on the behalf of a stock investment minded publication that wants to see a reason for everyone to go out and buy stuff.
But convergence will certainly come. For stock broker types though, the development that will bring it is not a welcome guest. That is, home "printed" appliances.
Rapid prototyping, as the technology for printing three dimensional objects is typically called, is a reality today. Most of the costs are related to intellectual property rights in the form of patents and patents in this field have limited durations. So, it's just a matter of time before the economics make it such that you could buy a box to "print" out all your whitegoods from generic "open source" 3-D models cheaper than you could buy them. When you factor in the savings in transportation and associated service costs, such a device could create enormous savings. The basic materials can be recyled as well so there would be no reason not to redesign your home interior as the seasons changed if you so desired.
I think is all quite reasonable and likely and with it will naturally come convergence of the data layer. When the rest of the design and assembly is open, then naturally the communications protocols will also be open and devices will seamlessly communicate with one another.
But Business Week isn't interested in this particular vision of the future, I'm sure. Far too radical for the business classes.
Well this is the whole bizarre point.
The RIAA has spent all this effort and garnered all this bad publicity over P2P, but there's this alternative to P2P that leads to precisely the same result and it is clearly legal.
And it's not just P2P. The whole notion of the PVR is almost identical to time shifting digital radio. The end result of using time shifting technology on digital radio and HDTV is identical to using P2P. The user ends up with a hard drive full of MP3s and MPEGs. But this is hardly an argument in their favor, this is daming evidence against their earlier quixotic foibles.
The conclusion that digital radio and PVR technology brings to center stage is what everyone has said all along --they were wrong. P2P was legit all along and this is the best evidence. The identical result of P2P still arises even without P2P. The simple fact is that this has never been a moral issue, it has been a technical issue that they have tried to simply run from because they procrastincated too long on innovating.
The digital radio issue isn't the **AA's next victim, it's the last straw.
Here's a link that goes straight to the "story" it's really just a note. But it has a few links and I think one of those has their PDF that is an awesome read.
While the author conceded that sharing data in biological studies is not new, he seemed to imply that there was something novel about collaborating on data rather than software tools and I think there are really many many examples of open colaboration in biology.
What is much more interesting, in my opinon is open source lab hardware and, in fact, there is such a thing. There is a team at at UCSD who's whole lab is dedicated to using plain old PC-CDRoms to do analysis of samples. That is far more empowering for the open source style of operation than just some academic collaboration that has settled on a database format.
The project is called Discode. I've written to the guy who is the head of the project for my own biotech site I started putting together last year. Right now they have a web page that is very cryptic, but they're looking for kernel hackers who have experience in CD-ROM drivers. Now, that's hot. That's real open source. At my still not quite public site, I have a few links to press releases of their first published paper on their work.
Well, it has been argued many times and there is abundant evidence to support the notion that the success of the US wouldn't have been anything like it has if it weren't, in fact, a fairly socialist nation.
Teachers like to joke that the Democratic party is actually merely a front for the National Education Association and it's not that far from the truth. And when you look at this huge pillar of the American community that is the education system, you can easily see that it is a form of welfare state.
Look at the recent shake-up at Disney to knock Eisner down a peg. Who did that? That was done by the California Pulic Enployees Retirement System, CalPers. So, all the rhetoric about America fighting against socialism is just that, we've been socialists all along.
Well clearly this demonstrates that Intel really does get the best smoke on the market today. That shit has got to be pricey, because the whole joint is stoned out of their heads.
Let's do some math for them. If we leave our PCs on all day --and that is why we have 24/7 broadband connections isn't it-- that's 5KW/Hrs a day.
At 15cents KW/Hr it now costs seventy five cents a day to have an Intel CPU. That's twenty bucks a month.
But do you get 15cents per KW/Hr lately? Check your bill, you might be closer to twenty cents. A buck a day. Hey, I running the Intel PC costs almost as much as broadband. Perhaps they should include free broadband connections with these things.
Interesting. I just covered a story about a Nature reporter hassling the Korean researcher who cloned human embryos a few months ago on my biotech blog.
But since I don't have the bandwidth, I'll point you to the original article. Here. And this is pressingly relevant because these traditional journals are claiming that they're upholding the scientific tradition, while, in fact, the evidence is that they are pressing their editorial slant to try and bend the agenda of independent researchers to their whims.
is that it contains a troubling assumption that the whole, which he defines as the final customer solution at the software level, is known in advance and will be engineered by Big Blue.
