HD playback (and all the lower frame/bitrates, too) just fine using unsolo's spu-medialib mplayer -vo driver on my PS3, as I have for about a year now.
The mesa3d project is highly active, including this month, on their dev email list.
There seems to be quite a lot of interest in PS3 programming to both developers and to end users - like playing video (directly to an HDMI TV) on a $400 PS3 that would crush a PC costing 2-5x as much, that includes all that other stuff like Blu-Ray, Bluetooth, and lots of games (in GameOS mode).
You don't need a license to write, distribute or sell Linux programs or games running on PS3. You don't even need a license to sell any games for PS3 that are downloaded, just those distributed on physical disc.
If you buy a PS3 and produce and distribute/sell a downloaded program/game, you haven't agreed to anything with Sony (except that console unit's support warranty from Sony, which says nothing about your programming it except that it's allowed in the official "OtherOS" option).
You probably can't use the Sony or PS3 logo to market your program, out of trademark requirements. But you probably can say in text (or your own graphics) that it's "Sony PS3 compatible", because that is a fact. That makes it harder to market the program, but not impossible.
Of course you should ask a lawyer exactly what you need to do if you're going to launch a game, but the basic rights and obligations don't prohibit you AFAIK.
There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.
There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.
The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about:).
There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU. Why don't you put some of those people you say you're training to program the Cell onto those projects and give something back to the community that's given you the programmable platform?
Perhaps so. But the visual neural system is highly adaptable once formed, even if sight is lost later. So even if you're correct that the patient must have had healthy sight at about 1 year old, if they were any younger than this 70 year old patient, they might readapt better to the new device. And also perhaps if they'd been adapted to the blindness for less than this patient's 30 years.
I once worked for a big insurance corp that used one of its two IBM supercomputers to run Lotus Notes (Domino). As George Clinton says, "the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill".
I wonder how much better the eye would work on someone with a younger brain, that can recalibrate itself better to the new signals coming from the new eye.
Those stats are meaningless without a baseline comparison to how many foreigners used to come here to get educated, work and save some money, build a resume, then go to another country where their money and resume is worth even more in buying power than here.
This research looks like just another fake study designed to convince Congress and Americans to keep replacing American workers with foreigners who are subsidized to compete with Americans by living abroad at least part of the time where things are cheaper. They don't care about the worse labor conditions there because they don't work there (they work here), and they don't care about the environment because they haven't grown up expecting better.
Indeed the ratings agencies committed vast fraud to increase their profits. Just like the Enron accounting common early in the decade. Which also shows how guilty the Congress of this decade is. And that includes the Democrats who let it ride another two years so they could make a big show of "cleaning it up", even though they're still letting the riches ride to the same bankers (who also profited from Enron's accounting). As the French might say, we are all rubes now.
That Swedish formula sounds pretty sensible. In America, a congressmember (can't recall their name at the moment, but a Democrat, perhaps Barney Frank) proposed last month that any bonuses paid bank execs be paid only on a multiyear basis, and paid only in the bank's own stock, tying it to the longterm performance. Which would also require forcing holding the stock for a long time, like until retirement (or maybe 8-10 years, whichever is longer). Perhaps a combination, where the bonuses are paid into a "401k" investing in only the bank itself, for all employees, is the best value/protection for everyone.
So far, though, America's regulation of that nature is being discussed only for those banks taking the TARP government bailout money. It should be universal. Perhaps the new regulations that Barney Frank is writing now, for probably reintroduction perhaps this Summer, will govern all bank bonuses that way.
FWIW, the shareholders in these banks should of course be wiped out. They own nothing but epic debt, and ran their corps into the ground (violating "fiduciary responsibility" laws). The government should own these banks now, rehab them with capital and governance, then sell them off (with their shares of the debt they generated) to private owners once the industry is stabilized. And tax the entire banking industry what it cost to get their industry under control.
If there were a couple-few or more orgs competing to use my extra cycles, outbidding each other with money in my account buying my cycles, I might trust them to control those extra cycles. If they sold time on their distributed supercomputer, they'd have money to pay me.
As a variation, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google distribute its own computing load onto the browsers creating that load.
Though both models raise the question of how to protect that distributed computing from being attacked by someone hostile, poisoning the results to damage the central controller's value from it (or its core business).
Putting aside the ridiculous assumption that you have a right to the product of someone else's creative efforts by virtue of being born, people gotta eat, right?
Let's not put aside that notion.
