One definition of superhuman intelligence is almost upon us. This deffinition is that a single entity is capable of directing human beings as if the humans had no free will. This scenario can easily be envisioned as marketing which is capable of selling whatever the marketeer wishes to sell. Given that the feedback systems within large retailers are already capable of predicting the response of individual consumers with a high degree of accuracy. There would not need to be much of a shift in the effectiveness of such systems for us to perceive that the organisations selling us things were capable of telling us what to buy.
Would the symbiosis between the marketing system and its human management then qualify as a superhuman entity? It would certainly not have the perception of free will that democratic government gives us. The combination of the marketing system and its human directors will tend to get better at manipulating us over time unless a concious effort to restrict its power is made.
Is Microsoft an example of such a superhuman entity? Does Microsoft tell us what we need before we know it? and what of Wallmart, a business which can change local retailing to fit its own deffinition, destroying a characteristic way of life in the process? A system with many component parts can be described as a superhuman entity, there is no need for us to wait for a processor which contains more switching elements than the human brain to detect the rise of more than human machine mediated superintelligence. Its all a matter of how you want to define superintelligence.
Actually the grid you are part of is very little to do with government or their enemies. All the news you hear about is about how ineffective and fragmented the information that law enforcement and government agencies manage to collect about you.
The people who do know what makes you tick are the retailers, WallMart can tell you what you will be spending your money on better than you know yourself. They also have a file which knows where you are going to retire, what healthcare might be sold to you and what is required to make you spend all of your disposeable income with them. There is no obvious problem with this until you consider the bit about how they can use your information to manipulate what you do with your life. You can vote your political representatives in and out of power and have some influence on government policy. You have no choice about how the marketing data mining can be used to influence your community.
I wouldnt be suprised if in twenty years time we would be begging our politicians to legislate that no single retailing organisation can take more than ten percent of our income because their manipulative powers will have become so strong. You already have an identity card, its your retailer "bonus" card.
I hope Mr Feeney survives his attempt, he is a brave man. SpaceShipOne will fly and has a resonable chance of returning its passengers to the ground in one piece now the obvious bugs have been ironed out through testing. There is no evidence whatsoever that Wild Fire can do that. Engineering is not all about theory otherwise it would not be a seperate discipline from Science. Flying Wild Fire without progressive testing is risky no matter how good the science is. It would not surprise me if the difference in costs between the two projects could be accounted for entirely by the cost of testing.
Art on my workbench is Art as far as I am concerned, if my viewing of it in an art context tells me it is art then it is art. Havent you ever looked at a view and said to yourself "that would make a great picture?". There are plenty of reasons why your chosen image would make a great picture even if its only to say "this captures the essence of a place and I want to take it away with me" Just because its not important art to the ongoing evolution of art history does not negate it as art.
I actualy had to look up PVR to check what it meant.
Web encylopedias seem to have plenty of alternate deffinitions, though I cannot recall having seen them used anywhere
"A PVR is also referred to as a hard disk recorder (HDR), digital video recorder (DVR), personal video station (PVS) , or a personal TV receiver (PTR)"
This is high culture and should be recorded for posterity!
Ok so its humor and humor isnt serious enough to count as news that matters, except that if you dont "get" humor then you are probably not functioning very well.
A little self mockery never did any harm to people with compulsive behaviour and I'm more than happy to remind myself that cool gadgets are only tools to do something else..
Having said that can I tell you about my new minidisk portable recorder, its just like brilliant! Its got 4x extended recording and a mic input so I can record live stuff and its half the size of the tape recorder it replaces. The only thing is that I dont have an optical input on my sound card so all transfers are going to have to be analog to start with, still its going to be far better quality than the cassette tapes I usualy use. It also has this realy neat remote so you can walk around with it in your pocket. Sorry am I boring you?
The story is well written. The voodo linux and magic are all authentic enough to read true. I get cartoons and satire in my newspaper so why not here?? Ok April 1st was a bit mad, but that was generally a bit too contrived to be funny; this article made me laugh.
Seems we have plenty of these automated garages in Europe also, I used to commute on the train past the one in Stockholm every day. There is a windows media player clip on the site which shows the vehicle driven into the system and returned rotated ready to drive away. Plenty of pictures also. Says the retrival time is 50 seconds.
One cool aspect of these storage silos is that you could plant one under an existing car park and put trees and grass in the place of the ground level car park.
Fusion reactors produce radioactive waste. Waste could be locked into more stable materials at high dilution levels making transportation more paletable, these materials could then be placed into the lithosphere in stable parts of tectonic plates or more controversially into seabed subduction zones.
There has to be a continious re-evaluation of all potential sources of power whilst our fossil fuel reserves are being depleted. It is perhaps better that we discover the potentials and the pitfalls of nuclear power before the situation arises where there is no choice but to use nuclear power. We do now at least have the knowledge to advise the growing Chinese economy on the safest way to utilise it for example should they find the need for power outstrips the availability of fossil fuel.
