The phone companies, the government, the media companies and everybody else aren't upset at Google per se. They are upset about the public getting new capabilities for free. Human progress normally evolves as a by-product of individuals figuring out how to make as much money as possible by doing as little as possible. Google's approach could have been simply to join the crowd -- setting up various metered services, becoming a "player" in various markets, trying to compete on efficiency and price. Instead, their philosophy seems to be to give away as much as possible while still making money. This pushes things forward much faster than the standard business model, in some cases sweeping away the very notion of a pay service. Well, that's life. Economic paradigm shifts happen now and then. Google is just the agency of this one.
I don't believe the people running Google are motivated by a desire to control the world. They know by now that they personally are going to be plenty wealthy for the rest of their lives, and I honestly think what drives them now is to do cool things in new ways that empower people. A few years ago I was saying the same thing about Microsoft. A few years from now Google will probably be the Great Satan. But for now we might as well enjoy our new toys and the change of scenery.
I agree 100% with theStorminMormon, except in regards to competition. Yes it would be a great thing, but I think it will be short-lived in this case. Microsoft has lost most of its ability to compete. It's one of those big, mature companies that should be mostly buying smaller companies and merely owning and branding them. Instead it's still trying to act like a young company and innovate, which is difficult to do at that stage in a company's life.
One reason is all the backward-compatibility baggage Microsoft has to drag along. Another is the sheer inertia of any large organization. Every new thing MS does involves training thousands or millions of people -- sales reps, service techs customers -- not to mention the bureaucratic process of getting the relevant people in the organization to agree on what to do and how to do it. The more people you have involved, the more communication and decision-making overhead. Google is still a much smaller organization with a much smaller existing product base to deal with, and seems to be run by people who are still in the gung-ho creative stage rather than the dig in and keep what you've got stage. I personally think they're going to blow MS away.
At least they showed the good sense not to call it Operetta. Making gadgets do more and more things is neato and all, but I can't get excited about surfing the web or watching videos on a 1-1/2 inch screen. It would be like riding a motorcycle with 4-inch tires -- good for about 5 minutes of novelty, then give me back my Harley.
Ok, forget chemical rockets. Here is an interesting article about a 100% reusable nuclear rocket design based on the Saturn V form factor, capable of launching 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit (30x the space shuttle's capacity) and returning an equal size cargo to a soft landing. No exploding atomic bombs (I never could take the Orion concept seriously myself). This design involves a "nuclear lightbulb" engine, consisting of a quartz bulb containing a cloud of gaseous uranium that emits intense energy in the ultraviolet range. Liquid hydrogen flowing over the outside of the bulb absorbs the UV without becoming radioactive, superheats and shoots out of the rocket nozzle.
It seems more and more useless to keep insisting that everybody remember that rights are not property and infringement is not theft. You can't steal what nobody owns. Calling copyright infringement stealing is like calling driving in the carpool lane by yourself stealing. It may be illegal and it might even cause a financial loss for someone, but it's a more complex thing than simply stealing somebody's property.
But the success of the recording industry's campaign to convert copyright to property is apparent even on Slashdot. The complex issues of infringement have been reduced to, "You stole my property," putting rights-holders (who usually aren't creators) in the unassailable postion of a little old lady chasing a purse snatcher. Like medieval peasants who truly believed that the forest belonged to the King by Divine Right, and to hunt rabbits there was a Sin, we seem to have abandoned culture for the sake of business.
The thing is, regardless of what any law says, it's wrong to hand over our culture to owners, because they simply don't take care of it unless they can make money off it. More than half of all the movies that were ever made have crumbled to dust because they were stuck away in vaults and forgotten. People who would have loved to make copies couldn't because they weren't allowed to, and the people who had the right to didn't bother because there was no profit in it. So nobody gets to see those movies anymore, ever.
