What's the net potential energy difference between the difference between the different spin states, if any? And what does the curve look like - is there a big hump between them, or a small hump relative to any energy difference? If it's a hump, is it a trough to flip the states back?
What's the cheapest (and maybe smallest, lowest powered) device that can flip the spin of electrons? Even if lots of electrons (coulombs) at once. Flip them up and down, singly or en masse (pun intended). I know they're different machines; I want to know abuot the cheapest machine I could get. If civilians can even get them.
Some astrophysicists say that some spinning cylindrical black holes warp spacetime enough that a projectile moving through its nearby region gets its velocity rotated to travel through time instead of a spatial axis. Is this new one the longest wormhole yet found?
Yes, of course there's no alternative to SUVs than horsedrawn carriages.
What are you, some kind of luddite?
Besides, when the streets are safe, quiet and clean again, diapered horses can be not only tidy, but a source for recycled biofuel. I'd love to see a few horsedrawn carriages mixing it up with the pedestrians and bikes among the trolley lines, between subway stations. Hi-tech victoriana is always charming.
Anti some capitalists is not "anticapitalist". Those of us capitalists who want capitalism to be sustainable so we can keep making profits are certainly not anticapitalist. It's the capitalists whose business destroys the relatively equitable capitalism in favor of corporate anarchy, feudalism, or worse, who are the anticapitalists. They're the looters.
The segue into reptiles and dinosaurs might have gone over your head, even though you know that fear comes from your reptile brain, and your oil comes from fossil feuls. Your "WTF" reaction comes from your fear that more is going on that threatens you. Which you've already started to admit, but cannot grasp, blocked by the knowledge available to you as well as it is to me, but which you repress to go about your own business in whatever is your way. When I dropped the image of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on you, you spat out an Anonymous Coward insult. Which is just bait for me to hit you again with the truth.
You're welcome. Even though you're an Anonymous asshole Coward. Even your kind of person needs to understand what we're doing to ourselves, if we want to change it. But you don't have to be such a dick about your own limited intelligence.
Does the family owe royalties for the government spies tapping their mobile phones they think are turned off while they sing to their kids?
The government needs to tax those extra royalties to pay for the hunt for Osama. The last place we'd expect to find him is at an Oz zoo singing Happy Birthday, so of course that's where we have to look. Last place after a VIP bar in Tahiti, but I'm applying for the grants to look there.
Stupid bitch, there are plenty of alternatives. Rail deliveries, or just restricting car/truck deliveries to 8PM-6AM. Do you think city centers were bare of products before 1900?
This version of carfree cities would be an interesting discussion, if you had tried entering it without showing off what a cunt you are. Why should I bother to educate your lost brain, when you're so obnoxious that you obviously will do nothing but whine and lie when faced with real alternatives?
Just because you're jerking off to Hummer visions doesn't mean the rest of us are trapped in the cage with you. Fucking obnoxious asshole - you probably like the exhaust. Have a deep breath for a few minutes as you think about me.
All these drastic actions that do more to mess with our environment are reckless. We barely understand that we don't really understand the complex feedback systems we've already upset. We have a much higher confidence that merely reducing our Greenhouse pollution will at least buy us time to learn what we can do to stay in the climatic "sweet spot" in which we've evolved our civilization.
Not to mention that producing all these extra artificial climate "enhancements" will produce a lot more pollution in their industrial processes. And use the existing political economics players, in manufacturing and energy, who have shoved us down the road to the Greenhouse with reckless abandon. They will screw up any complex/delicate procedure if it means more fast money, regardless of the worse consequences that they'll have to share (except the really old capitalists who'll die before their legacy is inherited).
Startling politicians, who understand Climate Change only as a buzzword tradeable on the open market, with visions of increasing pollution to fix the climate hazards that pollution has created is a terrible way to do business. It will just lock down their fear and greed. The reptile brains that survived the last climate change cataclysm, wrapped in mammal bodies. I don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, especially by voluntarily throwing myself to the Tyrannosaurus Rex who represents the fossil fuel industry.
What about just getting rid of those damn noisy, smelly dangerous cars that ruin life in city centers? That's guaranteed to be safer than either alternative in this article.