As someone who was once born, I have a right to Shakespeare's "King Lear". I can't coerce someone into printing me a book with the play printed in it to take with no compensation. But if I buy that book, I can perform the play, recite it in public (for a fee, if anyone will pay me). I could even put my name on it and sell it to a magazine for publication, if that magazine would pay me. I have the right to quote as much as I want in my own different story. I can rewrite it in modern English, or slang. I can write my own story about a king driving themself mad that's exactly like "King Lear". My birthright as a person is to inherit my folk culture and use it as I please, without anyone retaining the right to stop me (short of some clear and present danger of violence or something like that).
Writers share that birthright, of course. Without it, they'd have no cultural context to write their own "original" works. I quote "original" because practically all works, especially the most popular, derive closely from previous works. Our culture assigns value to new work that refers to the old work embedded in the culture. Without the old work, and free use of it, practically none of the new work would be even recognizable as valuable at all.
Yes, people gotta eat. The protection of copyright for some "opportunity window" like the original Constitutional 14 years, within which your monopoly should protect the "promotion of science and the useful arts". Or, if you double your investment, or maybe tenfold (so artists living above the poverty line can live well on the profits while they produce another work), your monopoly expires earlier. But copyrights that preserve the monopoly for every work to protect the maximum profit forever, excluding the works from the culture, are not at all a good compromise with free expression of people for their own culture.
People gotta eat. But people also need our own folk culture. After "pop" becomes "folk" (fairly quickly, about a human generation later), most of the value in the work is being contributed by the people perpetuating it. Copyright has a long way (smaller) to go to properly reflect those essential values.
Many people speculate that Google's monopoly over all of out-of-copyright works will result in a brutal monopoly that will hurt both writers and readers, and that the 'Author's Guild' had no right to make the deal in the first place.
How does Google protect a monopoly on that content without copyright preventing competitors from copying it and distributing it?
I understand quite clearly how bonuses work, having worked directly with many bankers and other employees of banks/brokerages/insurers for years, automating their business models and workflows (upon which their bonuses depend). In fact I helped convert more than one large institution in one of those sectors into a complete "integrated financials" corp to compete with CitiGroup, whose formation defines the entire business model from deregulation to integrated financials to derivatives to bonuses, and everything else. Everyone working on these systems knew at the time that it was eliminating all the old "firewalls" and feedback controls that stopped exactly this kind of profitable interest conflict from destroying the economy after "World Depression I" forced reregulation.
I also know that the bonuses are primarily designed to pay everyone less all year, withholding some salary for the corp to use for operations and investment, paying it out at the end of the year if the employee survives. For most employees their "bonuses" are just a break-even to what their baseline should be, but they've been negotiated into staking on the corp's "generosity".
But I also know that the decisionmakers get by far most of the bonuses. And I know that their decisions the past 2-5-10 years have been extremely bad. That no "merit" attaches to what they're getting bonuses paid for. And that they got record sized bonuses anyway.
So don't hide those ripoff execs behind some "middle level" human shields. First we should rip back the bonuses paid to people whose "merit" is merely unprecedented demerit. And if indeed some of those "middle" people have to lose bonus money too, that's what happens when they deal with the devil and stake their income on the performance of a corp that's performing extremely badly. If I knew it when I was just a little IT guy, those people should have known it too, and either tried to do something at work to protect their bonuses, or left for somewhere not so bad.
Because I sure know they shouldn't be getting paid by me for damaging me.
However, selling multiple derivatives (like multiple CDSes) per each mortgage (or mortgage bundle, like the CDOs called MBSes) was not fraud. Each buyer knew that it was buying one of multiple bets on the same event. The law permitted the practice. And the "rubes" kept buying. Not fraud within the transaction. Any fraud was in the marketing of the overall risk as anything other than "inevitably catastrophic".
The "rubes" didn't even stop buying after the sellers stopped paying them off, or after the underlying mortgages were clearly unsupportable, or after the mortgages were no longer issued.
But as Americans (like other citizens of countries bailing out "their" banks) now see, we're the rubes, because all that bad business risk is collapsing on us, not on the bankers or their shareholders. That is offensive.
Yeah, "complex mathematical model". Tell it to the judge.
