If I recall correctly these services were going to charge a fee similar to basic cable for access. Which is cool, everyone's got to make a living. But why wouldn't I just spend the money up front on a mp3 player and load it with all the songs I like? It shouldn't be that much longer before you can sign up for mp3 subscription services that track what you like and send you cheap mp3's you might enjoy. That's likely to be a hell of a lot cheaper, and not as far off. Hell, if I had a mp3 player in my car that'd read cd media, I might just make the ultimate greatest hits cd, and never listen to crappy ads seperating crappier bands. (I think these new networks are just straight programing, but still, what would you pay to never hear The Backstreet Boys again?)
It just seems to me that they'll have rough competition from mp3's in all their incarnations from the start, and later on from G3 phones that download music at ~2Mb/s and send it to your stereo via bluetooth. We'll all have the phones, and everyone's car stereo will be smart enough.... Just seems like a rocky road, and satellite prices being what they are....
What's to keep the 'developers', on whom they hope to collect royalties, from cutting out the middle man? They've got a software development kit for download, not that is even important considering the short cycle time one is likely to see for an Indreama emulator. The open factor really doesn't offer them anything other than window dressing. Their only choice is to make their money off the hardware, which doesn't seem to be their objective. I think they've got a good model to get the network effect to help them get a lot of early adoption, but what's keeping them as an integral part of the loop over time? It just seems that their plan could get them cut out of the loop both on the hardware and software end by the community they hope to service. Maybe I'm missing something....
You can backup anything you want music and software wise in the use. (excluding some game system software) As I later read, the advantage of the German tax was that you could give it to your buddies. You buy a cd here you buy the right to use the hell out of it, make one for your car, whatever.
But to my point, what kind of prices do you guys pay in europe to rent and buy originals anyway? I've bought movies because it was only a buck more than renting them (retal for most stuff $3, buy video tape $4 to $15, DVD $10 to $20). Some of the sweetest cds I have I've gotten retail for $3. (I couldn't make a copy for that if you include the art, let alone the time, typical price is $10/cd). But since the companies are essentially in an enviroment where pirating is subsidised do they do anything to make up the lost money?
Lots of people had it easier then Gore in Vietnam. My dad was one, it was his job to be in the rear with the gear, and to look peoples badges. There were many like him, but this one was mine. Being stationed on a large, safe airforce base beats the hell out to traveling anywhere in a jeep or by foot. That's not to say it was all sunshine and lollipops of course; it's not like he skipped ahead of thousands to join the "Champagne" unit of the Texas Air National Guard. (Not much threat of a Tet offensive in Texas so far as I know.)
I don't know how you all feel about webphones, but I find I get better information from that than my local papers (which are striking), and I get it a day early. One thing I read off MSNBC and didn't see elsewhere in the media, was that the republican counties all got new ballot counting machines over the past couple of years, but the largest, and democratic counties did not. Partisan behavior and pork barrel politics work in the microcosms of your local areas too, maybe they won't make your hometown an international laughing stock, but what rights of ours have had their edges neatly trimmed?
I'm not a fool, I know the democrats play the game the same way. However, in this Florida fiasco, which side would you want to take that of I won, let's bring out the keg and coke, or that of the disenfranchised voter? (The millitary ballot issue is a little murky too).
I'm showing my colors a little bit, and I did vote for Gore. Part of that was guilt, I had made fun of him for claiming to invent the internet. Well, I saw a NSF colloquy, and looked at his record, and he may not have invented but he pretty well single handedly made the money availible for it. I figured I kinda "owed" him.
That said, I truly think it doesn't matter. We as a people will get the leader we deserve. It won't matter if GW is really the president elect, he'll will soon have it explained to him that he doesn't run the country, bond traders and economists do. But I do look forward to paying a 2% social security tax increase so he can keep his promise, so much for my tax cut. I think that's why I enjoy this train wreck so much; how can one not revel in the irony of it all? In the end I got to be a part of history. A small part, but my role is undeniable; and as a bonus, I now get to put the smack down on anyone who says any vote doesn't count. Aside from the obvious Florida mess, if GW lost any of his other states, even lowly Wyoming, the Florida outcome would be irrelevent.
Re:Unlicensed Golden Waves of Grain.
