Article was fairly devoid of specific details on how they associate brain information with thoughts beyond vague notions of brain-area activity.
While it is true that you can get some nice readings of which areas of the brain are active, and we do know some areas of the brain associate with specific motivations and actions, to say this reads thoughts is like saying police polygraphs "detect lies".
This seems more of a tool to intimidate people into believing they won't successfully be able to lie to an interviewer. The interviewer will likely tell people to tell them something that will force the user to be protective or lie, which they will use to "train" the system to look for similar responses and call those responses a lie. Similarly, they will ask people about, for instance, terrorism, then call a part of their brain the "terrorist" spot for that person... all of which is complete psuedoscience, and I hope will remain inadmissable in court, but I know will be used by many organizations as an excuse to do various things to people based on what they decide means what in that person's brain responses.
I wish more people would be aware of polygraphs, and the deceptive practices involved in their use - but this device could bring the public misunderstanding about such things to a whole new level.
Shame - I'm starting to develop some nice casual window-only games in my spare time (for people tired of minesweeper, pinball and card games) using SDL and OpenGL, and I'd like windowed users to be able to use them. I'll still keep going - it's too much fun working with OpenGL to stop for some boneheaded MS decision - just don't like having to tell people their SOL for using a certain OS in certain situations.
I certainly agree - I'm more than a bit of a liberal in terms of environment, and environmental policy (and almost everything else). But until the market will sustain the active recovery of used materials, a non-socialist capitol-based society just won't realistically reward such action. That makes it quite inneficient to recycle plastics and the like, even for the more socialist nations.
What would be probably most efficient, under those circumstances, would be to work on policy to limit the use of unsustainable materials, like with CFC's and the like. But if that ends up costing more than what people are willing to accept... then the only practical choice is to use up the cheap-to-use resources, until the environment will accept the use of the more expensive-to-use resources.
It does point to a certain blind consumption on the part of humanity - but such is what we as humans value socially before anything else. Energy (laziness) first, immediate gain next, then the more esoteric considerations like progress and betterment.
I wish China the best - they'll likely end up with a lot of pure research gains that will help the world with a project like this. I don't think they'll end up with their goal, however, of a truly sustainable city, without compromises that few would accept. I wish the US would try more things like this - a commitment to general research would help humanity as a whole a lot more than what we've seen in the last 20 years. It just won't ever really give us the answers to the questions we pose when we start - that's what makes it general research, and also what makes it unprofitable and fascinationg at the same time.
Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller's (Penn & Teller) great show Bullshit did a great show last season on recycling. In short, recycling does allow reuse of some resources, but does not appear to damage less environment, or use less energy, or even consume much less space than just throwing everything away.
As far as the pure basis for modern cities are concerned, would this lead to a truly successful competitive society as a first priority? I'd certainly hope so - and applaud China for looking into it, but I don't know if "sustainability" in this sense is necissaruly efficient, long-term compared to using the best resources for the circumstances.
1. Injury or other causes of restricted bloodlow will change the pattern. People may be wearing a watch or carring a bag which may change the net translucent image of the hand for some time.
2. No mention if this is 3-d imaging, or multiple-perspective scanning of some sort - but if it's just a 2-d single image, then another source of the 2-d image could be used as fake ID. In the case of 3-d imaging, fakes become more difficult - gummy hands are a lot less common than gummy bears. Still - there has to be a basis for pattern-recognition in the complex mess that makes up a human hand/palm, and that basis can be exploited. A rubber glove with ink on the palm, flipped inside-out may do the trick, or something similar.
3. This equipment... will it be cheap? Will it require large databases and further security for that data? How much cheaper will this be than other security methods? Cost more than most things will likely determine the impact of a biometric technology. Just having another identification scheme won't help that much, if it can only be used in already-secure or expensive scenarios.
Biometrics are a great idea, and some very cool implementations - but they always seem to involve a lot of false negatives/positives (none have solved both), and are fairly expensive relative to their unreliability. They certainly haven't been a replacement for most standard security schemes. How is this scheme different?
