"Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts...
In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin"
It looks like this may be a full reverse - the Digg is cowering before its users. Interesting twist.
>>You're jumping ahead of us. You'd have to emulate sensory organs in order to sense "movement".
Actually, you just need to be able to read the outputs from a sensory organ. There's no rule against testing a simulated brain with a real eye's outputs. You can either record the outputs and send them through to the simulation later, or have realtime IO to a real eye. Same with equalibrium, and other data sources. Oddly enough, it's likely many, many, many orders of magnitude simpler for us to provide a world of inputs for a brain to sense for the sake of testing than it is to develop the processing algorithms for the brain itself. We've got a LOT of experience mocking up fake world inputs, and processing the signals of real sensory organ outputs.
It's cool that we can create the basic scale of the infrastructure of a (half) mouse brain - but if we're really going to simulate a brain, we need the ability to read the contents of a real one in order to verify our simulation. Otherwise, we have little basis for saying that input X gives the sensation of movement, and would have effect/output Y in terms of changed state/response.
I wonder what the current state of neuron state reading is - would we ever theoretically be able to read the state of a brain beyond the external outputs? Could we ever get a sinlgle state that would be the 'ROM' of a person's memories and mental state, that you could place in a simulation and have that person's memories 'wake up' in a simulation? I wonder how close we could get.
In the last episode, the capitol building collapsed - and now, the following letter appeared on the broken stairsteps to the Ohio capitol:
"We're sorry that the capitol building collapsed, but it ends up that we used Licoln Logs to build the dome, and it ends up that it collapses when the wind hits it from multiple directions at once.
We've gotten some complaints that we should have expected this, and were "total morons" for choosing such a design. We think this is a gross oversimplification, and more than a little unfair. We used multiple layers of high-quality chewing gum to secure the dome, which required countless hours of chewing, along with thousands of gallons of spittle. When you complain against such a massive effort, you insult the sore mouths of our hard working employees.
Seriously though, this is a rather strange turn of events. And given the Bush administration's history of explaining such strange events, I don't expect a civil debate coming out of this.
I understand that our economic system has evolved to dismiss long term thinking*, but what happens when our knowledge-based jobs are fed mostly by outsourced workers, or workers who are intentionally not permanent residents? Management is difficult in the same sense rappers say pimping is difficult - anyone could do it, they just have to be willing to do it. What's needed is the workers... what, aside from unreasonable "intellectual property" schemes prevents outsourced workers from forming companies and completely doing away with American dominance of knowledge-based industries?
Yes, we're going to get a few spikes in jobs for programmers filling gaps in the work that can be efficiently outsourced, and performing integration of outsourced work, but that only masks the shift away from our last reliable American industry outside of entertainment and service. Heedless outsourcing across decades invites the loss of our ability to do our own work.
To all programmers outside the US: This is by no stretch a complaint against you - I'm actually very glad to see this trend towards greater US money available to international professional programmers. I hope to see many new software companies started and outcompeting US companies, and I hope to work with many of them. My complaint is in the way our market is allowing the local US economy for programmers to shrink in terms of educating new programmers locally, switching existing programmers to a roll of managing outsourced programmers - I see that as long term strategy with a lot of negative consequences. Without a healthy entry level market for programmers, our programming economy may stall.
Ryan Fenton
*...to the point where a perceived lack of short-term thinking is grounds for a lawsuit for a publicly traded company.
Agreed - I'd much prefer a simple OpenGL/SDL/Etc. wrapper around DirectX 10 in order to meet long-term reuse of DirectX games. However, the demand exists now for DirectX content outside of the constraints Microsoft has planned for - that's where the large number of developers can work to stretch DirectX outside of those bounds.
It's not a fight against Microsoft entirely - just snubbing along the way to forcing their games to work without having to pay for Vista. It's meeting a demand Microsoft is uninterested to supply themselves.
