Technology has made copying simple so who should pay for the arts? People who copy aren't paying much especially if you consider that we'll likely be able to stick anywhere from 2 to 20 movies on a single DVD-R.
It's reasonable to expect big business or government to pay a big portion of the costs. That would continue to pay for the arts that everyone loves so much as well as give business publicity. Businesses can use downloads as part of an incentive/rebate/discount program. When artists vie for the sponsorship of businesses this translates into good art that businesses know will be popular.
Demand has driven businesses to develop technology to store more information faster and cheaper. People want the convenience of their own collection of art. In my opinion, this is good for the world. This can still be paid for if businesses pay the bulk of the expenses.
Besides, most of the popular arts promote excessive materialism and the effort and infrastructure to sustain such these desires.
For my physics A-level practical some 7-8 years ago now I tried pumping salt water through a tube inside a magnetic field. Two electrodes on opposite sides of the tube measured the voltage across it. You could see that voltage generated was propotional to the speed of the water and the amount of salt it contained
I picture this as a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the flow of the water and the voltmeter connected across the diameter (not the ends) of the tube in the direction perpendicular to the flow of the water as well as perpendicular to the magnetic field. As the ions in the tap water move in the magnetic field they are driven from one side of the tube to the other.
People who wonder where the energy source is - it's a pump or a tank/dam of pressurized water. This tank can be used as the battery. Switch on by letting the water flow. Switch off by stopping the flow.
One advantage - no moving parts unlike a turbine-generator setup.
The lifetime of an AI on a PC is basically one clock cycle.
If AI comprises both the program and the current memory contents (very similar to objects) as the AI changes the memory it may destroy itself or completely alter its personality.
If the AI's lifetime is measured without the memory then the AI is just an algorithm and not based on uptime.
The wild life does start moving at dusk, and is not limited to relatively small animals, but donkeys, camels and the regular cows and bulls (often Brahmen (sp?) in this area - really big buggers) make emus and kangaroos look tame. Where a kangaroo is unpredictable, the cow stands on the road in the dark, waiting for a car to hit it.
Premise. This thread is about energy.
Premise. Moving animals possess plenty of energy.
Conclusion. When it comes time, hitch the car to a moving animal.
It strikes me that the macs are still in their own cases. How fast can information travel between machines at the far ends of the racks? It all comes down to the size of the room that the computer is built in...
Since they went to so much effort to assemble the entire system, they should put the motherboards closer together. Is that harder to do with Macs as opposed to PCs?
How accurate are the benchmarks for supercomputers? If I want to compare this Mac cluster to a futuristic CPU running 17 THz who will appear faster?
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
Aha. Here's a proof by contradiction: one of the robot jobs is to educate people.
In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to fall off the grid like dominoes
This sounds like a poor design. The grid needs to be able to switch off nonessential loads - such as air conditioners if a generator station goes down. Can we have circuits or devices that automatically shut down if notified that the power generation is in trouble. We have wireless technologies and smart devices that ought to respond to information about disasters - another portal for hacking....
On the flip side, people who really need power should make sure they have the backup power to last through a long blackout.
What about the audacity of office towers? Many of them are frigid cold in the summer time with almost no thermostat controllability. Some have lights on everywhere 24/7 even if no one is there from 5-8. I suppose there aren't that many such buildings per capita but WTF?
Would major insulation help reduce the need for air conditioners? Also, global worming um warming would be reduced if people don't drive around so much for frivolity. In short, don't have so much fun.
Then what is the atomic weight and atomic number of a neutron star? Surely the atomic number would be fairly high even if most of the protons and electrons have neutralized each other.
These high atomic number elements keep self destructing, but how much longer would they live if they are built with more neutrons - not quite as big as a neutron star, but just more?
What happens in the time between t and t + 10^(-2.547*10^1000000)? Does the universe change at all?
If time is indeed a continuum, and that is a big if, in that short time we couldn't even "see" what is happening because light would appear stationary - the speed of growing grass.
There are ways for a computer program to tell what time it is. The program can consult a real-time clock. If you are personally kept in a room without a clock for some time, when you come out you can look up the time.
If half of the population is unemployed, what the hell are the rich producing that someone will purchase? NOTHING. Cause NO ONE is buying!!
You are not seeing the factor of generosity.
Machines are very, very generous. Their target output is distributed to people and to other machines.
Menial objects like houses, cars, orange juice will be available at such a low price they may as well be free.