They did indeed use this model, and the work of many other PhD mathematicians, physicists, and other geniuses. But any of the bankers could have looked at this whole class of derivatives from mortgages and seen the basics that make the model a joke. They sold millions of mortgages and other loans to people using artificially low initial interest, to get people to take the loans, but which ballooned to rates they couldn't afford, so they'd have to default. Inevitably, a large percentage would certainly default. A losing bet overall for banks holding those loans. Meanwhile, each bad loan was "good" because the banks could sell many times the number of derivatives on it. Which was "good" because they got paid for the derivatives they sold, but was much more "bad" because the derivatives would cost the issuing bank many times more when it came due. The derivatives came due when the mortgages defaulted. Which was inevitable.
So whatever "gaussian copula" model they use to convince each other it was good, basic business sense would have insisted that the business was bad, horribly bad. These bankers don't get paid for discovering new math, they get paid for their years of experience and business sense. So they should have laughed this model out of the boardroom, even if they didn't understand why it was wrong. They should have known it was wrong, as the past few years proved beyond any doubt. But they embraced it instead, and centuries old banks like Lehman Brothers have gone down, taking us with them (and no end in sight).
Because ultimately, the model was a way to delay the costs of a business that paid some fat revenue up front. Since bankers are paid in huge bonuses for the initial year of revenue, and then leave before the bills come due, they got paid to make those bad deals, because they paid off up front, before costing many times more their benefit a few years later. By which time the bankers are gone with their early bonuses. Which have a lot more buying power when the economy collapses, and everyone else is holding merely the debt they created.
Nice work, if you can get it. Since they ruined the banking system and everything else, no one can get any work at all.
These people are holding the money. Their bonuses often equal the losses that destroy their bank. The government should take back that money to pay for fixing and repairing some of the mess they made. "Fiduciary responsibility" is a requirement of bank execs, and these violated that by the $TRILLIONS. Make them pay for what they did. That's a simple model anyone can understand. Not just a complex conjob to hide behind.
The current lowest price per PV watt is $3.89. Anything anywhere as cheap as $1:W would revolutionize the current photovoltaic solar industry, which is already just becoming a good priced alternative to getting power from the "city grid".
How energy efficient is the dis/charge cycle using this new process? And how dense an energy storage medium could such a battery be, say, compared to Li-Ion batteries (or to gasoline, the champ)?
If dis/charge is at all close to 90%+, and storing about 400Mj (the way a 16 gallon gas tank does at 20% internal combustion efficiency), in anything close to approximately 40 pounds for gas, then it's a replacement. Since the electricity powers lighter motors (electric instead of gas), and conserves nearly all the regenerative braking power, its capacity needs to be only less than 400Mj to compete, maybe 350Mj, or even less if we don't get the full range (about 600 miles in a gas hybrid), maybe 175Mj.
Since an (single use) aluminum battery can be up to about 4.75Mj:Kg, (gasoline * 20% = 9.33Mj:Kg), the aluminum is probably twice as heavy for gasoline's energy. But if we can accept half the range, it might be OK, if this tech lets it recharge efficiently.
Better battery tech is very exciting. Energy storage is probably the worst link in all the alternative energy systems we're now looking at. Even if it's not good for cars, if the material costs less than lead-acid batteries (like under $36:Kj), it's a major advantage for home/building power. Even if just storing power during non-peak times for local discharge during peak times.
Free "speech" is not limited to merely mouth sounds. Free "press" is equivalent, and not just a pressurized ink transfer to paper.
Copyright is an exception to those rights, created by the government on the rationalization that it's necessary to promote science and the useful arts, and for limited times. The overextended copyright constraints I described violate both provisions of the basis of the exception. Therefore, copyright is not a legitimate exception to those rights.
This concept is well known in the form of "Fair Use". Fair use is not merely a narrow exception to the copyright exception, it is the protection of all the rights not compromised by the copyright exception. When I install some SW that speaks to me some content I legally acquired, I am exercising my "Fair Use" rights.
I legally acquire some content, I have the right to do whatever I want with it for my personal consumption. I can use it to scare away crows, even if some "license" doesn't grant that "privilege".
Now, my rights do not force a manufacturer (or SW developer) to add features like a digital jack or an API, if the provider doesn't want to. But the copyright owner of the content does not have the right to stop that provider, if the provider wants to. And indeed the provider does not have the right to do additional work to close up an interface, just to deprive me of my right to use my content any way I want for myself.
Free expression is a right. Copyright is an exception, a deeply flawed compromise with our rights that is always in the wrong, even when it's tolerable and necessary. And even then, it is strictly limited solely to protect the minimum recouping of costs in producing content. Content that is otherwise profitable, even on a general basis (like per author, per series, per publisher, per genre, or per medium) should not enjoy profit subsidies from any copyright benefit. Because in that case, even the explicit basis for copyright limits on free expression does not apply, therefore copyright should not apply.