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 1
If beta carotene is possibly so dangerous, then why don't we see associated ill effects? There are sources of beta carotene in the enviroments the rice would grow in, namely the white rice grown there now. The stalks of the rice have beta carotene already, the golden rice has some in the grain too. Over use of nitrates and phosphates, I would humbly submit, is a fair degree different than a more complex molecule, that already exists in the enviroment, being introduced to the diet of the population. Now I don't know why people don't eat stalks of rice, maybe it's the same reason I don't eat shredded wheat. (and thats good enough for me) But I think it's rather an odd position to support malnutrition, because the enviroment, quite improbably, wouldn't be able to support the change.
A change like the golden rice can be a catalyst for other, better changes. The people might be able to practice more crop rotation, which might bring the more income, and might allow them to adopt even better conventional farming techniques.
There are obviouly some bad scenerios that can come from this, like population explosions, disposable income used poorly. But if we have the ability to let someone help themselves out of the abyss, I would say it is immoral to not do that little bit.
Naw. HP will still make money, so they'll keep selling in Europe. It's no big deal for them, their customers will eat the tax. Yay! I'm europeon! I get to be taxed cause I might do something illegal. Wee.
Our government in America might not be able to count votes, and it might work best when it's grid locked, but at least we'll never see crap like this.
In the end, silly "fire bad" policies like this all fail. They presume that the citizens of a state aren't capable of participating intelligently in an economy. If they want to limit the adoption of technology, and the attendant benefits, who are we to say they're wrong? Maybe, along with personal greatest hit cds, the Germans also don't need convienent file archiving and data backup. I can't wait till the German government starts taxing cd blanks, that'll really hurt. (In the US you can walk into most retail chains and get a spindle of 50 700MB for $15)
New radicals: You get what you give?
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 1
why doesn't the US government stop paying farmers not to produce food? [I broke it in 2 parts]
One of the reason the US pays farmer to not farm fields is the agribusiness in the US has pushed prices so low that to make up the overhead, over farming and a return to the dust-bowl is a real threat. A second is from two-birds-one-stone-dept. The fedral government also uses this to encourage farmers to allow formerly native species, particularly birds, to return to the habitat. But mostly it's to reduce the over farming. If you're looking for extra food (doesn't really solve the problem, see below) then don't eat meat. Go Vegan, lots of extra food.
And ship the resulting excess to those self same countries?
For the sake of argument, we've got all the food to feed the whole world x 10. We fly the food to Starvania for free, bulk UPS discount. Ok, now we're giving away all this free food right? What happens to the local farmers? How do they compete with a better product that's free? (There is a reason "dumping" is frowned on by the FTC.) Where agriculture is pretty much the industry, wouldn't such action on our part pretty well annhilate what little local economy there is? I would consider that pretty sadistic, it's not small pox infected blankets, but it's not neighborly either. Maybe we if we got all the dragon balls together we could wish the economy OK, we still have the distribution issue. How do you get the food to the people. It's an obviously valueable commodity. The power to starve is pretty commpelling is it not? So you've got a poor region, and poor regions have desperate people, and they usually have guns. How do you distribute the food? Florida elections officials? Mormons? Marines? Well now the situation is really sticky.... What if we choose marines and push comes to shove? Do we slaughter desperate people wholesale? We could, and an argument could be made that this would be helpfull. Do we bluff? Early in Clinton's presidency we had a problem exactly like this. Not a kodak moment in spite of all the good intentions. There's a lesson to be learned.
At the end of the day, these people need someone to throw them a line, not jump in the quagmire with them.
All opinions expressed are humble and not necessarily those of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Unlicensed Golden Waves of Grain.
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 1
A couple of points of dubious worth...
Snipping in beta carotene is a little bit different than adding some DNA from a moth that makes wheat glow blue when it's sick. We know what beta carotene will do in the human body to a reasonable degree. I feel comfortable saying that it's a sure thing this enhanced rice will behave like other sources of beta carotene in the enviroment. It's not like you can't figure out if you snipped a sequence for producing beta carotene in the wrong place. Wrong place no beta carotene. Beta carotene doesn't make the rice supersmart and capable of developing artificial intelligences that will keep us forever dependent on fossil fuels. Fortified rice will not create locusts that swarm Greenpeace boats and hit them with Ode Teargas. It might help developing countries get a leg up, which could lead to more stability and thus less war and terrorism. But who the hell wants that?