Potential such as new ways of spreading knowledge and teaching subjects - the wikipedia concept is a superb working idea as an extension of an encyclopedia, and it's an idea that can be expanded further. Beyond detailing and linking concepts, the simple idea of teaching someone based on what they know could be one such branch of such developments. Many new elemental ways of using existing knowledge more freely and appropriatly have yet to be touched, or are even possible before we build the concepts needed to reach them.
It's not so much that we have some isolated potential we don't care about - it's that we have huge families of ideas that we won't even know about until we step back into the the idea of the advancement of human knowledge.
Something such as what to combat what?
Well, it's not combat, it's trying to build the public will and eductional environment so that we can bring the a-political progress that seems to be stagnating in our self-distracting society. There are far better priorities to consider than the combat and pure-market mentalities we have settled into, in my mind - though I'm open to argument. It's about ending the short-sightedness that seems to be cutting into the long-term benefit of everyone, especially the market at large.
Just my opinion: Without one new government program or non-conservative change, a simple shift in the interests of politicians and citizens back towards an interest in human progress would bring back something we seem to have lost for too long. I don't care about the politics, only getting away from the stagnation we seem to have fallen into.
The internet is a great tool - a channel for almost unlimited forms of information. It's potential hasn't even begun to be tapped, despite the wonders we've already seen. But to see more potential, we need a lot more than just access - we need people with the time, interest and freedom to explore that potential.
We don't see much of that anymore here in America. Few people have the time or interest to go beyond the mundane around them. The concept of progress has become the idea of people selling things to people, with little else involved. Science and education just aren't that important anymore, except for expanding markets.
Am I surprised this experiment failed? No - who is going to have the time to use even free bandwidth to try something new? Not many people anymore. We're just not interested.
That's not to say that it's a truly bleak picture - but we as a population do seem to be stuck waiting for progress to come to us, rather than going out and making the progress ourselves. We need science, social thought, meaningful public education, healthy debate and journalism, and a much greater interest in human progress.
It's not about liberalism versus convervatism - it's about humanity doing something to make the world better, so it's not such a horrible place. It's about doing something to outpace the destruction we're causing, at least on some level. It's about seeing beyond dollars, and using our vast resources towards creating a future where we all know more, not just avoiding the terrors that will never stop coming in new forms.
It's not experiments like these failing that we should be depressed about - it's that we have so very few experiments like them at all anymore (relative to population increase over time).
Certainly not a bad service - only problem would be having some odd person on the subway ask to watch with you. All this video-over-widerange-wireless stuff makes me wonder though - what are the long-term limits of wireless data transfer over large areas? I anticipate (article was more early marketing than real info)that users of this service will not be getting a high-resolution image on their cell phone, and what they get will likely jam with any signal interference, but it won't be too long until competition pushes for higher resolution, more video buffer, etc.
Can we expect ultra-high-resolution TV-style instant video eventually for everyone over a cellphone-style wireless network, or will it become more of a video-on-demand system where you chose ahead what you want to watch, then are notified when your show is available to watch? I wonder what the bandwidth will end up making plausible and simpler to provide.
Which makes me think - once people get to commonly learn video-on-demand or TIVO-style interfaces, which will be more popular? If providers can get past the nickel-and-dime mentality of providing shows on demand (see NetFlix for why losing this mentality helps), then I believe that style would be much more popular for people using cellphones who'd want to watch specific shows rather than the usual TV-zombie experience. So long as they can eventually have shows in storage rather than streaming them, it should be easier on the network too.
Ideally, this choice should be mostly shaped by what you'd like to be doing with your life. Do you want to use computers to provide power and connectivity to people? Do you want to use computers to allow your creative insticts to create something new to the world, or at least to your employers? Do you want to be be working with lots of interesting equipment as opposed to hitting a keyboard all day?
The reason I didn't choose to become an engineer of some sort instead of computer science is because the process of exploring ideas by way of computer was what has and does still fascinate me. The idea of chosing to become a computer engineer/scientist based on market conditions makes me shudder a little bit. I can certainly understand the many reasons one would want to take the more McGuyver approach and work more with hardware - but following that path based on an imagined market seems backwards to me.
The parrot and cockatoo species of birds offer some amazing insight into the likely evolution of intelligence and social interaction outside the human/mammal pathway.
To start with, birds in general have their origins traced back to dinosaur-era reptiles. That's a pretty huge developmental shift between humanity and bird.