The info age that so threatens these copyright misers' excess profits is precisely what makes their base profits so reliable. The 1700s "realities" of commerce that made copyright the default, with exceptions to the exceptions allowing the fundamental free expression rights to survive, have totally changed in the 21st Century. According to the original Constitutional formula, "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" it's no longer necessary for everything to be copyrighted by default. Rather than vastly expand copyright extents and durations, the government's limited artificial monopolies should be cranked way down from the original formula. Copyright protections should be the exception, not the rule. Let content creators apply for copyright protection if they can prove they're especially threatened even in this golden age for content marketing. Let registered copyrights pay a tax on their revenues, with deductions for costs documented when first registering. After their revenue has doubled or tenfolded (as decided by Congress), or some limited time (like the original 14 years in which "pop" turns to "folk" in a generation) the copyright should expire, the Constitutional requirement for promotion for limited times having expired.
Let my Kindle play my content, and let me hack it if Amazon doesn't want to include a text speaker in the basic product. But don't replace my free speech with some inferior copyright privilege just because copyright misers are making less profit than they possibly could. That just encourages them.
WikiLeaks could run out of money before they get their next funding in September. They're asking for money to keep running their essential service in the meantime:
The Sunshine Press (Wikileaks) is in a dire financial position.
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The reason that impartial, revelatory investigative journalism has
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Despite being universally recognized as being the most important
stimulus of democratic reforms, government funding for
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On-line donations, an important buttress to our ability to take on
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Our $2M funding injection later this year will support a radical expansion
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CDS pricing is now a matter of Federal law, and will surely be evaluated with this software as the legal rules for enforcing pricing.
I hope this event marks a watershed in our progress towards making all truly formulaic and deterministic laws, or those portions of any laws, validated compilable software. The laws should specify the software's policies, against which claims of bugs should be argued. But the actual execution of the software should let anyone who wants anticipate how a court would rule that part of the law should be applied.
Too much lawyering and weasel words make too many badly written laws merely risks for the public. Even though the software will have bugs, the "bugs" in many current laws are much worse, and much harder to prove in any conclusive way.
So many people who can't imagine what I spelled out for them, which is nothing like "using your phone as your desktop". It's clearly an idea way ahead of its time.
No, it's well thought out, at least the basic scenario. What you're not thinking through well is your attachment to "using my computer" or "using my word processor", as opposed to just "communicating with my people", which is what we really want to do.
Your bike/motorcycle/moped comparison is a good start, though you don't think through the conclusion well. Because I am not asking for a moped - quite the contrary. I am asking to use my bike to get between my car and subway, because there's no good parking nearby. I'm not going to read the newspaper on the bike, but I want to bring it folded to where I left off in my carpool so I can start again on the subway. If it's my turn to drive, I want pick up my paper in my car as I pass my newsstand, glance at the sports page, instead of getting a new paper for each vehicle - even if they do cost only 25 cents each. I do want to keep listening to my iPod as I go through all three vehicles.
Just because you take your entire session state with you doesn't mean you'll use it everywhere it's accessible. But you don't want to keep closing and recreating that state every time you leave or approach a terminal that can handle what you want to do. And if you can access everything in your session on every device, you can decide whether you want to do it crimped on the little device, or talk to a PC, or whatever isn't quite optimal, rather than have no choice.
The actual implementation of that general use case is left as an exercise to the developers. Think of it in its simplest terms as simply "shared bookmarks" to every state metadata available to X in every app, plus the config and content data from each app, "bookmarked" on every device, kept in (at least close to) realtime sync. The details of the data and execution distribution to which stores and processors is of course also an exercise for developers on each HW platform (which is mostly solved in the existing apps per platform, according to that platform's capabilities). If we're carrying around a trusted device like our phone, there's no reason we can't carry around a universal state with it, however that state is stored and used. Which, as a minimal exercise layered over X (as is now evidently possible with an Android phone), seems an idea whose time has come.
Don't use it if you don't like it. I don't use a bike, but plenty of people do. If I were carrying that bike in my pocket every day anyway, I'd prefer to be able to take a folder of paper documents from work home to read on my couch instead of fedexing them back and forth. YMMV.
I agree that the HW will probably develop the way that you describe. In fact I've posted on Slashdot some brainstorms about a netbook running iPhone OS/SW.