If nothing else, this can be a call to others to create similar projects. If the Alky Project is real (which it is by all accounts so far), then even if it is shut down, their work will continue. If it can't meet it's goals in some way, then it's full promise will remain as a focus for the great need to NOT 'upgrade' to Windows Vista, drawing in a large number of developers. It is also the promise that applications made for DirectX 10 may live beyond their operating environment.
This is very much a more direct refection of the same phenomenon that allows entire hardware systems to be emulated against the wishes of console, arcade and computer manufacturers.
This is the start of the market's reaction to Vista, made manifest.
More like a possibility space. Time is an expansion of a single possibility across evaluation of physical rules. Possibility is changing any variable in the world, to get new time-spaces based on that difference. Variance is changing the nature of the universe itself in some way, which in turn changes the possibility within it.
The trick is that all possibilities are mapped, and all universes are represented. That means that if you want to find anything that can exist in any universe, you just need one set/range of coordinates.
In terms of real-world application, we can map the start of our universe in terms of universal variance change, the extremely small scales in terms of possibility change, and the larger scales in terms of time change.
From the grade and high schools I've gone to, bullies are usually good at what they do, because punishments can't affect them for one reason or another. Besides, it's not that hard to figure out how to shield yourself from punishment, even while doing some of the most prohibited things in a school. You can shield yourself using threats, you can shield yourself by counter-accusing others, you can shield yourself using politics and parents, and most of all, you can obscure any evidence that would justify a weighty punishment.
Harsh rules usually end up working rather well for bullies. Bullies can threaten other children with false accusations just as well as they always have with a plausible "he started it" claim in the case of a fight. And if this ends up anything like fights were handled at schools I've went to, that means the victims stay quiet, because they know they get punished at a much higher rate than any rule-savvy bully.
This seems functionally more of a rule to punish technically-oriented non-bully kids who happen to anger faculty. I don't know of any kid who didn't constantly insult other kids, especially their friends, so technical kids are virtually guaranteed as targets here because of the visibility of online interactions for bullies or angry teachers to report. From living right on the Canadian border for my last high school years, I don't think Canada is any different.
I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!
Speaking of which, anyone interested in some rather funny dimensional hijinks, you might want to check out Flatland the classic book, or one of the movies being made about the story.
But it highlighted star still does show the six-ray spikes the other starts do... the white light in the center just seems to have an hourglass shape that matches with the hexagonal spikes (also likely an artifact) that makes a square as it radiates out. Is it possible that the core of this star is collapsing into a quasar-like object, radiating in two opposite directions, each mostly perpendicular to our viewpoint? Those two narrowing radiating jets of light could match the hexagon thatches to make that white hourglass in the center, making the red square on the outside.
I'm not a astrophysicist, but I've seen enough photographic artifacts to know you can get some interesting symmetrical single-color polygons through reflection and refraction that look remarkably like what is shown here. Is there any way to verify that this isn't a visual artifact, as opposed to an actual physical cloud? Or is the artifact itself a sign that there has to be a highly symmetrical set of objects creating it?
It's like RoboCop: You shall not harm any employee of the your owners. But you have the authority to find a way to get them fired, and THEN kill them. And no one found any problem with this until their boss was dead in front of them, and they realized they could be next.
Honestly though, I see value in a policy that no human life should be risked in automatic death systems - including land mines and other traps. These loopholes make that policy as useless as some RoboCop parody though.
Although the faint hope of commercial value in many television properties does give some television shows some guarantee it will be around for future folks to look at (including historians), I think it is also important that the banal and the "so-common-as-to-be-worthless" content get it's shot at archival also. I think Youtube is somewhat important - it looks to be strong enough to survive until digital storage is cheap enough that our current processes of digital archival are made irrelevant. It's important, because although there are groups like the Digital Archive Project, Archive.org, and the various file trading groups which keep a lot of content alive long term, none of these have as strong a hope of legally keeping their information freely available, or have the same mass of content that Youtube/Google can provide.