Energy policy has a big impact on the environment if global warming is directly linked to the burning of fossil fuel. Nuclear power may ironicaly have a lower impact on the environment in the long term if we solve the problem of waste recycling. Radioactive materials are dug out of the ground so it does not seem impossible to put them safely back into the ground. Exhaustion of fossil fuel will automatically drive greater use of water wind and wave power but only policy will drive the use of technologically sophisticated power sources like fusion and nuclear power.
Market distortion which could continue indefinitely because it is not imediately recognisable as a market distortion, will when recognised, be prevented by pre-existing anti-competitive legislation such as that set up to prevent monopoly market manipulation.
And yes what I did write deserves some mockery for lack of sense... I just have this problem with long sentences... maybe I need to change the default background colour on my screen or something...
"Nigel:...the numbers all go to eleven. Look...right across the
board. Marty: Ahh...oh, I see.... Nigel: Eleven...eleven...eleven.... Marty:..and most of these amps go up to ten.... Nigel: Exactly. Marty: Does that mean it's...louder? Is it any louder? Nigel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see,
most...most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten.
You're on ten here...all the way up...all the way up.... Marty: Yeah.... Nigel:...all the way up. You're on ten on your guitar...where
can you go from there? Where? Marty: I don't know.... Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra..
push over the cliff...you know what we do? Marty: Put it up to eleven. Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder. Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the
top... number... and make that a little louder?
I find it interesting that in general people do not have the same fear of pathogens that they have for radioactivity. We agonise about chucking truckloads of radioactive waste several kilometers underground but biohazard is an unheard word. Considering that a pinhead of plutonium ground up fine enough could kill a small village and a pinhead of the wrong bug could kill 90% of humanity it seems a little odd. We must have a great deal of faith that someone somewhere isnt trying to load Ebola into a common cold virus.
Meanwhile there are plenty of natural biohazards to research and control. If you think Foot and Mouth disease couldnt happen in the States then you are probably wrong. Huge numbers of farm animals in the UK were slaughtered and burnt because of this disease as recently as 2001. http://www.defra.gov.uk/footandmouth/ The final toll was 582,000 cattle, 3,487,000 sheep, 146,000 pigs, 3,000 goats, 1,000 deer, 1,000 other animals
It is particularly worrying that the entire outbreak was thought to have ocurred because illegaly imported meat from a far eastern source was fed to pigs on one farm. Vaccination is a strategy which will be used at the next outbreak and is expected to prevent a similar catastrophy.
So it is very worrying that this facility broke down. Particularly as the kind of work done there is absolutely necessary to defend against bio terrorism. All it would take one assumes to cause a foot and mouth epedemic would be a suitcase full of infected meat thrown over the wall of a pig farm.
Anti-American sentiment is putting it too strongly, its more a competetive spirit for ideas amongst team players. The anti sentiment only comes into play when it is felt that European ideas are being rejected by ideological fiat.
It is not clear whether or not the effective monopoly of Microsoft has benefited the world. Quite possibly the standards setting effect of the monopoly has done more good than bad in the long term. However perpetual market distortion cannot be tolerated indefinitely.
Part of the problem is determining exactly what should be done to remove distortions from the market whilst not throwing away global standards. It is not clear that the proposed fines and unbundling will do anything more than split the market up into different competing standards - all owned by American companies incidentally.
This is not a religious war. But this is a religious and philosphical conflict that has been hijacked by clever manipulative fanatics. The Base is only interested in killing "Westerners" because it increases their support amongst disafected Muslim youth.
The end game of the terrorist is probably the overthrow of current governments in Muslim countries. Killing Westerners is their Walt Disney propaganda channel. So it is absolutely true to say that negociating with Al Quaida is pointless, they dont want anything from us. Except to draw out bad behavior on our part.
So this does not give us carte blanch to throw away our own civilisation and start behaving as they do. Absolutely we should not kill people indiscriminately. But we should also not be imprisoning people without trial and we should not be destroying belief in the United Nations. The new Spanish administration has taken this stance.
All actions which demonstrate a lack of ethical or moral standards will be siezed upon by the population of Muslim countries as evidence that Al Quaida might be right. On the other hand demonstrating our standards and our good will go a long way towards freezing the terrorists out.
So no, we do not negociate with the terroists. But part of our defence will to be exceptionaly scrupulous about our influence and actions when dealing with Muslim countries and people.
Crossreference database technology will trap terrorists and criminals and is to be welcomed as it demonstrates belief in our society.
What would not be welcome would be holding people identified by the technology without trial or resort to our legal system. There will be false positives and it is a tenet of the basis of our whole society that we live by the rule of law and you are innocent until proven guilty. Change that and the terrorists will have definitely won.