But what I described is all SW. It's the kind of thing that could be developed right now, by a moderately capable X programmer. That's what's so exciting about true Android/Linux convergence by localhost interop. Such a system as I describe uses only the existing HW all around us (if you've got an Android, which many do). Rather than all the overhead and delay of a new HW platform. Though that would be worth waiting for. But why wait when we can get there in the meantime?
Slashdot Mirror
I get 1080p HD playback (and all the lower frame/bitrates, too) just fine using unsolo's spu-medialib mplayer -vo driver on my PS3, as I have for about a year now.
The mesa3d project is highly active, including this month, on their dev email list.
There seems to be quite a lot of interest in PS3 programming to both developers and to end users - like playing video (directly to an HDMI TV) on a $400 PS3 that would crush a PC costing 2-5x as much, that includes all that other stuff like Blu-Ray, Bluetooth, and lots of games (in GameOS mode).
You don't need a license to write, distribute or sell Linux programs or games running on PS3. You don't even need a license to sell any games for PS3 that are downloaded, just those distributed on physical disc.
If you buy a PS3 and produce and distribute/sell a downloaded program/game, you haven't agreed to anything with Sony (except that console unit's support warranty from Sony, which says nothing about your programming it except that it's allowed in the official "OtherOS" option).
You probably can't use the Sony or PS3 logo to market your program, out of trademark requirements. But you probably can say in text (or your own graphics) that it's "Sony PS3 compatible", because that is a fact. That makes it harder to market the program, but not impossible.
Of course you should ask a lawyer exactly what you need to do if you're going to launch a game, but the basic rights and obligations don't prohibit you AFAIK.
There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.
There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.
The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).
There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU. Why don't you put some of those people you say you're training to program the Cell onto those projects and give something back to the community that's given you the programmable platform?
Perhaps so. But the visual neural system is highly adaptable once formed, even if sight is lost later. So even if you're correct that the patient must have had healthy sight at about 1 year old, if they were any younger than this 70 year old patient, they might readapt better to the new device. And also perhaps if they'd been adapted to the blindness for less than this patient's 30 years.
I once worked for a big insurance corp that used one of its two IBM supercomputers to run Lotus Notes (Domino). As George Clinton says, "the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill".
I wonder how much better the eye would work on someone with a younger brain, that can recalibrate itself better to the new signals coming from the new eye.
Those stats are meaningless without a baseline comparison to how many foreigners used to come here to get educated, work and save some money, build a resume, then go to another country where their money and resume is worth even more in buying power than here.
This research looks like just another fake study designed to convince Congress and Americans to keep replacing American workers with foreigners who are subsidized to compete with Americans by living abroad at least part of the time where things are cheaper. They don't care about the worse labor conditions there because they don't work there (they work here), and they don't care about the environment because they haven't grown up expecting better.
Indeed the ratings agencies committed vast fraud to increase their profits. Just like the Enron accounting common early in the decade. Which also shows how guilty the Congress of this decade is. And that includes the Democrats who let it ride another two years so they could make a big show of "cleaning it up", even though they're still letting the riches ride to the same bankers (who also profited from Enron's accounting). As the French might say, we are all rubes now.
That Swedish formula sounds pretty sensible. In America, a congressmember (can't recall their name at the moment, but a Democrat, perhaps Barney Frank) proposed last month that any bonuses paid bank execs be paid only on a multiyear basis, and paid only in the bank's own stock, tying it to the longterm performance. Which would also require forcing holding the stock for a long time, like until retirement (or maybe 8-10 years, whichever is longer). Perhaps a combination, where the bonuses are paid into a "401k" investing in only the bank itself, for all employees, is the best value/protection for everyone.
So far, though, America's regulation of that nature is being discussed only for those banks taking the TARP government bailout money. It should be universal. Perhaps the new regulations that Barney Frank is writing now, for probably reintroduction perhaps this Summer, will govern all bank bonuses that way.
FWIW, the shareholders in these banks should of course be wiped out. They own nothing but epic debt, and ran their corps into the ground (violating "fiduciary responsibility" laws). The government should own these banks now, rehab them with capital and governance, then sell them off (with their shares of the debt they generated) to private owners once the industry is stabilized. And tax the entire banking industry what it cost to get their industry under control.
If there were a couple-few or more orgs competing to use my extra cycles, outbidding each other with money in my account buying my cycles, I might trust them to control those extra cycles. If they sold time on their distributed supercomputer, they'd have money to pay me.
As a variation, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google distribute its own computing load onto the browsers creating that load.