That sounds nice at first with IBM being such a supporter of open software. But it seems to be a bit optomistic in its assumption that software development, and particularly open source software, is a homogenous and readily controlled process.
It's not just open source. I think one of the reasons Longhorn is so far off is that Bill Gates insists it will have voice recognition, but there's no way he can get that in a form that will satisfy his massive, massive audiance that is not going to learn how to speak the right way to make it work. So, MS waits hoping some little start-up somewhere will make use of the latest chip speed improvements to paste together something saleable. But in this holistic systems approach where clock speed no longer matters, that generic speech recognition system doesn't happen because those solutions aren't done by little software start-ups, they require hardware resources or as this guy refers to it holistic approaches.
Clearly the desktop is ugly at this point and the advantage is with people in markets like embedded sytems where there is still plenty of growth and a clear road map for clock speed improvements. For the desktops, it should be all about clustering and with RDMA and Gig ethernet that's not a problem. A version of RDMA called i-warp is supposed to be in typical consumer grade GigE NICs by the end of this year. And of course the GigE standard scales right up to 10GbE even with copper for short runs. So, there's another level of power to be had. The catch here is how do you appeal to the broad consumer market with this new calss of product and the answer is probably you don't, this is the end of the line for awhile.
As he mentioned, there's reconfigureable computing. But I think its a bit silly to asume something like that is closer to maturity than clustering with something like i-warp in the cards. Proprietary solutions just don't cut it. Look at Infinniband. It was backed by plenty of big names, but a few huge names isn't enough. You need a homogenous target that literally thousands of independent developers can all work towards to get real progress. Clustering does that, perhaps not as it is now, but with RDMA it will be quite different. The question is whether there is even the will to begin the process of commodifying clustered computing.
if you could make it display the wavform of an MP3 player in near real time. But, it didn't sound like that was doable. I'd buy one if it could do that.
Amen to that.
I find the prejudice against independent research in biotech very disturbing. Why should some minority's morality or vaguely defined fears determine the limits of those researchers willing to reach out to the next level of progress. The real breakthroughs alomst cannot come from conventional labs.
As has been mentioned a few times in this thread, mother nature is a total mad scientist randomly mutating DNA every second that goes by. Why is it that when we try to apply our human gifts to these intricate processes that suddenly it is guarnteed to produce some horrendous outcome.
I don't want to attack Bill Joy personally, but it sounds like he's living out some issues that might have more to do with his own mortality and relationship to his children than anything else.
The guild idea is absurd and secrecy? My God, what the hell is he thinking? How is he deciding who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? And the insurance thing? Well, no wonder he didn't publish the book. That is a very strange idea. First, it would limit research to those with vast financial resources and then the real question is what good would insurance do if his worst projections did come true? To use his own analogy, why is it that nobody sells nuclear war insurance? This is a fairly simple anaology that you think someone as apparently sophisticated as Bill Joy would be able to grasp fairly early. His failure to make such obvious connections makes me think his real message may be more about his own personal life than about technology in gneral and perhaps he has confused the boundaries of the two.
I thought the questionaire was a very good idea. It is an interesting approach because it's not so simple to pawn it off on some low level campaign worker and its not as easy to throw away and ignore as a simple statement in favor of a position.
Unfortunately, it was slashdotted by the time I went to look at it so I didn't see all the language.
But I think there is some logic to the straightforward language. If you phrase it directly it might seem less friendly, but it is also less likely that the recipient will say --well none of the answers really fit the question so I couldn't answer it. It would be fair to say that a position on an issue is a separate issue from a vote. If you give politicians wiggle room, they'll take it. That's their job.
This is analogous to why the US Constitution doesn't have a right to privacy per se, but has a right against unreasonable search and seizure. While the former sounds like a reasonable idea, it is too ambiguous to be functional as legal language.
The very big problem with these theories is that they overlook the source of the hardware. They're operating on the illusion that it is possible to control the products coming predominantly out of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Mainland China. That belief is not well grounded and it is a huge oversight.
First of all, these nations of origin are themselves not even close to being a homogenous entity. It's not as though East Asia even has a single currency or is even moving in that direction. This is a fiercely independent part of the world that is wrapped up in political details that most westerners don't even care to know the details about. Taiwan and China are the best example, but the troubled relationship between Japan and the rest of Asia is no less prominent for people in the region. We could go on and on.
Even within Taiwan, it would be absurd to pretend that there is cohesion among the players in just the motherboard market. Give that reality, these specualtions are little more than wishful thinking on the part of washed up software companies.
Sure, hardware will be so cheap it will be as-if it were free. But it will be running free software as well. I'm sure of that.
"Personally, the only robot I'm interested in is a sex-slave android and I don't think we'll be seeing any of those in my lifetime."
I shouldn't be giving away my plans to rule the world and make a zillion bucks, but the sex robot might not be as difficult as you think. As always, you start off with what has already been done. In this case, there's already a major growth industry in robotic milking machines.
In fact, the reason there's so much growth in the field is that cows actually prefer robotic milkers and tend to go in for an extra milking a day because it just feels right. I'm not kidding. This is precisely why there is growth despite the costs, the diary ends up with higher milk production.
So, perhaps an android is out of the question so far, but how about 1090i video on a cube of four 42 inch high resolution panels and a milk machine!
You heard it here first baby.
And as for this hot air toy, how the hell is it a robot if you have to put the shirt on it yourself?
Why does free software need a leader?
I think the closest political analogy for open source enthusiasts should appropriately come from Monty Python's Holy Grail:
We're an anarcho syndicalist commune . . . political power comes from a direct mandate by the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Obviously the major concern is about the damage done to individual privacy, but there's another side to it that, in the long run, can be just as important.
When a government agency begins covertly compiling personal data on individuals, it sets in motion a long chain of events that can have implications far beyond the act of gathering data.
While it is easily possible to keep such record gathering secret for a period of time, history shows that eventually these efforts tend to make it into the public eye. When that happens, the result is often quite the opposite of what was originally intended.
It has happened over and over that political leaders come into power by virtue of the fact that they were the focus of investigations of entities that lost power. These secret lists eventually turn into a who's who of the next body politic. By focusing on certain individuals in hopes of pinning some dirt of them, the opposite effect is often achieved.
So, like so many things in life, this too is a doubled edged street, or a two-way sword or whatever symmetry metaphor you prefer.
Well cool. I really appreciate all your info. You are clearly well in the GIS community. In fact, you even listed the reason I was looking at the dataset. I bought some land and I wanted to use the data to help in planning the building of a house. That's where I picked up the idea that ArcView was NT only because the free viewer definitely is. See, how that works? Sure they use Linux on the way expensive stuff, but when it comes to the casual user it's lock-in time.
But I think the best analogy here is in the genome project. Consider this for a moment: both of these are literally mapping projects. That's not a metaphor, that's a fact. Both involve major government spending and the use of taxpayer money to fund extensive technical research. In the case of genomic and proteomic mapping though, there is a difference which was since the project was so massive, it was done internationally. In an international research program, open standards are the only choice.
So, considering it in this light, I think that it's clear that a truly vast mapping project can be done using open formats. In fact, if the project is so big, it's a perfect time to create a new and open standard. It's not about complexity, it is about will. In the case of the national dataset there was no will.
You ended up at the end doing a bit of preaching about the glory of GIS, and I think if you look back at my post you're not going to find me badmouthing GIS technology. As a matter of fact, I believe I was quite careful to close up my post by saying that I think satellite imagery is an excellent investment of government funds. So there's no need to preach to the choir as though they were a buncha sinners.
You mentioned my point exactly if you'll permit to quote
"they have become the industry standard (sort of the MS of the GIS community)."
And this puts the hammer right on the head of the damn nail. All you got to do is let her drop.
I know this I'm telegraphing this one for a mile and a yard, but why the hell does the US government need to take a taxpayer funded project and help to create the MS of the GIS community? If these guys are the MS of the GIS community then they should be the last ones getting subsidized with taxpayer dollars.
I'm not sure I see the utility of that from my outsiders perspective. Perhaps only people in the "community" have the vision to see how that is in the best interest of the public.
But hey, I'm not trying to be jerk about it. I just have a dramatic flair I find hard to tone down. It's not the end of the world although it is disturbing and I stick to my epithet of gross misdirection of government funds. But obviously there's hardly anybody intersted in GIS as the numbers in this thread show. It doesn't keep me up at night tossing and turning, but being a person of broad interests, I was definitely disappointed when I wanted to use the data in the National Dataset and found out what the restrictions were. I'm far from convinced that the best choice was made or that the advantages you elaborate were genuinely dependent upon that specific government/private "partnership." But what do I know?
That very first amendment is my all time favorite. Let's look at that one more time. It's a beauty.
`The term `financial gain' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value . ..
Let's crop that and move in closer.
Financial gain includes . . . anything of value.
Wow, that's pretty interesting isn't it? Receipt of anything of value is the same as financial gain. So, if I tell my wife I love her --that's a financial transaction, right? Should I declare that on my taxes? Or is it that love has no value? Must be one or the other according to the logic of this law.
This is so intriguing how Congress is basing laws on terms like "value" without stopping to consider that any freshman philosophy class flunkie could tell you that value is an extremely vague word. It could mean just about anything.
In fact, it has often been concluded that all speech is an exchange of value. Human speech is one step above grooming behavior in chimps. Now, clearly this is nothing buy the exchange of value. Where is the limit here? I'll tell ya, there is none. It is ambiguous to the core. This amendment alone seems to make the NET Act so absurd that it is useless.
Thanks for bringing up the National Elevation Dataset. You say it's the best thing since sliced bread for the "GIS community." But what does "community" mean here? I found it rather offensive that my government spent all this tax payer money on creating maps that only work with one particular commercial application. Sure, it's an awesome resource but only for those in the "community" that consists of the priveleged group having enough bucks to buy proprietary software at a thousand bucks a seat.
Did ESRI pay for that satellite imaging? Hell no. That's taxpayer money. Why are they, and their Win2K required software mandated to access data aquired with taxpayer money.
Oh, yeah, if you have a copy of ArcView then you're free to export into DXF. What the hell kind of subsidy is that?
Okay, end of rant. But I am sure few people outside the GIS "community" are aware of this gross misdirection of public funds. Yeah, satellite maps are great and space technology is wonderful, but let's not skip the real details of how this fails to actually benefit 99% of the public in the way that it could.
WElp, I did a bit of research as well and you're right that it does leave the Earth, but your tone of urgency, which I'm assuming, may be a bit displaced.
Helium makes up about 0.0005% of the earth's atmosphere. This trace amount of helium is not gravitationally bound to the earth and is constantly lost to space. The earth's atmospheric helium is replaced by the decay of radioactive elements in the earth's crust. Alpha decay, one type of radioactive decay, produces particles called alpha particles. An alpha particle can become a helium atom once it captures two electrons from its surroundings. This newly formed helium can eventually work its way to the atmosphere through cracks in the crust.
So, yeah, you're right it's leaving, but it's also being replaced by natural radioactivity so that even after all the hydrocarbons are used up, natural gas wells will still be producing helium for millions of years.
According to Praxair, fifty percent of current natural gas consists of helium. So, it's not all that rare which helps to explain why it's not all that expensive.
Well this is the crux of the problem. The people that you're accusing of *cheering the thieves on* are of the opinion that exchanging information non-commericially is not thieving. Your opinion is value laden and you can choose not to see that, but you can't prevent others from pointing that out.
I'm a fan of Chomsky as well, but I do see some problems that emerge from his background in linguistics. It's a series of complex issues, but to sum it up the social sciences are problematic at their core. While Chomsky is rarely wrong in a logical sense, politics goes far beyond logic and this is a real failing in my opinion.
Yep, in fact, that's what these high priced one-second scan machines consist of, just an array of digital cameras that stitch the image back together. That's why they're so much faster than a flatbed.
Doing my own experiments, I've found that my old 1.3 megapixel digital camera can easily produce a readable image of one page of a magazine but when I run it through OCR I probably get less than forty percent accuracy on glossy paper with small fonts. If I use a book with fairly large fonts I can get OCR probably closer to eighty percent which is still not too hot, but you can easily get an idea of what it says.
But that's with a 1.5 megapixel camera. These days six megapixels are cheaper than that one was when I bought it four years ago. I read, on Slashdot if I'm not mistaken, that professional scan machines usually have an array of image sensors in the range of fifteen megapixels. So perhaps two six megapixel cameras in a mounting and with a script to automatically paste them together would give you acceptable results.
Alternately, there was another story, also on Slashdot, about camera phones that had built-in stitching that allowed decent scans with a lower resolution camera. Some day that will likely be interesting, but I'd think two high end digital cameras could give you some interesting results with a bit of scripting magic. Perhaps you could use a naming scheme during capture so you could keep track of which images were meant to be stitched in which order.
As a follow up for people too busy to read the PDF or who don't like PDFs, I'll give away the plot. Basically, it's trivial to create false positives.
It is important to notice the difference between a false positive and a false negative. With a false negative, there's a powerful motivation to address the issue, but with a false positive if nobody makes any noise evberybody is happy. So, you have to be really careful about how well you monitor for false positives. Just because nobody complains, doesn't mean it is working.
My/. user journal has some more info on my personal interaction with this product.
Slashdot Mirror
on the behalf of a stock investment minded publication that wants to see a reason for everyone to go out and buy stuff.
But convergence will certainly come. For stock broker types though, the development that will bring it is not a welcome guest. That is, home "printed" appliances.
Rapid prototyping, as the technology for printing three dimensional objects is typically called, is a reality today. Most of the costs are related to intellectual property rights in the form of patents and patents in this field have limited durations. So, it's just a matter of time before the economics make it such that you could buy a box to "print" out all your whitegoods from generic "open source" 3-D models cheaper than you could buy them. When you factor in the savings in transportation and associated service costs, such a device could create enormous savings. The basic materials can be recyled as well so there would be no reason not to redesign your home interior as the seasons changed if you so desired.
I think is all quite reasonable and likely and with it will naturally come convergence of the data layer. When the rest of the design and assembly is open, then naturally the communications protocols will also be open and devices will seamlessly communicate with one another.
But Business Week isn't interested in this particular vision of the future, I'm sure. Far too radical for the business classes.
Well this is the whole bizarre point.
The RIAA has spent all this effort and garnered all this bad publicity over P2P, but there's this alternative to P2P that leads to precisely the same result and it is clearly legal.
And it's not just P2P. The whole notion of the PVR is almost identical to time shifting digital radio. The end result of using time shifting technology on digital radio and HDTV is identical to using P2P. The user ends up with a hard drive full of MP3s and MPEGs. But this is hardly an argument in their favor, this is daming evidence against their earlier quixotic foibles.
The conclusion that digital radio and PVR technology brings to center stage is what everyone has said all along --they were wrong. P2P was legit all along and this is the best evidence. The identical result of P2P still arises even without P2P. The simple fact is that this has never been a moral issue, it has been a technical issue that they have tried to simply run from because they procrastincated too long on innovating.
The digital radio issue isn't the **AA's next victim, it's the last straw.
Here's a link that goes straight to the "story" it's really just a note. But it has a few links and I think one of those has their PDF that is an awesome read.
What is much more interesting, in my opinon is open source lab hardware and, in fact, there is such a thing. There is a team at at UCSD who's whole lab is dedicated to using plain old PC-CDRoms to do analysis of samples. That is far more empowering for the open source style of operation than just some academic collaboration that has settled on a database format.
The project is called Discode. I've written to the guy who is the head of the project for my own biotech site I started putting together last year. Right now they have a web page that is very cryptic, but they're looking for kernel hackers who have experience in CD-ROM drivers. Now, that's hot. That's real open source. At my still not quite public site, I have a few links to press releases of their first published paper on their work.
Well, it has been argued many times and there is abundant evidence to support the notion that the success of the US wouldn't have been anything like it has if it weren't, in fact, a fairly socialist nation.
Teachers like to joke that the Democratic party is actually merely a front for the National Education Association and it's not that far from the truth. And when you look at this huge pillar of the American community that is the education system, you can easily see that it is a form of welfare state.
Look at the recent shake-up at Disney to knock Eisner down a peg. Who did that? That was done by the California Pulic Enployees Retirement System, CalPers. So, all the rhetoric about America fighting against socialism is just that, we've been socialists all along.
Well clearly this demonstrates that Intel really does get the best smoke on the market today. That shit has got to be pricey, because the whole joint is stoned out of their heads.
Let's do some math for them. If we leave our PCs on all day --and that is why we have 24/7 broadband connections isn't it-- that's 5KW/Hrs a day.
At 15cents KW/Hr it now costs seventy five cents a day to have an Intel CPU. That's twenty bucks a month.
But do you get 15cents per KW/Hr lately? Check your bill, you might be closer to twenty cents. A buck a day. Hey, I running the Intel PC costs almost as much as broadband. Perhaps they should include free broadband connections with these things.
But since I don't have the bandwidth, I'll point you to the original article. Here. And this is pressingly relevant because these traditional journals are claiming that they're upholding the scientific tradition, while, in fact, the evidence is that they are pressing their editorial slant to try and bend the agenda of independent researchers to their whims.
is that it contains a troubling assumption that the whole, which he defines as the final customer solution at the software level, is known in advance and will be engineered by Big Blue.
That sounds nice at first with IBM being such a supporter of open software. But it seems to be a bit optomistic in its assumption that software development, and particularly open source software, is a homogenous and readily controlled process.
It's not just open source. I think one of the reasons Longhorn is so far off is that Bill Gates insists it will have voice recognition, but there's no way he can get that in a form that will satisfy his massive, massive audiance that is not going to learn how to speak the right way to make it work. So, MS waits hoping some little start-up somewhere will make use of the latest chip speed improvements to paste together something saleable. But in this holistic systems approach where clock speed no longer matters, that generic speech recognition system doesn't happen because those solutions aren't done by little software start-ups, they require hardware resources or as this guy refers to it holistic approaches.
Clearly the desktop is ugly at this point and the advantage is with people in markets like embedded sytems where there is still plenty of growth and a clear road map for clock speed improvements. For the desktops, it should be all about clustering and with RDMA and Gig ethernet that's not a problem. A version of RDMA called i-warp is supposed to be in typical consumer grade GigE NICs by the end of this year. And of course the GigE standard scales right up to 10GbE even with copper for short runs. So, there's another level of power to be had. The catch here is how do you appeal to the broad consumer market with this new calss of product and the answer is probably you don't, this is the end of the line for awhile.
As he mentioned, there's reconfigureable computing. But I think its a bit silly to asume something like that is closer to maturity than clustering with something like i-warp in the cards. Proprietary solutions just don't cut it. Look at Infinniband. It was backed by plenty of big names, but a few huge names isn't enough. You need a homogenous target that literally thousands of independent developers can all work towards to get real progress. Clustering does that, perhaps not as it is now, but with RDMA it will be quite different. The question is whether there is even the will to begin the process of commodifying clustered computing.
if you could make it display the wavform of an MP3 player in near real time. But, it didn't sound like that was doable. I'd buy one if it could do that.
Amen to that.
I find the prejudice against independent research in biotech very disturbing. Why should some minority's morality or vaguely defined fears determine the limits of those researchers willing to reach out to the next level of progress. The real breakthroughs alomst cannot come from conventional labs.
As has been mentioned a few times in this thread, mother nature is a total mad scientist randomly mutating DNA every second that goes by. Why is it that when we try to apply our human gifts to these intricate processes that suddenly it is guarnteed to produce some horrendous outcome.
I don't want to attack Bill Joy personally, but it sounds like he's living out some issues that might have more to do with his own mortality and relationship to his children than anything else.
The guild idea is absurd and secrecy? My God, what the hell is he thinking? How is he deciding who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? And the insurance thing? Well, no wonder he didn't publish the book. That is a very strange idea. First, it would limit research to those with vast financial resources and then the real question is what good would insurance do if his worst projections did come true? To use his own analogy, why is it that nobody sells nuclear war insurance? This is a fairly simple anaology that you think someone as apparently sophisticated as Bill Joy would be able to grasp fairly early. His failure to make such obvious connections makes me think his real message may be more about his own personal life than about technology in gneral and perhaps he has confused the boundaries of the two.
I thought the questionaire was a very good idea. It is an interesting approach because it's not so simple to pawn it off on some low level campaign worker and its not as easy to throw away and ignore as a simple statement in favor of a position.
Unfortunately, it was slashdotted by the time I went to look at it so I didn't see all the language.
But I think there is some logic to the straightforward language. If you phrase it directly it might seem less friendly, but it is also less likely that the recipient will say --well none of the answers really fit the question so I couldn't answer it. It would be fair to say that a position on an issue is a separate issue from a vote. If you give politicians wiggle room, they'll take it. That's their job.
This is analogous to why the US Constitution doesn't have a right to privacy per se, but has a right against unreasonable search and seizure. While the former sounds like a reasonable idea, it is too ambiguous to be functional as legal language.
The very big problem with these theories is that they overlook the source of the hardware. They're operating on the illusion that it is possible to control the products coming predominantly out of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Mainland China. That belief is not well grounded and it is a huge oversight.
