Everybody in the world except perhaps for Osama Bin Laden's dishwasher has a CD-ROM drive on their PC. When you burn a CD for a stranger, then you know that they will be able to read it.
Not so with DVD. Market acceptance of DVD-ROMs is still low and will probably not catch on like CDs did in the mid 1990s because of the huge number of DVD movie players being sold cheaply.
When the media cost of DVD (on an average) falls to about 50% that of CD-ROM for the same storage capacity, then there will probably be a surge of buying of DVD ROM to maybe 50% of PCs having a DVD ROM reader. But since few people have the need for vast storage requirements, the primary use for DVD writers will be to back-up and trade DVD movies.
When DVD disk media reaches 50 cents US per blank disk, people will become very uninclined to spend several hours converting a DVD movie to DivX and that might lead to a significant decline of the number of DivX titles available for download on P2P channels.
In any event, cheap DVD reproduction hopefully will lead to film fans to finally be able to see the vast number of great foreign and independent films like Sundance that now never make it to wide distribution. Sure if you live in NYC you can always go down to Black Turtleneck Video and score the latest Win Wenders directly from the Berlin Film Festival. But if you're in Beaverton, Oregon, fat chance. There you get what Hollywood Video has or you get whatever's available from the shelve at the local library. And the library gets its stuff from donations from Hollywood Video.
Cheap DVD will allow great films, like great marijuana, to circulate through grass-roots channels from person-to-person. At 50 cents a disk, you can copy your favorite film and give it to a friend. If they like it then they can copy it for themselves and/or pass the disk to someone else. It will be similar to what Kazaa does with music but more oriented towards physical media exchange because of the enormous bandwidth requirements of film and big-brother monitoring of the P2P channels.
In this way, really great films (like El Topo or Dossier 51) won't disappear due to above ground legal and distribution hassles and masterpieces will get a chance to be seen even if they never make it to the local octoplex popcorn shop.
A Victrola would not be an effective solution to this problem. They are antiques; which makes them quite expensive on a unit by unit basis. They can't be serviced and replacement parts are no longer being made.
Their media is fragile and easily warped, distorted, and/or broken.
They have no electronic amplification and would not be of any utility for hearing-impaired seniors (what we call old people in the USA).
They require manual cranking for power to turn the sound-generating cylinder and few if any have been retrofitted with motors since that mod would significantly reduce the value of the unit as an antique. Plus the operation of the Victorola requires exact placement of a needle into a wax or foil groove in the media. This may prove difficult for seniors with palsy or any other common hand-movement disorder.
The possiblity that the Victorola may have utility in this application because seniors would be the only people who may have prior experience with their operation is misguided because the Victorla was already obsolete as a sound reproduction device when most of today's seniors were children. Vacuum tube amplifiers (invented in the 1914 in Palo Alto, CA) were in common use by the mid-1920's onward, when most of today's seniors were born.
In this application an advanced late 1990's technology would probably be best.
There is no such thing as an 18 year old man.
I must respectfully disagree. The American tendency to prolong the age of childhood until the twenties is deplorable.
Historically people became adults and responsible for their actions at much younger ages then today. In traditional Jewish culture, a boy becomes a man at his bar mitzvah ceremony at about age fourteen. Even until the 1990s, Americans reached the 'age of majority' at eighteen with all the privileges (like drinking a beer) and responsibly of an adult.
Layafette was 19 when became commander of the French forces assisting the American Revolution in the 1780s. I believe that Lewis and Clark were 19 when they started their voyage of discovery in 1803.
Until recently, the entire purpose of children's education was to prepare them for the responsibility of becoming an adult in their mid-teens. Now it's just day-care for teenagers who aren't allowed to become adults until their mid-twenties.
I suspect that your comment was just humorous, but it was still a good excuse to pontificate a bit.
What if journalists and scientists agree to only discuss the *positive* uses of scientific invention? That way, some uneducated terrorists from The Great Wherever won't get new ideas using Google keyword searches like "explosives", "bombs", "nukes".
This makes sense until you have that "eureka" epiphany moment when you realise that the quiet geeky white men in their labs who squander billions of public funds to come up new and exotic ways to kill people in the name of patriotism are the 'uneducated terrorists'. None of this shit would exist if they didn't make such a focused effort to invent it.
They may be educated to the max in science and technology, but they have always been, are now, and will continue to be illiterate retards in ethics, morality, and basic human decency.
Look, forty-odd years of top-level academic research has failed so far to come up with a good theoretical approach to machine translation.
Perhaps they're going at it from the wrong direction. Instead of trying to come up with a full translation engine from the top down i.e. feed it any text and get a level four translation, maybe the better (cheap portable $50 iPod-type of translator device) approach would be to start at a word translator and then present the user with interactive paths when the device encounters ambiguity.
you enter: "My Japanese is bad"
device replies: Japanese - unattached adjectival noun. Select: Japanese person Japanese language
Maybe the device should bring all of its internally programmed 'assumptions' out to the user to select. You'd tap out your selections on the screen. It would take forever to get a reasonable translation, but you could feel confident that what you are trying to convey is getting across.
Just a thought. It's time to get off the pot and get these devices out even if they are laughable just to get serious feedback from users for making them better and useful. At this point, anything is better than nothing. Except those Franklin Spanish-English devices that claim 50000 words but can't even find common verb conjugations.
I would be seriously interested in hearing what other people would use a 64-bit 6GHz processor with a terabyte harddisk and gigabyte of RAM for?