Excellent point about there being need for a better distribution system though. All we need now is a way to help people in developing countries produce a crop that they're familiar with and yet would add much needed nutritional value. I wonder if anyone thought about using something like rice as a base (it's a staple food in many locals), and then maybe enhance it in some way. And then, if they gave this enhanced rice to say, farmers in the afflicted areas and let them grow it, so they'd only need the seeds. That way we get a solution which takes a truly minimal investment and creates new prosperity. That would be brilliant.
That's the beauty of the system, it's self organizing. We, for a pitance of an investment, get to ease the social pressures facing many of the poorest regions of the world, increased stability (both socially and economically) in those areas, new markets with more reasources, and most importantly a warm fuzzy feeling reminiscent of ABC after school specials.
Sometimes it seems that I'm the only one who thinks that targeting is an offense which is not quite worthy of a public stoning. Secretly, I think it's handy. When I search for some arcane thing, it seems like I'll never find it, I can't help but think that it would be nice if a banner ad for a mint in box Tokutaku VF-1J Valkyrie just poped up. I just think it would be glorious if instead of me searching for products, they could search for me. Sure there are bad forms of targeted ads, but those really are controllable. I know google doesn't really do this, but still, if they did would it be so horrible if they gave you your data and a link to something you might want to buy? Maybe there is anime toy cleaner out there, and I really do need this stuff, only no one told me. Maybe it's crap. Maybe I'm lazy as hell. But still, it would be sweet if products that I want to buy came looking for me.
It just goes to prove, that with technology, (like anything else) people often just do things before determining if they should.
Somehow I doubt there are any hidden benefits to searching hotpot.com for the proper commode. But I imagine the cops walking a beat near their famed opera hall would take a dim view of someone marking their territory. It's not like it's New Jersey after all.
I'm tired of everyone asking why are we saving the children? What are we protecting them from? How in the hell can we realisticly expect to shelter them from ideas so prevelent?
You're all missing the point! We need to shelter them from the "bad ideas" so when they read Catcher In the Rye, the impact will be preserved. I know it's a lot of work to shield little Suzzie until sophmore english, but from my own personal experience the effort is well worth it.
See, I have a learning disorder which makes it immpossible for me to understand new words solely from their spoken context. Consequently, when I was around five or so and began to hear objectionable language regularly in school, I was unable to integrate it. By the time I was in sophmore english I still was ignorant. I would read the internet often, so I knew what it was in a sence, but I'd always seen it as "bowl of fukk." We were reading Salinger in class one day, and I hit the pivitol passage. Well I was stunned, and confused. I remember it like it was directed by John Woo, with doves and unnecessary slow motion. I rasied my hand. The teacher came over; I pointed and asked my question. He bent down and whispered his reply. At this point I reflexivly shouted, "No shit? Well sonuvabitch!" I spent the remainder of the afternoon with the vice principal, but wow what an impact!
And the answers to the questions follow: We're saving the children from Sally Struthers, and with a creature of her size we need all the help we can get.
It's not that NSI is personally offended. They are mearly selecting the type of customers they don't want, funny paying ones. That's cool they're free to go down that path, they can be the Nordstroms of domain naming. They can even have a little guy playing piano music on their website 24/7. It's stupid, but isn't that THEIR choice?
It's a big wide beautiful world we live in, and everyone should be allowed to be as silly and ignorant as they want to be. Sure, we who live in cities have to tolerate a little inconvienence, but those bible loving icon worshipers who want to save the interent for the children, they live in the midwest. I think it's pretty clear who got the short end of the stick.
The argument that any outlet of anything should offer you the full range of choices available is, even on its face, not very realistic. I personally think the world and its infobaun would be a fairly boring place if it were homogeneous. The differences are what make stuff interesting, stupid, worthy of ridicule, and the hottest wetest nastiest teenage porn you've never paid to see.
Our budy Linus works for Transmeta and lives in the US. Transmeta is a US company that produces the chip for Sony's new micro viao. IIRC it's a public company and I think Compaq has a stake in it. You know how it is, the home boys get famous, and even though they always swore they'd never leave the hood, what do they do, they move to a nice neighborhood in Cali. Ayeet?
