Right, and he seems to be suggesting that Libertarians are leftists. This another enormous assumption. I tend to think that libertarianism is the greatest thing that ever happened to the Republicans because it makes a lot of people who have liberal social values like not caring what drugs people take on the weekends or how others have sex feel that somehow their views are better expressed by the Republicans than the Democrats. I agree the twin parties both suck at this point and that the Democrats hardly seem like an alternative, but I know people who clearly have liberal social values and take drugs and have kinky sex lives who, due to their faith in libertarianism, actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their minds.
From my observations, I have an answer to the question of why there are so many Libertarians in tech. My observation may be an oversimplification, but oversimplification is the crux of the issue as I see it. From the Libertarians that I have spoken with there seems to be a common thread of wanting to break things down into fundamental principles and having faith that there really are fundamental phenomena such as market forces that can control society for the best if they are allowed to operate unfettered. To me, this is just an absurd and ignorant proposition, but it's not surprising that you see people in tech get so hung up on this because it mirrors the rules that govern technology and especially computers and most particularly computer hardware.
When you get right down to it, there's no question that what makes machine computing possible is the simplification of the input: that is the conversion from decimal to binary. Without the concept of binary numeracy, computing is simply too complicated. If you are willing to accept the premise that you can build everything else up from a binary number system including the letters of the alphabet and even arrays representing graphics and wave forms to represent sounds and scale it all up into extremely high definition representations of the analog world then you can easily delude yourself into the thought process that everything must be based upon similar fundamental principles and that the only way to govern behavior and society is to identify and rely upon those principles.
As seductive as this is to people, it's really closed minded and ignorant of how we got to where we are today in terms of technology and society in general. The eighteenth century French mathematicians who laid the mathematical foundations for what would become digital signal processing such as Fourier were the models upon which the concept of communists were founded. Marx was totally in awe of these intellectuals who demonstrated the intellectual courage to overturn the simplistic ideas of paternalist monarchy which is really where the libertarians are closer to in their worship of imaginary gods like the invisible hand.
Here's the information you're interested in. I'm sure you're genuinely interested rather than merely being one of these typical right wing assholes hoping to discredit any opinion you don't like by asking for documentation in the rhetorical manner of Rush Limbaugh or one of the many idiots at Fox News.
I'm willing to assume you're not one of those fascist cunts and that you really are interested in the facts. In that case, this is the video I refer to:
Easiest Targets: The Israeli Policy of Strip Searching Women and Children
description:13-minute video: Five women - Palestinian, American, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish - tell stories of humiliation and harassment by Israeli border guards and airport security officials.
In fact, you will find testimoney by American Christians and Jews as well as Palestinians if you take the time to watch the video.
I can't believe the people on here acting like this is a good thing or that Israeli style air force security is a step in the right direction. I just saw a documentary on how the Israelis routinely cavity search ten year old girls just because they are Palestinians. The intent is not to find anything, but to intimidate them and their families from returning to Israel. Even Israeli citizens, particularly female, who have publicly disagreed with militarist policies are strip searched simply to humiliate them and discourage them from travel.
That's really where we should be heading in America, is it now? So, since our Palestinians equivalents are the Mexicans then I suppose our lovely new Israeli style airport security policy ought to include strip searching and fondling all young Mexican girls in order to discourage them from travel. I mean after all, that's the example the Israelis offer. It has worked so well for them so far, hasn't it.
If we really want to stop terrorism, then perhaps we should start by not dropping bombs on foreign countries and killing hundreds of civilians each week. That might be an even more effective method than assigning the gestapo to the airports.
Great, you finally brought up the really grotesque and injust point and I'm glad we got around to it before this thread closes. Obviously it needs to be stated as plainly as possible because there is a curious mix here of people who have a thorough knowledge of accounting and those who keep their money in a piggy bank.
The ugly part here is in the amortization in the accounting sense and the concept of depreciation. Obviously the previous post doesn't need a lecture on the basics, but most people obviously do from a quick look at the off-the-wall posts below. Sadly, I'm short of time so let's just make it a real quick summary.
What makes capital expense golden and labor costs shit is the concept of depreciation. You cannot depreciate labor costs, but you can depreciate capital expenditures. This is the fundamental basis of corporate welfare. The state subsidizes businesses through tax refunds on capital expenditures.
Get it?
Of course there are other nefarious factors as well that drive the process even more such as the fact that by raising capital costs you can create barriers to entry and thus form the basis for the plutocratic system we use in the States today where the meaning of competition has been twisted to mean at least two brands used in marketing for each product category.
Stop and think about the shipping analogy here. Yes, there is some labor involved in shipping, but is that where the majority of costs in shipping come from? That would only be true if you were paying stevadores to unload the contents of a sailing ship onto a dock. Or let's say you were delivering packages via the Pony Express. Those were the situations Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote Wealth of Nations. But that's not where we are right now.
In today's world, where do the costs go for shipping? They obviously go to purchase, fueling and maintenance of vehicles. Purchases of Boeing 747 cargo jets, fleets of tractor-trailers, warehouse facilities and mountains of cargo containers are right at the heart of what's known as capital expenditure.
That's a lousy argument in a business environment.
The theory that big busineses are all about reducing costs is an oversimplification. Some small businesses worry about keeping costs as low as possible, but generally this is not a major issue for the big ones because they essentially control their markets and can charge whatever they want. The consumer is picking up the tab, so who cares about costs. Take the US telecoms market for example. Does anyone honestly think they're trying to control costs. If so, then why is the US so pathetic in comparison to the global market. Large corporations are just as wasteful as the large governments that they've taken over for in so many industries like telecoms that used to be heavily regulated. There's no efficiency added in this transition, just a new social model. What big businesses do is not to cut costs at every corner. No, what they do is whatever is best for the business ecosystem that they are a part of.
To know what that is, you need to understand some of the core principles of business. There are two particularly important categories of costs from a business perspective regardless of size and those are labor costs versus capital costs. Theses costs are not of equalent from a business management perspective. Labor costs are under constant pressure because they drag businesses down. Labor costs are the enemy of business and as a manager you always look for ways to reduce labor costs so as a worker you might get the idea that cost controls are what business is all about. But that's only half the picture. The other side of the coin is capital costs. Capital costs, on the other hand, are actually a good thing if you run a business. If you understand this you understand that there is a genuine fundamental resistance to open source in business for reasons that are much more complex than simply whether or not it costs more. Open source cuts capital costs and empowers labor which is not a good thing from a business leader's perspective.
And I'm not blaming the managers here. The people who make decisions in a company are just as much trapped in the game as the lowest level janitorial employees. They have to compete against other companies using the rules that companies play by and thus they need to make their decisions according to the laws of capital and not according to what makes sense or what they think is right or wrong. Often times business decisions do not make the slightest bit of sense from a practical perspective and yet they work from a business angle.
So arguing about whether Microsoft costs more is really not going to make much of a difference. The point is: even if Microsoft does costs more, it can cost a thousand times more and still make sense from a business perspective because it is counted as a capital cost and capital costs are good from a business perspective. Look at how US telecoms are still committed to an extremely costly ATM infrastructure in an on-going effort to block out VoIP. Clearly, reducing costs, especially capital costs, is not a major goal for large corporations. Labor costs, on the other hand, those make sense to cut. Ask your boss if he would like you to take a cut in your wages and I'm sure he'll totally see your point.
It can be done. Good luck doing rule based routing with tk though.
Anyhow, I was checking this out when it came out on Linux Devices the other day and it's intriguing but it's still more of an embedded device and they don't give you much access to the IO without an additional module that sort of detracts from the small form factor sexiness. I'd like to see something like a DIY Arduino type board based on the chip though.
That reaffirms Marx like nothing else because, as Marx stated clearly numerous time, the goal of Marxist Communism was, in fact, the creation of wealth. The creation of abundant wealth is the fundamental goal of Marxism as stated by Marx. So, since it was assumed that Capitalism was merely a phase on the way towards Communism this would simply be an alternate route to Marxist Communism. The Trotskyists would be wrong because they believed that revolution was the only way to achive this goal but this would fit right in with Marx' visions as well as those of Aristotle as laid out in Politics which were no doubt of some influence on Marx.
Oh fuck, I shoulda hit preview. I suck. I worded it so carefully and then fucked it. That last bit starting with "Let me clarify. .." was a false start from an earlier paragraph that was supposed to be deleted. What a bitch. Oh well, this thread is already ancient.
I am of the opinion that when people mechanically regurgitate the often repeated wisdom that time equals money, they are all too often implying something other than what such an equation states on its face. I am afraid we are seeing that happen in this thread.
If it were really true that time and money were equivalences and that one could be exchanged for the other in some fixed precise measure, then people who say that time is money would be quite satisfied to recieve time rather than money as a form of payment.
Of course it's quite simple to see that this is not what people mean when they say that time is equal to money. So what do people really mean when they repeat this aphoristic phrase? My opinion is that what a person usually intends the audiance to accept is that, in fact, money is more valuable than time. I can imagine a situation in which this phrase makes perfect sense indeed.
Take this example as an illustration of how the phrase might be used with great effect. Let us imagine a person being paid for their time through some contract such as an hourly laborer. If the laborer was taking a nap while on the clock and the manager noticed, the manager might quite naturally accuse the laborer of cheating on the contract by not maximizing the efficiency of his work time. The manager might effectively admonish the worker by giving him a good shake and saying --"wake up you good for nothing, time is money!" In such a case, clearly the real meaning is that the money is what is important and the real message is that the manager's money is more important than the worker's time. In this case, it does make sense that by wasting time one is also wasting money.
But, that is a very specific case. We cannot generalize the logic of this phrase into a broad law governing the universal relations between time and money. That would be fallacious logic and certainly only a fool would fall into such a simple minded trap.
Let there be no doubt, language is a slippery thing. It is but a minor sin when analogies appropriate in one situation might be sloppily redirected into another where they are no longer of use. But it is no longer a minor sin when those inappropriate and poorly considered usages become the basis of heated self-righteous rhetoric. The more so when this ill founded false logic becomes the justification for vicious, tyranical and oppressive behavior.
Let me clarify how I reach that conclusion by taking the example of the present debate. Here we're seeing debaters take the position that people who "create" ideas need to be paid money in
First off, this is cheating. I'm responding to a comment made at Blogspot here on Slashdot, but there's no way I'm creating an account over there just for this and besides they don't even have threaded conversations. Instead I'll quote the guy from Blogspot's comment here in full and then basically say he's full of shit.
Aaron said...
I am sorry, but as a psychometrician (i.e. someone who writes multiple choice tests and interprets the results), I have to simply chime in with this:
We know. That's why we don't just count correct answers.
Any major test (GRE, LSAT, TOEFL, TOEIC, etc.) uses some kind of item response theory (IRT) to determine the score. This means that the final score is actually the person's ability, given their performance on the items, which are weighted differently (to put it VERY simply) according to people's performance on them. It doesn't matter what easy-to-read numbers the test gives you as your score; your REAL score is a number between 0 and 1. Sometimes that number is rescaled to the actual number of items that were on the instrument to give people the illusion of a classical MC test.
Another point is this: Remember when you took your SAT (I think it was)? They told you not to guess if you weren't sure about that answer, right? The reason for that is that with a really well-worn and robust test, the developers have been able to figure out who picks which distractors, and can therefore derive further meaning from whatever option you choose. So instead of a simple binary item (right or wrong), they can create a partial-credit item. Say "A" is the right answer, but people who are pretty smart seem to pick "B" a lot. So maybe the stats will assign a value of 0.5 for that one. Maybe "C" is just a throwaway distractor and doesn't mean anything other than you missed the question. But what if "D" turns out to really distract total morons? The stats might end up assigning a NEGATIVE value if you pick that. So read the test specifications before you take a big test. If they say not to guess, that's why. What you don't know can actually hurt your score more than just skipping it.
Look into the Rasch model and multi-parameter IRT. It's late and I actually need to develop some questions tonight (no kidding!), so I leave it to you and Wikipedia.
So to sum up: Basically, you are right about the problems with MC tests, but wrong about how much this affects people's lives.
June 17, 2007 4:06 AM
So, as I was saying --bullshit.
I'm also a writer of GRE/TOEFL practice tests and I am quite sure this is not true. This was true for the TOEFL, but only for a few years. With the advent of the computer based TOEFL in 2000 there were weighted responses and the successful implementation of this feature was one of the primary differentiations between software practice test products that were published at that time such as my own which you are welcome to buy on Amazon but I'm sure you won't if you're already reading this in English.
However, that computer test was dropped in favor of a radically redesigned test in 2005 --another reason you probably won't buy it at Amazon-- in which ETS specifically documented that they were dropping weighted scoring entirely. This was specifically stated in documentation from ETS and it was distresing to me because I was offering one of the few projects that had a reasonably accurate weighted scoring system so I am absolutely sure of this. It cost me money big time.
As for GRE, well this is location depdendent. In some locations the GRE computer based test still uses weighted scoring, but in most of Asia that test is no longer offered and a non-weighted test is currently the only choice. The reason the
I don't see how what you're saying would possibly happen in anything more than a very limited and ineffectual way because what this is all about control.
There's almost zero autonomy for the workers. They literally cannot walk off the site because of the limitations of the resonant induction power supply. They're like slaves on a leash and discipline is as simple as flipping a relay and their physical existence in the US ceases to exist, they may as well be dead. Try pulling that trick with immigrant workers. Clearly, remote video monitoring would be integrated on the tractor as a remote management tool to monitor the overall progress of the workers. Indeed, each individual robotic unit would also require a video feed just as a human worker requires. The difference is that with a human worker it is not feasible to have the management audit what their video stream. With this system you would not only be able to spot sabotage after the fact, you'd be able to verify exactly which node was responsible by reviewing the data.
If a "rebellion" as you suggest were to happen, say whole crews began to destroy crops simultaneously --and I fail to see how this is any different with human immigrants and refer you to the UFW's successes in the seventies-- you could simply cut the power, reboot the system and switch to a new worker pool. Joysticks, monitors and internet connections are all cheap commodities these days and don't tell me kids are scared of game controllers. These might actually be desireable jobs for young people even here in the States.
Besides, the whole purpose of this remote labor pool is not simply to switch labor dependence from one location to another. There are potentially great advantages in doing so, but that's not the end of the real goal. The real point is to develop a database of interactions that you can use as the basis for progress to a nearly autonomous system that doesn't need human labor or requires just a very minimal interaction.