Yet, many species of birds can not only learn to speak human words, but they can learn context and how to use those words to manipulate people and other creatures. The birds in my parents pet store have learned more than just how to act in order to get treats, but how to manipulate people and other animals for seemingly the sheer pleasures and social interaction of it. It's hard to think of such use of intelligence as a base condition of animals that were ancestors of both mammals and dinosaurs - it seems more likely that intelligence itself is an independantly developed extension of logic.
As a smaller-scale example, Cockatoos are a more ancient species of bird than modern parrots. They also develop intelligence of many sorts, though of a more social nature. They can learn to speak words and immitate, but use the manipulation of those words on a more purely social level than parrots. It's somewhat amazing that such a mobile and diverse set of species as birds can each acquire different uses for language and intelligence - perhaps if it weren't for the necissary limitations of flight (weight, head-body aspect ratio), the intelligent species of our planet would have been birds, not mammals.
This is no hard evidence, but it also seems to make the possibility of intelligent life outside our known observed environments seem less unlikely too - especially if it can develop in so seemingly independant circumstances, despite a somewhat shared environment.
But how long until we can get some level of computer-controlled vehicles? Once the technology has matured a bit, I'd MUCH rather trust a reasonably engineered computerized system than the thousands of other drivers around me on my way about town. Not that I shouldn't be able to turn it off, but I think the concept would really grow once we switched the carpool lane to the auto-drive lane, and manual drivers learn to stay clear of the 80+mph traffic that flows on it.
Sounds like there's a LOT of room for new production techniques and cost improvements! Even worst-case, this design shows a lot of promise. If things pan out, I'd love to be on one of the first teams possibly integrating this kind of stuff into future motherboards, chipsets and devices. Even with a limited lifespan, (a "data health" meter on a hard drive would be annoying), this first generation of nanotech hardware looks very promising.
The question behind the questions is what potential roles that this product could fill.
If it can't run at room temperature conveniently, but can be made cheap per storage space and is reliable, then it may be useful in stationary servers for extreme-mass remote storage.
If it can run at room temperature and is somewhat affordable, but slow, it can be used as common backup.
If it can end up close but superior to hard disk in all aspects, then it may replace them.
If it can be fast enough to be used as live memory at room temperature, with conventional memory as cache, then even with a few limitations, it could transform the nature of computers as we experience them.
There's many, many other possibilities. Yes, of course, as you suggest, price will match the market - but the role this technology can play is limited more by it's logical capability than the market. If the possibility is open, it's usually much more of an opportunity if you can create a new technology in a market than to just replace another. That's why my questions are obvious - we all wonder how far this first generation of nanotechnology will take us.
1. What's the read/write speed? 2. What's the operating temperature requirements? 3. What's the max operating heat output per unit? 4. How many concurrant inputs/outputs can we get into a unit? 5. What's the failure rate/expected operating lifespan? 6. What's the near-term expected commodity cost of these units? 7. Given 1-6, how many units would be needed to make a properly redundant filesystem with at least the reliability and speed of current file storage devices on the market? What would be the expected near-term cost?
If the USPTO has had so much money taken from it, it obviously isn't a cheap operation to run. If we're in the mode of cutting governmental programs.... wouldn't it be a good idea to just cut the functions that the USPTO has to perform.
For instance - getting rid of software patents, along with biological patents, business-model patents, and the vast majority of method-based patents in general might be a good idea.
We owe it to our children to not force them to owe so many millions in the name of the ownership of ideas. These types of patent management is equivalent to flushing a large portion of our market down the tubes.
Ah - experimented further with about:config. Found that "browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick" seems to do it. Cool - now I'm not so anxious about losing future Mozilla updates.
Tabbed browsing is nice for most - but for some reason, I still prefer opening up links in new windows much more often than in tabs. There's just something about the dynamic ability to position independant windows and close them in several ways that appeals to me.
But Firefox still has no obvious options or plugins that let me override the functionality of the middle-mouse button. This isn't a rag on Firefox - I've just got an unpopular configuration preference. I've casually googled and searched the usenet for leads, but no dice thus far. I've also tried various tab-killing plugins, and exerimenting with about:config, but nothing obvious worked.