People who want to be rich can still be rich. They just have to show some merit, some ability to convert chaos into order. In other words, they just have to show an ability to convert basic resources into something useful or desirable.
That's not to say that each tiny bit of human ingenuity wouldn't be quickly converted or assigned or taken over by machines. The universe of problems is so vast that people have to explore more. Machines and people have to leapfrog each other and use each other's results to seek the greater truth.
Just remember that a dog hit and killed by a car, can never learn to avoid cars. You must survive in order to learn. The problem here is that the changes and forces are so profoundly stronger and faster than most believe that they simply do not see the need to adapt until it is all over.
The analogy at first seemed flawed - the dog doesn't understand cars the way people do.
However, a lot of people don't understand technology.
I have observed that a lot of people who don't know technology still want to use it. Small businesses are trying to use technology to make their businesses competitive.
A lot of automation makes decisions and people end up just following suggestions - the question: what good are people? Some people don't even know as much as the machines. Machines have the potential to learn more and to learn faster than people.
Right now there are some elite people and a lot of people who just accept that they don't know as much.
When you analyze it, it all comes down to the acceptabilility of having an elite person in a leadership position or a machine in a leadership position. First of all, there may be a lot of dumb people leading other people, but we want someone respectable as a leader, at the very least. Then we ask, is a machine better?
A machine is an algorithm, a mathematical formula or logical statement. If a person applies the logic to obtain a result, or if a machine churns out the result, the result is still the same. If the result is a good one, why should it matter which process was used? The process itself is totally transparent. It's just computation. It's as clean as the computer on your desk.
Now look at the inputs to the computation. Current implementors of AI hardly ever address the problem of input. A person requires vast terabytes/sec of input in order to get through the day. A machine that not only has to look after itself, but the welfare of people and resources in a huge enterprise will require perhaps a billion times the input rate just to run something viable and maybe not even profitable. The machine has to understand how to obtain its input efficiently with respect to the situation it exists in.
This will be the biggest source of error. In a chaotic system, if the input changes slightly the output can vary enormously.
This is very hard to do on a "micro", day-to-day level
One of the problems may be a feeling of impending failure, that everything will just go wrong and nothing will work. This might mess up your muscle control.
IF you can, visualize the solution step by step. Then do the steps.
I like having fun and doing something fun. That should beat work any day, right??
Well, is there a way to make work fun so you don't really know the difference?
If I'm trying to build something that I can use to have a lot of fun, I can really concentrate.
Try this - if you can build a little fun into the work, even if that means building something outside the scope of the work, you may find that you become really motivated. I haven't tried this yet since I just thought of it so I'm going to try it.
come on people - -the market regulates everything...how do people buy machines if there is NO INCOME?
Think of machines being equivalent to workers.
Do people go around buying workers? Not really.
Work is assigned.
Now think of children, who have no money until an owner of money gives them money. When children grow up, they are paid more money based either on what they deserve or the generosity of owners of money.
Machines are also allocated resources based either on what they deserve or generosity.
The failed concept here is that every person is somehow able to adapt "Instantly" to the new reality. People who are young do so fairly well so long as they are pretty bright and industrious. Many others particularly as they grow older have increasing difficulty adapting. Careers which once lasted a lifetime now last but a year or two.
The dinosaurs became extinct. What can I say? The universe doesn't wait for people to catch up. They have to keep learning.
Even learning will be a task done extremely well by machines.
Irregardless, humanity cannot keep going and going the way it has been going simply because of the limitations of being human. Even if nature doesn't force us to evolve for the sake of survival, we still change from one generation to the next.
Is it so implausible to expect people to augment this change through artificial means? After all, intelligence is natural.
With the advent of cotton pickers, this number dropped to an insignificant sum of a two or three thousand. There were a significant number of new jobs which arose that replaced some of the lost jobs but even as early as the 1960's and 1970's this was a real problem.
Now I understand what people are telling me when they say "What's your cotton picking problem?"
pros: - accessibility - low cost to operate - who wants to work on the odd fast food crew for people too stupid to work anywhere else?
cons: - stale food - misunderstanding - lack of choice - quality monitoring is corruptible if someone doesn't care. In the year 2000 several people in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada died from drinking tap water contaminated with E. coli because of negligence at the water supply.
Given time technology will surely replace workers in well known jobs. People have to do things that are not so well known, even as machines can learn or be built to handle more types of work.
Should people look at this as competition? My feeling is "no". For one thing, we should all cooperate to reach common goals, whatever they are. Even the set of integers is infinite, though countable. No matter how much energy is expended on work, there is still something to do.
The technology sounds formidable. Here's the abstract of the patent from uspto.gov.
An international transaction system for operation over the internet/intranet provides a pre-transactional calculation of all charges involved in any international transaction. Upon the option of the customer, the goods can be viewed on catalogue sheets translated to a language of the customer's choice, and the price provided in a currency selected by the customer. The customer also has the option of initiating the order with automatic credit authorization, generation of an electronic title or commercial invoice and arrangements and payment of shipping charges and any taxes and import/export duties
All the people with small businesses saying they can't afford such technology should relax. This is all about importing/exporting. I doubt small businesses are going to be worried about losing the handful of sales to someone in Timbuctoo.
Anyone with large enough export volumes would rather buy a licensed product than develop one themselves to do all the things specified in the abstract.
If a small business has so much exporting that they need to use software to automate sales - well, you won't be small for long.
The software under patent is complex enough to automate many activities required by the bureaucracy in international trade. That's creditable, not obvious.
My message to IT workers: - you have computer programming skills - computers are extensions of the mind
Apply these skills and machines to do something challenging. Businesses are buying 3 GHz machines so people can fill out form letters, store a few bytes of customer name address phone number sex age purchase order. Does that sound like a waste?
I don't want to hear how IT workers are suffering. People in the third world are getting off their asses and using computers to improve their own lives. Displaced IT personnel can do the same.
IT workers should go to their management and create new tasks worthy of the education and hardware currently available.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology has made copying simple so who should pay for the arts? People who copy aren't paying much especially if you consider that we'll likely be able to stick anywhere from 2 to 20 movies on a single DVD-R.
It's reasonable to expect big business or government to pay a big portion of the costs. That would continue to pay for the arts that everyone loves so much as well as give business publicity. Businesses can use downloads as part of an incentive/rebate/discount program. When artists vie for the sponsorship of businesses this translates into good art that businesses know will be popular.
Demand has driven businesses to develop technology to store more information faster and cheaper. People want the convenience of their own collection of art. In my opinion, this is good for the world. This can still be paid for if businesses pay the bulk of the expenses.
Besides, most of the popular arts promote excessive materialism and the effort and infrastructure to sustain such these desires.
For my physics A-level practical some 7-8 years ago now I tried pumping salt water through a tube inside a magnetic field. Two electrodes on opposite sides of the tube measured the voltage across it. You could see that voltage generated was propotional to the speed of the water and the amount of salt it contained
I picture this as a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the flow of the water and the voltmeter connected across the diameter (not the ends) of the tube in the direction perpendicular to the flow of the water as well as perpendicular to the magnetic field. As the ions in the tap water move in the magnetic field they are driven from one side of the tube to the other.
People who wonder where the energy source is - it's a pump or a tank/dam of pressurized water. This tank can be used as the battery. Switch on by letting the water flow. Switch off by stopping the flow.
One advantage - no moving parts unlike a turbine-generator setup.
The lifetime of an AI on a PC is basically one clock cycle.
If AI comprises both the program and the current memory contents (very similar to objects) as the AI changes the memory it may destroy itself or completely alter its personality.
If the AI's lifetime is measured without the memory then the AI is just an algorithm and not based on uptime.
The wild life does start moving at dusk, and is not limited to relatively small animals, but donkeys, camels and the regular cows and bulls (often Brahmen (sp?) in this area - really big buggers) make emus and kangaroos look tame. Where a kangaroo is unpredictable, the cow stands on the road in the dark, waiting for a car to hit it.
Premise. This thread is about energy.
Premise. Moving animals possess plenty of energy.
Conclusion. When it comes time, hitch the car to a moving animal.
The whole thing could conceivably fit into a room
It strikes me that the macs are still in their own cases. How fast can information travel between machines at the far ends of the racks? It all comes down to the size of the room that the computer is built in...
Since they went to so much effort to assemble the entire system, they should put the motherboards closer together. Is that harder to do with Macs as opposed to PCs?
How accurate are the benchmarks for supercomputers? If I want to compare this Mac cluster to a futuristic CPU running 17 THz who will appear faster?
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
Aha. Here's a proof by contradiction: one of the robot jobs is to educate people.
of the powerout is a bunch of ppls waking to their reality in the Matrix.
You have to be careful who you sleep with.
--
Anyone know how to split the screen in Internet Explorer?
In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but
....
in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much
like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the
right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off
making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to
fall off the grid like dominoes
This sounds like a poor design. The grid needs to be able to switch off nonessential loads - such as air conditioners if a generator station goes down. Can we have circuits or devices that automatically shut down if notified that the power generation is in trouble. We have wireless technologies and smart devices that ought to respond to information about disasters - another portal for hacking
On the flip side, people who really need power should make sure they have the backup power to last through a long blackout.
What about the audacity of office towers? Many of them are frigid cold in the summer time with almost no thermostat controllability. Some have lights on everywhere 24/7 even if no one is there from 5-8. I suppose there aren't that many such buildings per capita but WTF?
Would major insulation help reduce the need for air conditioners? Also, global worming um warming would be reduced if people don't drive around so much for frivolity. In short, don't have so much fun.
Is a neutron stars one big atomic nucleus?
Then what is the atomic weight and atomic number of a neutron star? Surely the atomic number would be fairly high even if most of the protons and electrons have neutralized each other.
These high atomic number elements keep self destructing, but how much longer would they live if they are built with more neutrons - not quite as big as a neutron star, but just more?
What happens in the time between t and t + 10^(-2.547*10^1000000)? Does the universe change at all?
If time is indeed a continuum, and that is a big if, in that short time we couldn't even "see" what is happening because light would appear stationary - the speed of growing grass.
There are ways for a computer program to tell what time it is. The program can consult a real-time clock. If you are personally kept in a room without a clock for some time, when you come out you can look up the time.
If half of the population is unemployed, what the hell are the rich producing that someone will purchase? NOTHING. Cause NO ONE is buying!!
You are not seeing the factor of generosity.
Machines are very, very generous. Their target output is distributed to people and to other machines.
Menial objects like houses, cars, orange juice will be available at such a low price they may as well be free.
People who want to be rich can still be rich. They just have to show some merit, some ability to convert chaos into order. In other words, they just have to show an ability to convert basic resources into something useful or desirable.
That's not to say that each tiny bit of human ingenuity wouldn't be quickly converted or assigned or taken over by machines. The universe of problems is so vast that people have to explore more. Machines and people have to leapfrog each other and use each other's results to seek the greater truth.
Just remember that a dog hit and killed by a car, can never learn to avoid cars. You must survive in order to learn. The problem here is that the changes and forces are so profoundly stronger and faster than most believe that they simply do not see the need to adapt until it is all over.
The analogy at first seemed flawed - the dog doesn't understand cars the way people do.
However, a lot of people don't understand technology.
I have observed that a lot of people who don't know technology still want to use it. Small businesses are trying to use technology to make their businesses competitive.
A lot of automation makes decisions and people end up just following suggestions - the question: what good are people? Some people don't even know as much as the machines. Machines have the potential to learn more and to learn faster than people.
Right now there are some elite people and a lot of people who just accept that they don't know as much.
When you analyze it, it all comes down to the acceptabilility of having an elite person in a leadership position or a machine in a leadership position. First of all, there may be a lot of dumb people leading other people, but we want someone respectable as a leader, at the very least. Then we ask, is a machine better?
A machine is an algorithm, a mathematical formula or logical statement. If a person applies the logic to obtain a result, or if a machine churns out the result, the result is still the same. If the result is a good one, why should it matter which process was used? The process itself is totally transparent. It's just computation. It's as clean as the computer on your desk.
Now look at the inputs to the computation. Current implementors of AI hardly ever address the problem of input. A person requires vast terabytes/sec of input in order to get through the day. A machine that not only has to look after itself, but the welfare of people and resources in a huge enterprise will require perhaps a billion times the input rate just to run something viable and maybe not even profitable. The machine has to understand how to obtain its input efficiently with respect to the situation it exists in.
This will be the biggest source of error. In a chaotic system, if the input changes slightly the output can vary enormously.
This is very hard to do on a "micro", day-to-day level
One of the problems may be a feeling of impending failure, that everything will just go wrong and nothing will work. This might mess up your muscle control.
IF you can, visualize the solution step by step. Then do the steps.
I like having fun and doing something fun. That should beat work any day, right??
Well, is there a way to make work fun so you don't really know the difference?
If I'm trying to build something that I can use to have a lot of fun, I can really concentrate.
Try this - if you can build a little fun into the work, even if that means building something outside the scope of the work, you may find that you become really motivated. I haven't tried this yet since I just thought of it so I'm going to try it.
Marshall Brain (the guy who started HowStuffWorks) has published an article claiming that robots will take half the jobs in the U.S. by 2050.
Wanted:
SWM looking for an SWFR. Nonsmoker, light drinker, small pets ok. (612) 894-3422. billthecat@msn.com
SBF looking for a SBMR. Smoker ok. Have friendly German Shepard. (612) 323-5393.
SWF looking for SWFR for some bi action. (612) 532-5434.
come on people - -the market regulates everything...how do people buy machines if there is NO INCOME?
Think of machines being equivalent to workers.
Do people go around buying workers? Not really.
Work is assigned.
Now think of children, who have no money until an owner of money gives them money. When children grow up, they are paid more money based either on what they deserve or the generosity of owners of money.
Machines are also allocated resources based either on what they deserve or generosity.
The failed concept here is that every person is somehow able to adapt "Instantly" to the new reality. People who are young do so fairly well so long as they are pretty bright and industrious. Many others particularly as they grow older have increasing difficulty adapting. Careers which once lasted a lifetime now last but a year or two.
The dinosaurs became extinct. What can I say? The universe doesn't wait for people to catch up. They have to keep learning.
Even learning will be a task done extremely well by machines.
Irregardless, humanity cannot keep going and going the way it has been going simply because of the limitations of being human. Even if nature doesn't force us to evolve for the sake of survival, we still change from one generation to the next.
Is it so implausible to expect people to augment this change through artificial means? After all, intelligence is natural.
With the advent of cotton pickers, this number dropped to an insignificant sum of a two or three thousand. There were a significant number of new jobs which arose that replaced some of the lost jobs but even as early as the 1960's and 1970's this was a real problem.
Now I understand what people are telling me when they say "What's your cotton picking problem?"
pros:
- accessibility
- low cost to operate
- who wants to work on the odd fast food crew for people too stupid to work anywhere else?
cons:
- stale food
- misunderstanding
- lack of choice
- quality monitoring is corruptible if someone doesn't care. In the year 2000 several people in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada died from drinking tap water contaminated with E. coli because of negligence at the water supply.
Given time technology will surely replace workers in well known jobs. People have to do things that are not so well known, even as machines can learn or be built to handle more types of work.
Should people look at this as competition? My feeling is "no". For one thing, we should all cooperate to reach common goals, whatever they are. Even the set of integers is infinite, though countable. No matter how much energy is expended on work, there is still something to do.
I sit at a computer desk for 10 hours a day with very little actual work
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice.
Get your lazy ass to work. You should type until your knuckles are sweating. No one with a job should be getting fat.
If you can't think of enough to type in, try pulling your hair.
The technology sounds formidable. Here's the abstract of the patent from
uspto.gov.
An international transaction system for operation over the internet/intranet provides a pre-transactional calculation of all charges involved in any international transaction. Upon the option of the customer, the goods can be viewed on catalogue sheets translated to a language of the customer's choice, and the price provided in a currency selected by the customer. The customer also has the option of initiating the order with automatic credit authorization, generation of an electronic title or commercial invoice and arrangements and payment of shipping charges and any taxes and import/export duties
All the people with small businesses saying they can't afford such technology should relax. This is all about importing/exporting. I doubt small businesses are going to be worried about losing the handful of sales to someone in Timbuctoo.
Anyone with large enough export volumes would rather buy a licensed product than develop one themselves to do all the things specified in the abstract.
If a small business has so much exporting that they need to use software to automate sales - well, you won't be small for long.
The software under patent is complex enough to automate many activities required by the bureaucracy in international trade. That's creditable, not obvious.
My message to IT workers:
- you have computer programming skills
- computers are extensions of the mind
Apply these skills and machines to do something challenging. Businesses are buying 3 GHz machines so people can fill out form letters, store a few bytes of customer name address phone number sex age purchase order. Does that sound like a waste?
I don't want to hear how IT workers are suffering. People in the third world are getting off their asses and using computers to improve their own lives. Displaced IT personnel can do the same.
IT workers should go to their management and create new tasks worthy of the education and hardware currently available.
hide my fake identity
How can you fake your IP address?
I know - you can only find the fake files.
The Primary Purpose of Copyright Law is not to Provide a Benefit to Authors, But to Provide the Public With Access to Authors' Works
My intuition: some authors would be very reluctant to publish if they have no protection