Again, let's go back to the example of the Google human language translation system. How did it work? You start off by building a database of interactions that are successful and then use that data as the basis for honing sets of patterns that can then make the interactions less and less clumsy. Perhaps you find that out of a million interactions there are three hundred thousand involving a certain series of a dozen repititions. This becomes the basis for a possibly useful script that might increase efficiency drmatically. Then you implement the script and find that there are exceptions when it can't be used. You don't know where the refinements should go until you start the project. But eventually you may get to the point where a single remote worker might be able to harvest the same as dozens or even hundreds or thousands of poorly paid immigrant workers stooped over in the fields under the hot sun. Now you've traded a low-wage, physically brutal job that invlolves massive social costs for a potentially high paying kick-back desk job while simultaneously lowering the costs of produce. Nobody loses in that transition.
If it sounds utopian then consider that a hundred and fifty years ago ninety percent of the human population was directly involved in agriculture. We're already in a kind of utopia, but we can take it even further.
Glad you felt compelled to respond, but let me put this idea to you in a slightly different manner and see if you would be willing to concede that this is not such a frustrating issue.
But first, I'd just like to address this concept of Artificial Intelligence in general terms. When you put a label on something that doesn't currently exist and set it as a goal, it's not surprising that you can get to the point where you intellectually come to believe that it is infinitely elusive. After all, if it doesn't exist currently why should it suddenly appear just because you call for its existence. Perhaps the goal is based on false beliefs or assumptions about this thing called intelligence. In summary, perhaps Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist at all and never will regardless of technological advances. For that matter, perhaps human intelligence doesn't exist either or, to put it another way, the thing that we call human intelligence may not turn out to be a coherent single thing that can ever be understood.
Maybe the debate about intelligence is missing the real goal. The real goal that I set in my post is to make it cheaper and more efficient to harvest fruits and vegetables that currently require a delicate human touch by using sophisticated and powerful automated tools. Whether those machines can offer their opinons on McLuhan's media analysis is of no import. (That's supposed to be a cute nod to Woody Allen.)
But let me give you a nice specific example from a recent Slashdot story. Didn't we recently read about how Google's approach to natural language translation sidesteps the whole AI boondoggle and kicks ass on all previous attempts that are based on complex AI schemes? And how did they do that? They just used a huge database of samples and statistically worked out what was an effective translation the majority of the time. There's no AI in that, it's just simple use of statistical filtering from a large databse of samples. Call it brute force math if you like. But the important point is, it works quite well. That's an important point, isn't it?
Okay, so now let's move to a new take on this farm labor solution. What if, instead of assuming that AI is the only possibility we take the realistic approach that many existing robotic solutions are primarily based on remote control. That's closer to reality, isn't it? Now we have all the "intelligence" we need. But you might protest, how does this save labor if we still need human operators for our robot teams. Ah hah, welcome the Internet. Yeah, you know where I'm going: outsourcing. We still have low-cost foreign labor, but we don't have to pay for the enormous infrastructure required to support their impoverished immigrant families.
But even better, once you have teams of outsourced low-cost robot operators working on these robotic systems for months and months and years and years you can save those interactions into a massive database. Through this process, you develop a pool of human, machine interactions from which you can begin to filter out those interactions that are successful and those that are not just like Google does with their translation technique.
Instead of starting from nothing and trying to reach some impossible goal, you start off with a large database of successful examples of what has worked in the past and then begin to look for redundancies and patterns. Scripts should emerge readily simply by setting the standards and getting started collecting the data. This is doable and all based on real-world commodity technologies. I'm sure Carnegie Mellon is a fine place and I wish them all the best in their quest, but the missing ingredient has been the low cost high-power density, not the lack of intelligence.
And quickly I'd like to address the comment below about this being a racist idea because I can see how it could easily be read that way. I belie
I came across this technology completely serendipitously a few weeks ago on How Things Work. There was a link to "wireless electricity" off the main page and I followed it and they discussed the MIT patents and I downloaded several different patents in the field. They were all from within the last few years and involved resonance coupled with induction.
What surprised me was the lack of imagination in the applications. They were talking about remotely recharging cell phones and MP3 players or letting you move around electronics without needing to find a plug. Well those are all fine ideas and quite obvious indeed but I saw nothing about the one area that seemed to potentially benefit the most from this: robotics.
All the pieces are there in robotics except for the one that this technology addresses: lightweight, high-density power. Oh, and let's not forget cheap.
Powering the lights without wires is a fine thing to do. I'm all for it. But what is the high energy deensity application that absolutely requires mobility? It seems to me that there is one in particular and that is robotics.
Moreover, this technology has a limitation of range that actually becomes a feature when applied to robotics. As we know all too well in the age of Iragi battle drones Asimov's laws of robotics are a fantasy relic of a time that couldn't imagine how software would really develop. The truth is, robots can be dangerous and this kind of technology effectively puts a leash on their range. They can do whatever within the home, but they can't just go out and go for a walk. It's a classic example of a limitation becoming a feauture.
So how would it solve the immigration issue?
I just mentioned this range limitation. So then, how could we use this for agricultural robots that would alleviate the need for low paid illegal immigrant farm labor? No problem. Obviously tractors bring their own power sources into the field. So, power in the field is not a problem. You would simply have gangs of robots attatched to resonant inductor power modules hanging off arms of the tractor. Say each tractor controls six platoons of robotic field hands with six resonant inductor orbs. They could work twenty four hours shifts. One tractor and labor gang could harvest dozens of farms per season in a timely manner.
If you need higher power, that's not a problem. There's no reason this technology is limited to 110volts. You can use 600V or 1200V. As much as you need. Your robotic workers would be as powerful as necessary.
Not only would it eliminate the need for foreign labor, it would also reduce the need to use high impact farming techniques such as posioning the soil with bromide gas and laying down plastic mulch. These things are done in the name of economy because it's too expensive to have human labor go through a farm and pick weeds. Monocrops are also planted for the same economic considerations. By dramatically shifting the labor equation you would enable a vast increase in the use of organic farming techniques.
The implications of this technology are far more revolutionary than re-charging an MP3 player.
You're absolutely right. I have no problem whatsoever with people "playing God" which seems to be part of the angle the ETC Group is taking. I think this is a recurring theme in biotech where we have people who detest these patents as a further abuse in the name of intellectual property on the one hand and on the other hand we've got these people who profess some kind of vague conservative religious fear of competing with a creator God who is somehow jealous of human knowledge. These two positions are worlds apart and yet both result in the same attitude towards these types of patents.
I believe it was James Watson who said --If scientists don't play God, who will? I agree one hundred percent. By all means let's play God to our heart's content. I would go so far as saying I have no qualms whatsoever about destroying embryos for therapeutic purposes. The moral issues is these matters simply don't exist as far as I'm concerned. And yet, I am disgusted by this report, but not because the researchers are playing God. I am upset that they are attempting to use the force of the government and ultimately the police to monopolize a form of life. That is just wrong as are all patents in the area of genetic engineering.
Well, that's a very good question. I'm speculating here. My speculation is that you'll be seeing plenty of Atmels' AT90CAN128's in the future. But I would grant that so far they're still too new to be found in junked cars. But my point still stands because these guys are going out in mass quantities. It's a little early to be seeing them in the junkyards, but they'll end up there eventually.
And since you're still checking on this thread, let me get your opinion on this article. I read this when it came out in '03 and it was partly where I developed my idea that ethernet was inappropriate for microcontroller networks. Would you disagree with what the author says here, or do you think maybe the disadvantages are being overplayed?
And you might find this interesting as well. I should have posted it earlier. It's about a project to use CAN in home automation hosted at Sourceforge.
Seriously, let me know your opinions. I won't be a dick again. That was out of character and I really do feel bad if I upset Apuku up there. He's clearly a pro and I'm just a freak with a lot of diverse interests repeating what I heard elsewhere. Although, if Apuku does ever look back on this thread I have to say one more thing to him.
Yeah, fair enough. I'm on the coast of an island and there was an intense storm front moving in here off the Taiwan Strait and when that happens the pressure drops like crazy and it does tend to make the skin boil and tempers flare. I did actually regret the post and it wasn't very effective as I wrote it.
But the storm has passed and I'm chilled out. Actually, another one is about to hit and it's muggy as hell but I'm sheepish about being a dick again so I'm keeping it in check. Nonethless, this idea that ethernet is the hot new thing and CAN is on the way out really does raise my eyebrows. I'm not an automotive engineer, but I'm interested in automation enough that I do read up on the topic regularly by lurking on the forums at control.com, PLCS.net and several topics at LabView including the quite active CAN forum. So perhaps I'm just an armchair enthusiast, but I believe I'm getting a fairly decent perspective on what's going on and this is the first I'm hearing about the impending demise of CAN.
Moreover, at Linux Devices you find most of the coolest new products are also using CAN such as the recent gee-whiz just-in-time specialty ice-cream vending machine they featured a few months ago. So, I had a few examples in mind that made me skeptical. I didn't need to be caustic about it, but like I said it was one of those days.
I looked at Apuku's web site and this seems like their product is primarily intended as a connection between PLCs which is slightly different definition of automation than what I was thinking. See, to me, a house is not all that different from a car in a lot of ways that are relevant to the original post. Specifically, home automation has a lot in common with the type of electronic automation we see in a car. For example: you get in a car and you want your lighting to be automatically adjusted for you, you want your favorite seat perhaps to adjust to some preset positions, you want the entertainment system to respond to your commands in an intuitive manner. You see where I'm going here? The current consensus in the automotive industry is that these tasks are best done with a controller area network, not ethernet.
I completely accept the point that there is a trend in industrial automation to use ethernet and even have devices get their IPs through DHCP and then use web interfaces which I think sounds psychotic but whatever. I'm not saying that is not a trend in industry. But while I would concede that point, I would nonethless question the assumption that there is an automatic saving of money with ethernet. I'm thinking this ignores the fact that the retail market for electronics includes grey aftermarkets such as automobile junkyards where device controllers that already have house control-like functions such as lighting, entertainment system controls, hydraulics controls, and environmental controls exist for almost no cost which could be re-purposed by a real pimp.
The original post was, after all, entitled "Pimping Out a New House" was it not? And where, I put it to you with all due respect this time, was that phrase popularized?
Apuku has it all figured out. I guess we better call the SAE and let them know that the decision is final, Apuku has made his decision. The new trend is using data architectures for control networks. This should be interesting as we attempt to design drive-by-wire systems using ethernet packet switching. But I'm sure Apuku wouldn't steer us in the wrong way.
Start off with the basics. The data network and the home automation network should be separate. Data should be old school for any slashdotter, but home automation is where you can really do something impressive. And for that, I would recommend that you look into CAN or Controller Area Networks. This is the primary system used by the automotive industry to make cars "smarter".
The reason CAN is so special is that it drives decision making into the network level. It's like taking Sun's motto of "the Network is the Computer" and applying it to large scale automation tasks. Most people try and go the easy way by using the off the shelf crap that is out there but the truth is that home automation has hardly begun because the real power tools are being largely ignored by the less than technically courageous types that typically do home automation.
on your sig and say that not only is DRM theft but very notion of intellectual property is theft; moreover, in matters of abundance and excess resources the addition of markets only serves to create poverty, not wealth.
Yes indeed, the problem surely goes well beyond Microsoft and Steve "McCarthy" Balmer.
But I want to point out something that I haven't seen so far although it is alluded to in some comments lower down a bit and that is the lack of software patent protections in Europe to date. I think this is a pretty major hole in this plan. If they really wanted to make this stick, they'd wait till a time when the forces of darkness push through some kind of onerous software protection scheme in the EU. The US is certainly Microsoft's largest market, but if you look at global sales such as in this link you see that a third of MS's market is outside the US and you'd think they might want to close up that little hole before they started whooping up the war cries.
I've been following this story since last week when the plan was leaked and then through Wednesday's postponement due to concerns about Cheney's physical status and through yesterday's news conference. What blew me away was the total lack of coverage it was getting in any press. In particular NPR really made me feel let down. I listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered non-stop for days and did not even hear the slightest mention of this while I sat through literally hours of interviews with neocon assholes like freaking William Kristol.
What a sad indictment of what has become of the broadcast media. The above posts that mention the re-alignment of the "center" way off to the right is clearly evidenced by this example. NPR has no time to even mention the beinning of an impeachment of Cheney but, on the other hand, there's plenty of time for a pleasant chuckling interview with Billy Kristol on the brighter side of McCane's chances on this so-called left leaning media outlet.
Don't forget the No Electronic Theft Act. Another Clinton Era monstrosity. But before you go and blame the Democrats, it was the Republicans who slipped in the worst part of the NET Act at the last minute in an amendment. The part I'm referring to is where the definition of "commercial exchange" is re-defined from meaning the exchange of copyrighted material in exchange for money, ie traditional piracy, to be replaced by the absurd definition where commercial exchange now means the exchange of copyrighted material for anything of any value. This language was targeted specifically at free peer-to-peer file sharing networks which had prior to that point arguably been exempt due to their lack of commercial exchange.
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
Home power has a cool PDF that describes how to create your own metal hydride based system. What's cool about their plans is they use bulk materials direct from the manufacturers and then show you how to prime your own system in a home lab if you're so inclined. I'd love to try it.
Seems I read there was a similar system that is used in one version of the hydrogen powered car prototypes and they say they can get a hundred miles per tank on tanks about the size of a scuba tank.
It's no mystery that circuit boards are produced by soldering the pieces together. If the parts can be soldered they can certainly be de-soldered as well. Instead of smashing the pieces, why not just slowly heat the boards to the point at which the solder liquifies and then vibrate them to free up the pieces. If the boards could tolerate the heat during production then obviously they can tolerate the same heat in dissassembly without burning.
Once the various capacitors, chips, connectors and such are separated from the boards they could be much more easily further processed and perhaps in some cases certain parts could even be re-used as is. The solder itself could almost certainly be reclaimed. The premise that the best first step is to either crush or burn the components seems poorly thought out.
Now I realize that the majority of the components cannot be directly re-used in an economic manner. Most of the waste is most likely either seriously outdated or already damaged to begin with but by first removing all the soldered components it would be far more efficient to concentrate like materials into dense bundles for further processing in a more efficient manner.
Gates has fallen in love with his born-again persona as a human rights campaigner that he hopes everyone will forget was financed by years as a blood thirsty take-no-prisoners capitalist hun pushing zillions of dollars in license agreements on public school districts, threatening open source projects, patenting protocols, bullying and buying out competitors etc.
And so now he's so far into his own navel gazing delusion that he thinks XP is a good fit with the OLPC project. Oh wow man, he's just like up there with Ghandi and Jeebuz, aint he? What a joke of a man. It just goes to show you that money is indeed quite like a drug. The dude is HIGH.
Oh sure, he's the principle funder of the BSA by day but . . but, but by night he's the Poverty Fairy. Whoo.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and he seems to be suggesting that Libertarians are leftists. This another enormous assumption. I tend to think that libertarianism is the greatest thing that ever happened to the Republicans because it makes a lot of people who have liberal social values like not caring what drugs people take on the weekends or how others have sex feel that somehow their views are better expressed by the Republicans than the Democrats. I agree the twin parties both suck at this point and that the Democrats hardly seem like an alternative, but I know people who clearly have liberal social values and take drugs and have kinky sex lives who, due to their faith in libertarianism, actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their minds.
From my observations, I have an answer to the question of why there are so many Libertarians in tech. My observation may be an oversimplification, but oversimplification is the crux of the issue as I see it. From the Libertarians that I have spoken with there seems to be a common thread of wanting to break things down into fundamental principles and having faith that there really are fundamental phenomena such as market forces that can control society for the best if they are allowed to operate unfettered. To me, this is just an absurd and ignorant proposition, but it's not surprising that you see people in tech get so hung up on this because it mirrors the rules that govern technology and especially computers and most particularly computer hardware.
When you get right down to it, there's no question that what makes machine computing possible is the simplification of the input: that is the conversion from decimal to binary. Without the concept of binary numeracy, computing is simply too complicated. If you are willing to accept the premise that you can build everything else up from a binary number system including the letters of the alphabet and even arrays representing graphics and wave forms to represent sounds and scale it all up into extremely high definition representations of the analog world then you can easily delude yourself into the thought process that everything must be based upon similar fundamental principles and that the only way to govern behavior and society is to identify and rely upon those principles.
As seductive as this is to people, it's really closed minded and ignorant of how we got to where we are today in terms of technology and society in general. The eighteenth century French mathematicians who laid the mathematical foundations for what would become digital signal processing such as Fourier were the models upon which the concept of communists were founded. Marx was totally in awe of these intellectuals who demonstrated the intellectual courage to overturn the simplistic ideas of paternalist monarchy which is really where the libertarians are closer to in their worship of imaginary gods like the invisible hand.
Here's the information you're interested in. I'm sure you're genuinely interested rather than merely being one of these typical right wing assholes hoping to discredit any opinion you don't like by asking for documentation in the rhetorical manner of Rush Limbaugh or one of the many idiots at Fox News.
0 548687549
I'm willing to assume you're not one of those fascist cunts and that you really are interested in the facts. In that case, this is the video I refer to:
Easiest Targets: The Israeli Policy of Strip Searching Women and Children
description:13-minute video: Five women - Palestinian, American, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish - tell stories of humiliation and harassment by Israeli border guards and airport security officials.
In fact, you will find testimoney by American Christians and Jews as well as Palestinians if you take the time to watch the video.
You can watch it at Google Video with the following link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-69116100
In addition, you can download the torrent from www.onebigtorrent.org which was formerly known as chomskytorrents.org.
I would say enjoy the film, but it's not meant to be an enjoyable film.
I can't believe the people on here acting like this is a good thing or that Israeli style air force security is a step in the right direction. I just saw a documentary on how the Israelis routinely cavity search ten year old girls just because they are Palestinians. The intent is not to find anything, but to intimidate them and their families from returning to Israel. Even Israeli citizens, particularly female, who have publicly disagreed with militarist policies are strip searched simply to humiliate them and discourage them from travel.
That's really where we should be heading in America, is it now? So, since our Palestinians equivalents are the Mexicans then I suppose our lovely new Israeli style airport security policy ought to include strip searching and fondling all young Mexican girls in order to discourage them from travel. I mean after all, that's the example the Israelis offer. It has worked so well for them so far, hasn't it.
If we really want to stop terrorism, then perhaps we should start by not dropping bombs on foreign countries and killing hundreds of civilians each week. That might be an even more effective method than assigning the gestapo to the airports.
Great, you finally brought up the really grotesque and injust point and I'm glad we got around to it before this thread closes. Obviously it needs to be stated as plainly as possible because there is a curious mix here of people who have a thorough knowledge of accounting and those who keep their money in a piggy bank.
The ugly part here is in the amortization in the accounting sense and the concept of depreciation. Obviously the previous post doesn't need a lecture on the basics, but most people obviously do from a quick look at the off-the-wall posts below. Sadly, I'm short of time so let's just make it a real quick summary.
What makes capital expense golden and labor costs shit is the concept of depreciation. You cannot depreciate labor costs, but you can depreciate capital expenditures. This is the fundamental basis of corporate welfare. The state subsidizes businesses through tax refunds on capital expenditures.
Get it?
Of course there are other nefarious factors as well that drive the process even more such as the fact that by raising capital costs you can create barriers to entry and thus form the basis for the plutocratic system we use in the States today where the meaning of competition has been twisted to mean at least two brands used in marketing for each product category.
Stop and think about the shipping analogy here. Yes, there is some labor involved in shipping, but is that where the majority of costs in shipping come from? That would only be true if you were paying stevadores to unload the contents of a sailing ship onto a dock. Or let's say you were delivering packages via the Pony Express. Those were the situations Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote Wealth of Nations. But that's not where we are right now.
In today's world, where do the costs go for shipping? They obviously go to purchase, fueling and maintenance of vehicles. Purchases of Boeing 747 cargo jets, fleets of tractor-trailers, warehouse facilities and mountains of cargo containers are right at the heart of what's known as capital expenditure.
That's a lousy argument in a business environment.
The theory that big busineses are all about reducing costs is an oversimplification. Some small businesses worry about keeping costs as low as possible, but generally this is not a major issue for the big ones because they essentially control their markets and can charge whatever they want. The consumer is picking up the tab, so who cares about costs. Take the US telecoms market for example. Does anyone honestly think they're trying to control costs. If so, then why is the US so pathetic in comparison to the global market. Large corporations are just as wasteful as the large governments that they've taken over for in so many industries like telecoms that used to be heavily regulated. There's no efficiency added in this transition, just a new social model. What big businesses do is not to cut costs at every corner. No, what they do is whatever is best for the business ecosystem that they are a part of.
To know what that is, you need to understand some of the core principles of business. There are two particularly important categories of costs from a business perspective regardless of size and those are labor costs versus capital costs. Theses costs are not of equalent from a business management perspective. Labor costs are under constant pressure because they drag businesses down. Labor costs are the enemy of business and as a manager you always look for ways to reduce labor costs so as a worker you might get the idea that cost controls are what business is all about. But that's only half the picture. The other side of the coin is capital costs. Capital costs, on the other hand, are actually a good thing if you run a business. If you understand this you understand that there is a genuine fundamental resistance to open source in business for reasons that are much more complex than simply whether or not it costs more. Open source cuts capital costs and empowers labor which is not a good thing from a business leader's perspective.
And I'm not blaming the managers here. The people who make decisions in a company are just as much trapped in the game as the lowest level janitorial employees. They have to compete against other companies using the rules that companies play by and thus they need to make their decisions according to the laws of capital and not according to what makes sense or what they think is right or wrong. Often times business decisions do not make the slightest bit of sense from a practical perspective and yet they work from a business angle.
So arguing about whether Microsoft costs more is really not going to make much of a difference. The point is: even if Microsoft does costs more, it can cost a thousand times more and still make sense from a business perspective because it is counted as a capital cost and capital costs are good from a business perspective. Look at how US telecoms are still committed to an extremely costly ATM infrastructure in an on-going effort to block out VoIP. Clearly, reducing costs, especially capital costs, is not a major goal for large corporations. Labor costs, on the other hand, those make sense to cut. Ask your boss if he would like you to take a cut in your wages and I'm sure he'll totally see your point.