I like to collect Old Time Radio programs. Almost 100% of my collection is illegal, because in 1998 Congress declared that all sound recordings made before 1972 were copyrighted until the year 2067. This includes even Edison's wax cylinders made in the 1890s. Most surviving copies exist only because people like radio station engineers took home discarded transcription disks and such. Eventually the originals made their way to collectors who made more durable copies. I would buy these shows from the copyright holders if they cared to sell them, but mostly they don't. With very few exceptions they've done nothing with this material since it was created. But legally that's fine, because it's theirs to abandon. It's their "property." So I trade these shows through the Internet and the mail, and in doing so I'm a criminal.
No matter how the recording industry wants us to change our natural way of thinking so they can stay in business, no matter what they bribe Congress to write into law, entrusting our culture to people who have a history of neglecting it is just plain wrong.
In my opinion the fixes the article describes will only complicate the present system. A true fix would be to return to copyrighting software instead of patenting it, and to end the utterly stupid patenting of business practices.
This is a million times cooler than the guy who claimed to have played sound from a scanned images of a phonograph record. I wonder how good an image you could get with a Mindstorms machine to move the mouse back and forth? [don't look at me, I have enough unfinished projects]
Let's not delude ourselves, according to the article his objective was vandalism; he deserves a visit from the cops for that.
Speaking of not deluding ourselves, how about if we stop lumping people's actions into the most convenient crime category (as in everything = "theft of...").
"Vandalism" is defacing or destroying property. What this kid did was conspiracy to cause a minor inconvenience, at best. Even the prosecutor is groping for what exactly to call it. In another article he said the kid "could have done tremendous damage" or something like that. Making a school website unreachable for a few hours is tremendous damage?
I say we should all move to Canton, since there's obviously not much crime there.
these guys reported major results that many other labs were trying to achieve. What were they thinking?
That was my first reaction. How could somebody intelligent enough to be working in this field in the first place think he could get away with reporting bogus results? There were the earlier allegations of pressuring a research assistant to donate human eggs, and then this. I'm not entirely sure what to believe.
Excuse me? You actually believe that by the 70s we would have developed the technology to manufacture enough miniature atomic bombs for the ship to explode one every second as called for in the Orion design?
If I had to pick a fantasy I'd rather believe in this warp drive story.
Apart from their incredibly bad judgement, I have to wonder how much work load Marquette administrators have that allows them to pursue such trivial matters. Next thing you know, students will be suspended for complaining about the cafeteria food. If my old college pulled crap like this I would notify the administration that I was withholding all further financial contributions until the entire punishment was rescinded, and I would write to the alums I'm personally still in touch with and urge them to do likewise.
It would sure be nice to read that she has been beseiged with offers of free legal representation. But no. Wait until people start winning these cases and getting compensatory damages. THEN you'll see attorneys crawling out of the woodwork. "Are you being sued by the RIAA? We Care about Your Rights! Call 1-800...."
All this terrorism paranoia brings to my mind an image of my brother in law, who had high cholesterol because he ate too much high cholesterol food. So he got himself on cholesterol medication, and now he feels free to eat all the steak and eggs and onion rings he wants. An alternative approach would have been to figure out what he was doing that was hurting his body and stop doing it. Changing his habits was too hard compared with simply shelling out some more money every month.
There have always been terrorists and there always will be, but it's not a constant thing, any more than famine is. For periods of time unrest dies down and then it flares up again. Trying to fix the root causes of the unrest is usually criticized as appeasment, or "coddling the terrorists." But that's like saying changing your diet is coddling the cholesterol. Unrest and terrorism are symptoms of other problems. Changing the system to fix the root problems isn't weakness, it's "intelligent design."
When will we stop pretending that there's nothing wrong with our way of life that can't be fixed by higher walls, bigger guns, more government power and fewer citizen liberties?
I agree with most of what you say. Personally I think our whole "free country" concept is being taken apart piece by piece. Various state governments want to place mandatory GPS trackers in all cars, ostensibly to collect road use taxes. Congress is seriously talking about building a fortified barrier across the entire Mexican border. The Miami police dept recently announced its intention to do random ID checks in public places like shopping malls. Nobody leaves without proving who they are. WTF?
When I was a kid the standard comeback to any complaint about the U.S. government was, "Would you rather live in Russia???" I didn't want to live in Russia then and I still don't now, but at the rate we're going America's future is looking more and more like an affluent version of the Soviet Union.