There's even a patent for using a flashlight/laser pointer to play with a cat! I kid you not
Is that a Business plan patent?
More green than a Nader-hater on election night...
on
On Asteroid Mining
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· Score: 1
The way I see it, the green-ness of Astro-mining is a red herring. That doesn't come into play when you talk about the cost benefit of it, it is really a non factor.
What Astro-mining is about, the Kibo way:
1. Getting there what you can't get here.
2. Free delivery.
Lemme start with the first of my hypothesies. What you really get from an asteroid isn't really spiffy metals. We've got those here. If I want gold I by a bunch of land, blow it up, pump in some cyanide and kill all the migratory birds that see my lakes of leftovers. I can then sell it for about $10/g or so. But what I get from asteroids is that they are in space. This gives me low vapor pressure and a 0-g enviroment to refine in. Low pressure enviroments are hard to make. Hydrogen is bad for metals, and really any non-metal (in extreamly general terms now) is bad for metals. If I melt them with a convienently located vacuum, thats just handy. But more importanly, I get a 0-g enviroment. When you alloy metals, or dope anything, to some degree, you fight gravity. It's gravity that gives you and orientation of up. Without that, you can make some ultrapure metals, or really interesting alloys. But at this point we're talking about foundries in space (who wants to make space more dangerous?). I don't think anyone is gonna be ready for that for a while yet, but they're kinda needed to make the whole endevor worth while.
Lemme go back to that second part. The other nice thing about asteroids is that they're a lot of material, and they're already in space. Since we're talking about a whole new class of superalloys as the what, with only the most demanding bleeding edge applications in need of them, it's kinda nice to have those alloys made where they're almost exclusively used. A space PT cruiser with Irridium lining for every astro-boy and girl! Stuff like that. If we want to build long term structures in space, it'll be nice to not mearly superalloys, but some of the densest materials ever created in our erector set. On top of it, our left overs are probably silicates and carbon, nice for alloying, and making other things too.
The better place to look for unobtanium, the supermaterial that will make toasters so cheap banks will just give them away is right hear on earth. Oddly, it'll probably be with a little help from biology, solid state physics and some ol fasioned ingenuity. Biomimetics: basically humans coopt small organisms to make small stuff they make, but out of what we tell them to make it. If you're familiar with chalk, that's the same stuff as nacre (mother of pearl). Everone knows chalk is weak and very brittle. Nacre is hard and tougher than any of the ceramics that come to my mind. Well the animal lays down the chalk in way that looks very similar to a brick wall. If we can trick it to use something that's useful like Alumina (Al2O3) then we've got some damn nice stuff that's very strong, chemically resistant, extreamly light weight, and tough enough to use in less specialized applications. And thats the really key, not more specialization, but less of it.
At 5GHz it's still low microwave. Which means most everything will screw with it. You'd get more speed with less humidity etc. It wouldn't be limited to line of sight, but the less you have in the way the better. Others asked if it would be IEEE 802.11 compliant, it will (check their PDFs or white sheets).
At 5GHz, and certainly with low power, they'll probably be local to an area of a few hundred feet. But it also depends on how wide a spectum they need. (I think the FCC is auctioning a band near 5GHz.) I'm getting my guess of a few hundred feet from assuming they'll use frequency hopping spread spectrum techniques similar as to what's available now.
For a look at the US spectum allocation, as it was in 1999 at least, check this.
Still 54Mb at duplex isn't bad. 11Mb or 44Mb and somtimes 54Mb?
But since they use (2) bands at 20MHz they're gonna need a Jeff Bezos ego sized chunk of spectrum to make it fly. To make it worse for both Cisco and their young(er) charge every damn countries spectrum is chopped up seperately, and they're getting kinda crowded. Given that the spectrum these puppies go at is an, as of yet, unallocated and (to my mind) a nessecarily large, block, I've gotta say these are at least 2 or more years off from the consumer.
There are a couple of up sides, these toys are really low power, they'll have very small antenna, and by the time you can get one you'll be playing 3d interactive web games off your G3 phone and won't give a crap.
In all fairness doesn't the article seem to imply that they can (with quality in the near term) render images?