It's very cool that we're overcoming these obstacles. It's just too bad these are the obstacles we have to overcome to get to useful public (not private) research.
It's kind of like the current general up-beat news about the middle-east. It's great that democracy appears to be on the rise - but that does NOT imply wisdom in what lead us to the current circumstances.
We just have to move foreward as best we can, and hope we can grow beyond our limitations.
As someone who completely missed the 70's version and the miniseries, I know there's a LOT I'm not getting, and thus don't want to invest the time in only getting part of the story. I understand the basics - doppleganger race, hunted humanity, wing-commander-like military comradery, etc - but I still don't want to jump in the middle when I possibly have another choice.
Do they officially offer the miniseries for download anywhere? I've set my MythTV box to record anything battlestar-related, but there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon to be able to catch up with the series.
If not, that's fine - perhaps I'll catch the miniseries on DVD someday and see if it's good.
They just don't want people to be able to watch their stock anymore, so they've made this move to change their stock symbol. Security through obscurity, indeed.
The language of future licensing is likely going to be per thread of main functionality running on a system at once. Multiple CPUs won't help you unless you can make the system branch out into multiple threads cooperatively. The marketing of such systems would be interesting too - a nice attractive initial price, but with extra costs multiplied by the resources you want to take advantage of.
Slashdot Mirror
> why a company like CNN and ABC with billions of
> dollars in revenue is still running unpatched
> windows 2000 computers.
To that, I have to ask: What reason is there to run Windows XP, when you have perfectly valid licensed copies of Windows 2000?
I've not yet seen any valid need for running Windows XP, nor spending the money and time to "upgrade". What's the motivation to switch?
Ryan Fenton
Article was fairly devoid of specific details on how they associate brain information with thoughts beyond vague notions of brain-area activity.
While it is true that you can get some nice readings of which areas of the brain are active, and we do know some areas of the brain associate with specific motivations and actions, to say this reads thoughts is like saying police polygraphs "detect lies".
This seems more of a tool to intimidate people into believing they won't successfully be able to lie to an interviewer. The interviewer will likely tell people to tell them something that will force the user to be protective or lie, which they will use to "train" the system to look for similar responses and call those responses a lie. Similarly, they will ask people about, for instance, terrorism, then call a part of their brain the "terrorist" spot for that person... all of which is complete psuedoscience, and I hope will remain inadmissable in court, but I know will be used by many organizations as an excuse to do various things to people based on what they decide means what in that person's brain responses.
I wish more people would be aware of polygraphs, and the deceptive practices involved in their use - but this device could bring the public misunderstanding about such things to a whole new level.
Ryan Fenton
Looks like from this thread", that with the current plan, windowed OpenGL implimentations will have to either not be truly hardware accellerated, or else have to shut down the Windows desktop hardware accelleration. That makes for a really bad choice to give the user when developing a cross-platform 3-d application, because we don't know what trouble that might cause for a user yet to force them back to a 2-d desktop.
Shame - I'm starting to develop some nice casual window-only games in my spare time (for people tired of minesweeper, pinball and card games) using SDL and OpenGL, and I'd like windowed users to be able to use them. I'll still keep going - it's too much fun working with OpenGL to stop for some boneheaded MS decision - just don't like having to tell people their SOL for using a certain OS in certain situations.
Ryan Fenton
I certainly agree - I'm more than a bit of a liberal in terms of environment, and environmental policy (and almost everything else). But until the market will sustain the active recovery of used materials, a non-socialist capitol-based society just won't realistically reward such action. That makes it quite inneficient to recycle plastics and the like, even for the more socialist nations.
What would be probably most efficient, under those circumstances, would be to work on policy to limit the use of unsustainable materials, like with CFC's and the like. But if that ends up costing more than what people are willing to accept... then the only practical choice is to use up the cheap-to-use resources, until the environment will accept the use of the more expensive-to-use resources.
It does point to a certain blind consumption on the part of humanity - but such is what we as humans value socially before anything else. Energy (laziness) first, immediate gain next, then the more esoteric considerations like progress and betterment.
I wish China the best - they'll likely end up with a lot of pure research gains that will help the world with a project like this. I don't think they'll end up with their goal, however, of a truly sustainable city, without compromises that few would accept. I wish the US would try more things like this - a commitment to general research would help humanity as a whole a lot more than what we've seen in the last 20 years. It just won't ever really give us the answers to the questions we pose when we start - that's what makes it general research, and also what makes it unprofitable and fascinationg at the same time.
Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller's (Penn & Teller) great show Bullshit did a great show last season on recycling. In short, recycling does allow reuse of some resources, but does not appear to damage less environment, or use less energy, or even consume much less space than just throwing everything away.
As far as the pure basis for modern cities are concerned, would this lead to a truly successful competitive society as a first priority? I'd certainly hope so - and applaud China for looking into it, but I don't know if "sustainability" in this sense is necissaruly efficient, long-term compared to using the best resources for the circumstances.
Ryan Fenton
This time, it's the translucent map of the hand.
Problems with this idea?
1. Injury or other causes of restricted bloodlow will change the pattern. People may be wearing a watch or carring a bag which may change the net translucent image of the hand for some time.
2. No mention if this is 3-d imaging, or multiple-perspective scanning of some sort - but if it's just a 2-d single image, then another source of the 2-d image could be used as fake ID. In the case of 3-d imaging, fakes become more difficult - gummy hands are a lot less common than gummy bears. Still - there has to be a basis for pattern-recognition in the complex mess that makes up a human hand/palm, and that basis can be exploited. A rubber glove with ink on the palm, flipped inside-out may do the trick, or something similar.
3. This equipment... will it be cheap? Will it require large databases and further security for that data? How much cheaper will this be than other security methods? Cost more than most things will likely determine the impact of a biometric technology. Just having another identification scheme won't help that much, if it can only be used in already-secure or expensive scenarios.
Biometrics are a great idea, and some very cool implementations - but they always seem to involve a lot of false negatives/positives (none have solved both), and are fairly expensive relative to their unreliability. They certainly haven't been a replacement for most standard security schemes. How is this scheme different?
Potential such as new ways of spreading knowledge and teaching subjects - the wikipedia concept is a superb working idea as an extension of an encyclopedia, and it's an idea that can be expanded further. Beyond detailing and linking concepts, the simple idea of teaching someone based on what they know could be one such branch of such developments. Many new elemental ways of using existing knowledge more freely and appropriatly have yet to be touched, or are even possible before we build the concepts needed to reach them.
It's not so much that we have some isolated potential we don't care about - it's that we have huge families of ideas that we won't even know about until we step back into the the idea of the advancement of human knowledge.
Well, it's not combat, it's trying to build the public will and eductional environment so that we can bring the a-political progress that seems to be stagnating in our self-distracting society. There are far better priorities to consider than the combat and pure-market mentalities we have settled into, in my mind - though I'm open to argument. It's about ending the short-sightedness that seems to be cutting into the long-term benefit of everyone, especially the market at large.
Just my opinion: Without one new government program or non-conservative change, a simple shift in the interests of politicians and citizens back towards an interest in human progress would bring back something we seem to have lost for too long. I don't care about the politics, only getting away from the stagnation we seem to have fallen into.
Ryan Fenton
The internet is a great tool - a channel for almost unlimited forms of information. It's potential hasn't even begun to be tapped, despite the wonders we've already seen. But to see more potential, we need a lot more than just access - we need people with the time, interest and freedom to explore that potential.
We don't see much of that anymore here in America. Few people have the time or interest to go beyond the mundane around them. The concept of progress has become the idea of people selling things to people, with little else involved. Science and education just aren't that important anymore, except for expanding markets.
Am I surprised this experiment failed? No - who is going to have the time to use even free bandwidth to try something new? Not many people anymore. We're just not interested.
That's not to say that it's a truly bleak picture - but we as a population do seem to be stuck waiting for progress to come to us, rather than going out and making the progress ourselves. We need science, social thought, meaningful public education, healthy debate and journalism, and a much greater interest in human progress.
It's not about liberalism versus convervatism - it's about humanity doing something to make the world better, so it's not such a horrible place. It's about doing something to outpace the destruction we're causing, at least on some level. It's about seeing beyond dollars, and using our vast resources towards creating a future where we all know more, not just avoiding the terrors that will never stop coming in new forms.
It's not experiments like these failing that we should be depressed about - it's that we have so very few experiments like them at all anymore (relative to population increase over time).
Ryan Fenton
Coach Z made a robot... named Elvis? Makes sense. Wow - great jorb!
Ryan Fenton
That means, the Roadrunner is the Cayote's daddy, Tweety bird is Sylvester's pappa, and GI Joe and Cobra are the world's most incestous family?
Egad!
Ryan Fenton
Certainly not a bad service - only problem would be having some odd person on the subway ask to watch with you. All this video-over-widerange-wireless stuff makes me wonder though - what are the long-term limits of wireless data transfer over large areas? I anticipate (article was more early marketing than real info)that users of this service will not be getting a high-resolution image on their cell phone, and what they get will likely jam with any signal interference, but it won't be too long until competition pushes for higher resolution, more video buffer, etc.
Can we expect ultra-high-resolution TV-style instant video eventually for everyone over a cellphone-style wireless network, or will it become more of a video-on-demand system where you chose ahead what you want to watch, then are notified when your show is available to watch? I wonder what the bandwidth will end up making plausible and simpler to provide.
Which makes me think - once people get to commonly learn video-on-demand or TIVO-style interfaces, which will be more popular? If providers can get past the nickel-and-dime mentality of providing shows on demand (see NetFlix for why losing this mentality helps), then I believe that style would be much more popular for people using cellphones who'd want to watch specific shows rather than the usual TV-zombie experience. So long as they can eventually have shows in storage rather than streaming them, it should be easier on the network too.
Ryan Fenton
Ideally, this choice should be mostly shaped by what you'd like to be doing with your life. Do you want to use computers to provide power and connectivity to people? Do you want to use computers to allow your creative insticts to create something new to the world, or at least to your employers? Do you want to be be working with lots of interesting equipment as opposed to hitting a keyboard all day?
The reason I didn't choose to become an engineer of some sort instead of computer science is because the process of exploring ideas by way of computer was what has and does still fascinate me. The idea of chosing to become a computer engineer/scientist based on market conditions makes me shudder a little bit. I can certainly understand the many reasons one would want to take the more McGuyver approach and work more with hardware - but following that path based on an imagined market seems backwards to me.
Ryan Fenton
The parrot and cockatoo species of birds offer some amazing insight into the likely evolution of intelligence and social interaction outside the human/mammal pathway.
To start with, birds in general have their origins traced back to dinosaur-era reptiles. That's a pretty huge developmental shift between humanity and bird.
Yet, many species of birds can not only learn to speak human words, but they can learn context and how to use those words to manipulate people and other creatures. The birds in my parents pet store have learned more than just how to act in order to get treats, but how to manipulate people and other animals for seemingly the sheer pleasures and social interaction of it. It's hard to think of such use of intelligence as a base condition of animals that were ancestors of both mammals and dinosaurs - it seems more likely that intelligence itself is an independantly developed extension of logic.
As a smaller-scale example, Cockatoos are a more ancient species of bird than modern parrots. They also develop intelligence of many sorts, though of a more social nature. They can learn to speak words and immitate, but use the manipulation of those words on a more purely social level than parrots. It's somewhat amazing that such a mobile and diverse set of species as birds can each acquire different uses for language and intelligence - perhaps if it weren't for the necissary limitations of flight (weight, head-body aspect ratio), the intelligent species of our planet would have been birds, not mammals.
This is no hard evidence, but it also seems to make the possibility of intelligent life outside our known observed environments seem less unlikely too - especially if it can develop in so seemingly independant circumstances, despite a somewhat shared environment.
Ryan Fenton
But how long until we can get some level of computer-controlled vehicles? Once the technology has matured a bit, I'd MUCH rather trust a reasonably engineered computerized system than the thousands of other drivers around me on my way about town. Not that I shouldn't be able to turn it off, but I think the concept would really grow once we switched the carpool lane to the auto-drive lane, and manual drivers learn to stay clear of the 80+mph traffic that flows on it.
Ryan Fenton
Even though I liked a good many of them - I hope they skip the psuedo-music videos in this series.
Then again... if they could get the likes of They Might Be Giants and U2 working on it, instead of poor B-52's impersonations...
Ryan Fenton
Thank you very much for that then!