Parliament voted this into law, but the Senate could overturn it, then the Upper House can do something else... and I thought U.S. government was confusing.
By expressly declining the terms of service you are taking measures to protect your system, which Sony then circumvents. IANAL and maybe I misunderstand the DMCA, but it seems like a violation to me.
Think of it -- a Windows screensaver that does email, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing... Windows becomes just something you boot to get to the screensaver. Then eventually they figure out that they can install just the screensaver by itself and it will run faster, for free.
What if print publishers decided to switch to all-electronic DRM'ed content, and bribed the legislature to outlaw paper? That way you couldn view content only on authorized devices, subject to fees and licenses on a per-view basis and complete control over usage. That's pretty much what the entertainment industry wants to do. Can't police analog signals? Then police the digital world and close the gateway between analog and digital, the so-called "analog hole."
If this concept becomes a law we'd better get busy digitizing existing analog material before the old equipment wears out. At some point all of human history not already recorded digitally will in effect cease to exist.
I agree 100% with GenSolo. For most of human history people didn't have mirrors. Yes, they could see themselves reflected in water, but how many people experience that as infants before becoming self aware?
This experiment merely demonstrates that the robot can detect which of two images its movements affect. It certainly doesn't imply any awareness of what the image represents. If the robot were controlling a traffic light, that wouldn't imply that the robot had a sense of self which it associated with the traffic light.
My old roommate came out of the Army with a saying, "If you want to keep your feet warm, keep your head warm." I've since noticed that when I am cold, say trying to sleep with not enough blankets, covering the top of my head with something invariably warms me right up. Seems like the reverse would apply.
Slashdot Mirror
The phone companies, the government, the media companies and everybody else aren't upset at Google per se. They are upset about the public getting new capabilities for free. Human progress normally evolves as a by-product of individuals figuring out how to make as much money as possible by doing as little as possible. Google's approach could have been simply to join the crowd -- setting up various metered services, becoming a "player" in various markets, trying to compete on efficiency and price. Instead, their philosophy seems to be to give away as much as possible while still making money. This pushes things forward much faster than the standard business model, in some cases sweeping away the very notion of a pay service. Well, that's life. Economic paradigm shifts happen now and then. Google is just the agency of this one.
I don't believe the people running Google are motivated by a desire to control the world. They know by now that they personally are going to be plenty wealthy for the rest of their lives, and I honestly think what drives them now is to do cool things in new ways that empower people. A few years ago I was saying the same thing about Microsoft. A few years from now Google will probably be the Great Satan. But for now we might as well enjoy our new toys and the change of scenery.
I agree 100% with theStorminMormon, except in regards to competition. Yes it would be a great thing, but I think it will be short-lived in this case. Microsoft has lost most of its ability to compete. It's one of those big, mature companies that should be mostly buying smaller companies and merely owning and branding them. Instead it's still trying to act like a young company and innovate, which is difficult to do at that stage in a company's life.
One reason is all the backward-compatibility baggage Microsoft has to drag along. Another is the sheer inertia of any large organization. Every new thing MS does involves training thousands or millions of people -- sales reps, service techs customers -- not to mention the bureaucratic process of getting the relevant people in the organization to agree on what to do and how to do it. The more people you have involved, the more communication and decision-making overhead. Google is still a much smaller organization with a much smaller existing product base to deal with, and seems to be run by people who are still in the gung-ho creative stage rather than the dig in and keep what you've got stage. I personally think they're going to blow MS away.
As a code monkey I find the term "booth babe" degrading to con chicks.
This thread has me wondering. Anyway, I think it's safe to expect lawsuit-ilarity to ensue.
Your dog wants an IPod.
My head asplode.
At least they showed the good sense not to call it Operetta.
Making gadgets do more and more things is neato and all, but I can't get excited about surfing the web or watching videos on a 1-1/2 inch screen. It would be like riding a motorcycle with 4-inch tires -- good for about 5 minutes of novelty, then give me back my Harley.