I could see having the drive size for storage of 10000 CDs or a few hundred of your favorite movies. I asked the same question about five years ago about a 10 Gig hard disk and the most common reply was to store all your music recordings on your PC. That's what I'm doing now.
I would like to see high quality language translation cheaply available. Language translation seems to have five levels. Level one is a word by word dictionary look-up. Level two is phrase translation inside sentences. Level three would translate whole sentences and compare them to other sentences in the paragraph. Level four would catch most idioms and ensure that the paragraphs made sense in the destination language and level five would be equalivent to a modern professional translation.
This is just my WAG on the subject. But it seems that the web translators like SysTranCom and Babelfish are working on level two. I wonder if a 6 GigHz CPU and 1 GigRAM box would be able to do OCR on Arabic and also translate to English. I would think that Arabic to be the hardest language to do Optical Char Recognition on because the syntatic elements are linked together.
I wonder if 6 GigCPU with 1GigRAM would be able to do speech-to-text better than today's Dragon Systems and IBM. A $50 hand held box that does level four translation from speech in one language to synthetic speech in a second language would be a great goal to hope for. But I don't think these devices will be around for another 15 years, at least at $50 US.
Another wish-for would be audio remixing of commercial music. Hate that stupid guitar solo or dumb background vocal? Then just phase-lock onto it and remove it.
How about a comment compilier? Toss the source and do linguistic analysis on the code's comments. Then have the comment compilier create the source according to what the designer wants. If it's not right, then do another interation until it gets closer. C language is so primitive: it's a legacy from the days when RAM was tiny little metal beads woven into a grid that doubled as a spaghetti strainer and CPUs acted as room heaters.
What are your thoughts? What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
I get the feeling that the people who are doing the whole DRM thing don't quite understand the long term results of their efforts. I suspect that they are simply running on auto-pilot to develop technology to prevent people from consuming media product, which, you gotta admit, is ironic considering that the people who are paying for all this DRM research make their money from people consuming media product.
DRM could be analogous to the old fairy tale of killing the goose that laid golden eggs. Basically DRM chokes off distibution networks for media product, especially when it gets legally mandated into consumer electronics. And even more so when it gets legally mandated at different levels for different types of media product. After a few times of getting burned by disks that don't play or appear not to work correctly due to hidden DRM, people will be less willing to rent or buy media product.
DRM can be seen as a way of artifically saturating a media channel. Which isn't good because the media channels are already saturated. The only one that isn't is the latest media channel: P2P. And it's already illegal.
I read recently (I think it was Variety or Premier magazine) that there will be 60, yes 60, block buster movies released this summer (from early May to late August) that cost over 100 million dollars each in production costs. Add to this another 20 million in advertising and promotion costs per movie and we are looking at a seriously saturated marketplace. Even at present the movie business just breaks even on worldwide box office and only makes profit on DVD sales and rentals (roughly about 30% of box office) and ancilliary distibution (TV, airlines, VCR sales, hotel rentals, ect...). Check the numbers on Box Office Mojo. At least half of the movies don't make their production costs back in box office. Plus we all know that something like 80% of the records released don't make any money for the 'artist' or the record company. The RIAA companies use this as an excuse to charge the same price for every record regardless of the quality or demand.
Anyway, there is a GLUT of media product now. The media companies should be researching an 'anti-DRM' instead of DRM. They should be trying to come up with new ways to get people to copy and share media product on their PCs instead of trying to stop people from doing this.
Since all the media product is owned by only four or five corporations anyway, it doesn't matter if any individual product is generating a pay-per-view or listen income stream. They're getting all the money from all the product anyway. So it is in their best interests to get more and more people to just consume more and more media product. DRM is counter-productive because it is shutting down the last multimedia channel that isn't saturated, that is, the internet PC, before it has a chance to fully develop its income-generating potential.
... I should leave my access point totally unguarded, with no encryption, or passwords, or logging.
Not really. The point is that you should provide a means for your ISP to 'cover their ass' in the event that they get 'requested' to do something about you specifically.
It would be nice to have a standard letter that lists the reasons that would be acceptable to them the presence of this 'criminal activity' in an area that they have legal liablity.
In short, the issue of copying music books and movies has no answer. So no one cares if you do or don't do it. All anyone really cares about is whether it is going to create a problem for them.
If they (the **AAs) were truly serious about stopping copying, then people would be going to jail for long periods of time for selling hard disks. Like how people in the USA (for example 65-year-old Canadian comedian Tommy Chong) are sent to jail for selling painted glass tubes that might be used for , ohmygod!, smoking illegal herbs.
[By the way, the news broadcast of Mr. Chong's imprisonment was followed by an advert for corporate love drugs - expensive pills designed to increase woman's sexual response. Ask your doctor today!]
Anyway, what Comcast is trying to tell you is that if you share files (and you do), please make an effort to come up with a reasonable excuse for them to ignore you while still collecting your money and providing service.
This is a book-length argument, and I only have 30 minutes on the librarie's internet computer with a weird keyboard.
The core of the argument is this: software developers need to develop new tools to vastly increase their productivity. This is the cure to the problem of piracy. If they could take ten hours to develop the same software that takes 300 hours now to do, then they could reduce the cost of their unit product significantly and this would greatly increase sales and make copying an irrelavent issue.
The entire issue of piracy is not an issue of whether or not the developers are getting paid for their efforts, or whether the people who copy and distribute are stealing.
Beneath the entire issue of copying and cost is the point that there has not been the order of magnitude increases of productivity in the software development field that there has been in the hardware field. This is because software developers refuse to press for new types of software writing tools that will make it possible to develop a commercial game in 1/10 of the time that it takes today.