It may seem rather silly to keep ahold of some of this stuff - but even if you'd never even dream of spending the time to watch any of it, I believe that our increasing ability to find new ways of consuming content and searching through it will bring surprising value, even as the value of content itself continues to fall. Youtube increases this aggregate historical value still further by also having a (youth and nerd-oriented) snapshot of a wide variety of daily lives around the world.
Well, the danger for the RIAA is that this sets precedents not that stop them from pursuing their current path, but that it makes that path more statistically more expensive to follow. If they can expect to be successfully counter sued a given (even small)percentage of the time based on blind accusations, not only does that make their strategy more expensive in all likelyhood, it also spreads less fear.
It's like a despot who makes money by demanding it of his neighbors, otherwise he sends his slaves off to explode in their town centers. If his neighbors learn that it is possible to identify and send these slaves back home before they explode in some cases (but not always), then this despot's income and power mechanisms are potentially at risk. His neighbors may in fact be able to join together at this point and find more ways of stopping him. That, and the rich nobles (Sir Sony, Sir BMG, et al) who finance this horrible dictator may finally realize the problems of spending so much money on propping up such a horrible dictator just to maintain the value of their positions, as their own bombs start to blow up in their own faces.
Mileage mania? What does that make stretch Hummer/fuel injected racecar owners? Sufferers of Mileage Dementia/Depression?
My favorite motorcar extremists lately are the guys strapping together thousands of dollars worth of batteries to make ultra-high performance vehicles that still get 40 mpg. Sure, they have to go light and limited to 100 miles range per charge, but they end up with a true racecar that makes no sound except the burning of the wheels. That's just damn cool.
Mileage itself is a bit of a red herring though - there's always going to be a need for vehicles with 'horrid' milage, and 'wasting' that fuel to move earth, or just push a lot of metal - it really isn't an inherent problem to 'waste' fuel on big cars. The only real concern is the effect using that fuel in a fuel cycle. If going through that cycle returns the earth to a carbon-rich atmosphere, that's not a good thing. If the cycle doesn't involve such troublesome consequences though, then as long as the fuel is worth it's other negative effects (like on your wallet), then I don't see how it's a problem.
We just need better fuels and energy source paths. The market's having a hard time finding a good set of somethings for now - but the dynamics look to be changing, thanks in large part to a lot of nations making some rather interesting long-term investments in fuel research. If you get the right fuel, then I'd much rather have a fuel-inneficient car that theoretically retails for $12,000 after mass manufacture, than a maximized fuel efficient car that retails for $50,000. We need fuels we can waste, so we can consider fuel efficiency completely in terms of direct cost rather than indirect environmental impact as a society.
I look forward to being able to waste a lot of new kinds of fuel in the future. Here's hoping they come up with one that smells like rich coffee ice cream!
Does the polygon rating mean that much in terms of ray tracing performance? From what I've done with raytracing, most objects exist as geometric additions/subtractions of primitive shapes. A door would be a cube transformed to be stretched into a rectangular plank, plus a couple cylinders for the various parts of the door handle, plus a sphere for the handle end, minus a series of cubes for the lock opening shape. Polygons only come into play outside the engine, when you're trying to decide how to map textures across objects, then you'd want to represent the side they're painting as a polygon - but only before it goes to the engine, it would just be a single texture for all sides wrapped around the visible object. You might have a separate polygon primitive, but I'd think it would be one of the least ones used, in terms of raytracing efficiency.
You can cheat a lot in comparing polys to primitives when it comes to comparing raytracers to polygon engines. Still, it's been a while since I've played with raytracers, and I'm interested in what I've missed - this seems like it would be a real treat to see in action.
He's largely responsible for the Green Revolution in the 1960-70's and onward which transformed land use world wide. The guy's still working in fields across the world to teach folks how to use better land use for increased production. Without that, we'd have already pressed against the population limits in many nations in theory. True, distribution is the primary factor in starvation - but there is still a limit to the production of any given landscape, given a set of farming techniques. Farming practices over the generations have changed that dynamic, and changed the very nature of the crops and the people that eat them for the better.
But this potential fuel demand on the soil is a new dynamic - I highly doubt we can expect to make a working economy on it, just like I doubt we'd be able to multiply our population many more times before we have to switch away from soil-based crops.
Ah cool - thanks for the input there. I'll have to keep an eye on both cellulosic ethanol and new algae developments.
Here's the Wikipedia article on cellulosic ethanol posted in another thread. Seems to have a lot of inputs - and the early estimates put the cost at 2.5 - 4 times the cost of corn ethanol. Hmmm - while I'm sure we could make a healthy market for this fuel if pressed, it first generation doesn't seem that viable. Collecting from non-crop lands would also add to the theoretical costs too.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on algae in terms of larger scale potential, and comparative simplicity in terms of the inputs and outputs if the crops were managed and even engineered well enough - but this certainly could potentially fill some openings in the energy market until something else comes along!
Indeed - there's another resource we need to care about here. Viable soil is a renewable resource - but like fresh water, it has its limits, and is geographically quite limited in terms of cheap availability. By forcing the land to both feed everyone, and fuel all their vehicles, we place a much lower maximum on the population that can be supported by that land. More than that, by potentially stretching the demands on the land too far, we risk that farmers and companies may deplete or despoil the soil they use for short term gain before they decide to leave the market, making it difficult for anyone else to economically recover that same area.
That said, we could make better use of the oceans - but I trust our current free market much less there - the oceans have much more of a "tragedy of the commons" dynamic than elsewhere, with fragile ecosystems and high difficulty sectioning off properties. Algae on land-based ponds in otherwise nonviable landscapes would offer the most promise for producing biomass in a way that would not negatively affect prices for the poor. Algae can produce its own food, doesn't need to use much fresh water, can produce various kinds of oils, and could even be used as a part of foods if we are interested in exploring that. The only question is, will it be able to scale and pay for itself in terms of needing to control its environment to mass produce it? Given the history of livestock, I can't imagine algae can't be made efficient or be properly bred en mass.
That's just my idea though - and I'm fairly uninformed about the whole field of energy crops. Why are we currently pursuing the whole turn-food-to-fuel path anyway, given how wide open the algae field is?
Not that it has been easy to order a copy of the upgrade - but I wonder how many of those 20 million copies of Vista that have been sold are actually the $12 (after shipping) upgrades one could get when they ordered a copy of XP before Vista was sold. I know I did that, because if I needed to use an application that needed Vista, I could throw it on for that case.
I certainly know I'm not going to install Vista unless I absolutely have to, for the same reason I only switched to XP with my new computer a few months ago. It'll be interesting to see when the first pieces of Vista-only hardware come out - likely new DirectX-oriented video cards.
Yes, it only takes one demonstration to a render invalid a scientific theory. But that does not validate any other theories by doing so, unless they can accurately carry the same predictive weight as the previous theory, plus comply with the improved observations.
A hole in Newtons second theory in any case doesn't mean scientists throw out their physics books, it generally means they add and exception to the theory and work on finding a more unified algorithm to describe the newly revised observations. Here's hoping this somewhat exotic set of observations leads eventually to a stronger set of theories, rather than just more false controversy about 'mavericks' and 'closed minded skeptics' - everyone's a skeptic AND a maverick, closed minded and radical - focusing only on the extremes of that, especially in terms of science sort of ignores the whole point of science, to use biased viewpoints to paint a larger picture.
Slashdot Mirror
http://blog.digg.com/
This was just posted on Digg's official blog:
"Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts...
In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin"
It looks like this may be a full reverse - the Digg is cowering before its users. Interesting twist.