They even cite CAD/CAM uses. Naw, all they got is a mirror trick. They're just Edmunds Scientific for the infobaun.
For Darwin's sake, they have a long long long way to go before they have a product that even does anything interesting, and usefulness...well that's dubious. They'll need a mess of LCD projectors, and even then the resolution of their object, which is spread over a surface area, will be questionalble.
I'm afraid 3d TV and a Britney Spears you can almost touch is a little further off. The best canidate I've seen for that was from a EE research professor from Berkley (IIRC). She used LTZ glasses and pairs of lasers to get a "pixel" to flouresce. I really should have written something down, but it was a seminar, you don't have to take notes in those things. I anycase she had a special hunk of glass, shine 2 lasers, where they cross: a glowing monochromatic dot. She made a circle in a chunk the size of a sugar cube.
As I've always understood US patent law, they (those applying for the patent) must present the very best form of their idea to be patented, and only those things described in or are clearly derivitive of can be protected.
These, as I was told as a MetE student, are two advantages under the US system. 1st the pior work of others was available to one to spring board off of. I was oft regaled with tales of emmeritus professors who whiled away their retirement researching patents for inspiration to create their better mouse trap. Alter someone's Nylon 10 to make Nylon 6 and wee, a check from du Pont. The 2nd bonus was that after the idealized form of your world changing idea was set, you could describe slight alterations or spin-off ideas, and applications. These too being the fruit of your labor are also protected.
Aside from business plan patents, US patents are fairly narrow. You can't, for instance, have a general idea like memory compression and provide one example of it and then assert dominion over everything from gif to gnuzip to speed reading.
Should my recollection and fuzzy estimation prove to be accurate, then there were no secret patents when they were setting standards during the colloquies. They actually did the work showing not only that their techniques were usable but how.
My call, they made a sucker play, and caught some suckers. But if I was going to bitch about patent law, I would bust on the pharmicutical companies who get their R&D underwritten by the tax payers, get the monopoly power of patents, and sometimes keep other viable products from market.
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It just seems to me that they'll have rough competition from mp3's in all their incarnations from the start, and later on from G3 phones that download music at ~2Mb/s and send it to your stereo via bluetooth. We'll all have the phones, and everyone's car stereo will be smart enough.... Just seems like a rocky road, and satellite prices being what they are....
But to my point, what kind of prices do you guys pay in europe to rent and buy originals anyway? I've bought movies because it was only a buck more than renting them (retal for most stuff $3, buy video tape $4 to $15, DVD $10 to $20). Some of the sweetest cds I have I've gotten retail for $3. (I couldn't make a copy for that if you include the art, let alone the time, typical price is $10/cd). But since the companies are essentially in an enviroment where pirating is subsidised do they do anything to make up the lost money?
Lots of people had it easier then Gore in Vietnam. My dad was one, it was his job to be in the rear with the gear, and to look peoples badges. There were many like him, but this one was mine. Being stationed on a large, safe airforce base beats the hell out to traveling anywhere in a jeep or by foot. That's not to say it was all sunshine and lollipops of course; it's not like he skipped ahead of thousands to join the "Champagne" unit of the Texas Air National Guard. (Not much threat of a Tet offensive in Texas so far as I know.)
I'm not a fool, I know the democrats play the game the same way. However, in this Florida fiasco, which side would you want to take that of I won, let's bring out the keg and coke, or that of the disenfranchised voter? (The millitary ballot issue is a little murky too).
I'm showing my colors a little bit, and I did vote for Gore. Part of that was guilt, I had made fun of him for claiming to invent the internet. Well, I saw a NSF colloquy, and looked at his record, and he may not have invented but he pretty well single handedly made the money availible for it. I figured I kinda "owed" him.
That said, I truly think it doesn't matter. We as a people will get the leader we deserve. It won't matter if GW is really the president elect, he'll will soon have it explained to him that he doesn't run the country, bond traders and economists do. But I do look forward to paying a 2% social security tax increase so he can keep his promise, so much for my tax cut. I think that's why I enjoy this train wreck so much; how can one not revel in the irony of it all? In the end I got to be a part of history. A small part, but my role is undeniable; and as a bonus, I now get to put the smack down on anyone who says any vote doesn't count. Aside from the obvious Florida mess, if GW lost any of his other states, even lowly Wyoming, the Florida outcome would be irrelevent.