Software is basically a 'cost-plus' industry. Developers take as long as they like to make their product and then add up the number of hours and expected sale units and price each unit accordingly. There is no incentive to conceive and code whole new classes of development tools that will give order-of-magnitude in productivity.
This is the real reason that software costs so much and why the developers get so upset about copying. But, hell, most of them are still using C or C++: the most backward, cryptic, and unproductive languages imagineable.
Software development has really changed since the early 1970's. Although, it's not completely the software community's fault. Every time they begin to feel that the tools that they are working with are inadaquate, the hardware people come up with a order-of-magnitude performance increase that sends back to assembly language (like the microprocessor did to the VAX in the mid-1970's, and the flash Harvard-bus microcontroller did to the microprocessor in the mid-1980's, and the net did to the PC in the 1990's, and the next-big-thing will do in a few years).
Piracy is GOOD because when developers can't make enough under the old approach, they will actually be forced to develop the tools that will allow to get the order-of-magnitude gain in productivity that has been eluding them since the development of the first compiliers (40 years ago).
If Intel was a software development company they would be pissed that they can't charge $100 for an 8088 anymore, and would be taking legal action to remedy the situation in the interest of fairness.
Re:Practical or somebody's thesis?
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Robocones
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The project will reduce the need for expensive no-skill workers and redirect the money to electronic engineers, designers, and technicians.
All great advances in electronics start as weird ideas and then advance to 'solutions in search of a problem'.
There has always been a point where the proponents and developers realize that they have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to develop something that could have been done much simpler and easier with human workers. This nadir is almost always the turning point where economies of scale resulting from Moore's Law begin to kick in and the new technical application begins to become known and accepted by the general public.
Wealth is created by new technologies developed through digitization of ordinary processes (like moving around traffic cones) when the ordinary process is split into seperate parts in a way that couldn't be done without the digitization process. Then they are reassembled in ways that not only accomplish the original task, but add features that provide levels of economic utility that were impossible by the old way of doing the specific task.
This is an overly simplicitic overview of 'general theory' of the effect of digitization of a medium or process. It's too bad the Marshall McLuhan died at the near beginning of the personal computer age. He would have had valuable insight into the nature of the effect of the digitization process on media in general.
If you vote for a third party it still won't make any difference in the USA. Because the election system is set up to be 'winner take all'.
Say there are two parties, evenly split, say 45% blue, 45% red, and 10% green. If some of the reds and blues decide to go green, either red or blue will still win because when the votes are counted (a loose word in Diebold country), it's the party that has one vote more than the other party who wins. Regardless of how psychotic the policies are.
This 'hustler' mentality of the RIAA and their obsession with tracking down and punishing song traders is not in their best interest.
Considering that there are only five or so corporations that 'own' the world's commercial cultural product, it's not like someone else is going to get the money if someone buys record X while someone else downloads record Y. If there were still hundreds of independent record companies, then this mentality would be reasonable. But there's not. And the media executives should grow out of the 'hustler' mentality that was the way the music business used to work when they were coming up through the ranks. Things are different now.
What the RIAA/MPAA doesn't seem to realize is that their biggest long-term problem is not that people will 'steal' their product, it's that people will become so uninterested in their product that they won't be able to give it away even if they tried. Creating an atmosphere where consumers are threatened with prison and property confiscation for listening to RIAA product will go a long way to creating a subliminal distrust of commercial music. Eventually people will go out of their way to avoid exposure to RIAA product simply to avoid the possibility of arbitrary legal harassment.
When the RIAA customers are gone, it will be really difficult to get them back. Because the techniques that they are employing now will destroy any trust that people have in the RIAA. Trust in this case meaning that people believe that what the RIAA say's is legal use, will actually be legal use.
As far as the MPAA product is concerned, it is absurd to harass downloaders. They need to cut their costs for film production and promotion. Then they need to cut the admission prices for going to the films in theatres. Few people will download a 1 gigabyte movie when they can pay $2 to see it in a safe, comfortable theatre with quality projection and large screen.
An example of this is the Valley Theatre in Beaverton Oregon (a suburb of Portland). Built in the 1960s, they now show second-run features on a giant 50 foot screen and have started a 20 admissions for $20 pricing policy with $3 for single standard admission. Who wants to spend 10 hours downloading a DivX of LOTR when you can see it on a big screen for a dollar?
All the RIAA/MPAA problems have reasonable solutions. Their big problem is that they're not reasonable people.
Basically the entire SCO vs. Linux affair is Microsoft using a front organisation to attempt to destroy their strongest competitor. Because this competitor is not a single company, but a loose collection of individuals connected by a large network, Microsoft can destroy Linux only by either destroying the network itself or by using a custom-crafted law to prevent any company from using Linux openly. The internet is too big to destroy now so they are threatening to destroy any company that switches from MS to Linux by endlessly expanding legal fees.
Let's not forget that Bill Gates was a master poker player. He's using the threat of an endless series of raises (Microsoft's lawyers disguised as SCO vs. the lawyer's of the target company).
No one in their right mind would play poker like this against the richest man in the world. It is impossible to win because he will always out raise you.
Linux must develop a different strategy against Microsoft/SCO.
As health care becomes more unaffordable for the American middle class and technology continues to post large gains in price-performance, an underground market will evolve in non-FDA-certified devices.
The only real difference between a heart monitor in the Intensive Care Unit of the large hospital and the heart rate monitor on a bicycle handlebar is about $10000 in cost. All that cost goes to provide FDA certification and insurance overhead for the ICU device.
There will be a large black market in medical devices developing in the USA.