How about offering those corporate subsidies earlier, as free tuition grant prizes for highschool achievement in engineering prerequisites? That would lower American business costs, by investing in American people. Instead of just spreading around money later to the noisiest corporate whiners who demand cheap foreign labor? Who might not be as productive as Americans, but who can go back to their countries and live cheap part time, where they don't have the expenses of labor and environment protection.
I take a ripe 1" cherry tomato, insert a wooden toothpick into about the center, and put it on high for about 1-2min. The tomato launches the toothpick across the microwave.
So then I take 20 1" cherry tomatoes, insert toothpicks, arrange them in ranks facing each other at the range of the tested shots, and cook my favorite "tomatoes battle royale".
I'd love to see someone video that to YouTube, maybe with some other characters inserted into the battlefield. Like grapes injected with rubbing alcohol, which will boil and burst faster than the watery tomatoes shoot.
"Does too many things" is different from "too complicated to use". Until the Mac, computers were both. After the Mac, they've been accepted as at least sometimes simple enough to use, even though they do way more things than they ever did when they were "too complicated".
We need an iPhone ASAP. Did Xerox PARC demonstrate a mobile "phone" UI in the magic 1970s that Jobs somehow missed?
A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace.
Matter is denser energy. And energy is denser information.
NASA scientists estimate that 23% of matter is dark, and 73% of that dark matter is dark energy. Likewise, the majority of that dark energy is dark info.
Dark info is all that would have transpired in our universe once it ends/rebegins, minus what can already be known in this moment, including what won't have happened.
Another event dating to 5Bya is the origin of the Earth.
So the schneidics exploration of nemory is the key to knowing the universe, as it will be, and even as it won't have been.
No one can know what will work to help Africa, with its many, and now many ancient, basic problems.
What has G. Pascal Zachary actually done to help? He's been an academic/journalism/lecturer Africa expert watcher for a long time, but Africa is even worse in most ways than when he began his career. Where's the evidence that his opinions, part of the "help Africa" status quo, are any more likely to work than a new project that focuses on a quantum leap in empowering a new generation of Africans?
I'm not so sure the difference is entirely in the meta level of the content, though I do think that aspect is relevant, as I replied.
I meant what I said "literally" (pun appreciated;). But I think the difference is more in "the news" as "the stories we hear". I don't see any clear distinction between "facts" and "editorial" content in news media, especially the most popular; just a degree of editorial, and sometimes just a degree of covert editorial (and sometimes covert, fake, "facts"). Ultimately the news is just a more structured set of content with higher expectations of consistency, over time and among reporters of the same events, than any other content. It's not like science, which is practically machine-readable, and interesting only to a specialty class of people whom most normals shun.
That's why I expect people to migrate more to P2P journalism, because people prefer gossip to facts, especially when that gossip is corroborated by other circles of gossipers. The current news media has always worked that way, within its tech limits and our political expectations. Both of those are rapidly changing. And favoring each other, as our direct associates and their social networks have the power once too expensive for any but the richest, most centralized producers.
The "best" stories are those told us by people we feel we know best. That way lies the future of media.
You're giving the mass media too much credit for the journalism done by a very few. Even the newspapers are largely reprinting the AP and Reuters. When they're not, they're usually just getting their own rewritten version of those stories under their own writer's byline. Tim Krause' The Boys on the Bus documents "pack journalism", where stories are vetted by editors against the wire stories they all get, defining the "conventional wisdom", first in the newsroom, then in the public mind. TV news is even worse, and radio news is nothing but the audio version of a photocopy.
That culture has put news consumers into the position blogs find us today: mostly interested in the backstory, or the coverage of the story, or the coverup: all the meta angles. Or just discussing the story and its meta angles among ourselves, kicked off by the news publisher. As I said, the era of mass news publishing is drawing to a close, and the P2P age is just dawning. So of course most news consumption is still according to the mass patterns. And as I noted, the new generation is produced with the tools that are the old, so the old patterns are still perpetuated in the new format, at least for a while.