/like I have a Harley
Ok, forget chemical rockets. Here is an interesting article about a 100% reusable nuclear rocket design based on the Saturn V form factor, capable of launching 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit (30x the space shuttle's capacity) and returning an equal size cargo to a soft landing. No exploding atomic bombs (I never could take the Orion concept seriously myself). This design involves a "nuclear lightbulb" engine, consisting of a quartz bulb containing a cloud of gaseous uranium that emits intense energy in the ultraviolet range. Liquid hydrogen flowing over the outside of the bulb absorbs the UV without becoming radioactive, superheats and shoots out of the rocket nozzle.
It seems more and more useless to keep insisting that everybody remember that rights are not property and infringement is not theft. You can't steal what nobody owns. Calling copyright infringement stealing is like calling driving in the carpool lane by yourself stealing. It may be illegal and it might even cause a financial loss for someone, but it's a more complex thing than simply stealing somebody's property.
But the success of the recording industry's campaign to convert copyright to property is apparent even on Slashdot. The complex issues of infringement have been reduced to, "You stole my property," putting rights-holders (who usually aren't creators) in the unassailable postion of a little old lady chasing a purse snatcher. Like medieval peasants who truly believed that the forest belonged to the King by Divine Right, and to hunt rabbits there was a Sin, we seem to have abandoned culture for the sake of business.
The thing is, regardless of what any law says, it's wrong to hand over our culture to owners, because they simply don't take care of it unless they can make money off it. More than half of all the movies that were ever made have crumbled to dust because they were stuck away in vaults and forgotten. People who would have loved to make copies couldn't because they weren't allowed to, and the people who had the right to didn't bother because there was no profit in it. So nobody gets to see those movies anymore, ever.
I like to collect Old Time Radio programs. Almost 100% of my collection is illegal, because in 1998 Congress declared that all sound recordings made before 1972 were copyrighted until the year 2067. This includes even Edison's wax cylinders made in the 1890s. Most surviving copies exist only because people like radio station engineers took home discarded transcription disks and such. Eventually the originals made their way to collectors who made more durable copies. I would buy these shows from the copyright holders if they cared to sell them, but mostly they don't. With very few exceptions they've done nothing with this material since it was created. But legally that's fine, because it's theirs to abandon. It's their "property." So I trade these shows through the Internet and the mail, and in doing so I'm a criminal.
No matter how the recording industry wants us to change our natural way of thinking so they can stay in business, no matter what they bribe Congress to write into law, entrusting our culture to people who have a history of neglecting it is just plain wrong.
In my opinion the fixes the article describes will only complicate the present system. A true fix would be to return to copyrighting software instead of patenting it, and to end the utterly stupid patenting of business practices.
The companion's distance from Polaris A makes me think of 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke, in which Jupiter ignites and becomes a small star.
This is a million times cooler than the guy who claimed to have played sound from a scanned images of a phonograph record. I wonder how good an image you could get with a Mindstorms machine to move the mouse back and forth? [don't look at me, I have enough unfinished projects]
Let's not delude ourselves, according to the article his objective was vandalism; he deserves a visit from the cops for that.
Speaking of not deluding ourselves, how about if we stop lumping people's actions into the most convenient crime category (as in everything = "theft of...").
"Vandalism" is defacing or destroying property. What this kid did was conspiracy to cause a minor inconvenience, at best. Even the prosecutor is groping for what exactly to call it. In another article he said the kid "could have done tremendous damage" or something like that. Making a school website unreachable for a few hours is tremendous damage?
I say we should all move to Canton, since there's obviously not much crime there.
these guys reported major results that many other labs were trying to achieve. What were they thinking?
That was my first reaction. How could somebody intelligent enough to be working in this field in the first place think he could get away with reporting bogus results? There were the earlier allegations of pressuring a research assistant to donate human eggs, and then this. I'm not entirely sure what to believe.
Excuse me? You actually believe that by the 70s we would have developed the technology to manufacture enough miniature atomic bombs for the ship to explode one every second as called for in the Orion design?
If I had to pick a fantasy I'd rather believe in this warp drive story.
