Fair enough, but a responsible person should not be punished for the actions of an irresponsible person. You should only be taking away the rights of the irresponsible people. If I rob the local bank should my neighbors be put in jail? No, I should. This proposal is like adding a tax to ski masks because some people use them when robbing a bank. Or banning gloves because people like to use them when commiting crimes. If you want to say that it is just to punish or take away the rights of irresponsible people, you must also say that it is unjust to punish responsible people for things they dont do. Otherwise you are saying that everyone needs to be punished regardless of their actions, which is what the copyright societies are trying to do in this case.
Thin Client terminals running an Internet browser will be all we need in 10 years
All OS's will be redundant
Thus explains Microsoft's fear of Netscape. Bill had this.NET thing planned out years ago. Monopoly in OS market gets internet browser onto every machine. Monopoly in internet browser market gets.NET onto every machine..NET on every machine means another generation of MS monopolies. As you say, the future is.NET.
It makes me wonder if perhaps the problem isn't the US Patent Office approving stupid patents as it is *gasp* LAWYERS!!
Didnt you know that the US Patent Office is getting kickbacks from the lawyers. They were seeing all these companies getting rich and wanted a part of the action so they made an agreement with the bar associations in every state. The patent office was to allow stupid patents through to drum up demand for lawyers. In return, the patent office gets %30 of all legal fees.
What the patent office needs to do is instrument some kind of grace period for challenging a patent. Once a patent is accepted, if anyone can construct a working product that demonstrates all the features described in the patent within say a month or some other reasonable time frame, the patent becomes null and void. I think this would eliminate alot of the patents on "common knowledge".
When you include support, development, administration/operation, etc. of a system, the OS price (free or not) is nearly insignificant.
MS recently "donated" about $50,000 in OS licenses to the university I attend. By not having to pay for the OS on some of the machines they can now do one of the following: build a new lab, hire another tech support person, support four more grad students for a year, remodel the office of the department chair, etc.
The cost of the OS is only insignificant when you only have a couple machines or you use pirated OS software anyway. For large institutions, with hundreds/thousands of machines, two to three hundred dollars per machine every two years to upgrade the OS can be very significant regardless of how much money you are paying for support, development, administration, etc.
Ok, so it is apparent that many people dont understand this, but there are alot of
problems with human society that cannot be fixed. They are a part of being human and living in groups. You cannot
remove rebellion from adolescents. You cannot remove the desire to have sex. You cannot remove hate from an individual.
If there was a way to convince people not to kill each other there would be no need to have laws concerning murder.
Unfortunately, there is no way to convince people to not kill each other. But that is no excuse to allow murder so we have
to find some way to control it. That is why there are laws. We know why there are so many unwanted pregnancies. Its
because people want to have sex but dont want to have kids. They dont want to have to accept the responsibilities of their
actions. We know why there is violence in the schools. Its because kids are angry. We know many of the reasons that kids
are angry. Much of it is because of bad parenting or bad schooling or a lack of respect for authority or any combination of
the three. Can we fix this? No. We cant force people to be good parents, there arent enough good teachers and
administrators to run all the schools and there will always be people who dont respect authority. Since there is no way to
fix the cause much of the time, we are left with only treating the symptoms to try and make life a little better for everyone else. Im sorry
if you feel that life isnt perfect, but deal with it.
Its not just "Dubya's" morals. Remember, we (im assuming you are American since you are complaining about Bush) live in a democracy and as such American morals are defined by majority opinion. Since the majority of Americans are white anglo-saxon protestant capitalists or of similar beliefs, the country's moral standards will be those of white anglo-saxon protestant capitalists. Until another group finds itself in the majority, we are going to have to live with their opinion of morals or leave the country.
The advantage is that this would create competition and choices for cable TV. Granted, there would be about as much choice as voting for the president, but ill take what I can get.
From what I can tell from your link(please correct me if I am wrong), it looks more like Novus is putting fiber into the homes. What the article is talking about is using the existing phone lines to deliver TV. These are two completely different things.
I still don't exactly see how the things could grow exponentially at all without some kind of motion to move the "center" nanobots.
I dont see why you need to move the bots if you can move the plane. As it says in the article:
While each robotic arm would have only two degrees of freedom, the surface itself
could be moved in X, Y and Z.
I know im assuming alot about the process here and I could be completely wrong on this, but if you move the planes in an organized way, it is plausible that you wont have to move the bots and that they wont crowd each other too much either. This is because each bot doesnt make a new bot on its own plane, it makes it on the opposite plane. Thus, bot1 on plane1 makes bot2 on plane2. Currently bot1 is still close to bot2 since the plates havent moved much. Next, big machine moves plate2 1 meter parallel to plate1. Now, bot1 is 1 meter away from bot2. Bot1 and bot2 have plenty of room to reproduce. Repeat till bots are too dense to reproduce. Clean up mess and start over.
Now if your plates are large enough, you wont have to worry about crowding for quite a while. The only problem would be in coming up with the scheme to move the plates and in making big enough plates. I guess you could call this "moving the center nanobots" even though you arent really touching them in any way, just moving the plates they are on.
Your O(n^2)(which should be O(n) as pointed out in another reply) limitation is only on space as you state. However, the O(2^n) growth rate is a limitation on time. Thus, if you double the area of the plate, you can make roughly twice as many arms but with only one more time step, not twice as many time steps.
These nanobots are really tiny (hence the name) and you will need to make lots of them to do anything useful. If you are trying to make 10^15 of them, you dont want to have to make them one at a time, a thousand at a time or even a million at a time (all have a o(n) growth rate), that would take all too long. By having an exponential growth rate, they can focus on making larger plates to grow the nanobots on rather than making more nanobot producing factories.
Your position of power is very limited though. Yes you can refuse to pay the bills, but the company can respond in numerous ways including but not limited to sending the bill to a collection agency, ruining your credit, stopping the service(you will eventually pay your electricity bill unless you move out of their service area or buy a couple solarpanels), taking you to court, etc. All of which can have a much higher cost than the original bill.
That said, I agree with your paranoia and dont sign up for automatic bill payments unless I can reasonably guarantee that the bill will be for the same amount each and every time and that I will have enough in my account to cover the expense.
Taking Aoliza as a model, what you need to do is get some speech software and hook it up to an ELIZA program. call the 800 numbers with your modem and see how long you can get the customer service agents to talk to the computer. ok, this may not be feasible to implement right now, what with current speech technology, but you wouldnt have to spend any of your own time and if you kept logs of the long ones it could be really funny.
personally i havent read the book, but i know that he has written some excellent books on languages and it sounds similar to what you are talking about.
I think that one of the problems here is that there are alot of people who learned procedural programming techniques before they learned oop techniques. consequently their oop designs have flavors of procedural designs. my advisor is always talking about how people say that his lisp programs look like pascal programs and that his c programs look like lisp programs because he learned pascal before lisp and lisp before c. IIRC, alan kay did a study on this in the mid seventies. he found that it was easier to teach the children how to program in smalltalk than it was to teach professionals how to program in smalltalk. the professionals had been programming in one mindset so long that they tried to morph the oop techniques into what they already knew. i know that when i first learned how to program(and i see this at too many schools), the first course was all procedural programming in pascal. the second course was on data structures and some object oriented techniques(pretty much just inheritance and polymorphism) in c++. consequently i found myself trying to use an oop language to do procedural programming. the only oop techniques that i found useful were the ones that made my procedural programs easier to write. it wasnt until i had an actual oop course that stressed viewing things in terms of objects and their behaviour that i was able to understand what it meant to use oop design.
my point is that people dont properly implement programs with oop techniques because they have only been taught how to write procedural programs and dont know how to design a program in terms of objects and their behavior. if we want more people using good oop techniques, we need to teach the first programming courses in oop languages and stress oop design from the beginning.
true, but IIRC there have been studies that suggest that a programmer will produce the same amount of code per day (measured in LOC) regardless of the language. this was one of the reasons to stop programming in assembly. by having a high level language, the programmer didnt have to go through all the hassle of moving register contents onto the stack, etc. every time they wanted to call a function. by using an oo language that provides the syntactic niceties of oo techniques, the programmer doesnt have to recreate them when they want to use them. in the end, the programmer still produces the same amount(lines) of code, but the code they produce is capable of doing more because the instructions do more.
True, but power plants dont just pop up over night. They have to be built and that takes time. This wont solve the immediate problem of low power reserves. As the article mentions, much of the loss in power is due to breakdowns, maintenance and pollution limits. Yes, they need to build more power plants, but they should have started doing it long ago.
Larry Ellison is as rich as he is because he was in the right place at the right time
No, Larry Ellison is as rich as he is today because he did the right action in the right place at the right time. There are lots of people who have been "in the right place at the right time" but not all of them are as rich as Ellison. One of the requirements of a functional communtiy is that people are held responsible for their actions. That is, people get rewarded (or penalized) for their actions, not the actions of others. If I shoot someone, should you be put in jail? No, I should. If I make a billion dollars, should you get a roof over your head? No, I should. Responsibility works both ways. It protects you from my mistakes and protects me from you leaching off my acomplishments. Im not saying that it is good that people are starving while Ellison lives in a mansion, but it is not Ellison's fault that they are starving so dont blame him or try to make him fix the situation if he doesnt want to. As the saying goes, credit where credit is due.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, but a responsible person should not be punished for the actions of an irresponsible person. You should only be taking away the rights of the irresponsible people. If I rob the local bank should my neighbors be put in jail? No, I should. This proposal is like adding a tax to ski masks because some people use them when robbing a bank. Or banning gloves because people like to use them when commiting crimes. If you want to say that it is just to punish or take away the rights of irresponsible people, you must also say that it is unjust to punish responsible people for things they dont do. Otherwise you are saying that everyone needs to be punished regardless of their actions, which is what the copyright societies are trying to do in this case.
All OS's will be redundant
Thus explains Microsoft's fear of Netscape. Bill had this .NET thing planned out years ago. Monopoly in OS market gets internet browser onto every machine. Monopoly in internet browser market gets .NET onto every machine. .NET on every machine means another generation of MS monopolies. As you say, the future is .NET.
Didnt you know that the US Patent Office is getting kickbacks from the lawyers. They were seeing all these companies getting rich and wanted a part of the action so they made an agreement with the bar associations in every state. The patent office was to allow stupid patents through to drum up demand for lawyers. In return, the patent office gets %30 of all legal fees.
What the patent office needs to do is instrument some kind of grace period for challenging a patent. Once a patent is accepted, if anyone can construct a working product that demonstrates all the features described in the patent within say a month or some other reasonable time frame, the patent becomes null and void. I think this would eliminate alot of the patents on "common knowledge".
MS recently "donated" about $50,000 in OS licenses to the university I attend. By not having to pay for the OS on some of the machines they can now do one of the following: build a new lab, hire another tech support person, support four more grad students for a year, remodel the office of the department chair, etc.
The cost of the OS is only insignificant when you only have a couple machines or you use pirated OS software anyway. For large institutions, with hundreds/thousands of machines, two to three hundred dollars per machine every two years to upgrade the OS can be very significant regardless of how much money you are paying for support, development, administration, etc.
Cost to starving citizen to get a job like everyone else so that they can feed themselves: $0
Ok, so it is apparent that many people dont understand this, but there are alot of problems with human society that cannot be fixed. They are a part of being human and living in groups. You cannot remove rebellion from adolescents. You cannot remove the desire to have sex. You cannot remove hate from an individual. If there was a way to convince people not to kill each other there would be no need to have laws concerning murder. Unfortunately, there is no way to convince people to not kill each other. But that is no excuse to allow murder so we have to find some way to control it. That is why there are laws. We know why there are so many unwanted pregnancies. Its because people want to have sex but dont want to have kids. They dont want to have to accept the responsibilities of their actions. We know why there is violence in the schools. Its because kids are angry. We know many of the reasons that kids are angry. Much of it is because of bad parenting or bad schooling or a lack of respect for authority or any combination of the three. Can we fix this? No. We cant force people to be good parents, there arent enough good teachers and administrators to run all the schools and there will always be people who dont respect authority. Since there is no way to fix the cause much of the time, we are left with only treating the symptoms to try and make life a little better for everyone else. Im sorry if you feel that life isnt perfect, but deal with it.
Its not just "Dubya's" morals. Remember, we (im assuming you are American since you are complaining about Bush) live in a democracy and as such American morals are defined by majority opinion. Since the majority of Americans are white anglo-saxon protestant capitalists or of similar beliefs, the country's moral standards will be those of white anglo-saxon protestant capitalists. Until another group finds itself in the majority, we are going to have to live with their opinion of morals or leave the country.
Source of Funds: Hundreds of Millions of Taxpayers
Cost to me: less than $1
Sounds fine to me.
The advantage is that this would create competition and choices for cable TV. Granted, there would be about as much choice as voting for the president, but ill take what I can get.
From what I can tell from your link(please correct me if I am wrong), it looks more like Novus is putting fiber into the homes. What the article is talking about is using the existing phone lines to deliver TV. These are two completely different things.
I dont see why you need to move the bots if you can move the plane. As it says in the article:
While each robotic arm would have only two degrees of freedom, the surface itself could be moved in X, Y and Z.
I know im assuming alot about the process here and I could be completely wrong on this, but if you move the planes in an organized way, it is plausible that you wont have to move the bots and that they wont crowd each other too much either. This is because each bot doesnt make a new bot on its own plane, it makes it on the opposite plane. Thus, bot1 on plane1 makes bot2 on plane2. Currently bot1 is still close to bot2 since the plates havent moved much. Next, big machine moves plate2 1 meter parallel to plate1. Now, bot1 is 1 meter away from bot2. Bot1 and bot2 have plenty of room to reproduce. Repeat till bots are too dense to reproduce. Clean up mess and start over.
Now if your plates are large enough, you wont have to worry about crowding for quite a while. The only problem would be in coming up with the scheme to move the plates and in making big enough plates. I guess you could call this "moving the center nanobots" even though you arent really touching them in any way, just moving the plates they are on.
These nanobots are really tiny (hence the name) and you will need to make lots of them to do anything useful. If you are trying to make 10^15 of them, you dont want to have to make them one at a time, a thousand at a time or even a million at a time (all have a o(n) growth rate), that would take all too long. By having an exponential growth rate, they can focus on making larger plates to grow the nanobots on rather than making more nanobot producing factories.
That said, I agree with your paranoia and dont sign up for automatic bill payments unless I can reasonably guarantee that the bill will be for the same amount each and every time and that I will have enough in my account to cover the expense.
Taking Aoliza as a model, what you need to do is get some speech software and hook it up to an ELIZA program. call the 800 numbers with your modem and see how long you can get the customer service agents to talk to the computer. ok, this may not be feasible to implement right now, what with current speech technology, but you wouldnt have to spend any of your own time and if you kept logs of the long ones it could be really funny.
If it works as well as Gore-Tex, it will probably cost as much as Gore-Tex. It all depends on how much demand for the product there is.
Turn them inside out and you should have no problem. You just cant cuddle with Rudolph anymore cause all his sweat will wick right onto you.
personally i havent read the book, but i know that he has written some excellent books on languages and it sounds similar to what you are talking about.
my point is that people dont properly implement programs with oop techniques because they have only been taught how to write procedural programs and dont know how to design a program in terms of objects and their behavior. if we want more people using good oop techniques, we need to teach the first programming courses in oop languages and stress oop design from the beginning.
true, but IIRC there have been studies that suggest that a programmer will produce the same amount of code per day (measured in LOC) regardless of the language. this was one of the reasons to stop programming in assembly. by having a high level language, the programmer didnt have to go through all the hassle of moving register contents onto the stack, etc. every time they wanted to call a function. by using an oo language that provides the syntactic niceties of oo techniques, the programmer doesnt have to recreate them when they want to use them. in the end, the programmer still produces the same amount(lines) of code, but the code they produce is capable of doing more because the instructions do more.
California already imports energy from its neighbors. Unfortunately, California's neighbors dont have enough to cover all of its requests for energy.
True, but power plants dont just pop up over night. They have to be built and that takes time. This wont solve the immediate problem of low power reserves. As the article mentions, much of the loss in power is due to breakdowns, maintenance and pollution limits. Yes, they need to build more power plants, but they should have started doing it long ago.
No, Larry Ellison is as rich as he is today because he did the right action in the right place at the right time. There are lots of people who have been "in the right place at the right time" but not all of them are as rich as Ellison. One of the requirements of a functional communtiy is that people are held responsible for their actions. That is, people get rewarded (or penalized) for their actions, not the actions of others. If I shoot someone, should you be put in jail? No, I should. If I make a billion dollars, should you get a roof over your head? No, I should. Responsibility works both ways. It protects you from my mistakes and protects me from you leaching off my acomplishments. Im not saying that it is good that people are starving while Ellison lives in a mansion, but it is not Ellison's fault that they are starving so dont blame him or try to make him fix the situation if he doesnt want to. As the saying goes, credit where credit is due.