Not e-books, is the issue. If Xerox, EInk and IBM have their way, maybe publishing companies *will* go out of business, because 'paper' presses will no longer be necessary, in the traditional sense.
It's not that we'll stop using paper, with e-paper, it's that paper will be upgraded to all the advantages of electronic displays.
The article sums it up pretty clearly when describing e-paper to paper as paper was to vellum.
The whole idea of good older technology being blown away by newer technology is what happened with vellum and parchment, with stone and clay tablets. Not because the newer, more sophisticated was more expensive (they weren't) but because they were cheaper and more flexible.
E-paper *should* approach the cost of paper printing, if it uses the same print techniques (you do know, for example, we can use inkjet technologies to fabricate printed circuit boards?)
So when we can 'print' 'e-paper' from our printers using organic circuit technology, paper will be 'unnecessary' in the same way vellum, parchment, clay tablets, and stone tablets are unnecessary.
Of course the optimist in me says "Sure, I'll pay your 'publishing' 'licensing' fee", except that since they don't have a physical medium to control, IE paper and books, I don't see that they will be able to corner the market in the same way.
All it takes is someone to create an 'unrestricted' book, much like region free dvd players.
That's an implementation specific issue and not a technical issue.
If an e-paperback is designed properly/sensibly, publishers won't be able to take away content you paid for.
The e-paperback has more features than regular paper, which makes it attractive in it's own light, such as updateability, note/data backup and transmission, the ability to 'share' texts among multiple books, and the ability to store multiple books in one e-paperback.
Content restriction and control is a design issue, and not inherently part of the definition of what an e-paperback is, excepting the fact that publishers may be attracted or repelled to the idea due to device capabilities.
The analogy the article suggests is that e-paper is to paper what paper was to vellum.
It should have all the same properties of read when and where you like (why would e-paperbacks restrict you?), read in any order you like, quote from it like a real book, sell it to someone else, or lend to someone else.
Most of those things are *implementation* specific, and not technological specific. E-paper should look and behave just like regular paper. The content restriction properties is a very different issue entirely, and is as such a very valid concern.
If an e-book is designed with e-paper, if power goes out, it should act just like a regular book. Given the right tool, you should be able to mark it up just like a regular book. A little more complex than a pen or pencil, yes, but pens and pencils are themselves special tools specifically for paper. If content management is done correctly, the e-book is no different than a regular book.
The advantages of e-paperbacks is regular updates, being able to transmit notes and annotations between other e-paperbacks, being able to back up and translate your notes, being able to browse and search and query, being able to 'change' the content without changing the physical book itself.
So they want to be able to run their scans and not look like attacks...
Conceivably, isn't that *also* the same goal any well educated cracker/hacker has? Not that I know, since I am neither, but being able to observe without arousing suspicion is pretty important, isn't it?
In which case, wouldn't the goal of security experts be to be better able to discriminate between a dangerous scan and a harmless inquery? So unless Quova has a clearly nondangerous fingerprint, won't they always be triggering alarms as hacks/cracks start using similar techniques?
As far as I know, mutation is not the method to avoid local minima. 'Diversity', to borrow an analogous biological description, is used to prevent local minima. If you have a gene space that accurately samples the entire space, and an algorithm that doesn't kill variation too fast, you will find several local minima, statistically, without being trapped within any of them.
On the assumption that the light emitted is mostly the product of, say, stars. Hydrogen and helium have (I think) pretty well mapped out spectra. You can red and blue shift all you like, but the spectra looks the same, if a bit shifted in either direction.
So you can use those two elements as landmarks to determine the sugar molecules.
The electrons jump up and down levels on, say, copper, absorbing and emitting photons.
However, the bonds between two carbon atoms are nothing more than electrons sharing the space between the two; they can *also* rearrange themselves in the energy configuration, and absorb and emit energies as well, but in different manners.
So they detected the emission of radio frequencies when the sugar molecule rearranged itself. As it absorbed energy from space, it enters into higher energy states. When it 'emits' energy, it enters into a lower energy state. Statistically then, the combination of the energy spectra forms a pattern fairly unique to the sugar.