Apart from their incredibly bad judgement, I have to wonder how much work load Marquette administrators have that allows them to pursue such trivial matters. Next thing you know, students will be suspended for complaining about the cafeteria food. If my old college pulled crap like this I would notify the administration that I was withholding all further financial contributions until the entire punishment was rescinded, and I would write to the alums I'm personally still in touch with and urge them to do likewise.
It would sure be nice to read that she has been beseiged with offers of free legal representation. But no. Wait until people start winning these cases and getting compensatory damages. THEN you'll see attorneys crawling out of the woodwork. "Are you being sued by the RIAA? We Care about Your Rights! Call 1-800...."
All this terrorism paranoia brings to my mind an image of my brother in law, who had high cholesterol because he ate too much high cholesterol food. So he got himself on cholesterol medication, and now he feels free to eat all the steak and eggs and onion rings he wants. An alternative approach would have been to figure out what he was doing that was hurting his body and stop doing it. Changing his habits was too hard compared with simply shelling out some more money every month.
There have always been terrorists and there always will be, but it's not a constant thing, any more than famine is. For periods of time unrest dies down and then it flares up again. Trying to fix the root causes of the unrest is usually criticized as appeasment, or "coddling the terrorists." But that's like saying changing your diet is coddling the cholesterol. Unrest and terrorism are symptoms of other problems. Changing the system to fix the root problems isn't weakness, it's "intelligent design."
When will we stop pretending that there's nothing wrong with our way of life that can't be fixed by higher walls, bigger guns, more government power and fewer citizen liberties?
I agree with most of what you say. Personally I think our whole "free country" concept is being taken apart piece by piece. Various state governments want to place mandatory GPS trackers in all cars, ostensibly to collect road use taxes. Congress is seriously talking about building a fortified barrier across the entire Mexican border. The Miami police dept recently announced its intention to do random ID checks in public places like shopping malls. Nobody leaves without proving who they are. WTF?
When I was a kid the standard comeback to any complaint about the U.S. government was, "Would you rather live in Russia???" I didn't want to live in Russia then and I still don't now, but at the rate we're going America's future is looking more and more like an affluent version of the Soviet Union.
they spent a lot of cash on brainwashing you to dislike France because they wouldn't join your half cocked crusade
Not my half-cocked crusade, mate. Bush won by less than 3%. Nearly half of us over here know he's a lying bastard.
Life in Pre-Revolutionary America is an interesting experience.
Parliament voted this into law, but the Senate could overturn it, then the Upper House can do something else...
and I thought U.S. government was confusing.
By expressly declining the terms of service you are taking measures to protect your system, which Sony then circumvents. IANAL and maybe I misunderstand the DMCA, but it seems like a violation to me.
Makes me feel bad that I got a giant Sony TV earlier this year. If this had happened sooner I wouldn't have even looked at them.
Think of it -- a Windows screensaver that does email, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing... Windows becomes just something you boot to get to the screensaver. Then eventually they figure out that they can install just the screensaver by itself and it will run faster, for free.
What if print publishers decided to switch to all-electronic DRM'ed content, and bribed the legislature to outlaw paper? That way you couldn view content only on authorized devices, subject to fees and licenses on a per-view basis and complete control over usage. That's pretty much what the entertainment industry wants to do. Can't police analog signals? Then police the digital world and close the gateway between analog and digital, the so-called "analog hole."
If this concept becomes a law we'd better get busy digitizing existing analog material before the old equipment wears out. At some point all of human history not already recorded digitally will in effect cease to exist.
I agree 100% with GenSolo. For most of human history people didn't have mirrors. Yes, they could see themselves reflected in water, but how many people experience that as infants before becoming self aware?
This experiment merely demonstrates that the robot can detect which of two images its movements affect. It certainly doesn't imply any awareness of what the image represents. If the robot were controlling a traffic light, that wouldn't imply that the robot had a sense of self which it associated with the traffic light.
My old roommate came out of the Army with a saying, "If you want to keep your feet warm, keep your head warm." I've since noticed that when I am cold, say trying to sleep with not enough blankets, covering the top of my head with something invariably warms me right up. Seems like the reverse would apply.