Though both models raise the question of how to protect that distributed computing from being attacked by someone hostile, poisoning the results to damage the central controller's value from it (or its core business).
Let's not put aside that notion.
As someone who was once born, I have a right to Shakespeare's "King Lear". I can't coerce someone into printing me a book with the play printed in it to take with no compensation. But if I buy that book, I can perform the play, recite it in public (for a fee, if anyone will pay me). I could even put my name on it and sell it to a magazine for publication, if that magazine would pay me. I have the right to quote as much as I want in my own different story. I can rewrite it in modern English, or slang. I can write my own story about a king driving themself mad that's exactly like "King Lear". My birthright as a person is to inherit my folk culture and use it as I please, without anyone retaining the right to stop me (short of some clear and present danger of violence or something like that).
Writers share that birthright, of course. Without it, they'd have no cultural context to write their own "original" works. I quote "original" because practically all works, especially the most popular, derive closely from previous works. Our culture assigns value to new work that refers to the old work embedded in the culture. Without the old work, and free use of it, practically none of the new work would be even recognizable as valuable at all.
Yes, people gotta eat. The protection of copyright for some "opportunity window" like the original Constitutional 14 years, within which your monopoly should protect the "promotion of science and the useful arts". Or, if you double your investment, or maybe tenfold (so artists living above the poverty line can live well on the profits while they produce another work), your monopoly expires earlier. But copyrights that preserve the monopoly for every work to protect the maximum profit forever, excluding the works from the culture, are not at all a good compromise with free expression of people for their own culture.
People gotta eat. But people also need our own folk culture. After "pop" becomes "folk" (fairly quickly, about a human generation later), most of the value in the work is being contributed by the people perpetuating it. Copyright has a long way (smaller) to go to properly reflect those essential values.
How does Google protect a monopoly on that content without copyright preventing competitors from copying it and distributing it?
I understand quite clearly how bonuses work, having worked directly with many bankers and other employees of banks/brokerages/insurers for years, automating their business models and workflows (upon which their bonuses depend). In fact I helped convert more than one large institution in one of those sectors into a complete "integrated financials" corp to compete with CitiGroup, whose formation defines the entire business model from deregulation to integrated financials to derivatives to bonuses, and everything else. Everyone working on these systems knew at the time that it was eliminating all the old "firewalls" and feedback controls that stopped exactly this kind of profitable interest conflict from destroying the economy after "World Depression I" forced reregulation.
I also know that the bonuses are primarily designed to pay everyone less all year, withholding some salary for the corp to use for operations and investment, paying it out at the end of the year if the employee survives. For most employees their "bonuses" are just a break-even to what their baseline should be, but they've been negotiated into staking on the corp's "generosity".
But I also know that the decisionmakers get by far most of the bonuses. And I know that their decisions the past 2-5-10 years have been extremely bad. That no "merit" attaches to what they're getting bonuses paid for. And that they got record sized bonuses anyway.
So don't hide those ripoff execs behind some "middle level" human shields. First we should rip back the bonuses paid to people whose "merit" is merely unprecedented demerit. And if indeed some of those "middle" people have to lose bonus money too, that's what happens when they deal with the devil and stake their income on the performance of a corp that's performing extremely badly. If I knew it when I was just a little IT guy, those people should have known it too, and either tried to do something at work to protect their bonuses, or left for somewhere not so bad.
Because I sure know they shouldn't be getting paid by me for damaging me.
No offense - it's "Ruby", not "rube".
However, selling multiple derivatives (like multiple CDSes) per each mortgage (or mortgage bundle, like the CDOs called MBSes) was not fraud. Each buyer knew that it was buying one of multiple bets on the same event. The law permitted the practice. And the "rubes" kept buying. Not fraud within the transaction. Any fraud was in the marketing of the overall risk as anything other than "inevitably catastrophic".
The "rubes" didn't even stop buying after the sellers stopped paying them off, or after the underlying mortgages were clearly unsupportable, or after the mortgages were no longer issued.
But as Americans (like other citizens of countries bailing out "their" banks) now see, we're the rubes, because all that bad business risk is collapsing on us, not on the bankers or their shareholders. That is offensive.
Yeah, "complex mathematical model". Tell it to the judge.