Social selection has been at work on ants, bees, wolves, etc; anything with a social structure where the existence of the structure aids or hurts the survival of the species.
Look at *sterile* ants, bees, and insects, yet they very much reproduce, evolve, and survive.
Look at pack/pod/social creatures where some never get to mate, while others get all the eggs. They survive, reproduce, evolve, mate, etc.
We are no different.
We have not outsmarted evolution. By it's definition of 'survival of the fittest', anything, social, genetic, or otherwise, that enhance reproduction, survival, and mating, is encouraged, while anything that reduces the three is discouraged.
Culture can both help and hurt; religions that want people to breed like rabits work in one way. Culture that value quality of living(and less children) push it the other way. Culture that encourage diversity, growth, and success help us, where culture that suppresses it hurt us.
There are socio-genetic cultural forces that enact evolutionary forces on us. AIDs, birth rates, quality of living, hormones in our food, contaminated environments, diabetes, drugs, etc.
So to say that 'another form of evolution is at work' now is misleading, because this force has been here from the dawn of time.
We're just smart enough to minimize the 'natural' process of the more brute force eat/die/mate/breed selection, while encouraging the other more secondary terms instead
Really bright light source with a know chemical composition(stars being mostly hydrogen and helium count) emit light and energy.
A sugar is composed of bonds between carbons, oxygens, hydrogens, etc.
The bond between two atoms is a like a spring; it can store energy, or it can release energy. In a laser, you structure it to release energy of certain wavelengths. In this case, the bond will absorb these certain wavelengths out of the light put out by the star.
So if 15 different wavelengths are subtracted out from the spectra at certain intensities, we can create an image from this light.
If we take a light source of the same composition(in the lab or something) and place, say, a sugar laden gas in front of it, and get *the same* spectra, we can conclude with *some* certainty that sugar exists in the first case too. Sorta vague only because you are identifying by shadows... but it is an accepted method of identifying chemical composition
It is a good thing to be sceptical, as long as you aren't also stubborn ^^
Spectral analysis of the cloud and doing a statistical match; if the cloud absorbs several frequencies in the right proportions as a sugar, there is a good chance(not absolute) that there exists a sugar. But this doesn't rule out that there is something there *other* than sugar, just that there are things that have the same bond energies and structure as a sugar...
I will name some factors that influence our birth rate, our propogation, and our survival. By those very factors then the human race is evolving because they are selecting survivors.
AIDS is going to change the landscape of very many countries over the next 2 generations.
Affluence and technology seems to very effectively strangle the population growth of a country, again effecting birth rate and growth rate.
Religions and beliefs the encourage large families affect the growth and birth rate as well, and these will also effect human evolution.
Affluence and technology also seems to retard the age of conception, and this will change the way in which humans select, reproduce, and care for our young.
So no, there are still evolutionary forces in action, even if we try our best to get rid of them!
We are not 'dirtying' our gene pool with people who have disabilities! The very definition of evolution is such that, if we frame a disability as a trait, that in certain environmental circumstances a trait is a disadvantage, useless, or an advantage. So that means that if we start throwing things out of our gene pool, we lose evolutionary power because we won't be able to match those genes to future cases because they happened to fail on past cases.
In this case, a disabled person can have *perfectly* healthy/good genes and an unfortunate environmental circumstance. Like mothers who take drugs during pregnancy. Or we have extreme cases, like Steven Hawkings, where a disability is paired with a bonus.
Evolution is still alive and well! As long as there are factors that control our birth rate and survival rate, evolution is at work!
...What I don't like about my Palm V is the lack of color, lack of memory, lack of CPU, lack of small removable storage. And better sound capability. I want to be able to toss out my portable MP3 player and just swap memory sticks in and out of my PDA with a good set of earphones. And to be able to plug in a small game controller and play stuff on it as well. There goes the Gameboy. Heck, even small movies on that screen if the removable storage has the space...
Ick. You almost perfectly described a WinCE/PocketPC device. So why haven't you bought one yet, then?
Ick is a relative term. I sorta want one too... but I'd have to find or write a program to throttle down the CPU and power down the screen, I think, when it's playing MP3s. It'd be nice to be able to play music for 10 hours, even if you're doing nothing else with it!
-AS
Questions about DeCSS
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
Wouldn't it be perfectly legal for, say, a no-name electronics manufacturer to reverse engineer a hardware DVD player in order to create a compatible DVD player to sell to the market?
Would it be just as legal then for the same electronics manufacturer to reverse engineer a Windows DVD player, and then apply that to hardware, to create a DVD player to sell to the market?
Then wouldn't it be just as legal for them to just package a PC with a software DVD player, crafted from their efforts of reverse engineering, to sell to the market as a DVD player?
Besides the difference of selling a player to the market, how does anyone see DeCSS as any different, other than the ability and desire to spread the information on the market via the Internet?
From a technical standpoint, MacOS is all but dead. The only remnant is the compatibility layer, Blue Box or whatever it's called, to allow the older Mac software to run under MacOS X.
The UI has changed; refined, reworked, upgraded, facelifted, whatever. It's not the MacOS anymore, any more or less than Windows98 is MacOS
The OS/kernal/core/system itself is different. Mach Kernel with BSD atop that, with NeXTisms atop that. Nothing in common with the traditional MacOS.
So the analogy with M$ is Apple is getting rid of MacOS to make MacOS X in the same way that M$ got rid of Windows9x to make WindowsNT or WindowsCE. There are compatibility layers for both, but it's underlying OS is non compatibile and unsimilar.
So I'm a little peeved. It has an ethernet port! I want a FireWire port, dammit!
I mean, I have a perfectly good video device, another Sony product, the TRV103, digital 8 FireWire/iLink capable digital camcorder... but if I want to record audio, the best I can do is keep the lens on and record for about an hour straight. Is there no solution for people looking for a digital audio recorder device? DAT, miniDisc, whatever? I'm not sure where to look, but mostly what I've found are FireWire tape backup devices...
Sigh, this is off topic, of course, but it seems the best place, of any, to find other link minded individuals. Anyone able to help?
A lot of people through out the idea of micropayments: Per minute or per song...
This isn't a bad idea, I guess. I was thinking there should be more, though, because you're paying for the distribution mechanism. What's stopping people from reposting the song back onto Napster or Gnutella once they pay for a copy? Perhaps the songs that Metallica releases should have a 'digital fingerprint', and go after Napster/Gnutella legally/technologically?
I would think membership and fan clubs, and as other people have pointed out, access to merchandise, t-shirts, concerts, etc, after showing proof of ownership, or by being a member.
Dunno, I think that's as many good ideas as I've seen today
Given his own admission. His pulling out of lawyers is not an admission of not caring, just of his reliance on the standard system, instead of trying to change the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Not e-books, is the issue. If Xerox, EInk and IBM have their way, maybe publishing companies *will* go out of business, because 'paper' presses will no longer be necessary, in the traditional sense.
It's not that we'll stop using paper, with e-paper, it's that paper will be upgraded to all the advantages of electronic displays.
The article sums it up pretty clearly when describing e-paper to paper as paper was to vellum.
The whole idea of good older technology being blown away by newer technology is what happened with vellum and parchment, with stone and clay tablets. Not because the newer, more sophisticated was more expensive (they weren't) but because they were cheaper and more flexible.
E-paper *should* approach the cost of paper printing, if it uses the same print techniques (you do know, for example, we can use inkjet technologies to fabricate printed circuit boards?)
So when we can 'print' 'e-paper' from our printers using organic circuit technology, paper will be 'unnecessary' in the same way vellum, parchment, clay tablets, and stone tablets are unnecessary.
-AS
Of course the optimist in me says "Sure, I'll pay your 'publishing' 'licensing' fee", except that since they don't have a physical medium to control, IE paper and books, I don't see that they will be able to corner the market in the same way.
All it takes is someone to create an 'unrestricted' book, much like region free dvd players.
-AS
E-paper will take away none of this functionality.
In fact, in a properly designed e-book, you should be able to 'email' a book to someone.
'Hey, I think you'll enjoy this. Let me upload it to you!'
Of course, this also depends on the content restriction technologies some people are so keen on.
-AS
That's an implementation specific issue and not a technical issue.
If an e-paperback is designed properly/sensibly, publishers won't be able to take away content you paid for.
The e-paperback has more features than regular paper, which makes it attractive in it's own light, such as updateability, note/data backup and transmission, the ability to 'share' texts among multiple books, and the ability to store multiple books in one e-paperback.
Content restriction and control is a design issue, and not inherently part of the definition of what an e-paperback is, excepting the fact that publishers may be attracted or repelled to the idea due to device capabilities.
-AS
I think you're missing the point of e-paper.
The analogy the article suggests is that e-paper is to paper what paper was to vellum.
It should have all the same properties of read when and where you like (why would e-paperbacks restrict you?), read in any order you like, quote from it like a real book, sell it to someone else, or lend to someone else.
Most of those things are *implementation* specific, and not technological specific. E-paper should look and behave just like regular paper. The content restriction properties is a very different issue entirely, and is as such a very valid concern.
If an e-book is designed with e-paper, if power goes out, it should act just like a regular book. Given the right tool, you should be able to mark it up just like a regular book. A little more complex than a pen or pencil, yes, but pens and pencils are themselves special tools specifically for paper. If content management is done correctly, the e-book is no different than a regular book.
The advantages of e-paperbacks is regular updates, being able to transmit notes and annotations between other e-paperbacks, being able to back up and translate your notes, being able to browse and search and query, being able to 'change' the content without changing the physical book itself.
-AS
I just realized how cool the new mouse is.
Not necessarily how useful, just how cool. Absolutely no moving parts. Nothing at all. No buttons, no triggers, no ball.
Wow
-AS
Younger:
Kiki's Delivery Service (1 episode, vhs)
My Friend Totoro (1 episode, vhs)
Pokemon (tv)
Drama:
Macross Plus (4 episodes, 2dvds)
Grave of the Fireflies (1 episode, vhs)
Serial Experiments Lain (14 episodes, 4dvds)
Action:
Ghost in the Shell (1 episode, vhs)
Bubblegum Crisis (8 episodes, 3dvds, tape)
Akira (1 episode, vhs)
Random Highly Recommended:
If you can find these...
Escaflowne (7 vhs)
El Hazard (5 vhs)
Evangelion (26 episodes, 13vhs)
-AS
At that rate, buy a Gameboy of each color: 7*70 = $490!
Or just buy 2 Gameboy colors, the printer, a handful of multiplayer games, and 2 batterypacks, and you are *still* ahead of the game.
Sigh
-AS
So they want to be able to run their scans and not look like attacks...
Conceivably, isn't that *also* the same goal any well educated cracker/hacker has? Not that I know, since I am neither, but being able to observe without arousing suspicion is pretty important, isn't it?
In which case, wouldn't the goal of security experts be to be better able to discriminate between a dangerous scan and a harmless inquery? So unless Quova has a clearly nondangerous fingerprint, won't they always be triggering alarms as hacks/cracks start using similar techniques?
-AS
As far as I know, mutation is not the method to avoid local minima. 'Diversity', to borrow an analogous biological description, is used to prevent local minima. If you have a gene space that accurately samples the entire space, and an algorithm that doesn't kill variation too fast, you will find several local minima, statistically, without being trapped within any of them.
-AS
On the assumption that the light emitted is mostly the product of, say, stars. Hydrogen and helium have (I think) pretty well mapped out spectra. You can red and blue shift all you like, but the spectra looks the same, if a bit shifted in either direction.
So you can use those two elements as landmarks to determine the sugar molecules.
-AS
It's still spectral analysis.
The electrons jump up and down levels on, say, copper, absorbing and emitting photons.
However, the bonds between two carbon atoms are nothing more than electrons sharing the space between the two; they can *also* rearrange themselves in the energy configuration, and absorb and emit energies as well, but in different manners.
So they detected the emission of radio frequencies when the sugar molecule rearranged itself. As it absorbed energy from space, it enters into higher energy states. When it 'emits' energy, it enters into a lower energy state. Statistically then, the combination of the energy spectra forms a pattern fairly unique to the sugar.
-AS
Social selection has been at work on ants, bees, wolves, etc; anything with a social structure where the existence of the structure aids or hurts the survival of the species.
Look at *sterile* ants, bees, and insects, yet they very much reproduce, evolve, and survive.
Look at pack/pod/social creatures where some never get to mate, while others get all the eggs. They survive, reproduce, evolve, mate, etc.
We are no different.
We have not outsmarted evolution. By it's definition of 'survival of the fittest', anything, social, genetic, or otherwise, that enhance reproduction, survival, and mating, is encouraged, while anything that reduces the three is discouraged.
Culture can both help and hurt; religions that want people to breed like rabits work in one way. Culture that value quality of living(and less children) push it the other way. Culture that encourage diversity, growth, and success help us, where culture that suppresses it hurt us.
There are socio-genetic cultural forces that enact evolutionary forces on us. AIDs, birth rates, quality of living, hormones in our food, contaminated environments, diabetes, drugs, etc.
So to say that 'another form of evolution is at work' now is misleading, because this force has been here from the dawn of time.
We're just smart enough to minimize the 'natural' process of the more brute force eat/die/mate/breed selection, while encouraging the other more secondary terms instead
-AS
So essentially it works like this:
Really bright light source with a know chemical composition(stars being mostly hydrogen and helium count) emit light and energy.
A sugar is composed of bonds between carbons, oxygens, hydrogens, etc.
The bond between two atoms is a like a spring; it can store energy, or it can release energy. In a laser, you structure it to release energy of certain wavelengths. In this case, the bond will absorb these certain wavelengths out of the light put out by the star.
So if 15 different wavelengths are subtracted out from the spectra at certain intensities, we can create an image from this light.
If we take a light source of the same composition(in the lab or something) and place, say, a sugar laden gas in front of it, and get *the same* spectra, we can conclude with *some* certainty that sugar exists in the first case too. Sorta vague only because you are identifying by shadows... but it is an accepted method of identifying chemical composition
-AS
It is a good thing to be sceptical, as long as you aren't also stubborn ^^
Spectral analysis of the cloud and doing a statistical match; if the cloud absorbs several frequencies in the right proportions as a sugar, there is a good chance(not absolute) that there exists a sugar. But this doesn't rule out that there is something there *other* than sugar, just that there are things that have the same bond energies and structure as a sugar...
-AS
I will name some factors that influence our birth rate, our propogation, and our survival. By those very factors then the human race is evolving because they are selecting survivors.
AIDS is going to change the landscape of very many countries over the next 2 generations.
Affluence and technology seems to very effectively strangle the population growth of a country, again effecting birth rate and growth rate.
Religions and beliefs the encourage large families affect the growth and birth rate as well, and these will also effect human evolution.
Affluence and technology also seems to retard the age of conception, and this will change the way in which humans select, reproduce, and care for our young.
So no, there are still evolutionary forces in action, even if we try our best to get rid of them!
-AS
We are not 'dirtying' our gene pool with people who have disabilities! The very definition of evolution is such that, if we frame a disability as a trait, that in certain environmental circumstances a trait is a disadvantage, useless, or an advantage. So that means that if we start throwing things out of our gene pool, we lose evolutionary power because we won't be able to match those genes to future cases because they happened to fail on past cases.
In this case, a disabled person can have *perfectly* healthy/good genes and an unfortunate environmental circumstance. Like mothers who take drugs during pregnancy. Or we have extreme cases, like Steven Hawkings, where a disability is paired with a bonus.
Evolution is still alive and well! As long as there are factors that control our birth rate and survival rate, evolution is at work!
-AS
Bad AC! Shame! Shame!
What a waste of bandwidth, resources, and oxygen.
-AS
...What I don't like about my Palm V is the lack of color, lack of memory, lack of CPU, lack of small removable storage. And better sound capability. I want to be able to toss out my portable MP3 player and just swap memory sticks in and out of my PDA with a good set of earphones. And to be able to plug in a small game controller and play stuff on it as well. There goes the Gameboy. Heck, even small movies on that screen if the removable storage has the space...
Ick. You almost perfectly described a WinCE/PocketPC device. So why haven't you bought one yet, then?
Ick is a relative term. I sorta want one too... but I'd have to find or write a program to throttle down the CPU and power down the screen, I think, when it's playing MP3s. It'd be nice to be able to play music for 10 hours, even if you're doing nothing else with it!
-AS
Wouldn't it be perfectly legal for, say, a no-name electronics manufacturer to reverse engineer a hardware DVD player in order to create a compatible DVD player to sell to the market?
Would it be just as legal then for the same electronics manufacturer to reverse engineer a Windows DVD player, and then apply that to hardware, to create a DVD player to sell to the market?
Then wouldn't it be just as legal for them to just package a PC with a software DVD player, crafted from their efforts of reverse engineering, to sell to the market as a DVD player?
Besides the difference of selling a player to the market, how does anyone see DeCSS as any different, other than the ability and desire to spread the information on the market via the Internet?
-AS
So(prolly cuz I'm browsing high level and all ^^) I'm not seeing any comments on what would make DoomIII rock...
Lots of monsters on screen at once!
Monsters that don't get along...
Monsters that do get along...
Real time lighting and shadow. Seeing monsters moving in the darkness
Better directional sound! Immersion here!
Squadron tactics. Wiping out of demons as a team!
Voice over Network... JC always talks about it, lets hear it for real!
Of course we need tactically useful music...
Gadgets: Cloaking suits, night vision goggles, holographic decoys, etc.
Anything else?
-AS
From a technical standpoint, MacOS is all but dead. The only remnant is the compatibility layer, Blue Box or whatever it's called, to allow the older Mac software to run under MacOS X.
The UI has changed; refined, reworked, upgraded, facelifted, whatever. It's not the MacOS anymore, any more or less than Windows98 is MacOS
The OS/kernal/core/system itself is different. Mach Kernel with BSD atop that, with NeXTisms atop that. Nothing in common with the traditional MacOS.
So the analogy with M$ is Apple is getting rid of MacOS to make MacOS X in the same way that M$ got rid of Windows9x to make WindowsNT or WindowsCE. There are compatibility layers for both, but it's underlying OS is non compatibile and unsimilar.
-AS
So I'm a little peeved. It has an ethernet port! I want a FireWire port, dammit!
I mean, I have a perfectly good video device, another Sony product, the TRV103, digital 8 FireWire/iLink capable digital camcorder... but if I want to record audio, the best I can do is keep the lens on and record for about an hour straight. Is there no solution for people looking for a digital audio recorder device? DAT, miniDisc, whatever? I'm not sure where to look, but mostly what I've found are FireWire tape backup devices...
Sigh, this is off topic, of course, but it seems the best place, of any, to find other link minded individuals. Anyone able to help?
-AS
A lot of people through out the idea of micropayments: Per minute or per song...
This isn't a bad idea, I guess. I was thinking there should be more, though, because you're paying for the distribution mechanism. What's stopping people from reposting the song back onto Napster or Gnutella once they pay for a copy? Perhaps the songs that Metallica releases should have a 'digital fingerprint', and go after Napster/Gnutella legally/technologically?
I would think membership and fan clubs, and as other people have pointed out, access to merchandise, t-shirts, concerts, etc, after showing proof of ownership, or by being a member.
Dunno, I think that's as many good ideas as I've seen today
-AS
Given his own admission. His pulling out of lawyers is not an admission of not caring, just of his reliance on the standard system, instead of trying to change the system.
At least, that's my take
-AS