There may even develop a black market in minor home surgery, although this seems at first glance to be a nightmare seanario.
Minn governor Jesse Ventura was once asked if there were any positions on the issues on which he had changed his opinion since becoming governor.
He said that the compulsory seat belt law he had come to support. He said that the state had to pay $80,000 for care for people who became wheelchair bound as a result of refusing to wear a seat belt and then having that accident that they claimed would never happen to them.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message. Most slashdotters would have just mod'ed it as low as possible.
It may be a little off-topic, but I just discovered a seriously cool Atari ST program. Atari ST is was a 'cousin' computer popular at the same time (about 15 years ago) as the original Amiga.
It is a powerful sys-ex voice editor for an obscure but magically powerful tone module music synthesizer that I found on Ebay for peanuts.
It only runs through an advanced emulator program that allows old but useful programs for the Atari ST to be run on modern PCs. It's the STeem emulator. Kudos to the people who got it to actually work and have been able to keep the Atari ST programs alive long after the platform has been forgotten.
Is there any powerful emulator that allows Amiga programs to run on modern PCs?
A 'Yuppie' (from 'Young Urban Professional') law is any emotional law that is passed to enforce a lifestyle affection primarily of the young and upper-middle class on the poor and lower-middle class people. It gives the Yuppie do-gooders the impression that they have addressed what they precieve to be a 'social problem' without actually doing anything about in the real world and often making the underlying problem worse.
An example would be the law that requires all children to wear bicycle helmets. Fine for yuppie mommies, they're the first to buy anything that might help protect precious little Megan and Justin. But bad for the children of the poor.
Say a cop sees a poor kid on a bicycle without a helmet. He stops the kid and gives him a big (more than $100) ticket that his parents must pay or lose their driver's license. [I know, there's no connection between the two in the real world. But yuppie mommies love to come up with creative and nasty little ways to make the poor people improve themselves i.e. see things from a yuppie mommy prespective]
The parents can't afford a $100 helmet for the kid -and- pay the ticket. So they tell the kid on the threat of a beating not to get caught by the cops for riding around the neighborhood without a helmet.
So the next time that the cops are around and see the kids riding without helmets, the kids take off in the opposite direction. Being kids, they don't look where they're going and dive right out into traffic where they get hit by a car.
The good yuppie mommies point to this incident as a reason for all kids to wear helmets and to increase the penalities on the parents of the working class children to 'encourage them to make the right choices for their children's safety'.
I know, I know, that you're all going to tell me what a shit I am and how this doesn't make any sense and , of course, kids NEED helmets and what a stupid jerk I am and how I have a serious attitude problem and how I could certainly benefit from counseling and how my own kids deserve a better parent than me and everything else...
It doesn't change the fact that we don't need any more yuppie mommie laws. You need to consider the possible side effects of any law will have before you endorse passing it.
This is a bad, dumb, wrong law that won't work and will only be used by crackhead prosecutors to harass their political enemies.
Real spammers will simply move their base to a country that won't extradite them and has good broadband connections. Like maybe some island in the middle of the Pacific that acts as a supply and maintenence station for the major trans-oceanic internet cables. So this law won't do anything to reduce the amount of spam that gets to your PC.
I call it a 'Yuppie' law because it's one of those 'feel good' laws that make Baby Boomer mommies believe that they're solving a problem but in reality has exactly the opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve. Because the definition of spam here is so broad, the law can be used by prosecuters ( in the USA these are the government's lawyers who file charges against citizens in the courts. Unlike most other countries, in the USA, the courts are a seperate division of government from the police and the police are subject to the law as interpreted by the courts) to go after people for their lifestyle. For instance anyone sending an e-mail about an out-of-favor political position or an announcement of a demonstration could be sent to prison under a broad interpretation of an anti-spam law. And the present government of the USA is really big on broad interpretation for laws against people that it doesn't like.
So this law is stupid and worthless for what it's supposed to do, and provides a broad weapon to be used indiscriminately against citizens.
Many big city libraries bought lots of CD ROM titles for major expenditure during the first wave of CD software in the early to mid 1990's. Very little of it got actually checked out or used. The libraries probably won't be buying much more software for circulation again.
I do occasionly see CDs in books on the shelves, for example, in the travel section of the local surburban library there is a set of six CDs that have the detailed topographic maps of the entire United States (except Alaska and Hawaii). And what few computer books that get bought will have their CDs included.
The argument that publishers would be totally against having libraries circulate their products for free is balanced by the reality that libraries actually buy a large percentage of the stuff that gets published. A first novel by an unknown but talented writer might sell a few thousand copies on the basis of book tours and positive reviews. But if the good reviews in prestigous literary magazines leads 50,000 libraries each to purchase one copy, then the publishers overlook the supposed loss of revenue from having twenty people read the book from the library. It's a symbotic relationship that has been acknowledged by intelligent book publishers since Ben Franklin opened the first public library in America (before it became the USA).
Software publishers, however, are mostly climbing the up-side of the Bell Curve and see any possible loss of a full retail sale as a theft. It would be difficult if not impossible to come to mutually beneficial arrangement for creative distribution of software and compensation with these guys.
Basically, it's a class issue. What kind of people have it and what kind don't.
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Wake up, girl! Remember the preview is not just for coming attractions.
I can't see any reason to use CDs.
Everybody in the world except perhaps for Osama Bin Laden's dishwasher has a CD-ROM drive on their PC. When you burn a CD for a stranger, then you know that they will be able to read it.
Not so with DVD. Market acceptance of DVD-ROMs is still low and will probably not catch on like CDs did in the mid 1990s because of the huge number of DVD movie players being sold cheaply.