Sounds like there's a LOT of room for new production techniques and cost improvements! Even worst-case, this design shows a lot of promise. If things pan out, I'd love to be on one of the first teams possibly integrating this kind of stuff into future motherboards, chipsets and devices. Even with a limited lifespan, (a "data health" meter on a hard drive would be annoying), this first generation of nanotech hardware looks very promising.
Ryan Fenton
The question behind the questions is what potential roles that this product could fill.
If it can't run at room temperature conveniently, but can be made cheap per storage space and is reliable, then it may be useful in stationary servers for extreme-mass remote storage.
If it can run at room temperature and is somewhat affordable, but slow, it can be used as common backup.
If it can end up close but superior to hard disk in all aspects, then it may replace them.
If it can be fast enough to be used as live memory at room temperature, with conventional memory as cache, then even with a few limitations, it could transform the nature of computers as we experience them.
There's many, many other possibilities. Yes, of course, as you suggest, price will match the market - but the role this technology can play is limited more by it's logical capability than the market. If the possibility is open, it's usually much more of an opportunity if you can create a new technology in a market than to just replace another. That's why my questions are obvious - we all wonder how far this first generation of nanotechnology will take us.
Ryan Fenton
1. What's the read/write speed?
2. What's the operating temperature requirements?
3. What's the max operating heat output per unit?
4. How many concurrant inputs/outputs can we get into a unit?
5. What's the failure rate/expected operating lifespan?
6. What's the near-term expected commodity cost of these units?
7. Given 1-6, how many units would be needed to make a properly redundant filesystem with at least the reliability and speed of current file storage devices on the market? What would be the expected near-term cost?
Ryan Fenton
If the USPTO has had so much money taken from it, it obviously isn't a cheap operation to run. If we're in the mode of cutting governmental programs.... wouldn't it be a good idea to just cut the functions that the USPTO has to perform.
For instance - getting rid of software patents, along with biological patents, business-model patents, and the vast majority of method-based patents in general might be a good idea.
We owe it to our children to not force them to owe so many millions in the name of the ownership of ideas. These types of patent management is equivalent to flushing a large portion of our market down the tubes.
Ryan Fenton
Ah - experimented further with about:config. Found that "browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick" seems to do it. Cool - now I'm not so anxious about losing future Mozilla updates.
Ryan Fenton
Tabbed browsing is nice for most - but for some reason, I still prefer opening up links in new windows much more often than in tabs. There's just something about the dynamic ability to position independant windows and close them in several ways that appeals to me.
But Firefox still has no obvious options or plugins that let me override the functionality of the middle-mouse button. This isn't a rag on Firefox - I've just got an unpopular configuration preference. I've casually googled and searched the usenet for leads, but no dice thus far. I've also tried various tab-killing plugins, and exerimenting with about:config, but nothing obvious worked.
Any suggestions short of re-compiling?
Ryan Fenton
It's very cool that we're overcoming these obstacles. It's just too bad these are the obstacles we have to overcome to get to useful public (not private) research.
It's kind of like the current general up-beat news about the middle-east. It's great that democracy appears to be on the rise - but that does NOT imply wisdom in what lead us to the current circumstances.
We just have to move foreward as best we can, and hope we can grow beyond our limitations.
Ryan Fenton
Got the episode... but I can't get into it.
As someone who completely missed the 70's version and the miniseries, I know there's a LOT I'm not getting, and thus don't want to invest the time in only getting part of the story. I understand the basics - doppleganger race, hunted humanity, wing-commander-like military comradery, etc - but I still don't want to jump in the middle when I possibly have another choice.
Do they officially offer the miniseries for download anywhere? I've set my MythTV box to record anything battlestar-related, but there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon to be able to catch up with the series.
If not, that's fine - perhaps I'll catch the miniseries on DVD someday and see if it's good.
Ryan Fenton
They just don't want people to be able to watch their stock anymore, so they've made this move to change their stock symbol. Security through obscurity, indeed.
Ryan Fenton
The language of future licensing is likely going to be per thread of main functionality running on a system at once. Multiple CPUs won't help you unless you can make the system branch out into multiple threads cooperatively. The marketing of such systems would be interesting too - a nice attractive initial price, but with extra costs multiplied by the resources you want to take advantage of.
Ryan Fenton