Ryan Fenton
>>You're jumping ahead of us. You'd have to emulate sensory organs in order to sense "movement".
Actually, you just need to be able to read the outputs from a sensory organ. There's no rule against testing a simulated brain with a real eye's outputs. You can either record the outputs and send them through to the simulation later, or have realtime IO to a real eye. Same with equalibrium, and other data sources. Oddly enough, it's likely many, many, many orders of magnitude simpler for us to provide a world of inputs for a brain to sense for the sake of testing than it is to develop the processing algorithms for the brain itself. We've got a LOT of experience mocking up fake world inputs, and processing the signals of real sensory organ outputs.
Ryan Fenton
It's cool that we can create the basic scale of the infrastructure of a (half) mouse brain - but if we're really going to simulate a brain, we need the ability to read the contents of a real one in order to verify our simulation. Otherwise, we have little basis for saying that input X gives the sensation of movement, and would have effect/output Y in terms of changed state/response.
I wonder what the current state of neuron state reading is - would we ever theoretically be able to read the state of a brain beyond the external outputs? Could we ever get a sinlgle state that would be the 'ROM' of a person's memories and mental state, that you could place in a simulation and have that person's memories 'wake up' in a simulation? I wonder how close we could get.
Ryan Fenton
In the last episode, the capitol building collapsed - and now, the following letter appeared on the broken stairsteps to the Ohio capitol:
"We're sorry that the capitol building collapsed, but it ends up that we used Licoln Logs to build the dome, and it ends up that it collapses when the wind hits it from multiple directions at once.
We've gotten some complaints that we should have expected this, and were "total morons" for choosing such a design. We think this is a gross oversimplification, and more than a little unfair. We used multiple layers of high-quality chewing gum to secure the dome, which required countless hours of chewing, along with thousands of gallons of spittle. When you complain against such a massive effort, you insult the sore mouths of our hard working employees.
Sincerely,
Halliburton CEO
Bozo D. Clown"
Next episode: FEMA picks up the pieces.
Ryan Fenton
Netcraft confirms: Democracy is dead.
Seriously though, this is a rather strange turn of events. And given the Bush administration's history of explaining such strange events, I don't expect a civil debate coming out of this.
Ryan Fenton
I understand that our economic system has evolved to dismiss long term thinking*, but what happens when our knowledge-based jobs are fed mostly by outsourced workers, or workers who are intentionally not permanent residents? Management is difficult in the same sense rappers say pimping is difficult - anyone could do it, they just have to be willing to do it. What's needed is the workers... what, aside from unreasonable "intellectual property" schemes prevents outsourced workers from forming companies and completely doing away with American dominance of knowledge-based industries?
...to the point where a perceived lack of short-term thinking is grounds for a lawsuit for a publicly traded company.
Yes, we're going to get a few spikes in jobs for programmers filling gaps in the work that can be efficiently outsourced, and performing integration of outsourced work, but that only masks the shift away from our last reliable American industry outside of entertainment and service. Heedless outsourcing across decades invites the loss of our ability to do our own work.
To all programmers outside the US: This is by no stretch a complaint against you - I'm actually very glad to see this trend towards greater US money available to international professional programmers. I hope to see many new software companies started and outcompeting US companies, and I hope to work with many of them. My complaint is in the way our market is allowing the local US economy for programmers to shrink in terms of educating new programmers locally, switching existing programmers to a roll of managing outsourced programmers - I see that as long term strategy with a lot of negative consequences. Without a healthy entry level market for programmers, our programming economy may stall.
Ryan Fenton
*
Agreed - I'd much prefer a simple OpenGL/SDL/Etc. wrapper around DirectX 10 in order to meet long-term reuse of DirectX games. However, the demand exists now for DirectX content outside of the constraints Microsoft has planned for - that's where the large number of developers can work to stretch DirectX outside of those bounds.