First of all, these nations of origin are themselves not even close to being a homogenous entity. It's not as though East Asia even has a single currency or is even moving in that direction. This is a fiercely independent part of the world that is wrapped up in political details that most westerners don't even care to know the details about. Taiwan and China are the best example, but the troubled relationship between Japan and the rest of Asia is no less prominent for people in the region. We could go on and on.
Even within Taiwan, it would be absurd to pretend that there is cohesion among the players in just the motherboard market. Give that reality, these specualtions are little more than wishful thinking on the part of washed up software companies.
Sure, hardware will be so cheap it will be as-if it were free. But it will be running free software as well. I'm sure of that.
"Personally, the only robot I'm interested in is a sex-slave android and I don't think we'll be seeing any of those in my lifetime."
I shouldn't be giving away my plans to rule the world and make a zillion bucks, but the sex robot might not be as difficult as you think. As always, you start off with what has already been done. In this case, there's already a major growth industry in robotic milking machines.
In fact, the reason there's so much growth in the field is that cows actually prefer robotic milkers and tend to go in for an extra milking a day because it just feels right. I'm not kidding. This is precisely why there is growth despite the costs, the diary ends up with higher milk production.
So, perhaps an android is out of the question so far, but how about 1090i video on a cube of four 42 inch high resolution panels and a milk machine!
You heard it here first baby.
And as for this hot air toy, how the hell is it a robot if you have to put the shirt on it yourself?
Why does free software need a leader?
I think the closest political analogy for open source enthusiasts should appropriately come from Monty Python's Holy Grail:
We're an anarcho syndicalist commune . . . political power comes from a direct mandate by the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Obviously the major concern is about the damage done to individual privacy, but there's another side to it that, in the long run, can be just as important.
When a government agency begins covertly compiling personal data on individuals, it sets in motion a long chain of events that can have implications far beyond the act of gathering data.
While it is easily possible to keep such record gathering secret for a period of time, history shows that eventually these efforts tend to make it into the public eye. When that happens, the result is often quite the opposite of what was originally intended.
It has happened over and over that political leaders come into power by virtue of the fact that they were the focus of investigations of entities that lost power. These secret lists eventually turn into a who's who of the next body politic. By focusing on certain individuals in hopes of pinning some dirt of them, the opposite effect is often achieved.
So, like so many things in life, this too is a doubled edged street, or a two-way sword or whatever symmetry metaphor you prefer.
Well cool. I really appreciate all your info. You are clearly well in the GIS community. In fact, you even listed the reason I was looking at the dataset. I bought some land and I wanted to use the data to help in planning the building of a house. That's where I picked up the idea that ArcView was NT only because the free viewer definitely is. See, how that works? Sure they use Linux on the way expensive stuff, but when it comes to the casual user it's lock-in time.
But I think the best analogy here is in the genome project. Consider this for a moment: both of these are literally mapping projects. That's not a metaphor, that's a fact. Both involve major government spending and the use of taxpayer money to fund extensive technical research. In the case of genomic and proteomic mapping though, there is a difference which was since the project was so massive, it was done internationally. In an international research program, open standards are the only choice.
So, considering it in this light, I think that it's clear that a truly vast mapping project can be done using open formats. In fact, if the project is so big, it's a perfect time to create a new and open standard. It's not about complexity, it is about will. In the case of the national dataset there was no will.
You ended up at the end doing a bit of preaching about the glory of GIS, and I think if you look back at my post you're not going to find me badmouthing GIS technology. As a matter of fact, I believe I was quite careful to close up my post by saying that I think satellite imagery is an excellent investment of government funds. So there's no need to preach to the choir as though they were a buncha sinners.
You mentioned my point exactly if you'll permit to quote
"they have become the industry standard (sort of the MS of the GIS community)."
And this puts the hammer right on the head of the damn nail. All you got to do is let her drop.
I know this I'm telegraphing this one for a mile and a yard, but why the hell does the US government need to take a taxpayer funded project and help to create the MS of the GIS community? If these guys are the MS of the GIS community then they should be the last ones getting subsidized with taxpayer dollars.
I'm not sure I see the utility of that from my outsiders perspective. Perhaps only people in the "community" have the vision to see how that is in the best interest of the public.