A change like the golden rice can be a catalyst for other, better changes. The people might be able to practice more crop rotation, which might bring the more income, and might allow them to adopt even better conventional farming techniques.
There are obviouly some bad scenerios that can come from this, like population explosions, disposable income used poorly. But if we have the ability to let someone help themselves out of the abyss, I would say it is immoral to not do that little bit.
Our government in America might not be able to count votes, and it might work best when it's grid locked, but at least we'll never see crap like this.
In the end, silly "fire bad" policies like this all fail. They presume that the citizens of a state aren't capable of participating intelligently in an economy. If they want to limit the adoption of technology, and the attendant benefits, who are we to say they're wrong? Maybe, along with personal greatest hit cds, the Germans also don't need convienent file archiving and data backup. I can't wait till the German government starts taxing cd blanks, that'll really hurt. (In the US you can walk into most retail chains and get a spindle of 50 700MB for $15)
One of the reason the US pays farmer to not farm fields is the agribusiness in the US has pushed prices so low that to make up the overhead, over farming and a return to the dust-bowl is a real threat. A second is from two-birds-one-stone-dept. The fedral government also uses this to encourage farmers to allow formerly native species, particularly birds, to return to the habitat. But mostly it's to reduce the over farming. If you're looking for extra food (doesn't really solve the problem, see below) then don't eat meat. Go Vegan, lots of extra food.
And ship the resulting excess to those self same countries?
For the sake of argument, we've got all the food to feed the whole world x 10. We fly the food to Starvania for free, bulk UPS discount. Ok, now we're giving away all this free food right? What happens to the local farmers? How do they compete with a better product that's free? (There is a reason "dumping" is frowned on by the FTC.) Where agriculture is pretty much the industry, wouldn't such action on our part pretty well annhilate what little local economy there is? I would consider that pretty sadistic, it's not small pox infected blankets, but it's not neighborly either. Maybe we if we got all the dragon balls together we could wish the economy OK, we still have the distribution issue. How do you get the food to the people. It's an obviously valueable commodity. The power to starve is pretty commpelling is it not? So you've got a poor region, and poor regions have desperate people, and they usually have guns. How do you distribute the food? Florida elections officials? Mormons? Marines? Well now the situation is really sticky.... What if we choose marines and push comes to shove? Do we slaughter desperate people wholesale? We could, and an argument could be made that this would be helpfull. Do we bluff? Early in Clinton's presidency we had a problem exactly like this. Not a kodak moment in spite of all the good intentions. There's a lesson to be learned.
At the end of the day, these people need someone to throw them a line, not jump in the quagmire with them.
All opinions expressed are humble and not necessarily those of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Snipping in beta carotene is a little bit different than adding some DNA from a moth that makes wheat glow blue when it's sick. We know what beta carotene will do in the human body to a reasonable degree. I feel comfortable saying that it's a sure thing this enhanced rice will behave like other sources of beta carotene in the enviroment. It's not like you can't figure out if you snipped a sequence for producing beta carotene in the wrong place. Wrong place no beta carotene. Beta carotene doesn't make the rice supersmart and capable of developing artificial intelligences that will keep us forever dependent on fossil fuels. Fortified rice will not create locusts that swarm Greenpeace boats and hit them with Ode Teargas. It might help developing countries get a leg up, which could lead to more stability and thus less war and terrorism. But who the hell wants that?
Excellent point about there being need for a better distribution system though. All we need now is a way to help people in developing countries produce a crop that they're familiar with and yet would add much needed nutritional value. I wonder if anyone thought about using something like rice as a base (it's a staple food in many locals), and then maybe enhance it in some way. And then, if they gave this enhanced rice to say, farmers in the afflicted areas and let them grow it, so they'd only need the seeds. That way we get a solution which takes a truly minimal investment and creates new prosperity. That would be brilliant.
That's the beauty of the system, it's self organizing. We, for a pitance of an investment, get to ease the social pressures facing many of the poorest regions of the world, increased stability (both socially and economically) in those areas, new markets with more reasources, and most importantly a warm fuzzy feeling reminiscent of ABC after school specials.