It's not a fight against Microsoft entirely - just snubbing along the way to forcing their games to work without having to pay for Vista. It's meeting a demand Microsoft is uninterested to supply themselves.
Ryan Fenton
If nothing else, this can be a call to others to create similar projects. If the Alky Project is real (which it is by all accounts so far), then even if it is shut down, their work will continue. If it can't meet it's goals in some way, then it's full promise will remain as a focus for the great need to NOT 'upgrade' to Windows Vista, drawing in a large number of developers. It is also the promise that applications made for DirectX 10 may live beyond their operating environment.
This is very much a more direct refection of the same phenomenon that allows entire hardware systems to be emulated against the wishes of console, arcade and computer manufacturers.
This is the start of the market's reaction to Vista, made manifest.
Ryan Fenton
More like a possibility space. Time is an expansion of a single possibility across evaluation of physical rules. Possibility is changing any variable in the world, to get new time-spaces based on that difference. Variance is changing the nature of the universe itself in some way, which in turn changes the possibility within it.
The trick is that all possibilities are mapped, and all universes are represented. That means that if you want to find anything that can exist in any universe, you just need one set/range of coordinates.
In terms of real-world application, we can map the start of our universe in terms of universal variance change, the extremely small scales in terms of possibility change, and the larger scales in terms of time change.
Ryan Fenton
From the grade and high schools I've gone to, bullies are usually good at what they do, because punishments can't affect them for one reason or another. Besides, it's not that hard to figure out how to shield yourself from punishment, even while doing some of the most prohibited things in a school. You can shield yourself using threats, you can shield yourself by counter-accusing others, you can shield yourself using politics and parents, and most of all, you can obscure any evidence that would justify a weighty punishment.
Harsh rules usually end up working rather well for bullies. Bullies can threaten other children with false accusations just as well as they always have with a plausible "he started it" claim in the case of a fight. And if this ends up anything like fights were handled at schools I've went to, that means the victims stay quiet, because they know they get punished at a much higher rate than any rule-savvy bully.
This seems functionally more of a rule to punish technically-oriented non-bully kids who happen to anger faculty. I don't know of any kid who didn't constantly insult other kids, especially their friends, so technical kids are virtually guaranteed as targets here because of the visibility of online interactions for bullies or angry teachers to report. From living right on the Canadian border for my last high school years, I don't think Canada is any different.
Ryan Fenton
Depending on how it works out, time, possibility, and variance might be good names.
Time is a line of in a field of possibility for our space and time, which in turn is a sliver of all potential variance in all spaces and times.
Each is a coordinate in being able to find an object, and an object can stretch across each.
Ryan Fenton
I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!
Speaking of which, anyone interested in some rather funny dimensional hijinks, you might want to check out Flatland the classic book, or one of the movies being made about the story.
Ryan Fenton
But it highlighted star still does show the six-ray spikes the other starts do... the white light in the center just seems to have an hourglass shape that matches with the hexagonal spikes (also likely an artifact) that makes a square as it radiates out. Is it possible that the core of this star is collapsing into a quasar-like object, radiating in two opposite directions, each mostly perpendicular to our viewpoint? Those two narrowing radiating jets of light could match the hexagon thatches to make that white hourglass in the center, making the red square on the outside.
Ryan Fenton
I'm not a astrophysicist, but I've seen enough photographic artifacts to know you can get some interesting symmetrical single-color polygons through reflection and refraction that look remarkably like what is shown here. Is there any way to verify that this isn't a visual artifact, as opposed to an actual physical cloud? Or is the artifact itself a sign that there has to be a highly symmetrical set of objects creating it?
Ryan Fenton
It's like RoboCop: You shall not harm any employee of the your owners. But you have the authority to find a way to get them fired, and THEN kill them. And no one found any problem with this until their boss was dead in front of them, and they realized they could be next.
Honestly though, I see value in a policy that no human life should be risked in automatic death systems - including land mines and other traps. These loopholes make that policy as useless as some RoboCop parody though.