In fact, I don't even use an RSS newsreader myself, except for special research, and I'm Internet immersed (since 1981). They suck, compared to the editorial guidance of a news "paper" (including their websites). The consumer community hasn't interacted with the aggregators enough to evolve them into the background to reveal the news again. But after a few more years, they will. Especially as the P2P features of social networks make weighting and alerts seamless, always-on integration with the news and subjects that your associates are consuming. And featuring the coverage from your associates' mobile media devices ("vidcamphones"). Once monetized, even just enough in micropayments to balance costs on a mass-customization scale, RSS aggreggators will look like tabloids.
Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant to my point about acceptance. But I think that at least undermining the power of corporate mass media publishers to control the official truth conventional wisdom, frame the issues, and constrain the debates (and debaters) is more good than bad. If we eventually distrust most news as much as most people today distrust tabloids, we'll have evolved ourselves at least as much as we have our tech. And I'd like to think that our capacity to trust people who tell us stories about an objective world we share will favor editors and presenters who have both personality and accuracy. We'll see soon enough.
What a total misunderstanding of both blogs and mass media. The only reason any media outlets, however interactive, publish stories about each other is competition among them, and defense from such competition. Blogs publish stories only because they're interesting to the blogger. Bloggers aren't so much in competition with each other yet. And blogs' personalities aren't the main interest yet, compared to newspaper writers. So stories about those bloggers changing publishers is just "insider baseball", not even interesting enough for practically any blogger to cover.
Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.
The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.
The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.
The infomediary industry is already more rich and powerful than the old info ownership industry. Delivering, analyzing, associating, remixing/remastering is more lucrative and demanded than the original source material. Even the copyright industry is mostly infomediaries, who locked up rights to copy info from its producers, but who don't do most of the copying people want. They're basically just lawyers who bottleneck the growth of really popular, powerful, lucrative media communications.
So although the copyright industry has a lot of legal and biz momentum, they'll lose to the bigger forces. Both the biz interests, and the vast, complex array of global humans with new power to ignore the lawyers and share the content anyway. The more biz gets on that bandwagon, the more doomed is the copyright industry.
Except maybe in lucrative niches like licensing free pop content for specific promotional reuses, like ad jingles and movie soundtracks. Leaving the copyright weasels a good place like that to continue spawning without getting in the way of the popularity engine that keeps us all afloat will relieve the pressure, letting the new equilibrium favor sharing that makes the tiny controlled fraction even more profitable.
Will VHS be the last format to die and take its data with it? Digital formats like CD, DVD and WAV/MP3/AAC have physical media formats distinct from their data formats. Lossless copying (of even lossy data) means the data images can live forever, transferred from doomed physical media to new (doomed) physical media. Whether that media is some kind of disk, removable or fixed, or solid state, or eventually holographic, nanotech, psychic friends network, whatever.
Of course, every replacement of copyrighted content you've made has multiplied the revenue of the copyright licenser, and thereby multiplied manifold the profits (10% profit on the first copy, plus maybe 50-90% profit on each subsequent replacement). So copyright holders perpetuate their copyrights beyond any proportion to the necessary protected return on investment "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". Even prohibiting the clearly fair use of moving content you "own" to backup disks. Because they see the privilege of keeping you consuming your favorite content as their god-given right, rooted in a contract they signed with a producer once for a few weeks of work decades ago, while the consumers did most of the work keeping it popular after the initial blast of creation.
The god of dollar, the rights of an artificial government monopoly. Vs a global networked storage daemon. Who survives their armageddon?
This move by Microsoft was pretty obviously in the works when they announced their patent cross-licensing scheme with Novell. But the Novell deal isn't absolutely committed yet. And Microsoft, like other submarine patent strategists, usually waits awhile to announce their target, to fool more people into forgetting the way they set up the target, and fool more people into thinking the original transaction was executed for its intrinsic business merits.
So this whole campaign to screw Linux with patent attacks looks desperate. And since the Novell deal isn't absolutely committed, the strategy is in jeopardy, without its foundation properly laid. With IBM already whipping Novell's last created Frankenstein, SCO, into harmless foam after years in court, Microsoft's attempt looks less likely to succeed every few days. When will Oracle come out of the woods? Does RedHat have a patent arsenal to match its brand and budgets?