But hey, I'm not trying to be jerk about it. I just have a dramatic flair I find hard to tone down. It's not the end of the world although it is disturbing and I stick to my epithet of gross misdirection of government funds. But obviously there's hardly anybody intersted in GIS as the numbers in this thread show. It doesn't keep me up at night tossing and turning, but being a person of broad interests, I was definitely disappointed when I wanted to use the data in the National Dataset and found out what the restrictions were. I'm far from convinced that the best choice was made or that the advantages you elaborate were genuinely dependent upon that specific government/private "partnership." But what do I know?
That very first amendment is my all time favorite. Let's look at that one more time. It's a beauty.
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`The term `financial gain' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value . .
Let's crop that and move in closer.
Financial gain includes . . . anything of value.
Wow, that's pretty interesting isn't it? Receipt of anything of value is the same as financial gain. So, if I tell my wife I love her --that's a financial transaction, right? Should I declare that on my taxes? Or is it that love has no value? Must be one or the other according to the logic of this law.
This is so intriguing how Congress is basing laws on terms like "value" without stopping to consider that any freshman philosophy class flunkie could tell you that value is an extremely vague word. It could mean just about anything.
In fact, it has often been concluded that all speech is an exchange of value. Human speech is one step above grooming behavior in chimps. Now, clearly this is nothing buy the exchange of value. Where is the limit here? I'll tell ya, there is none. It is ambiguous to the core. This amendment alone seems to make the NET Act so absurd that it is useless.
Did ESRI pay for that satellite imaging? Hell no. That's taxpayer money. Why are they, and their Win2K required software mandated to access data aquired with taxpayer money.
Oh, yeah, if you have a copy of ArcView then you're free to export into DXF. What the hell kind of subsidy is that?
Okay, end of rant. But I am sure few people outside the GIS "community" are aware of this gross misdirection of public funds. Yeah, satellite maps are great and space technology is wonderful, but let's not skip the real details of how this fails to actually benefit 99% of the public in the way that it could.
So, yeah, you're right it's leaving, but it's also being replaced by natural radioactivity so that even after all the hydrocarbons are used up, natural gas wells will still be producing helium for millions of years.
According to Praxair, fifty percent of current natural gas consists of helium. So, it's not all that rare which helps to explain why it's not all that expensive.
Well this is the crux of the problem. The people that you're accusing of *cheering the thieves on* are of the opinion that exchanging information non-commericially is not thieving. Your opinion is value laden and you can choose not to see that, but you can't prevent others from pointing that out.
I'm a fan of Chomsky as well, but I do see some problems that emerge from his background in linguistics. It's a series of complex issues, but to sum it up the social sciences are problematic at their core. While Chomsky is rarely wrong in a logical sense, politics goes far beyond logic and this is a real failing in my opinion.
Yep, in fact, that's what these high priced one-second scan machines consist of, just an array of digital cameras that stitch the image back together. That's why they're so much faster than a flatbed.
Doing my own experiments, I've found that my old 1.3 megapixel digital camera can easily produce a readable image of one page of a magazine but when I run it through OCR I probably get less than forty percent accuracy on glossy paper with small fonts. If I use a book with fairly large fonts I can get OCR probably closer to eighty percent which is still not too hot, but you can easily get an idea of what it says.
But that's with a 1.5 megapixel camera. These days six megapixels are cheaper than that one was when I bought it four years ago. I read, on Slashdot if I'm not mistaken, that professional scan machines usually have an array of image sensors in the range of fifteen megapixels. So perhaps two six megapixel cameras in a mounting and with a script to automatically paste them together would give you acceptable results.
Alternately, there was another story, also on Slashdot, about camera phones that had built-in stitching that allowed decent scans with a lower resolution camera. Some day that will likely be interesting, but I'd think two high end digital cameras could give you some interesting results with a bit of scripting magic. Perhaps you could use a naming scheme during capture so you could keep track of which images were meant to be stitched in which order.
As a follow up for people too busy to read the PDF or who don't like PDFs, I'll give away the plot. Basically, it's trivial to create false positives. /. user journal has some more info on my personal interaction with this product.
It is important to notice the difference between a false positive and a false negative. With a false negative, there's a powerful motivation to address the issue, but with a false positive if nobody makes any noise evberybody is happy. So, you have to be really careful about how well you monitor for false positives. Just because nobody complains, doesn't mean it is working.
My
If you're interested to know what their own research shows, you may find this paper an eyeopener.
The paper is a PDF called "Stumping e-Rater" commissioned by ETS, the developers of the product.