Two hours a week of television indicates to me that you are probably not retired or stuck at home with young children. You are lucky to have the choice to avoid television. I note with interest though that more and more people indicate that they watch very little these days.
The web came into existance to share academic information when Tim Burners-Lee "wrote a program, called Enquire, which he called a "memory substitute," for his personal use to help him remember connections between various people and projects at the lab.. ~He envisioned a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere." http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.html
Economics dictates that someone has to pay for the web, academia can no longer afford to supply the bandwith. The expansion of the web has come about because of commercial usage, mostly by business communications one suspects.
A business with web presence is handicapped by the history of the web because we do not expect to pay. It is also handicapped by the simple fact that someone somewhere is going to be offering the information for free anyway. This means that it is difficult to sell information on the web unless it is extraordinarily unique and difficult to put together or is presented in such a compelling way that people pay for it.
Into this paradigm you suggest that advertising has some special right to be viewed. This is not true and is a confidence trick pushed by media organisations used to the television model. No doubt there will be businesses which suceed in using the internet to broadcast television and can use a varient of the traditional advertising model to gain income. However there are a lot of businesses which will not, particularly if the users keep up with the technology to reduce their exposure to advertising - Spybot et al.
I put it to you that user resistance to advertising is a straightforward personal preference and has no bearing on whether advertising is lucrative or not. Some advertising always gets through.
Additionaly it is always worth pointing out that we resent or are suspicious about the motives of businesses collecting private information about us. Quite possibly there is nothing to fear from businesses which know more about you than you do yourself. However if it isnt questioned then it is never going to be scrutinised or regulated until we have an "information" Three Mile Island.
If advertising has sufficient entertainment value then we will seek it out, the initiatives reported here indicate that the day when that might happen is drawing nearer.
Absolutely, if I wasnt unemployed right now I would be pleased to buy a subscription.
However more generally I think people still have a right to express a preference for the ammount and kind of advertising thrown at them. Otherwise we would all have tvs bolted to our heads with constant advertising twenty four hours a day. We have a perfect right to "circumvent the cost factor of these websites" if it involves choosing what advertising we want to see.
Also it should be possible to withold private information from businesses if we choose to. It is bad enough that the state and law enforcement agencies will eventually persuade us to log our every action with them so that we can stop terrorism. I have no intention of allowing that process to extend to businesses which will seek to control my behaviour in order to increase their profits.
It is a matter of freedom of the individual to choose without coercion. Surely you dont always sit through advertising commercials with the sound on? Or is your attention span so degraded that the only thing you can follow on tv is the advertising?
My family was involved in a business through most of the last century. Eventually it went bust handing over from one generation to the next. They all lost their jobs and the elders lost their pensions.
I kept out of it, reasoning that a business that big would end up owning you. Sadly it proved to be the case as nobody talks to each other any more. I'm not saying dont do it but be aware that relationships can come second to business. Also remember that relationships can change over time. Depends on the people involved, many cultures handle family businesses very well, but they tend to be the ones with very clearly deffined social heirarchy. The best bet would be to set out very clearly the rights and responsibilities of everybody involved - employment contracts right from the start. Then expect to adjust as time passes and the business changes.
A final suggestion is that the number one rule is dont lose a friends or family members money if they invest.
Bill Colwells talk at Stanford tells the whole story of where clock speed and marketing is going. World class CPU design guru predicting the end of the clock wars and looking to what chips have to do next to sell.
Its a fairly long lecture but it is absolute gold dust if you want to know where the industry is heading. I knew there was some reason why I like this internet thing, you can find out what is realy going on...
Evidence for processor clock speed variability and techniques used to reduce it in production can be found in this IBM paper http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462/ shahidi.html In particular table 2 identifies sources of variation
Slashdot Mirror
One definition of superhuman intelligence is almost upon us. This deffinition is that a single entity is capable of directing human beings as if the humans had no free will. This scenario can easily be envisioned as marketing which is capable of selling whatever the marketeer wishes to sell. Given that the feedback systems within large retailers are already capable of predicting the response of individual consumers with a high degree of accuracy. There would not need to be much of a shift in the effectiveness of such systems for us to perceive that the organisations selling us things were capable of telling us what to buy.
Would the symbiosis between the marketing system and its human management then qualify as a superhuman entity? It would certainly not have the perception of free will that democratic government gives us. The combination of the marketing system and its human directors will tend to get better at manipulating us over time unless a concious effort to restrict its power is made.
Is Microsoft an example of such a superhuman entity? Does Microsoft tell us what we need before we know it? and what of Wallmart, a business which can change local retailing to fit its own deffinition, destroying a characteristic way of life in the process? A system with many component parts can be described as a superhuman entity, there is no need for us to wait for a processor which contains more switching elements than the human brain to detect the rise of more than human machine mediated superintelligence. Its all a matter of how you want to define superintelligence.