They did indeed use this model, and the work of many other PhD mathematicians, physicists, and other geniuses. But any of the bankers could have looked at this whole class of derivatives from mortgages and seen the basics that make the model a joke. They sold millions of mortgages and other loans to people using artificially low initial interest, to get people to take the loans, but which ballooned to rates they couldn't afford, so they'd have to default. Inevitably, a large percentage would certainly default. A losing bet overall for banks holding those loans. Meanwhile, each bad loan was "good" because the banks could sell many times the number of derivatives on it. Which was "good" because they got paid for the derivatives they sold, but was much more "bad" because the derivatives would cost the issuing bank many times more when it came due. The derivatives came due when the mortgages defaulted. Which was inevitable.
So whatever "gaussian copula" model they use to convince each other it was good, basic business sense would have insisted that the business was bad, horribly bad. These bankers don't get paid for discovering new math, they get paid for their years of experience and business sense. So they should have laughed this model out of the boardroom, even if they didn't understand why it was wrong. They should have known it was wrong, as the past few years proved beyond any doubt. But they embraced it instead, and centuries old banks like Lehman Brothers have gone down, taking us with them (and no end in sight).
Because ultimately, the model was a way to delay the costs of a business that paid some fat revenue up front. Since bankers are paid in huge bonuses for the initial year of revenue, and then leave before the bills come due , they got paid to make those bad deals, because they paid off up front, before costing many times more their benefit a few years later. By which time the bankers are gone with their early bonuses. Which have a lot more buying power when the economy collapses, and everyone else is holding merely the debt they created.
Nice work, if you can get it. Since they ruined the banking system and everything else, no one can get any work at all.
These people are holding the money. Their bonuses often equal the losses that destroy their bank. The government should take back that money to pay for fixing and repairing some of the mess they made. "Fiduciary responsibility" is a requirement of bank execs, and these violated that by the $TRILLIONS. Make them pay for what they did. That's a simple model anyone can understand. Not just a complex conjob to hide behind.
The current lowest price per PV watt is $3.89. Anything anywhere as cheap as $1:W would revolutionize the current photovoltaic solar industry, which is already just becoming a good priced alternative to getting power from the "city grid".
How energy efficient is the dis/charge cycle using this new process? And how dense an energy storage medium could such a battery be, say, compared to Li-Ion batteries (or to gasoline, the champ)?
If dis/charge is at all close to 90%+, and storing about 400Mj (the way a 16 gallon gas tank does at 20% internal combustion efficiency), in anything close to approximately 40 pounds for gas, then it's a replacement. Since the electricity powers lighter motors (electric instead of gas), and conserves nearly all the regenerative braking power, its capacity needs to be only less than 400Mj to compete, maybe 350Mj, or even less if we don't get the full range (about 600 miles in a gas hybrid), maybe 175Mj.
Since an (single use) aluminum battery can be up to about 4.75Mj:Kg, (gasoline * 20% = 9.33Mj:Kg), the aluminum is probably twice as heavy for gasoline's energy. But if we can accept half the range, it might be OK, if this tech lets it recharge efficiently.
Better battery tech is very exciting. Energy storage is probably the worst link in all the alternative energy systems we're now looking at. Even if it's not good for cars, if the material costs less than lead-acid batteries (like under $36:Kj), it's a major advantage for home/building power. Even if just storing power during non-peak times for local discharge during peak times.
Free "speech" is not limited to merely mouth sounds. Free "press" is equivalent, and not just a pressurized ink transfer to paper.
Copyright is an exception to those rights, created by the government on the rationalization that it's necessary to promote science and the useful arts, and for limited times. The overextended copyright constraints I described violate both provisions of the basis of the exception. Therefore, copyright is not a legitimate exception to those rights.
This concept is well known in the form of "Fair Use". Fair use is not merely a narrow exception to the copyright exception, it is the protection of all the rights not compromised by the copyright exception. When I install some SW that speaks to me some content I legally acquired, I am exercising my "Fair Use" rights.
I legally acquire some content, I have the right to do whatever I want with it for my personal consumption. I can use it to scare away crows, even if some "license" doesn't grant that "privilege".
Now, my rights do not force a manufacturer (or SW developer) to add features like a digital jack or an API, if the provider doesn't want to. But the copyright owner of the content does not have the right to stop that provider, if the provider wants to. And indeed the provider does not have the right to do additional work to close up an interface, just to deprive me of my right to use my content any way I want for myself.
Free expression is a right. Copyright is an exception, a deeply flawed compromise with our rights that is always in the wrong, even when it's tolerable and necessary. And even then, it is strictly limited solely to protect the minimum recouping of costs in producing content. Content that is otherwise profitable, even on a general basis (like per author, per series, per publisher, per genre, or per medium) should not enjoy profit subsidies from any copyright benefit. Because in that case, even the explicit basis for copyright limits on free expression does not apply, therefore copyright should not apply.