Because the "spectrum" is a lease the government offers to franchised operators from the public airwaves. That's the right of way. And spectrum licenses have an even more highly specified requirement for serving the public good than do landline rights of way.
However, to date the spectrum operators have operated as cartels to maximize profits without the risk of competition, arbitrarily restrict consumer choice, and subvert the public interest. Sure, their costs are high, but their profits are so high that they're carrying the telcos, despite the rest of the wireline business that's so cheap.
So not only are the usual monopoly protections important, but the government has extra leverage in the public good of the public airwaves and franchises. For the past 6-12 years, that's meant the mobile carriers were safer, under a monopoly-hungry FCC and Congress. Now that control has changed, back to the party that legislated the AT&T breakup and Internet development, the public's hand is probably strong enough to push changes. Considering the growth of a diversified economy in a unified voice/data network market, I'd say it's inevitable.
When the GSM and CDMA networks are opened as wholesale carriage with competition, like the long distance carriage and local origination/termination industries have been, then the playing field will finally be level. The beginning revolution in component telephone services integrated with familiar phones and contacts will finally include the mobile terminals ("phone") and all their advanced features, including the personal ones like presence. That will mean we'll have more choice over the features of our terminals, like we do with our PCs. And more control over our data.
The existing mobile network operators have consolidated, rather than competed. And kept locks on end-to-end control of their networks, services, data, terminals, subscribers. But multimode roaming 3G, like WiFi/CDMA, and mixes of Bluetooth and WiMAX, will finally open the mobile networks to too many competitors. Especially as the legislative climate long favoring media ownership monopolization tends to wane.
In the meantime we'll be stuck with the services, phones, prices and privacy the Sprint/Verizon/AT&T oligopoly wants us to have.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the net potential energy difference between the difference between the different spin states, if any? And what does the curve look like - is there a big hump between them, or a small hump relative to any energy difference? If it's a hump, is it a trough to flip the states back?
What's the cheapest (and maybe smallest, lowest powered) device that can flip the spin of electrons? Even if lots of electrons (coulombs) at once. Flip them up and down, singly or en masse (pun intended). I know they're different machines; I want to know abuot the cheapest machine I could get. If civilians can even get them.
Some astrophysicists say that some spinning cylindrical black holes warp spacetime enough that a projectile moving through its nearby region gets its velocity rotated to travel through time instead of a spatial axis. Is this new one the longest wormhole yet found?
Yes, of course there's no alternative to SUVs than horsedrawn carriages.
What are you, some kind of luddite?
Besides, when the streets are safe, quiet and clean again, diapered horses can be not only tidy, but a source for recycled biofuel. I'd love to see a few horsedrawn carriages mixing it up with the pedestrians and bikes among the trolley lines, between subway stations. Hi-tech victoriana is always charming.
Anti some capitalists is not "anticapitalist". Those of us capitalists who want capitalism to be sustainable so we can keep making profits are certainly not anticapitalist. It's the capitalists whose business destroys the relatively equitable capitalism in favor of corporate anarchy, feudalism, or worse, who are the anticapitalists. They're the looters.
The segue into reptiles and dinosaurs might have gone over your head, even though you know that fear comes from your reptile brain, and your oil comes from fossil feuls. Your "WTF" reaction comes from your fear that more is going on that threatens you. Which you've already started to admit, but cannot grasp, blocked by the knowledge available to you as well as it is to me, but which you repress to go about your own business in whatever is your way. When I dropped the image of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on you, you spat out an Anonymous Coward insult. Which is just bait for me to hit you again with the truth.
You're welcome. Even though you're an Anonymous asshole Coward. Even your kind of person needs to understand what we're doing to ourselves, if we want to change it. But you don't have to be such a dick about your own limited intelligence.
So pleasing how Anonymous twit Cowards will still insult me even when they agree with me. Keep up the foolish consistency, little hobgoblins!
Does the family owe royalties for the government spies tapping their mobile phones they think are turned off while they sing to their kids?