Sometimes it seems that I'm the only one who thinks that targeting is an offense which is not quite worthy of a public stoning. Secretly, I think it's handy. When I search for some arcane thing, it seems like I'll never find it, I can't help but think that it would be nice if a banner ad for a mint in box Tokutaku VF-1J Valkyrie just poped up. I just think it would be glorious if instead of me searching for products, they could search for me. Sure there are bad forms of targeted ads, but those really are controllable. I know google doesn't really do this, but still, if they did would it be so horrible if they gave you your data and a link to something you might want to buy? Maybe there is anime toy cleaner out there, and I really do need this stuff, only no one told me. Maybe it's crap. Maybe I'm lazy as hell. But still, it would be sweet if products that I want to buy came looking for me.
Somehow I doubt there are any hidden benefits to searching hotpot.com for the proper commode. But I imagine the cops walking a beat near their famed opera hall would take a dim view of someone marking their territory. It's not like it's New Jersey after all.
You're all missing the point! We need to shelter them from the "bad ideas" so when they read Catcher In the Rye, the impact will be preserved. I know it's a lot of work to shield little Suzzie until sophmore english, but from my own personal experience the effort is well worth it.
See, I have a learning disorder which makes it immpossible for me to understand new words solely from their spoken context. Consequently, when I was around five or so and began to hear objectionable language regularly in school, I was unable to integrate it. By the time I was in sophmore english I still was ignorant. I would read the internet often, so I knew what it was in a sence, but I'd always seen it as "bowl of fukk." We were reading Salinger in class one day, and I hit the pivitol passage. Well I was stunned, and confused. I remember it like it was directed by John Woo, with doves and unnecessary slow motion. I rasied my hand. The teacher came over; I pointed and asked my question. He bent down and whispered his reply. At this point I reflexivly shouted, "No shit? Well sonuvabitch!" I spent the remainder of the afternoon with the vice principal, but wow what an impact!
And the answers to the questions follow: We're saving the children from Sally Struthers, and with a creature of her size we need all the help we can get.
It's a big wide beautiful world we live in, and everyone should be allowed to be as silly and ignorant as they want to be. Sure, we who live in cities have to tolerate a little inconvienence, but those bible loving icon worshipers who want to save the interent for the children, they live in the midwest. I think it's pretty clear who got the short end of the stick.
The argument that any outlet of anything should offer you the full range of choices available is, even on its face, not very realistic. I personally think the world and its infobaun would be a fairly boring place if it were homogeneous. The differences are what make stuff interesting, stupid, worthy of ridicule, and the hottest wetest nastiest teenage porn you've never paid to see.
Transmeta.com
Is that a Business plan patent?
What Astro-mining is about, the Kibo way:
1. Getting there what you can't get here.
2. Free delivery.
Lemme start with the first of my hypothesies. What you really get from an asteroid isn't really spiffy metals. We've got those here. If I want gold I by a bunch of land, blow it up, pump in some cyanide and kill all the migratory birds that see my lakes of leftovers. I can then sell it for about $10/g or so. But what I get from asteroids is that they are in space. This gives me low vapor pressure and a 0-g enviroment to refine in. Low pressure enviroments are hard to make. Hydrogen is bad for metals, and really any non-metal (in extreamly general terms now) is bad for metals. If I melt them with a convienently located vacuum, thats just handy. But more importanly, I get a 0-g enviroment. When you alloy metals, or dope anything, to some degree, you fight gravity. It's gravity that gives you and orientation of up. Without that, you can make some ultrapure metals, or really interesting alloys. But at this point we're talking about foundries in space (who wants to make space more dangerous?). I don't think anyone is gonna be ready for that for a while yet, but they're kinda needed to make the whole endevor worth while.
Lemme go back to that second part. The other nice thing about asteroids is that they're a lot of material, and they're already in space. Since we're talking about a whole new class of superalloys as the what, with only the most demanding bleeding edge applications in need of them, it's kinda nice to have those alloys made where they're almost exclusively used. A space PT cruiser with Irridium lining for every astro-boy and girl! Stuff like that. If we want to build long term structures in space, it'll be nice to not mearly superalloys, but some of the densest materials ever created in our erector set. On top of it, our left overs are probably silicates and carbon, nice for alloying, and making other things too.
The better place to look for unobtanium, the supermaterial that will make toasters so cheap banks will just give them away is right hear on earth. Oddly, it'll probably be with a little help from biology, solid state physics and some ol fasioned ingenuity. Biomimetics: basically humans coopt small organisms to make small stuff they make, but out of what we tell them to make it. If you're familiar with chalk, that's the same stuff as nacre (mother of pearl). Everone knows chalk is weak and very brittle. Nacre is hard and tougher than any of the ceramics that come to my mind. Well the animal lays down the chalk in way that looks very similar to a brick wall. If we can trick it to use something that's useful like Alumina (Al2O3) then we've got some damn nice stuff that's very strong, chemically resistant, extreamly light weight, and tough enough to use in less specialized applications. And thats the really key, not more specialization, but less of it.
Or maybe I'm full of shit.
I think I had you for a professor once. I shot your dog.
http://ftp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~tiapr o/w ire/Image1.gif
Sorry.
Radiata Product Briefs
At 5GHz, and certainly with low power, they'll probably be local to an area of a few hundred feet. But it also depends on how wide a spectum they need. (I think the FCC is auctioning a band near 5GHz.) I'm getting my guess of a few hundred feet from assuming they'll use frequency hopping spread spectrum techniques similar as to what's available now.
For a look at the US spectum allocation, as it was in 1999 at least, check this.
US FCC Spectrum allocation as of 1999.
Still 54Mb at duplex isn't bad. 11Mb or 44Mb and somtimes 54Mb?
But since they use (2) bands at 20MHz they're gonna need a Jeff Bezos ego sized chunk of spectrum to make it fly. To make it worse for both Cisco and their young(er) charge every damn countries spectrum is chopped up seperately, and they're getting kinda crowded. Given that the spectrum these puppies go at is an, as of yet, unallocated and (to my mind) a nessecarily large, block, I've gotta say these are at least 2 or more years off from the consumer.
There are a couple of up sides, these toys are really low power, they'll have very small antenna, and by the time you can get one you'll be playing 3d interactive web games off your G3 phone and won't give a crap.
They even cite CAD/CAM uses. Naw, all they got is a mirror trick. They're just Edmunds Scientific for the infobaun.
For Darwin's sake, they have a long long long way to go before they have a product that even does anything interesting, and usefulness...well that's dubious. They'll need a mess of LCD projectors, and even then the resolution of their object, which is spread over a surface area, will be questionalble.
I'm afraid 3d TV and a Britney Spears you can almost touch is a little further off. The best canidate I've seen for that was from a EE research professor from Berkley (IIRC). She used LTZ glasses and pairs of lasers to get a "pixel" to flouresce. I really should have written something down, but it was a seminar, you don't have to take notes in those things. I anycase she had a special hunk of glass, shine 2 lasers, where they cross: a glowing monochromatic dot. She made a circle in a chunk the size of a sugar cube.
But this is nice too.
Phi lips 3d LCD (older but interesting)
Science ain't for wussies.
As I've always understood US patent law, they (those applying for the patent) must present the very best form of their idea to be patented, and only those things described in or are clearly derivitive of can be protected. These, as I was told as a MetE student, are two advantages under the US system. 1st the pior work of others was available to one to spring board off of. I was oft regaled with tales of emmeritus professors who whiled away their retirement researching patents for inspiration to create their better mouse trap. Alter someone's Nylon 10 to make Nylon 6 and wee, a check from du Pont. The 2nd bonus was that after the idealized form of your world changing idea was set, you could describe slight alterations or spin-off ideas, and applications. These too being the fruit of your labor are also protected. Aside from business plan patents, US patents are fairly narrow. You can't, for instance, have a general idea like memory compression and provide one example of it and then assert dominion over everything from gif to gnuzip to speed reading. Should my recollection and fuzzy estimation prove to be accurate, then there were no secret patents when they were setting standards during the colloquies. They actually did the work showing not only that their techniques were usable but how. My call, they made a sucker play, and caught some suckers. But if I was going to bitch about patent law, I would bust on the pharmicutical companies who get their R&D underwritten by the tax payers, get the monopoly power of patents, and sometimes keep other viable products from market.