The info age that so threatens these copyright misers' excess profits is precisely what makes their base profits so reliable. The 1700s "realities" of commerce that made copyright the default, with exceptions to the exceptions allowing the fundamental free expression rights to survive, have totally changed in the 21st Century. According to the original Constitutional formula, "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" it's no longer necessary for everything to be copyrighted by default. Rather than vastly expand copyright extents and durations, the government's limited artificial monopolies should be cranked way down from the original formula. Copyright protections should be the exception, not the rule. Let content creators apply for copyright protection if they can prove they're especially threatened even in this golden age for content marketing. Let registered copyrights pay a tax on their revenues, with deductions for costs documented when first registering. After their revenue has doubled or tenfolded (as decided by Congress), or some limited time (like the original 14 years in which "pop" turns to "folk" in a generation) the copyright should expire, the Constitutional requirement for promotion for limited times having expired.
Let my Kindle play my content, and let me hack it if Amazon doesn't want to include a text speaker in the basic product. But don't replace my free speech with some inferior copyright privilege just because copyright misers are making less profit than they possibly could. That just encourages them.
WikiLeaks could run out of money before they get their next funding in September. They're asking for money to keep running their essential service in the meantime:
CDS pricing is now a matter of Federal law, and will surely be evaluated with this software as the legal rules for enforcing pricing.
I hope this event marks a watershed in our progress towards making all truly formulaic and deterministic laws, or those portions of any laws, validated compilable software. The laws should specify the software's policies, against which claims of bugs should be argued. But the actual execution of the software should let anyone who wants anticipate how a court would rule that part of the law should be applied.
Too much lawyering and weasel words make too many badly written laws merely risks for the public. Even though the software will have bugs, the "bugs" in many current laws are much worse, and much harder to prove in any conclusive way.
Yes, because in the 20th Century you had nothing.
So many people who can't imagine what I spelled out for them, which is nothing like "using your phone as your desktop". It's clearly an idea way ahead of its time.
No, it's well thought out, at least the basic scenario. What you're not thinking through well is your attachment to "using my computer" or "using my word processor", as opposed to just "communicating with my people", which is what we really want to do.
Your bike/motorcycle/moped comparison is a good start, though you don't think through the conclusion well. Because I am not asking for a moped - quite the contrary. I am asking to use my bike to get between my car and subway, because there's no good parking nearby. I'm not going to read the newspaper on the bike, but I want to bring it folded to where I left off in my carpool so I can start again on the subway. If it's my turn to drive, I want pick up my paper in my car as I pass my newsstand, glance at the sports page, instead of getting a new paper for each vehicle - even if they do cost only 25 cents each. I do want to keep listening to my iPod as I go through all three vehicles.
Just because you take your entire session state with you doesn't mean you'll use it everywhere it's accessible. But you don't want to keep closing and recreating that state every time you leave or approach a terminal that can handle what you want to do. And if you can access everything in your session on every device, you can decide whether you want to do it crimped on the little device, or talk to a PC, or whatever isn't quite optimal, rather than have no choice.
The actual implementation of that general use case is left as an exercise to the developers. Think of it in its simplest terms as simply "shared bookmarks" to every state metadata available to X in every app, plus the config and content data from each app, "bookmarked" on every device, kept in (at least close to) realtime sync. The details of the data and execution distribution to which stores and processors is of course also an exercise for developers on each HW platform (which is mostly solved in the existing apps per platform, according to that platform's capabilities). If we're carrying around a trusted device like our phone, there's no reason we can't carry around a universal state with it, however that state is stored and used. Which, as a minimal exercise layered over X (as is now evidently possible with an Android phone), seems an idea whose time has come.
Don't use it if you don't like it. I don't use a bike, but plenty of people do. If I were carrying that bike in my pocket every day anyway, I'd prefer to be able to take a folder of paper documents from work home to read on my couch instead of fedexing them back and forth. YMMV.
I agree that the HW will probably develop the way that you describe. In fact I've posted on Slashdot some brainstorms about a netbook running iPhone OS/SW.
But what I described is all SW. It's the kind of thing that could be developed right now, by a moderately capable X programmer. That's what's so exciting about true Android/Linux convergence by localhost interop. Such a system as I describe uses only the existing HW all around us (if you've got an Android, which many do). Rather than all the overhead and delay of a new HW platform. Though that would be worth waiting for. But why wait when we can get there in the meantime?