The government needs to tax those extra royalties to pay for the hunt for Osama. The last place we'd expect to find him is at an Oz zoo singing Happy Birthday, so of course that's where we have to look. Last place after a VIP bar in Tahiti, but I'm applying for the grants to look there.
Stupid bitch, there are plenty of alternatives. Rail deliveries, or just restricting car/truck deliveries to 8PM-6AM. Do you think city centers were bare of products before 1900?
This version of carfree cities would be an interesting discussion, if you had tried entering it without showing off what a cunt you are. Why should I bother to educate your lost brain, when you're so obnoxious that you obviously will do nothing but whine and lie when faced with real alternatives?
Just because you're jerking off to Hummer visions doesn't mean the rest of us are trapped in the cage with you. Fucking obnoxious asshole - you probably like the exhaust. Have a deep breath for a few minutes as you think about me.
All these drastic actions that do more to mess with our environment are reckless. We barely understand that we don't really understand the complex feedback systems we've already upset. We have a much higher confidence that merely reducing our Greenhouse pollution will at least buy us time to learn what we can do to stay in the climatic "sweet spot" in which we've evolved our civilization.
Not to mention that producing all these extra artificial climate "enhancements" will produce a lot more pollution in their industrial processes. And use the existing political economics players, in manufacturing and energy, who have shoved us down the road to the Greenhouse with reckless abandon. They will screw up any complex/delicate procedure if it means more fast money, regardless of the worse consequences that they'll have to share (except the really old capitalists who'll die before their legacy is inherited).
Startling politicians, who understand Climate Change only as a buzzword tradeable on the open market, with visions of increasing pollution to fix the climate hazards that pollution has created is a terrible way to do business. It will just lock down their fear and greed. The reptile brains that survived the last climate change cataclysm, wrapped in mammal bodies. I don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, especially by voluntarily throwing myself to the Tyrannosaurus Rex who represents the fossil fuel industry.
What about just getting rid of those damn noisy, smelly dangerous cars that ruin life in city centers? That's guaranteed to be safer than either alternative in this article.
How about offering those corporate subsidies earlier, as free tuition grant prizes for highschool achievement in engineering prerequisites? That would lower American business costs, by investing in American people. Instead of just spreading around money later to the noisiest corporate whiners who demand cheap foreign labor? Who might not be as productive as Americans, but who can go back to their countries and live cheap part time, where they don't have the expenses of labor and environment protection.
I'm too lazy to setup, video and submit it. But not lazy enough to give away this hilarious idea that I've already tested.
Thanks for the encouragement, but it'll probably take months before I have the time to spend a half-day having a blast with this little feature.
I take a ripe 1" cherry tomato, insert a wooden toothpick into about the center, and put it on high for about 1-2min. The tomato launches the toothpick across the microwave.
So then I take 20 1" cherry tomatoes, insert toothpicks, arrange them in ranks facing each other at the range of the tested shots, and cook my favorite "tomatoes battle royale".
I'd love to see someone video that to YouTube, maybe with some other characters inserted into the battlefield. Like grapes injected with rubbing alcohol, which will boil and burst faster than the watery tomatoes shoot.
"Does too many things" is different from "too complicated to use". Until the Mac, computers were both. After the Mac, they've been accepted as at least sometimes simple enough to use, even though they do way more things than they ever did when they were "too complicated".
We need an iPhone ASAP. Did Xerox PARC demonstrate a mobile "phone" UI in the magic 1970s that Jobs somehow missed?
Read the linked article. And do some of your own schneidics, instead of acting like a nerdy science bully.
Matter is denser energy. And energy is denser information.
NASA scientists estimate that 23% of matter is dark, and 73% of that dark matter is dark energy. Likewise, the majority of that dark energy is dark info.
Dark info is all that would have transpired in our universe once it ends/rebegins, minus what can already be known in this moment, including what won't have happened.
Another event dating to 5Bya is the origin of the Earth.
So the schneidics exploration of nemory is the key to knowing the universe, as it will be, and even as it won't have been.
No one can know what will work to help Africa, with its many, and now many ancient, basic problems.