It can be done. Good luck doing rule based routing with tk though.
Anyhow, I was checking this out when it came out on Linux Devices the other day and it's intriguing but it's still more of an embedded device and they don't give you much access to the IO without an additional module that sort of detracts from the small form factor sexiness. I'd like to see something like a DIY Arduino type board based on the chip though.
That reaffirms Marx like nothing else because, as Marx stated clearly numerous time, the goal of Marxist Communism was, in fact, the creation of wealth. The creation of abundant wealth is the fundamental goal of Marxism as stated by Marx. So, since it was assumed that Capitalism was merely a phase on the way towards Communism this would simply be an alternate route to Marxist Communism. The Trotskyists would be wrong because they believed that revolution was the only way to achive this goal but this would fit right in with Marx' visions as well as those of Aristotle as laid out in Politics which were no doubt of some influence on Marx.
Oh fuck, I shoulda hit preview. I suck. I worded it so carefully and then fucked it. That last bit starting with "Let me clarify. . ." was a false start from an earlier paragraph that was supposed to be deleted. What a bitch. Oh well, this thread is already ancient.
I am of the opinion that when people mechanically regurgitate the often repeated wisdom that time equals money, they are all too often implying something other than what such an equation states on its face. I am afraid we are seeing that happen in this thread.
If it were really true that time and money were equivalences and that one could be exchanged for the other in some fixed precise measure, then people who say that time is money would be quite satisfied to recieve time rather than money as a form of payment.
Of course it's quite simple to see that this is not what people mean when they say that time is equal to money. So what do people really mean when they repeat this aphoristic phrase? My opinion is that what a person usually intends the audiance to accept is that, in fact, money is more valuable than time. I can imagine a situation in which this phrase makes perfect sense indeed.
Take this example as an illustration of how the phrase might be used with great effect. Let us imagine a person being paid for their time through some contract such as an hourly laborer. If the laborer was taking a nap while on the clock and the manager noticed, the manager might quite naturally accuse the laborer of cheating on the contract by not maximizing the efficiency of his work time. The manager might effectively admonish the worker by giving him a good shake and saying --"wake up you good for nothing, time is money!" In such a case, clearly the real meaning is that the money is what is important and the real message is that the manager's money is more important than the worker's time. In this case, it does make sense that by wasting time one is also wasting money.
But, that is a very specific case. We cannot generalize the logic of this phrase into a broad law governing the universal relations between time and money. That would be fallacious logic and certainly only a fool would fall into such a simple minded trap.
Let there be no doubt, language is a slippery thing. It is but a minor sin when analogies appropriate in one situation might be sloppily redirected into another where they are no longer of use. But it is no longer a minor sin when those inappropriate and poorly considered usages become the basis of heated self-righteous rhetoric. The more so when this ill founded false logic becomes the justification for vicious, tyranical and oppressive behavior.
Let me clarify how I reach that conclusion by taking the example of the present debate. Here we're seeing debaters take the position that people who "create" ideas need to be paid money in
First off, this is cheating. I'm responding to a comment made at Blogspot here on Slashdot, but there's no way I'm creating an account over there just for this and besides they don't even have threaded conversations. Instead I'll quote the guy from Blogspot's comment here in full and then basically say he's full of shit.
Aaron said...
I am sorry, but as a psychometrician (i.e. someone who writes multiple choice tests and interprets the results), I have to simply chime in with this:
We know. That's why we don't just count correct answers.
Any major test (GRE, LSAT, TOEFL, TOEIC, etc.) uses some kind of item response theory (IRT) to determine the score. This means that the final score is actually the person's ability, given their performance on the items, which are weighted differently (to put it VERY simply) according to people's performance on them. It doesn't matter what easy-to-read numbers the test gives you as your score; your REAL score is a number between 0 and 1. Sometimes that number is rescaled to the actual number of items that were on the instrument to give people the illusion of a classical MC test.
Another point is this: Remember when you took your SAT (I think it was)? They told you not to guess if you weren't sure about that answer, right? The reason for that is that with a really well-worn and robust test, the developers have been able to figure out who picks which distractors, and can therefore derive further meaning from whatever option you choose. So instead of a simple binary item (right or wrong), they can create a partial-credit item. Say "A" is the right answer, but people who are pretty smart seem to pick "B" a lot. So maybe the stats will assign a value of 0.5 for that one. Maybe "C" is just a throwaway distractor and doesn't mean anything other than you missed the question. But what if "D" turns out to really distract total morons? The stats might end up assigning a NEGATIVE value if you pick that. So read the test specifications before you take a big test. If they say not to guess, that's why. What you don't know can actually hurt your score more than just skipping it.
Look into the Rasch model and multi-parameter IRT. It's late and I actually need to develop some questions tonight (no kidding!), so I leave it to you and Wikipedia.
So to sum up: Basically, you are right about the problems with MC tests, but wrong about how much this affects people's lives.
June 17, 2007 4:06 AM
So, as I was saying --bullshit.
I'm also a writer of GRE/TOEFL practice tests and I am quite sure this is not true. This was true for the TOEFL, but only for a few years. With the advent of the computer based TOEFL in 2000 there were weighted responses and the successful implementation of this feature was one of the primary differentiations between software practice test products that were published at that time such as my own which you are welcome to buy on Amazon but I'm sure you won't if you're already reading this in English.
However, that computer test was dropped in favor of a radically redesigned test in 2005 --another reason you probably won't buy it at Amazon-- in which ETS specifically documented that they were dropping weighted scoring entirely. This was specifically stated in documentation from ETS and it was distresing to me because I was offering one of the few projects that had a reasonably accurate weighted scoring system so I am absolutely sure of this. It cost me money big time.
As for GRE, well this is location depdendent. In some locations the GRE computer based test still uses weighted scoring, but in most of Asia that test is no longer offered and a non-weighted test is currently the only choice. The reason the
I don't see how what you're saying would possibly happen in anything more than a very limited and ineffectual way because what this is all about control.
There's almost zero autonomy for the workers. They literally cannot walk off the site because of the limitations of the resonant induction power supply. They're like slaves on a leash and discipline is as simple as flipping a relay and their physical existence in the US ceases to exist, they may as well be dead. Try pulling that trick with immigrant workers. Clearly, remote video monitoring would be integrated on the tractor as a remote management tool to monitor the overall progress of the workers. Indeed, each individual robotic unit would also require a video feed just as a human worker requires. The difference is that with a human worker it is not feasible to have the management audit what their video stream. With this system you would not only be able to spot sabotage after the fact, you'd be able to verify exactly which node was responsible by reviewing the data.
If a "rebellion" as you suggest were to happen, say whole crews began to destroy crops simultaneously --and I fail to see how this is any different with human immigrants and refer you to the UFW's successes in the seventies-- you could simply cut the power, reboot the system and switch to a new worker pool. Joysticks, monitors and internet connections are all cheap commodities these days and don't tell me kids are scared of game controllers. These might actually be desireable jobs for young people even here in the States.
Besides, the whole purpose of this remote labor pool is not simply to switch labor dependence from one location to another. There are potentially great advantages in doing so, but that's not the end of the real goal. The real point is to develop a database of interactions that you can use as the basis for progress to a nearly autonomous system that doesn't need human labor or requires just a very minimal interaction.
Again, let's go back to the example of the Google human language translation system. How did it work? You start off by building a database of interactions that are successful and then use that data as the basis for honing sets of patterns that can then make the interactions less and less clumsy. Perhaps you find that out of a million interactions there are three hundred thousand involving a certain series of a dozen repititions. This becomes the basis for a possibly useful script that might increase efficiency drmatically. Then you implement the script and find that there are exceptions when it can't be used. You don't know where the refinements should go until you start the project. But eventually you may get to the point where a single remote worker might be able to harvest the same as dozens or even hundreds or thousands of poorly paid immigrant workers stooped over in the fields under the hot sun. Now you've traded a low-wage, physically brutal job that invlolves massive social costs for a potentially high paying kick-back desk job while simultaneously lowering the costs of produce. Nobody loses in that transition.
If it sounds utopian then consider that a hundred and fifty years ago ninety percent of the human population was directly involved in agriculture. We're already in a kind of utopia, but we can take it even further.
Glad you felt compelled to respond, but let me put this idea to you in a slightly different manner and see if you would be willing to concede that this is not such a frustrating issue.
But first, I'd just like to address this concept of Artificial Intelligence in general terms. When you put a label on something that doesn't currently exist and set it as a goal, it's not surprising that you can get to the point where you intellectually come to believe that it is infinitely elusive. After all, if it doesn't exist currently why should it suddenly appear just because you call for its existence. Perhaps the goal is based on false beliefs or assumptions about this thing called intelligence. In summary, perhaps Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist at all and never will regardless of technological advances. For that matter, perhaps human intelligence doesn't exist either or, to put it another way, the thing that we call human intelligence may not turn out to be a coherent single thing that can ever be understood.
Maybe the debate about intelligence is missing the real goal. The real goal that I set in my post is to make it cheaper and more efficient to harvest fruits and vegetables that currently require a delicate human touch by using sophisticated and powerful automated tools. Whether those machines can offer their opinons on McLuhan's media analysis is of no import. (That's supposed to be a cute nod to Woody Allen.)
But let me give you a nice specific example from a recent Slashdot story. Didn't we recently read about how Google's approach to natural language translation sidesteps the whole AI boondoggle and kicks ass on all previous attempts that are based on complex AI schemes? And how did they do that? They just used a huge database of samples and statistically worked out what was an effective translation the majority of the time. There's no AI in that, it's just simple use of statistical filtering from a large databse of samples. Call it brute force math if you like. But the important point is, it works quite well. That's an important point, isn't it?
Okay, so now let's move to a new take on this farm labor solution. What if, instead of assuming that AI is the only possibility we take the realistic approach that many existing robotic solutions are primarily based on remote control. That's closer to reality, isn't it? Now we have all the "intelligence" we need. But you might protest, how does this save labor if we still need human operators for our robot teams. Ah hah, welcome the Internet. Yeah, you know where I'm going: outsourcing. We still have low-cost foreign labor, but we don't have to pay for the enormous infrastructure required to support their impoverished immigrant families.
But even better, once you have teams of outsourced low-cost robot operators working on these robotic systems for months and months and years and years you can save those interactions into a massive database. Through this process, you develop a pool of human, machine interactions from which you can begin to filter out those interactions that are successful and those that are not just like Google does with their translation technique.
Instead of starting from nothing and trying to reach some impossible goal, you start off with a large database of successful examples of what has worked in the past and then begin to look for redundancies and patterns. Scripts should emerge readily simply by setting the standards and getting started collecting the data. This is doable and all based on real-world commodity technologies. I'm sure Carnegie Mellon is a fine place and I wish them all the best in their quest, but the missing ingredient has been the low cost high-power density, not the lack of intelligence.
And quickly I'd like to address the comment below about this being a racist idea because I can see how it could easily be read that way. I belie
I came across this technology completely serendipitously a few weeks ago on How Things Work. There was a link to "wireless electricity" off the main page and I followed it and they discussed the MIT patents and I downloaded several different patents in the field. They were all from within the last few years and involved resonance coupled with induction.
What surprised me was the lack of imagination in the applications. They were talking about remotely recharging cell phones and MP3 players or letting you move around electronics without needing to find a plug. Well those are all fine ideas and quite obvious indeed but I saw nothing about the one area that seemed to potentially benefit the most from this: robotics.
All the pieces are there in robotics except for the one that this technology addresses: lightweight, high-density power. Oh, and let's not forget cheap.
Powering the lights without wires is a fine thing to do. I'm all for it. But what is the high energy deensity application that absolutely requires mobility? It seems to me that there is one in particular and that is robotics.
Moreover, this technology has a limitation of range that actually becomes a feature when applied to robotics. As we know all too well in the age of Iragi battle drones Asimov's laws of robotics are a fantasy relic of a time that couldn't imagine how software would really develop. The truth is, robots can be dangerous and this kind of technology effectively puts a leash on their range. They can do whatever within the home, but they can't just go out and go for a walk. It's a classic example of a limitation becoming a feauture.
So how would it solve the immigration issue?
I just mentioned this range limitation. So then, how could we use this for agricultural robots that would alleviate the need for low paid illegal immigrant farm labor? No problem. Obviously tractors bring their own power sources into the field. So, power in the field is not a problem. You would simply have gangs of robots attatched to resonant inductor power modules hanging off arms of the tractor. Say each tractor controls six platoons of robotic field hands with six resonant inductor orbs. They could work twenty four hours shifts. One tractor and labor gang could harvest dozens of farms per season in a timely manner.
If you need higher power, that's not a problem. There's no reason this technology is limited to 110volts. You can use 600V or 1200V. As much as you need. Your robotic workers would be as powerful as necessary.
Not only would it eliminate the need for foreign labor, it would also reduce the need to use high impact farming techniques such as posioning the soil with bromide gas and laying down plastic mulch. These things are done in the name of economy because it's too expensive to have human labor go through a farm and pick weeds. Monocrops are also planted for the same economic considerations. By dramatically shifting the labor equation you would enable a vast increase in the use of organic farming techniques.
The implications of this technology are far more revolutionary than re-charging an MP3 player.
You're absolutely right. I have no problem whatsoever with people "playing God" which seems to be part of the angle the ETC Group is taking. I think this is a recurring theme in biotech where we have people who detest these patents as a further abuse in the name of intellectual property on the one hand and on the other hand we've got these people who profess some kind of vague conservative religious fear of competing with a creator God who is somehow jealous of human knowledge. These two positions are worlds apart and yet both result in the same attitude towards these types of patents.
I believe it was James Watson who said --If scientists don't play God, who will? I agree one hundred percent. By all means let's play God to our heart's content. I would go so far as saying I have no qualms whatsoever about destroying embryos for therapeutic purposes. The moral issues is these matters simply don't exist as far as I'm concerned. And yet, I am disgusted by this report, but not because the researchers are playing God. I am upset that they are attempting to use the force of the government and ultimately the police to monopolize a form of life. That is just wrong as are all patents in the area of genetic engineering.
Well, that's a very good question. I'm speculating here. My speculation is that you'll be seeing plenty of Atmels' AT90CAN128's in the future. But I would grant that so far they're still too new to be found in junked cars. But my point still stands because these guys are going out in mass quantities. It's a little early to be seeing them in the junkyards, but they'll end up there eventually.
D =13000304
And since you're still checking on this thread, let me get your opinion on this article. I read this when it came out in '03 and it was partly where I developed my idea that ethernet was inappropriate for microcontroller networks. Would you disagree with what the author says here, or do you think maybe the disadvantages are being overplayed?
ttp://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleI
And you might find this interesting as well. I should have posted it earlier. It's about a project to use CAN in home automation hosted at Sourceforge.
http://caraca.sourceforge.net/
Seriously, let me know your opinions. I won't be a dick again. That was out of character and I really do feel bad if I upset Apuku up there. He's clearly a pro and I'm just a freak with a lot of diverse interests repeating what I heard elsewhere. Although, if Apuku does ever look back on this thread I have to say one more thing to him.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
Yeah, fair enough. I'm on the coast of an island and there was an intense storm front moving in here off the Taiwan Strait and when that happens the pressure drops like crazy and it does tend to make the skin boil and tempers flare. I did actually regret the post and it wasn't very effective as I wrote it.
But the storm has passed and I'm chilled out. Actually, another one is about to hit and it's muggy as hell but I'm sheepish about being a dick again so I'm keeping it in check. Nonethless, this idea that ethernet is the hot new thing and CAN is on the way out really does raise my eyebrows. I'm not an automotive engineer, but I'm interested in automation enough that I do read up on the topic regularly by lurking on the forums at control.com, PLCS.net and several topics at LabView including the quite active CAN forum. So perhaps I'm just an armchair enthusiast, but I believe I'm getting a fairly decent perspective on what's going on and this is the first I'm hearing about the impending demise of CAN.
Moreover, at Linux Devices you find most of the coolest new products are also using CAN such as the recent gee-whiz just-in-time specialty ice-cream vending machine they featured a few months ago. So, I had a few examples in mind that made me skeptical. I didn't need to be caustic about it, but like I said it was one of those days.
I looked at Apuku's web site and this seems like their product is primarily intended as a connection between PLCs which is slightly different definition of automation than what I was thinking. See, to me, a house is not all that different from a car in a lot of ways that are relevant to the original post. Specifically, home automation has a lot in common with the type of electronic automation we see in a car. For example: you get in a car and you want your lighting to be automatically adjusted for you, you want your favorite seat perhaps to adjust to some preset positions, you want the entertainment system to respond to your commands in an intuitive manner. You see where I'm going here? The current consensus in the automotive industry is that these tasks are best done with a controller area network, not ethernet.
I completely accept the point that there is a trend in industrial automation to use ethernet and even have devices get their IPs through DHCP and then use web interfaces which I think sounds psychotic but whatever. I'm not saying that is not a trend in industry. But while I would concede that point, I would nonethless question the assumption that there is an automatic saving of money with ethernet. I'm thinking this ignores the fact that the retail market for electronics includes grey aftermarkets such as automobile junkyards where device controllers that already have house control-like functions such as lighting, entertainment system controls, hydraulics controls, and environmental controls exist for almost no cost which could be re-purposed by a real pimp.
The original post was, after all, entitled "Pimping Out a New House" was it not? And where, I put it to you with all due respect this time, was that phrase popularized?
Apuku has it all figured out. I guess we better call the SAE and let them know that the decision is final, Apuku has made his decision. The new trend is using data architectures for control networks. This should be interesting as we attempt to design drive-by-wire systems using ethernet packet switching. But I'm sure Apuku wouldn't steer us in the wrong way.
Start off with the basics. The data network and the home automation network should be separate. Data should be old school for any slashdotter, but home automation is where you can really do something impressive. And for that, I would recommend that you look into CAN or Controller Area Networks. This is the primary system used by the automotive industry to make cars "smarter".
The reason CAN is so special is that it drives decision making into the network level. It's like taking Sun's motto of "the Network is the Computer" and applying it to large scale automation tasks. Most people try and go the easy way by using the off the shelf crap that is out there but the truth is that home automation has hardly begun because the real power tools are being largely ignored by the less than technically courageous types that typically do home automation.
on your sig and say that not only is DRM theft but very notion of intellectual property is theft; moreover, in matters of abundance and excess resources the addition of markets only serves to create poverty, not wealth.
Yes indeed, the problem surely goes well beyond Microsoft and Steve "McCarthy" Balmer.
But I want to point out something that I haven't seen so far although it is alluded to in some comments lower down a bit and that is the lack of software patent protections in Europe to date. I think this is a pretty major hole in this plan. If they really wanted to make this stick, they'd wait till a time when the forces of darkness push through some kind of onerous software protection scheme in the EU. The US is certainly Microsoft's largest market, but if you look at global sales such as in this link you see that a third of MS's market is outside the US and you'd think they might want to close up that little hole before they started whooping up the war cries.
I've been following this story since last week when the plan was leaked and then through Wednesday's postponement due to concerns about Cheney's physical status and through yesterday's news conference. What blew me away was the total lack of coverage it was getting in any press. In particular NPR really made me feel let down. I listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered non-stop for days and did not even hear the slightest mention of this while I sat through literally hours of interviews with neocon assholes like freaking William Kristol.
What a sad indictment of what has become of the broadcast media. The above posts that mention the re-alignment of the "center" way off to the right is clearly evidenced by this example. NPR has no time to even mention the beinning of an impeachment of Cheney but, on the other hand, there's plenty of time for a pleasant chuckling interview with Billy Kristol on the brighter side of McCane's chances on this so-called left leaning media outlet.
Don't forget the No Electronic Theft Act. Another Clinton Era monstrosity. But before you go and blame the Democrats, it was the Republicans who slipped in the worst part of the NET Act at the last minute in an amendment. The part I'm referring to is where the definition of "commercial exchange" is re-defined from meaning the exchange of copyrighted material in exchange for money, ie traditional piracy, to be replaced by the absurd definition where commercial exchange now means the exchange of copyrighted material for anything of any value. This language was targeted specifically at free peer-to-peer file sharing networks which had prior to that point arguably been exempt due to their lack of commercial exchange.
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
Home power has a cool PDF that describes how to create your own metal hydride based system. What's cool about their plans is they use bulk materials direct from the manufacturers and then show you how to prime your own system in a home lab if you're so inclined. I'd love to try it.
Seems I read there was a similar system that is used in one version of the hydrogen powered car prototypes and they say they can get a hundred miles per tank on tanks about the size of a scuba tank.
It's no mystery that circuit boards are produced by soldering the pieces together. If the parts can be soldered they can certainly be de-soldered as well. Instead of smashing the pieces, why not just slowly heat the boards to the point at which the solder liquifies and then vibrate them to free up the pieces. If the boards could tolerate the heat during production then obviously they can tolerate the same heat in dissassembly without burning.
Once the various capacitors, chips, connectors and such are separated from the boards they could be much more easily further processed and perhaps in some cases certain parts could even be re-used as is. The solder itself could almost certainly be reclaimed. The premise that the best first step is to either crush or burn the components seems poorly thought out.
Now I realize that the majority of the components cannot be directly re-used in an economic manner. Most of the waste is most likely either seriously outdated or already damaged to begin with but by first removing all the soldered components it would be far more efficient to concentrate like materials into dense bundles for further processing in a more efficient manner.
Gates has fallen in love with his born-again persona as a human rights campaigner that he hopes everyone will forget was financed by years as a blood thirsty take-no-prisoners capitalist hun pushing zillions of dollars in license agreements on public school districts, threatening open source projects, patenting protocols, bullying and buying out competitors etc.
And so now he's so far into his own navel gazing delusion that he thinks XP is a good fit with the OLPC project. Oh wow man, he's just like up there with Ghandi and Jeebuz, aint he? What a joke of a man. It just goes to show you that money is indeed quite like a drug. The dude is HIGH.
Oh sure, he's the principle funder of the BSA by day but . . but, but by night he's the Poverty Fairy. Whoo.