Actually the grid you are part of is very little to do with government or their enemies. All the news you hear about is about how ineffective and fragmented the information that law enforcement and government agencies manage to collect about you.
The people who do know what makes you tick are the retailers, WallMart can tell you what you will be spending your money on better than you know yourself. They also have a file which knows where you are going to retire, what healthcare might be sold to you and what is required to make you spend all of your disposeable income with them. There is no obvious problem with this until you consider the bit about how they can use your information to manipulate what you do with your life. You can vote your political representatives in and out of power and have some influence on government policy. You have no choice about how the marketing data mining can be used to influence your community.
I wouldnt be suprised if in twenty years time we would be begging our politicians to legislate that no single retailing organisation can take more than ten percent of our income because their manipulative powers will have become so strong. You already have an identity card, its your retailer "bonus" card.
I hope Mr Feeney survives his attempt, he is a brave man. SpaceShipOne will fly and has a resonable chance of returning its passengers to the ground in one piece now the obvious bugs have been ironed out through testing. There is no evidence whatsoever that Wild Fire can do that. Engineering is not all about theory otherwise it would not be a seperate discipline from Science. Flying Wild Fire without progressive testing is risky no matter how good the science is. It would not surprise me if the difference in costs between the two projects could be accounted for entirely by the cost of testing.
Art on my workbench is Art as far as I am concerned, if my viewing of it in an art context tells me it is art then it is art. Havent you ever looked at a view and said to yourself "that would make a great picture?". There are plenty of reasons why your chosen image would make a great picture even if its only to say "this captures the essence of a place and I want to take it away with me" Just because its not important art to the ongoing evolution of art history does not negate it as art.
We are all artists.
wake up and smell the coffee
Biometric identification
The new uk national id card will have biometric id built in.
The question is how long it will take before all ISP's will be obliged to collect internet usage data linked to the biometric id of the user.
Great for catching terroists
Great for controlling political activists as China proves
Total and absolute ending of freedom of thought.
Remember information is power, you can throw your guns, votes and education into the trash. The end of an anarchic golden age?
I actualy had to look up PVR to check what it meant.
Web encylopedias seem to have plenty of alternate deffinitions, though I cannot recall having seen them used anywhere
"A PVR is also referred to as a hard disk recorder (HDR), digital video recorder (DVR), personal video station (PVS) , or a personal TV receiver (PTR)"
And all mp3 players will be called ipods?
No No No, this is a great story
This is high culture and should be recorded for posterity!
Ok so its humor and humor isnt serious enough to count as news that matters, except that if you dont "get" humor then you are probably not functioning very well.
A little self mockery never did any harm to people with compulsive behaviour and I'm more than happy to remind myself that cool gadgets are only tools to do something else..
Having said that can I tell you about my new minidisk portable recorder, its just like brilliant! Its got 4x extended recording and a mic input so I can record live stuff and its half the size of the tape recorder it replaces. The only thing is that I dont have an optical input on my sound card so all transfers are going to have to be analog to start with, still its going to be far better quality than the cassette tapes I usualy use. It also has this realy neat remote so you can walk around with it in your pocket. Sorry am I boring you?
The story is well written. The voodo linux and magic are all authentic enough to read true. I get cartoons and satire in my newspaper so why not here?? Ok April 1st was a bit mad, but that was generally a bit too contrived to be funny; this article made me laugh.
http://www.trevipark.co.uk/after-intro.html
Seems we have plenty of these automated garages in Europe also, I used to commute on the train past the one in Stockholm every day. There is a windows media player clip on the site which shows the vehicle driven into the system and returned rotated ready to drive away. Plenty of pictures also. Says the retrival time is 50 seconds.
One cool aspect of these storage silos is that you could plant one under an existing car park and put trees and grass in the place of the ground level car park.
Fusion reactors produce radioactive waste. Waste could be locked into more stable materials at high dilution levels making transportation more paletable, these materials could then be placed into the lithosphere in stable parts of tectonic plates or more controversially into seabed subduction zones.
There has to be a continious re-evaluation of all potential sources of power whilst our fossil fuel reserves are being depleted. It is perhaps better that we discover the potentials and the pitfalls of nuclear power before the situation arises where there is no choice but to use nuclear power. We do now at least have the knowledge to advise the growing Chinese economy on the safest way to utilise it for example should they find the need for power outstrips the availability of fossil fuel.
Energy policy has a big impact on the environment if global warming is directly linked to the burning of fossil fuel. Nuclear power may ironicaly have a lower impact on the environment in the long term if we solve the problem of waste recycling. Radioactive materials are dug out of the ground so it does not seem impossible to put them safely back into the ground. