Who says you can't own a color? I claim ownership of the color on this page. Intellectual Property Beige. I will be sending Slashdot a C&D just as soon as the USPTO rubber-stamps my patent ("Method of displaying a news story in a sickening shade of brownish"). Everyone reading this story is also guilty of infringement, by god.
The main article and here(1) don't say. All the sensor network would do is sense vibration, temperature, etc. But no explanation of how this would help save energy. Here(2) was farked, I mean slashdotted. Here(3) provides clues: "allowing plant personnel to repair or replace motors before their production capacity drops or they fail entirely," and, "the two-way communications network will enable the use of control applications. For example, if a monitoring system is being used on a generator and has sent notification that it is running too hot, the monitoring personnel could issue wireless commands back to the generator for it to turn on its exhaust fan."
I can see the usefulness of doing these things in terms of fewer breakdowns, but where is the energy-saving tie in, particularly the claim that the sensor system will "increase a motor's efficiency by 10 to 20 percent" ???
The article was short on technical details. A lot more info can be found easily on the net, such as here.
To clear up one point, solar sails are not powered by the solar wind, which is a stream of particles. They are powered by light, which exerts several thousand times more force than the solar wind.
The sail is not direction. It is affected by light coming from all directions, but it "blows" in the direction of the prevailing light, which would come from the brightest/closest star. To change direction a solar sail ship must change the angle of the sail in relation to the nearest star.
At the start of a journey the sail would be ahead of the ship, towing the ship behind it. Sometime between stars the ship could use small maneuvering jets or something to flip itself around and put the sail behind it. The increasingly strong light from the destination star would gradually slow it down.
More likely though, the sail would be retracted or jettisoned in mid-journey, when the light from the destination star equalled the light from the original star. This is when the ship would be at its maximum velocity. It would then coast at that speed for the rest of the trip and use the gravity of the destination star or planets to decelerate much more quickly.
I too have had errors migrating from both Outlook and Outlook Express. I plan to be part of this bash.
Also, when importing from Outlook it would be nice to be able to integrate, instead of keeping the Outlook Address Book and mail folders separate from the native T-Bird ones. I want migrate and dump Outlook. Why do I need two separate trees within Thunderbird?
Comparing solar panels with ethanol is insightful? Nothing Cornell University says about ethanol has any bearing on solar panels. Ethanol is fuel. Solar panels are machines. Comparing the two would only make sense if the energy cost of manufacturing solar panels exceeded their entire lifetime electricity output, which it doesn't.
When CDs were invented, nobody thought of patenting "method of distributing music by recording it on a CD and putting it in a plastic box." But that will change. Governments, following the lead of the US, are increasingly allowing patents on business practices. Someone has already patented the idea of recording and mixing a live concert and producing CDs on the spot to sell to audience members as they leave. There's no reason this couldn't happen with whatever new thing people are going to buy when they stop buying CDs. Recording companies need only wait a few years for the next leap in media technology, patent not just the technology itself but the methods of using it to distribute entertainment, and they will have a lock on licensing it to anybody who wants to use it. Say goodbye to the idea of bands cutting their own albums. P2P and other file sharing systems will be illegal (see other/. story today), so musicians will once again be workers-for-hire for record companies.
Through the 20th Century record companies controlled who was able to publish recorded music because the technology to do it was expensive. They could keep this control in the 21st Century by controlling the use of the newest media technology through rights-holding. That's why this school indoctrination thing is evil. The idea of copyrights and patents may not be all that bad, but it's been badly subverted. Intellectual Property laws need to be fixed, not worshipped. Letting the entertainment industry come into schools and shove their agenda down kids throats is a very, very bad idea.
Increasingly I feel like we are living in a Philip K. Dick novel. How much more unabashed can our government leaders and their corporate sponsors be, as they outright run a country supposedly governed by "We the People?" Some years ago I started saying that Americans don't live in a real democracy any more (I know, it's a Republic, but try to get my point). We live in a pretend democracy, like Student Council in high school. Adult citizens, or "consumers," have about as much real political power as we had in high school.
Do you honestly believe that 46 state Attorneys General think software can run on a computer when it's turned off??? These people aren't idiots, they are attorneys. Say what you like about the ethics of some lawyers, but I've never met anyone genuinely stupid who made it through law school. Okay, maybe Orrin Hatch, but we are talking about the Attorneys General of 46 states here.
I have, however, known many people who could straight-facedly offer up a document such as this, knowing it was full of crap, if they were confident that the other side didn't have the resources to fight them. And that's what we are looking at right here. What are the "consumers" going to do about this? Nothing. Watch tv. Have a beer. Write comments on Slashdot. No problem for the people who run things, because they have their shit together and we don't.
It's not the public's fault for having too little time or energy to care about the fifty million problems the government inflicts on us. People have lives to lead, diapers to change and floors to vacuum. They only rise up when things get bad enough that everyday life is directly threatened. When Safeway is empty, and armed guards are escorting shipments of food into gated communities, then we might see some real action, but it won't be about copyright laws.
The button pushers know that all they have to do is move slowly and deliberately, taking step after step but never doing anything that makes the average Joe feel threatened. They can thumb their noses at the few of us who have issues, because they know we'll never get enough people interested in this until it's too late. And when all unmoderated copy-making technology in the US has been banned and we go to war with a country that still makes plain old DVD burners, because they might be hiding terrorists or something, "consumers" will watch it on Fox News and then flip back to American Idol VIII. And this will go on and on until five or six corporations own the world.
Anyway, Phil, thanks for trying. Sorry we let you down.
I agree with the parent that this looks like a product of the RIAA or MPAA. Sure, it's possible that state AGs think of the public they represent as "their" consumers, but we have seen too many other instances of legislators and bureaucrats rubber-stamping documents handed to them by the entertainment industry (and others). They may have once deserved the benefit of the doubt, but not now.
In other news: "Louisiana state government needs more money, thinks up new way to get it."
I can visualize the meeting. "Hey, there's lots of people fixin' computers in Looziana and we aint making a dime off'em. Say we charge $55 a pop. I'll get started mailing out the threat letters!"
Unmoderated message boards might be like airlines were in the 1950s. Pay your fare, get on, no hassle. Totally vulnerable to all sorts of mayhem that nobody happened to think of doing.
The mayhem we are vulnerable to on today's message boards isn't libel, it's litigation brought by people who can't excuse other people for acting and talking like humans. The result is that people are going to have to be hyper-careful about expressing anything negative, like employers being asked about former employees.
If this gentleman wins his suit(s), imagine how many people George Bush could sue for comparing him with Hitler. Or Courtney Love for calling her a skank? Everybody has the right to their own opinion, as long as they shut up about it.
To keep this in perspective, let's remember that the whole copy-protection issue is an accident of history. Publishers, broadcasters and record companies have been able to flourish all these years because the general public simply didn't have the capability to widely distribute copies of things. If distributing copies had been as trivially simple as it is now, at the time sound and video recordings were invented, there would be no media companies because there would have been no market for records and tapes. People who wanted to make money in that area would have had to do it in a different way, or not at all. We would not have it ingrained in our minds that the world can't function properly unless someone owns or controls the distribution of every image and sound they produce. It's not a moral imperative, it's just an idea we are used to. If we want to, we can get used to other ideas just as well.
I agree that this is the future, but not a rail system. When self-driving cars become reality, I believe it will lead to the end of personal car ownership. At first many families will go to single-car ownership. Why pay to leave a car parked at work when it can return home by itself and drive other family members around? I think we will see various forms of timesharing for cars, just like condos, but the dominant mode will be automated taxi services. Without the need to pay drivers, cab companies should be able to provide rides for less than the cost of personal car ownership, insurance, etc.
The "Planetron" New York to Los Angeles subway system shown on the site reminded me of an old science fiction story that featured an even more fanciful long-distance subway system. In the story the tunnels were straight lines through the Earth's molten magma layer, held open by force fields. The cars needed no power, they used gravity to accelerate downhill to the halfway point and decelerate up to the destination. I wish I could remember more about this story. Does it ring any bells?
I work mostly as a contractor on projects for Microsoft on Microsoft dev platforms. To find documentation on various MS widgets, I type the name of the object/method/whatever into Google and it returns a wealth of useful references. A lot of these point to MSDN, but MSDN's own search engine returns a load of useless irrelevant crap. Ballmer will have to do a lot more than make a speech to convince me that Microsoft has figured out how to write a decent search engine.
Looking at the cutaway diagram of the fastener, I first thought this might be a parody or hoax. Automate something as trivial as a bolt? But then if you read what applications they are talking about, it seems these fasteners aren't meant to make nuts and bolts obsolete, they are meant to restrict access to certain replacement parts. It would be more appropriate to call them locks rather than fasteners. Locks controlled by someone other than the customer.
It's going to be the suppliers' world. You'll just consume in it.
I have no web references to offer, but suborbital airliners have been under discussion for years. In the version I remember best, the plane takes off from a regular runway and climbs to 40,000 feet, where it refuels in midair from a tanker. Then it goes into a steep, powerful climb out of the atmosphere. After the engines shut down, leaving only enough fuel for a powered approach and landing, the plane flies through a zero-gravity arc, re-enters the atmosphere, glides to low altitude and lands under power.
It is claimed that this proposed scheme would lower the cost of commercial airline flight for many reasons: Fuel cost would be lower because the boost engines would run for a much shorter time than jet engines and would use cheaper fuel, despite burning it faster. With midair refueling the plane would not have to be built to carry all the fuel it needs. Because of shorter flight times (2 hrs max to anywhere) the planes would be much simpler inside, with denser seating, little or no carry-on luggage space, and no food, restrooms or other amenities. People would be strapped in like astronauts (or sardines) for the duration of the flight and not allowed to leave their seats, which would improve in-flight security.
Take one look at the way the veins stand out on Steve Ballmer's neck when he talks about OSS, and you know there's just no way in hell this is going to happen no matter how much sense it might make.
Van Allen makes a couple good points. The International Space Station has an unacceptably high cost/benefit ratio, and probably won't produce any significant science. The significant science (so far) has come from automated probes. Analogies between space travel and past explorations on earth may also be weak, but that is because space travel is an entirely different sort of undertaking. Beyond learning anything or exploring new territory, space travel is a conscious evolutionary step.
With all due respect to this legendary scientist, suggesting that human space flight may be obsolete is like the Patent Office suggesting in the 1800s, according to myth, that there was nothing left to invent. There may be no tangible material benefits to space travel in the foreseeable future, ignoring Teflon and the standard list of by-products. The most important benefit will be the long-term survival of the human race. We know that our planet is subject periodically to catastrophic events that can extinguish us. Populating at least one more world will be as significant as climbing out of the primordial ooze.
Incidentally, grounding the remaining space shuttle fleet "to take steps to improve their safety" doesn't conflict with starting "a more costly and far more hazardous" Moon/Mars program. Astronauts, and I think most people in general, are fully aware that no spaceship is "safe" in any normal sense. Safety in the space program is more of a euphemism for "avoiding setbacks."
Slashdot Mirror
Who says you can't own a color? I claim ownership of the color on this page. Intellectual Property Beige. I will be sending Slashdot a C&D just as soon as the USPTO rubber-stamps my patent ("Method of displaying a news story in a sickening shade of brownish"). Everyone reading this story is also guilty of infringement, by god.
At this point in Shatner's career I think it would have to be Kirk in a rubber suit fighting a shirtless guy.
The main article and here(1) don't say. All the sensor network would do is sense vibration, temperature, etc. But no explanation of how this would help save energy. Here(2) was farked, I mean slashdotted. Here(3) provides clues: "allowing plant personnel to repair or replace motors before their production capacity drops or they fail entirely," and, "the two-way communications network will enable the use of control applications. For example, if a monitoring system is being used on a generator and has sent notification that it is running too hot, the monitoring personnel could issue wireless commands back to the generator for it to turn on its exhaust fan."
I can see the usefulness of doing these things in terms of fewer breakdowns, but where is the energy-saving tie in, particularly the claim that the sensor system will "increase a motor's efficiency by 10 to 20 percent" ???
The article was short on technical details. A lot more info can be found easily on the net, such as here.
To clear up one point, solar sails are not powered by the solar wind, which is a stream of particles. They are powered by light, which exerts several thousand times more force than the solar wind.
The sail is not direction. It is affected by light coming from all directions, but it "blows" in the direction of the prevailing light, which would come from the brightest/closest star. To change direction a solar sail ship must change the angle of the sail in relation to the nearest star.
At the start of a journey the sail would be ahead of the ship, towing the ship behind it. Sometime between stars the ship could use small maneuvering jets or something to flip itself around and put the sail behind it. The increasingly strong light from the destination star would gradually slow it down.
More likely though, the sail would be retracted or jettisoned in mid-journey, when the light from the destination star equalled the light from the original star. This is when the ship would be at its maximum velocity. It would then coast at that speed for the rest of the trip and use the gravity of the destination star or planets to decelerate much more quickly.
In a contract job interview a Microsoft manager outright told me that since Netscape was dead they had no reason to do anything more with IE.
"Go competition" is right!
I too have had errors migrating from both Outlook and Outlook Express. I plan to be part of this bash.
Also, when importing from Outlook it would be nice to be able to integrate, instead of keeping the Outlook Address Book and mail folders separate from the native T-Bird ones. I want migrate and dump Outlook. Why do I need two separate trees within Thunderbird?
Comparing solar panels with ethanol is insightful? Nothing Cornell University says about ethanol has any bearing on solar panels. Ethanol is fuel. Solar panels are machines. Comparing the two would only make sense if the energy cost of manufacturing solar panels exceeded their entire lifetime electricity output, which it doesn't.
When CDs were invented, nobody thought of patenting "method of distributing music by recording it on a CD and putting it in a plastic box." But that will change. Governments, following the lead of the US, are increasingly allowing patents on business practices. Someone has already patented the idea of recording and mixing a live concert and producing CDs on the spot to sell to audience members as they leave. There's no reason this couldn't happen with whatever new thing people are going to buy when they stop buying CDs. Recording companies need only wait a few years for the next leap in media technology, patent not just the technology itself but the methods of using it to distribute entertainment, and they will have a lock on licensing it to anybody who wants to use it. Say goodbye to the idea of bands cutting their own albums. P2P and other file sharing systems will be illegal (see other /. story today), so musicians will once again be workers-for-hire for record companies.
Through the 20th Century record companies controlled who was able to publish recorded music because the technology to do it was expensive. They could keep this control in the 21st Century by controlling the use of the newest media technology through rights-holding. That's why this school indoctrination thing is evil. The idea of copyrights and patents may not be all that bad, but it's been badly subverted. Intellectual Property laws need to be fixed, not worshipped. Letting the entertainment industry come into schools and shove their agenda down kids throats is a very, very bad idea.
Increasingly I feel like we are living in a Philip K. Dick novel. How much more unabashed can our government leaders and their corporate sponsors be, as they outright run a country supposedly governed by "We the People?" Some years ago I started saying that Americans don't live in a real democracy any more (I know, it's a Republic, but try to get my point). We live in a pretend democracy, like Student Council in high school. Adult citizens, or "consumers," have about as much real political power as we had in high school.
Do you honestly believe that 46 state Attorneys General think software can run on a computer when it's turned off??? These people aren't idiots, they are attorneys. Say what you like about the ethics of some lawyers, but I've never met anyone genuinely stupid who made it through law school. Okay, maybe Orrin Hatch, but we are talking about the Attorneys General of 46 states here.
I have, however, known many people who could straight-facedly offer up a document such as this, knowing it was full of crap, if they were confident that the other side didn't have the resources to fight them. And that's what we are looking at right here. What are the "consumers" going to do about this? Nothing. Watch tv. Have a beer. Write comments on Slashdot. No problem for the people who run things, because they have their shit together and we don't.
It's not the public's fault for having too little time or energy to care about the fifty million problems the government inflicts on us. People have lives to lead, diapers to change and floors to vacuum. They only rise up when things get bad enough that everyday life is directly threatened. When Safeway is empty, and armed guards are escorting shipments of food into gated communities, then we might see some real action, but it won't be about copyright laws.
The button pushers know that all they have to do is move slowly and deliberately, taking step after step but never doing anything that makes the average Joe feel threatened. They can thumb their noses at the few of us who have issues, because they know we'll never get enough people interested in this until it's too late. And when all unmoderated copy-making technology in the US has been banned and we go to war with a country that still makes plain old DVD burners, because they might be hiding terrorists or something, "consumers" will watch it on Fox News and then flip back to American Idol VIII. And this will go on and on until five or six corporations own the world.
Anyway, Phil, thanks for trying. Sorry we let you down.
I agree with the parent that this looks like a product of the RIAA or MPAA. Sure, it's possible that state AGs think of the public they represent as "their" consumers, but we have seen too many other instances of legislators and bureaucrats rubber-stamping documents handed to them by the entertainment industry (and others). They may have once deserved the benefit of the doubt, but not now.
President Bush as well has in speeches repeatedly referred to "consumers" where he clearly means "citizens" or "the American People" or "the public".
It's their world, we just consume in it.
Oh, the product! I thought you were talking about the FrogDesign website, which is already Farked, I mean Slashdotted.
In other news: "Louisiana state government needs more money, thinks up new way to get it."
I can visualize the meeting. "Hey, there's lots of people fixin' computers in Looziana and we aint making a dime off'em. Say we charge $55 a pop. I'll get started mailing out the threat letters!"
Unmoderated message boards might be like airlines were in the 1950s. Pay your fare, get on, no hassle. Totally vulnerable to all sorts of mayhem that nobody happened to think of doing.
The mayhem we are vulnerable to on today's message boards isn't libel, it's litigation brought by people who can't excuse other people for acting and talking like humans. The result is that people are going to have to be hyper-careful about expressing anything negative, like employers being asked about former employees.
If this gentleman wins his suit(s), imagine how many people George Bush could sue for comparing him with Hitler. Or Courtney Love for calling her a skank? Everybody has the right to their own opinion, as long as they shut up about it.
To keep this in perspective, let's remember that the whole copy-protection issue is an accident of history. Publishers, broadcasters and record companies have been able to flourish all these years because the general public simply didn't have the capability to widely distribute copies of things. If distributing copies had been as trivially simple as it is now, at the time sound and video recordings were invented, there would be no media companies because there would have been no market for records and tapes. People who wanted to make money in that area would have had to do it in a different way, or not at all. We would not have it ingrained in our minds that the world can't function properly unless someone owns or controls the distribution of every image and sound they produce. It's not a moral imperative, it's just an idea we are used to. If we want to, we can get used to other ideas just as well.
I agree that this is the future, but not a rail system. When self-driving cars become reality, I believe it will lead to the end of personal car ownership. At first many families will go to single-car ownership. Why pay to leave a car parked at work when it can return home by itself and drive other family members around? I think we will see various forms of timesharing for cars, just like condos, but the dominant mode will be automated taxi services. Without the need to pay drivers, cab companies should be able to provide rides for less than the cost of personal car ownership, insurance, etc.