Ryan Fenton
Although the faint hope of commercial value in many television properties does give some television shows some guarantee it will be around for future folks to look at (including historians), I think it is also important that the banal and the "so-common-as-to-be-worthless" content get it's shot at archival also. I think Youtube is somewhat important - it looks to be strong enough to survive until digital storage is cheap enough that our current processes of digital archival are made irrelevant. It's important, because although there are groups like the Digital Archive Project, Archive.org, and the various file trading groups which keep a lot of content alive long term, none of these have as strong a hope of legally keeping their information freely available, or have the same mass of content that Youtube/Google can provide.
It may seem rather silly to keep ahold of some of this stuff - but even if you'd never even dream of spending the time to watch any of it, I believe that our increasing ability to find new ways of consuming content and searching through it will bring surprising value, even as the value of content itself continues to fall. Youtube increases this aggregate historical value still further by also having a (youth and nerd-oriented) snapshot of a wide variety of daily lives around the world.
Ryan Fenton
Well, the danger for the RIAA is that this sets precedents not that stop them from pursuing their current path, but that it makes that path more statistically more expensive to follow. If they can expect to be successfully counter sued a given (even small)percentage of the time based on blind accusations, not only does that make their strategy more expensive in all likelyhood, it also spreads less fear.
It's like a despot who makes money by demanding it of his neighbors, otherwise he sends his slaves off to explode in their town centers. If his neighbors learn that it is possible to identify and send these slaves back home before they explode in some cases (but not always), then this despot's income and power mechanisms are potentially at risk. His neighbors may in fact be able to join together at this point and find more ways of stopping him. That, and the rich nobles (Sir Sony, Sir BMG, et al) who finance this horrible dictator may finally realize the problems of spending so much money on propping up such a horrible dictator just to maintain the value of their positions, as their own bombs start to blow up in their own faces.
Ryan Fenton
Mileage mania? What does that make stretch Hummer/fuel injected racecar owners? Sufferers of Mileage Dementia/Depression?
My favorite motorcar extremists lately are the guys strapping together thousands of dollars worth of batteries to make ultra-high performance vehicles that still get 40 mpg. Sure, they have to go light and limited to 100 miles range per charge, but they end up with a true racecar that makes no sound except the burning of the wheels. That's just damn cool.
Mileage itself is a bit of a red herring though - there's always going to be a need for vehicles with 'horrid' milage, and 'wasting' that fuel to move earth, or just push a lot of metal - it really isn't an inherent problem to 'waste' fuel on big cars. The only real concern is the effect using that fuel in a fuel cycle. If going through that cycle returns the earth to a carbon-rich atmosphere, that's not a good thing. If the cycle doesn't involve such troublesome consequences though, then as long as the fuel is worth it's other negative effects (like on your wallet), then I don't see how it's a problem.
We just need better fuels and energy source paths. The market's having a hard time finding a good set of somethings for now - but the dynamics look to be changing, thanks in large part to a lot of nations making some rather interesting long-term investments in fuel research. If you get the right fuel, then I'd much rather have a fuel-inneficient car that theoretically retails for $12,000 after mass manufacture, than a maximized fuel efficient car that retails for $50,000. We need fuels we can waste, so we can consider fuel efficiency completely in terms of direct cost rather than indirect environmental impact as a society.
I look forward to being able to waste a lot of new kinds of fuel in the future. Here's hoping they come up with one that smells like rich coffee ice cream!
Ryan Fenton
Does the polygon rating mean that much in terms of ray tracing performance? From what I've done with raytracing, most objects exist as geometric additions/subtractions of primitive shapes. A door would be a cube transformed to be stretched into a rectangular plank, plus a couple cylinders for the various parts of the door handle, plus a sphere for the handle end, minus a series of cubes for the lock opening shape. Polygons only come into play outside the engine, when you're trying to decide how to map textures across objects, then you'd want to represent the side they're painting as a polygon - but only before it goes to the engine, it would just be a single texture for all sides wrapped around the visible object. You might have a separate polygon primitive, but I'd think it would be one of the least ones used, in terms of raytracing efficiency.