What has G. Pascal Zachary actually done to help? He's been an academic/journalism/lecturer Africa expert watcher for a long time, but Africa is even worse in most ways than when he began his career. Where's the evidence that his opinions, part of the "help Africa" status quo, are any more likely to work than a new project that focuses on a quantum leap in empowering a new generation of Africans?
I'm not so sure the difference is entirely in the meta level of the content, though I do think that aspect is relevant, as I replied.
;). But I think the difference is more in "the news" as "the stories we hear". I don't see any clear distinction between "facts" and "editorial" content in news media, especially the most popular; just a degree of editorial, and sometimes just a degree of covert editorial (and sometimes covert, fake, "facts"). Ultimately the news is just a more structured set of content with higher expectations of consistency, over time and among reporters of the same events, than any other content. It's not like science, which is practically machine-readable, and interesting only to a specialty class of people whom most normals shun.
I meant what I said "literally" (pun appreciated
That's why I expect people to migrate more to P2P journalism, because people prefer gossip to facts, especially when that gossip is corroborated by other circles of gossipers. The current news media has always worked that way, within its tech limits and our political expectations. Both of those are rapidly changing. And favoring each other, as our direct associates and their social networks have the power once too expensive for any but the richest, most centralized producers.
The "best" stories are those told us by people we feel we know best. That way lies the future of media.
You're giving the mass media too much credit for the journalism done by a very few. Even the newspapers are largely reprinting the AP and Reuters. When they're not, they're usually just getting their own rewritten version of those stories under their own writer's byline. Tim Krause' The Boys on the Bus documents "pack journalism", where stories are vetted by editors against the wire stories they all get, defining the "conventional wisdom", first in the newsroom, then in the public mind. TV news is even worse, and radio news is nothing but the audio version of a photocopy.
That culture has put news consumers into the position blogs find us today: mostly interested in the backstory, or the coverage of the story, or the coverup: all the meta angles. Or just discussing the story and its meta angles among ourselves, kicked off by the news publisher. As I said, the era of mass news publishing is drawing to a close, and the P2P age is just dawning. So of course most news consumption is still according to the mass patterns. And as I noted, the new generation is produced with the tools that are the old, so the old patterns are still perpetuated in the new format, at least for a while.
In fact, I don't even use an RSS newsreader myself, except for special research, and I'm Internet immersed (since 1981). They suck, compared to the editorial guidance of a news "paper" (including their websites). The consumer community hasn't interacted with the aggregators enough to evolve them into the background to reveal the news again. But after a few more years, they will. Especially as the P2P features of social networks make weighting and alerts seamless, always-on integration with the news and subjects that your associates are consuming. And featuring the coverage from your associates' mobile media devices ("vidcamphones"). Once monetized, even just enough in micropayments to balance costs on a mass-customization scale, RSS aggreggators will look like tabloids.
Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant to my point about acceptance. But I think that at least undermining the power of corporate mass media publishers to control the official truth conventional wisdom, frame the issues, and constrain the debates (and debaters) is more good than bad. If we eventually distrust most news as much as most people today distrust tabloids, we'll have evolved ourselves at least as much as we have our tech. And I'd like to think that our capacity to trust people who tell us stories about an objective world we share will favor editors and presenters who have both personality and accuracy. We'll see soon enough.
What a total misunderstanding of both blogs and mass media. The only reason any media outlets, however interactive, publish stories about each other is competition among them, and defense from such competition. Blogs publish stories only because they're interesting to the blogger. Bloggers aren't so much in competition with each other yet. And blogs' personalities aren't the main interest yet, compared to newspaper writers. So stories about those bloggers changing publishers is just "insider baseball", not even interesting enough for practically any blogger to cover.
Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.
The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.
The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.
The infomediary industry is already more rich and powerful than the old info ownership industry. Delivering, analyzing, associating, remixing/remastering is more lucrative and demanded than the original source material. Even the copyright industry is mostly infomediaries, who locked up rights to copy info from its producers, but who don't do most of the copying people want. They're basically just lawyers who bottleneck the growth of really popular, powerful, lucrative media communications.