When the media cost of DVD (on an average) falls to about 50% that of CD-ROM for the same storage capacity, then there will probably be a surge of buying of DVD ROM to maybe 50% of PCs having a DVD ROM reader. But since few people have the need for vast storage requirements, the primary use for DVD writers will be to back-up and trade DVD movies.
When DVD disk media reaches 50 cents US per blank disk, people will become very uninclined to spend several hours converting a DVD movie to DivX and that might lead to a significant decline of the number of DivX titles available for download on P2P channels.
In any event, cheap DVD reproduction hopefully will lead to film fans to finally be able to see the vast number of great foreign and independent films like Sundance that now never make it to wide distribution. Sure if you live in NYC you can always go down to Black Turtleneck Video and score the latest Win Wenders directly from the Berlin Film Festival. But if you're in Beaverton, Oregon, fat chance. There you get what Hollywood Video has or you get whatever's available from the shelve at the local library. And the library gets its stuff from donations from Hollywood Video.
Cheap DVD will allow great films, like great marijuana, to circulate through grass-roots channels from person-to-person. At 50 cents a disk, you can copy your favorite film and give it to a friend. If they like it then they can copy it for themselves and/or pass the disk to someone else. It will be similar to what Kazaa does with music but more oriented towards physical media exchange because of the enormous bandwidth requirements of film and big-brother monitoring of the P2P channels.
In this way, really great films (like El Topo or Dossier 51) won't disappear due to above ground legal and distribution hassles and masterpieces will get a chance to be seen even if they never make it to the local octoplex popcorn shop.
Have you considered a Victrola?
A Victrola would not be an effective solution to this problem. They are antiques; which makes them quite expensive on a unit by unit basis. They can't be serviced and replacement parts are no longer being made.
Their media is fragile and easily warped, distorted, and/or broken.
They have no electronic amplification and would not be of any utility for hearing-impaired seniors (what we call old people in the USA).
They require manual cranking for power to turn the sound-generating cylinder and few if any have been retrofitted with motors since that mod would significantly reduce the value of the unit as an antique. Plus the operation of the Victorola requires exact placement of a needle into a wax or foil groove in the media. This may prove difficult for seniors with palsy or any other common hand-movement disorder.
The possiblity that the Victorola may have utility in this application because seniors would be the only people who may have prior experience with their operation is misguided because the Victorla was already obsolete as a sound reproduction device when most of today's seniors were children. Vacuum tube amplifiers (invented in the 1914 in Palo Alto, CA) were in common use by the mid-1920's onward, when most of today's seniors were born.
In this application an advanced late 1990's technology would probably be best.
There is no such thing as an 18 year old man.
I must respectfully disagree. The American tendency to prolong the age of childhood until the twenties is deplorable.
Historically people became adults and responsible for their actions at much younger ages then today. In traditional Jewish culture, a boy becomes a man at his bar mitzvah ceremony at about age fourteen. Even until the 1990s, Americans reached the 'age of majority' at eighteen with all the privileges (like drinking a beer) and responsibly of an adult.
Layafette was 19 when became commander of the French forces assisting the American Revolution in the 1780s. I believe that Lewis and Clark were 19 when they started their voyage of discovery in 1803.
Until recently, the entire purpose of children's education was to prepare them for the responsibility of becoming an adult in their mid-teens. Now it's just day-care for teenagers who aren't allowed to become adults until their mid-twenties.
I suspect that your comment was just humorous, but it was still a good excuse to pontificate a bit.
What if journalists and scientists agree to only discuss the *positive* uses of scientific invention? That way, some uneducated terrorists from The Great Wherever won't get new ideas using Google keyword searches like "explosives", "bombs", "nukes".
This makes sense until you have that "eureka" epiphany moment when you realise that the quiet geeky white men in their labs who squander billions of public funds to come up new and exotic ways to kill people in the name of patriotism are the 'uneducated terrorists'. None of this shit would exist if they didn't make such a focused effort to invent it.
They may be educated to the max in science and technology, but they have always been, are now, and will continue to be illiterate retards in ethics, morality, and basic human decency.
Look, forty-odd years of top-level academic research has failed so far to come up with a good theoretical approach to machine translation.
Perhaps they're going at it from the wrong direction. Instead of trying to come up with a full translation engine from the top down i.e. feed it any text and get a level four translation, maybe the better (cheap portable $50 iPod-type of translator device) approach would be to start at a word translator and then present the user with interactive paths when the device encounters ambiguity.
you enter: "My Japanese is bad"
device replies: Japanese - unattached adjectival noun.
Select:
Japanese person
Japanese language
Maybe the device should bring all of its internally programmed 'assumptions' out to the user to select. You'd tap out your selections on the screen. It would take forever to get a reasonable translation, but you could feel confident that what you are trying to convey is getting across.
Just a thought. It's time to get off the pot and get these devices out even if they are laughable just to get serious feedback from users for making them better and useful. At this point, anything is better than nothing. Except those Franklin Spanish-English devices that claim 50000 words but can't even find common verb conjugations.
I would be seriously interested in hearing what other people would use a 64-bit 6GHz processor with a terabyte harddisk and gigabyte of RAM for?
I could see having the drive size for storage of 10000 CDs or a few hundred of your favorite movies. I asked the same question about five years ago about a 10 Gig hard disk and the most common reply was to store all your music recordings on your PC. That's what I'm doing now.
I would like to see high quality language translation cheaply available. Language translation seems to have five levels. Level one is a word by word dictionary look-up. Level two is phrase translation inside sentences. Level three would translate whole sentences and compare them to other sentences in the paragraph. Level four would catch most idioms and ensure that the paragraphs made sense in the destination language and level five would be equalivent to a modern professional translation.
This is just my WAG on the subject. But it seems that the web translators like SysTranCom and Babelfish are working on level two. I wonder if a 6 GigHz CPU and 1 GigRAM box would be able to do OCR on Arabic and also translate to English. I would think that Arabic to be the hardest language to do Optical Char Recognition on because the syntatic elements are linked together.
I wonder if 6 GigCPU with 1GigRAM would be able to do speech-to-text better than today's Dragon Systems and IBM. A $50 hand held box that does level four translation from speech in one language to synthetic speech in a second language would be a great goal to hope for. But I don't think these devices will be around for another 15 years, at least at $50 US.
Another wish-for would be audio remixing of commercial music. Hate that stupid guitar solo or dumb background vocal? Then just phase-lock onto it and remove it.
How about a comment compilier? Toss the source and do linguistic analysis on the code's comments. Then have the comment compilier create the source according to what the designer wants.
If it's not right, then do another interation until it gets closer. C language is so primitive: it's a legacy from the days when RAM was tiny little metal beads woven into a grid that doubled as a spaghetti strainer and CPUs acted as room heaters.
What are your thoughts? What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
Let me guess....
Ultra Porn
and Games
I get the feeling that the people who are doing the whole DRM thing don't quite understand the long term results of their efforts. I suspect that they are simply running on auto-pilot to develop technology to prevent people from consuming media product, which, you gotta admit, is ironic considering that the people who are paying for all this DRM research make their money from people consuming media product.
DRM could be analogous to the old fairy tale of killing the goose that laid golden eggs. Basically DRM chokes off distibution networks for media product, especially when it gets legally mandated into consumer electronics. And even more so when it gets legally mandated at different levels for different types of media product. After a few times of getting burned by disks that don't play or appear not to work correctly due to hidden DRM, people will be less willing to rent or buy media product.
DRM can be seen as a way of artifically saturating a media channel. Which isn't good because the media channels are already saturated. The only one that isn't is the latest media channel: P2P. And it's already illegal.
I read recently (I think it was Variety or Premier magazine) that there will be 60, yes 60, block buster movies released this summer (from early May to late August) that cost over 100 million dollars each in production costs. Add to this another 20 million in advertising and promotion costs per movie and we are looking at a seriously saturated marketplace. Even at present the movie business just breaks even on worldwide box office and only makes profit on DVD sales and rentals (roughly about 30% of box office) and ancilliary distibution (TV, airlines, VCR sales, hotel rentals, ect...). Check the numbers on Box Office Mojo. At least half of the movies don't make their production costs back in box office. Plus we all know that something like 80% of the records released don't make any money for the 'artist' or the record company. The RIAA companies use this as an excuse to charge the same price for every record regardless of the quality or demand.
Anyway, there is a GLUT of media product now. The media companies should be researching an 'anti-DRM' instead of DRM. They should be trying to come up with new ways to get people to copy and share media product on their PCs instead of trying to stop people from doing this.
Since all the media product is owned by only four or five corporations anyway, it doesn't matter if any individual product is generating a pay-per-view or listen income stream. They're getting all the money from all the product anyway. So it is in their best interests to get more and more people to just consume more and more media product. DRM is counter-productive because it is shutting down the last multimedia channel that isn't saturated, that is, the internet PC, before it has a chance to fully develop its income-generating potential.
Not really. The point is that you should provide a means for your ISP to 'cover their ass' in the event that they get 'requested' to do something about you specifically.
It would be nice to have a standard letter that lists the reasons that would be acceptable to them the presence of this 'criminal activity' in an area that they have legal liablity.
In short, the issue of copying music books and movies has no answer. So no one cares if you do or don't do it. All anyone really cares about is whether it is going to create a problem for them.
If they (the **AAs) were truly serious about stopping copying, then people would be going to jail for long periods of time for selling hard disks. Like how people in the USA (for example 65-year-old Canadian comedian Tommy Chong) are sent to jail for selling painted glass tubes that might be used for , ohmygod!, smoking illegal herbs.
[By the way, the news broadcast of Mr. Chong's imprisonment was followed by an advert for corporate love drugs - expensive pills designed to increase woman's sexual response. Ask your doctor today!]
Anyway, what Comcast is trying to tell you is that if you share files (and you do), please make an effort to come up with a reasonable excuse for them to ignore you while still collecting your money and providing service.
That's what this is all about.
This is a book-length argument, and I only have 30 minutes on the librarie's internet computer with a weird keyboard.
The core of the argument is this: software developers need to develop new tools to vastly increase their productivity. This is the cure to the problem of piracy. If they could take ten hours to develop the same software that takes 300 hours now to do, then they could reduce the cost of their unit product significantly and this would greatly increase sales and make copying an irrelavent issue.
Software development has really changed since the early 1970's.
Software development has NOT NOT NOT really changed since the early 1970's.
Learn to use the preview button, girl!
The entire issue of piracy is not an issue of whether or not the developers are getting paid for their efforts, or whether the people who copy and distribute are stealing.
Beneath the entire issue of copying and cost is the point that there has not been the order of magnitude increases of productivity in the software development field that there has been in the hardware field. This is because software developers refuse to press for new types of software writing tools that will make it possible to develop a commercial game in 1/10 of the time that it takes today.
Software is basically a 'cost-plus' industry. Developers take as long as they like to make their product and then add up the number of hours and expected sale units and price each unit accordingly. There is no incentive to conceive and code whole new classes of development tools that will give order-of-magnitude in productivity.
This is the real reason that software costs so much and why the developers get so upset about copying. But, hell, most of them are still using C or C++: the most backward, cryptic, and unproductive languages imagineable.
Software development has really changed since the early 1970's. Although, it's not completely the software community's fault. Every time they begin to feel that the tools that they are working with are inadaquate, the hardware people come up with a order-of-magnitude performance increase that sends back to assembly language (like the microprocessor did to the VAX in the mid-1970's, and the flash Harvard-bus microcontroller did to the microprocessor in the mid-1980's, and the net did to the PC in the 1990's, and the next-big-thing will do in a few years).
Piracy is GOOD because when developers can't make enough under the old approach, they will actually be forced to develop the tools that will allow to get the order-of-magnitude gain in productivity that has been eluding them since the development of the first compiliers (40 years ago).
If Intel was a software development company they would be pissed that they can't charge $100 for an 8088 anymore, and would be taking legal action to remedy the situation in the interest of fairness.
The project will reduce the need for expensive no-skill workers and redirect the money to electronic engineers, designers, and technicians.
All great advances in electronics start as weird ideas and then advance to 'solutions in search of a problem'.
There has always been a point where the proponents and developers realize that they have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to develop something that could have been done much simpler and easier with human workers. This nadir is almost always the turning point where economies of scale resulting from Moore's Law begin to kick in and the new technical application begins to become known and accepted by the general public.
Wealth is created by new technologies developed through digitization of ordinary processes (like moving around traffic cones) when the ordinary process is split into seperate parts in a way that couldn't be done without the digitization process.
Then they are reassembled in ways that not only accomplish the original task, but add features that provide levels of economic utility that were impossible by the old way of doing the specific task.
This is an overly simplicitic overview of 'general theory' of the effect of digitization of a medium or process. It's too bad the Marshall McLuhan died at the near beginning of the personal computer age. He would have had valuable insight into the nature of the effect of the digitization process on media in general.
If you vote for a third party it still won't make any difference in the USA. Because the election system is set up to be 'winner take all'.
Say there are two parties, evenly split, say 45% blue, 45% red, and 10% green. If some of the reds and blues decide to go green, either red or blue will still win because when the votes are counted (a loose word in Diebold country), it's the party that has one vote more than the other party who wins. Regardless of how psychotic the policies are.
Try another strategy.
If she would be willing to open the pod bay door more often, then I'd be happy to activate her more often.
This 'hustler' mentality of the RIAA and their obsession with tracking down and punishing song traders is not in their best interest.
Considering that there are only five or so corporations that 'own' the world's commercial cultural product, it's not like someone else is going to get the money if someone buys record X while someone else downloads record Y. If there were still hundreds of independent record companies, then this mentality would be reasonable. But there's not. And the media executives should grow out of the 'hustler' mentality that was the way the music business used to work when they were coming up through the ranks. Things are different now.
What the RIAA/MPAA doesn't seem to realize is that their biggest long-term problem is not that people will 'steal' their product, it's that people will become so uninterested in their product that they won't be able to give it away even if they tried. Creating an atmosphere where consumers are threatened with prison and property confiscation for listening to RIAA product will go a long way to creating a subliminal distrust of commercial music. Eventually people will go out of their way to avoid exposure to RIAA product simply to avoid the possibility of arbitrary legal harassment.
When the RIAA customers are gone, it will be really difficult to get them back. Because the techniques that they are employing now will destroy any trust that people have in the RIAA. Trust in this case meaning that people believe that what the RIAA say's is legal use, will actually be legal use.
As far as the MPAA product is concerned, it is absurd to harass downloaders. They need to cut their costs for film production and promotion. Then they need to cut the admission prices for going to the films in theatres. Few people will download a 1 gigabyte movie when they can pay $2 to see it in a safe, comfortable theatre with quality projection and large screen.
An example of this is the Valley Theatre in Beaverton Oregon (a suburb of Portland). Built in the 1960s, they now show second-run features on a giant 50 foot screen and have started a 20 admissions for $20 pricing policy with $3 for single standard admission. Who wants to spend 10 hours downloading a DivX of LOTR when you can see it on a big screen for a dollar?
All the RIAA/MPAA problems have reasonable solutions. Their big problem is that they're not reasonable people.
One of the tricky and devious ways that Slashdotters judge the competence of message posters is whether or not they can use a Spell Checker program.
Basically the entire SCO vs. Linux affair is Microsoft using a front organisation to attempt to destroy their strongest competitor. Because this competitor is not a single company, but a loose collection of individuals connected by a large network, Microsoft can destroy Linux only by either destroying the network itself or by using a custom-crafted law to prevent any company from using Linux openly. The internet is too big to destroy now so they are threatening to destroy any company that switches from MS to Linux by endlessly expanding legal fees.
Let's not forget that Bill Gates was a master poker player. He's using the threat of an endless series of raises (Microsoft's lawyers disguised as SCO vs. the lawyer's of the target company).
No one in their right mind would play poker like this against the richest man in the world. It is impossible to win because he will always out raise you.
Linux must develop a different strategy against Microsoft/SCO.
As health care becomes more unaffordable for the American middle class and technology continues to post large gains in price-performance, an underground market will evolve in non-FDA-certified devices.
The only real difference between a heart monitor in the Intensive Care Unit of the large hospital and the heart rate monitor on a bicycle handlebar is about $10000 in cost. All that cost goes to provide FDA certification and insurance overhead for the ICU device.
There will be a large black market in medical devices developing in the USA.
There may even develop a black market in minor home surgery, although this seems at first glance to be a nightmare seanario.
Minn governor Jesse Ventura was once asked if there were any positions on the issues on which he had changed his opinion since becoming governor.
He said that the compulsory seat belt law he had come to support. He said that the state had to pay $80,000 for care for people who became wheelchair bound as a result of refusing to wear a seat belt and then having that accident that they claimed would never happen to them.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message. Most slashdotters would have just mod'ed it as low as possible.
It may be a little off-topic, but I just discovered a seriously cool Atari ST program.
Atari ST is was a 'cousin' computer popular at the same time (about 15 years ago) as the original Amiga.
It is a powerful sys-ex voice editor for an obscure but magically powerful tone module music synthesizer that I found on Ebay for peanuts.
It only runs through an advanced emulator program that allows old but useful programs for the Atari ST to be run on modern PCs. It's the STeem emulator. Kudos to the people who got it to actually work and have been able to keep the Atari ST programs alive long after the platform has been forgotten.
Is there any powerful emulator that allows Amiga programs to run on modern PCs?
Remember the movie 'The Sixth Sense'?
Aren't the dead always the last to realize that they're actually dead?
Do Amiga users ever find it, well,... strange that sometimes people in a crowd will walk right up to them and then right through them?
Or are they too busy thinking up new features for the next operating system?
A 'Yuppie' (from 'Young Urban Professional') law is any emotional law that is passed to enforce a lifestyle affection primarily of the young and upper-middle class on the poor and lower-middle class people. It gives the Yuppie do-gooders the impression that they have addressed what they precieve to be a 'social problem' without actually doing anything about in the real world and often making the underlying problem worse.
An example would be the law that requires all children to wear bicycle helmets. Fine for yuppie mommies, they're the first to buy anything that might help protect precious little Megan and Justin. But bad for the children of the poor.
Say a cop sees a poor kid on a bicycle without a helmet. He stops the kid and gives him a big (more than $100) ticket that his parents must pay or lose their driver's license. [I know, there's no connection between the two in the real world. But yuppie mommies love to come up with creative and nasty little ways to make the poor people improve themselves i.e. see things from a yuppie mommy prespective]
The parents can't afford a $100 helmet for the kid -and- pay the ticket. So they tell the kid on the threat of a beating not to get caught by the cops for riding around the neighborhood without a helmet.
So the next time that the cops are around and see the kids riding without helmets, the kids take off in the opposite direction. Being kids, they don't look where they're going and dive right out into traffic where they get hit by a car.
The good yuppie mommies point to this incident as a reason for all kids to wear helmets and to increase the penalities on the parents of the working class children to 'encourage them to make the right choices for their children's safety'.
I know, I know, that you're all going to tell me what a shit I am and how this doesn't make any sense and , of course, kids NEED helmets and what a stupid jerk I am and how I have a serious attitude problem and how I could certainly benefit from counseling and how my own kids deserve a better parent than me and everything else...
It doesn't change the fact that we don't need any more yuppie mommie laws. You need to consider the possible side effects of any law will have before you endorse passing it.
Thank you,
This is a bad, dumb, wrong law that won't work and will only be used by crackhead prosecutors to harass their political enemies.
Real spammers will simply move their base to a country that won't extradite them and has good broadband connections. Like maybe some island in the middle of the Pacific that acts as a supply and maintenence station for the major trans-oceanic internet cables. So this law won't do anything to reduce the amount of spam that gets to your PC.
I call it a 'Yuppie' law because it's one of those 'feel good' laws that make Baby Boomer mommies believe that they're solving a problem but in reality has exactly the opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve. Because the definition of spam here is so broad, the law can be used by prosecuters ( in the USA these are the government's lawyers who file charges against citizens in the courts. Unlike most other countries, in the USA, the courts are a seperate division of government from the police and the police are subject to the law as interpreted by the courts) to go after people for their lifestyle. For instance anyone sending an e-mail about an out-of-favor political position or an announcement of a demonstration could be sent to prison under a broad interpretation of an anti-spam law. And the present government of the USA is really big on broad interpretation for laws against people that it doesn't like.
So this law is stupid and worthless for what it's supposed to do, and provides a broad weapon to be used indiscriminately against citizens.
So why would anyone on Slashdot support it?
Many big city libraries bought lots of CD ROM titles for major expenditure during the first wave of CD software in the early to mid 1990's. Very little of it got actually checked out or used. The libraries probably won't be buying much more software for circulation again.
I do occasionly see CDs in books on the shelves, for example, in the travel section of the local surburban library there is a set of six CDs that have the detailed topographic maps of the entire United States (except Alaska and Hawaii). And what few computer books that get bought will have their CDs included.
The argument that publishers would be totally against having libraries circulate their products for free is balanced by the reality that libraries actually buy a large percentage of the stuff that gets published. A first novel by an unknown but talented writer might sell a few thousand copies on the basis of book tours and positive reviews. But if the good reviews in prestigous literary magazines leads 50,000 libraries each to purchase one copy, then the publishers overlook the supposed loss of revenue from having twenty people read the book from the library. It's a symbotic relationship that has been acknowledged by intelligent book publishers since Ben Franklin opened the first public library in America (before it became the USA).
Software publishers, however, are mostly climbing the up-side of the Bell Curve and see any possible loss of a full retail sale as a theft. It would be difficult if not impossible to come to mutually beneficial arrangement for creative distribution of software and compensation with these guys.
Basically, it's a class issue. What kind of people have it and what kind don't.