You can cheat a lot in comparing polys to primitives when it comes to comparing raytracers to polygon engines. Still, it's been a while since I've played with raytracers, and I'm interested in what I've missed - this seems like it would be a real treat to see in action.
Ryan Fenton
Ah - that makes more sense then. Unknown end price, goal price is $1.07 so far - got it.
Ryan Fenton
Ah cool - thanks for the input there. I'll have to keep an eye on both cellulosic ethanol and new algae developments.
Here's the Wikipedia article on cellulosic ethanol posted in another thread. Seems to have a lot of inputs - and the early estimates put the cost at 2.5 - 4 times the cost of corn ethanol. Hmmm - while I'm sure we could make a healthy market for this fuel if pressed, it first generation doesn't seem that viable. Collecting from non-crop lands would also add to the theoretical costs too.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on algae in terms of larger scale potential, and comparative simplicity in terms of the inputs and outputs if the crops were managed and even engineered well enough - but this certainly could potentially fill some openings in the energy market until something else comes along!
Ryan Fenton
Indeed - there's another resource we need to care about here. Viable soil is a renewable resource - but like fresh water, it has its limits, and is geographically quite limited in terms of cheap availability. By forcing the land to both feed everyone, and fuel all their vehicles, we place a much lower maximum on the population that can be supported by that land. More than that, by potentially stretching the demands on the land too far, we risk that farmers and companies may deplete or despoil the soil they use for short term gain before they decide to leave the market, making it difficult for anyone else to economically recover that same area.
That said, we could make better use of the oceans - but I trust our current free market much less there - the oceans have much more of a "tragedy of the commons" dynamic than elsewhere, with fragile ecosystems and high difficulty sectioning off properties. Algae on land-based ponds in otherwise nonviable landscapes would offer the most promise for producing biomass in a way that would not negatively affect prices for the poor. Algae can produce its own food, doesn't need to use much fresh water, can produce various kinds of oils, and could even be used as a part of foods if we are interested in exploring that. The only question is, will it be able to scale and pay for itself in terms of needing to control its environment to mass produce it? Given the history of livestock, I can't imagine algae can't be made efficient or be properly bred en mass.
That's just my idea though - and I'm fairly uninformed about the whole field of energy crops. Why are we currently pursuing the whole turn-food-to-fuel path anyway, given how wide open the algae field is?
Ryan Fenton
Not that it has been easy to order a copy of the upgrade - but I wonder how many of those 20 million copies of Vista that have been sold are actually the $12 (after shipping) upgrades one could get when they ordered a copy of XP before Vista was sold. I know I did that, because if I needed to use an application that needed Vista, I could throw it on for that case.
I certainly know I'm not going to install Vista unless I absolutely have to, for the same reason I only switched to XP with my new computer a few months ago. It'll be interesting to see when the first pieces of Vista-only hardware come out - likely new DirectX-oriented video cards.
Ryan Fenton
Yes, it only takes one demonstration to a render invalid a scientific theory. But that does not validate any other theories by doing so, unless they can accurately carry the same predictive weight as the previous theory, plus comply with the improved observations.
A hole in Newtons second theory in any case doesn't mean scientists throw out their physics books, it generally means they add and exception to the theory and work on finding a more unified algorithm to describe the newly revised observations. Here's hoping this somewhat exotic set of observations leads eventually to a stronger set of theories, rather than just more false controversy about 'mavericks' and 'closed minded skeptics' - everyone's a skeptic AND a maverick, closed minded and radical - focusing only on the extremes of that, especially in terms of science sort of ignores the whole point of science, to use biased viewpoints to paint a larger picture.
Ryan Fenton