The "Planetron" New York to Los Angeles subway system shown on the site reminded me of an old science fiction story that featured an even more fanciful long-distance subway system. In the story the tunnels were straight lines through the Earth's molten magma layer, held open by force fields. The cars needed no power, they used gravity to accelerate downhill to the halfway point and decelerate up to the destination. I wish I could remember more about this story. Does it ring any bells?
I work mostly as a contractor on projects for Microsoft on Microsoft dev platforms. To find documentation on various MS widgets, I type the name of the object/method/whatever into Google and it returns a wealth of useful references. A lot of these point to MSDN, but MSDN's own search engine returns a load of useless irrelevant crap. Ballmer will have to do a lot more than make a speech to convince me that Microsoft has figured out how to write a decent search engine.
Looking at the cutaway diagram of the fastener, I first thought this might be a parody or hoax. Automate something as trivial as a bolt? But then if you read what applications they are talking about, it seems these fasteners aren't meant to make nuts and bolts obsolete, they are meant to restrict access to certain replacement parts. It would be more appropriate to call them locks rather than fasteners. Locks controlled by someone other than the customer.
It's going to be the suppliers' world. You'll just consume in it.
You have to keep in mind, Batman built the big-tire version when he was still young, and had a mullet.
Dude, please tell us how 3 of your computers got gasoline poured on them and lit on fire. And moreover, was she worth it?
I have no web references to offer, but suborbital airliners have been under discussion for years. In the version I remember best, the plane takes off from a regular runway and climbs to 40,000 feet, where it refuels in midair from a tanker. Then it goes into a steep, powerful climb out of the atmosphere. After the engines shut down, leaving only enough fuel for a powered approach and landing, the plane flies through a zero-gravity arc, re-enters the atmosphere, glides to low altitude and lands under power.
It is claimed that this proposed scheme would lower the cost of commercial airline flight for many reasons: Fuel cost would be lower because the boost engines would run for a much shorter time than jet engines and would use cheaper fuel, despite burning it faster. With midair refueling the plane would not have to be built to carry all the fuel it needs. Because of shorter flight times (2 hrs max to anywhere) the planes would be much simpler inside, with denser seating, little or no carry-on luggage space, and no food, restrooms or other amenities. People would be strapped in like astronauts (or sardines) for the duration of the flight and not allowed to leave their seats, which would improve in-flight security.
Take one look at the way the veins stand out on Steve Ballmer's neck when he talks about OSS, and you know there's just no way in hell this is going to happen no matter how much sense it might make.
Van Allen makes a couple good points. The International Space Station has an unacceptably high cost/benefit ratio, and probably won't produce any significant science. The significant science (so far) has come from automated probes. Analogies between space travel and past explorations on earth may also be weak, but that is because space travel is an entirely different sort of undertaking. Beyond learning anything or exploring new territory, space travel is a conscious evolutionary step.
With all due respect to this legendary scientist, suggesting that human space flight may be obsolete is like the Patent Office suggesting in the 1800s, according to myth, that there was nothing left to invent. There may be no tangible material benefits to space travel in the foreseeable future, ignoring Teflon and the standard list of by-products. The most important benefit will be the long-term survival of the human race. We know that our planet is subject periodically to catastrophic events that can extinguish us. Populating at least one more world will be as significant as climbing out of the primordial ooze.
Incidentally, grounding the remaining space shuttle fleet "to take steps to improve their safety" doesn't conflict with starting "a more costly and far more hazardous" Moon/Mars program. Astronauts, and I think most people in general, are fully aware that no spaceship is "safe" in any normal sense. Safety in the space program is more of a euphemism for "avoiding setbacks."
Just a shameless plug for Freevo, the free Linux PC media platform.