So although the copyright industry has a lot of legal and biz momentum, they'll lose to the bigger forces. Both the biz interests, and the vast, complex array of global humans with new power to ignore the lawyers and share the content anyway. The more biz gets on that bandwagon, the more doomed is the copyright industry.
Except maybe in lucrative niches like licensing free pop content for specific promotional reuses, like ad jingles and movie soundtracks. Leaving the copyright weasels a good place like that to continue spawning without getting in the way of the popularity engine that keeps us all afloat will relieve the pressure, letting the new equilibrium favor sharing that makes the tiny controlled fraction even more profitable.
Will VHS be the last format to die and take its data with it? Digital formats like CD, DVD and WAV/MP3/AAC have physical media formats distinct from their data formats. Lossless copying (of even lossy data) means the data images can live forever, transferred from doomed physical media to new (doomed) physical media. Whether that media is some kind of disk, removable or fixed, or solid state, or eventually holographic, nanotech, psychic friends network, whatever.
Of course, every replacement of copyrighted content you've made has multiplied the revenue of the copyright licenser, and thereby multiplied manifold the profits (10% profit on the first copy, plus maybe 50-90% profit on each subsequent replacement). So copyright holders perpetuate their copyrights beyond any proportion to the necessary protected return on investment "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". Even prohibiting the clearly fair use of moving content you "own" to backup disks. Because they see the privilege of keeping you consuming your favorite content as their god-given right, rooted in a contract they signed with a producer once for a few weeks of work decades ago, while the consumers did most of the work keeping it popular after the initial blast of creation.
The god of dollar, the rights of an artificial government monopoly. Vs a global networked storage daemon. Who survives their armageddon?
This move by Microsoft was pretty obviously in the works when they announced their patent cross-licensing scheme with Novell. But the Novell deal isn't absolutely committed yet. And Microsoft, like other submarine patent strategists, usually waits awhile to announce their target, to fool more people into forgetting the way they set up the target, and fool more people into thinking the original transaction was executed for its intrinsic business merits.
So this whole campaign to screw Linux with patent attacks looks desperate. And since the Novell deal isn't absolutely committed, the strategy is in jeopardy, without its foundation properly laid. With IBM already whipping Novell's last created Frankenstein, SCO, into harmless foam after years in court, Microsoft's attempt looks less likely to succeed every few days. When will Oracle come out of the woods? Does RedHat have a patent arsenal to match its brand and budgets?
Because the "spectrum" is a lease the government offers to franchised operators from the public airwaves. That's the right of way. And spectrum licenses have an even more highly specified requirement for serving the public good than do landline rights of way.
However, to date the spectrum operators have operated as cartels to maximize profits without the risk of competition, arbitrarily restrict consumer choice, and subvert the public interest. Sure, their costs are high, but their profits are so high that they're carrying the telcos, despite the rest of the wireline business that's so cheap.
So not only are the usual monopoly protections important, but the government has extra leverage in the public good of the public airwaves and franchises. For the past 6-12 years, that's meant the mobile carriers were safer, under a monopoly-hungry FCC and Congress. Now that control has changed, back to the party that legislated the AT&T breakup and Internet development, the public's hand is probably strong enough to push changes. Considering the growth of a diversified economy in a unified voice/data network market, I'd say it's inevitable.
When the GSM and CDMA networks are opened as wholesale carriage with competition, like the long distance carriage and local origination/termination industries have been, then the playing field will finally be level. The beginning revolution in component telephone services integrated with familiar phones and contacts will finally include the mobile terminals ("phone") and all their advanced features, including the personal ones like presence. That will mean we'll have more choice over the features of our terminals, like we do with our PCs. And more control over our data.
The existing mobile network operators have consolidated, rather than competed. And kept locks on end-to-end control of their networks, services, data, terminals, subscribers. But multimode roaming 3G, like WiFi/CDMA, and mixes of Bluetooth and WiMAX, will finally open the mobile networks to too many competitors. Especially as the legislative climate long favoring media ownership monopolization tends to wane.
In the meantime we'll be stuck with the services, phones, prices and privacy the Sprint/Verizon/AT&T oligopoly wants us to have.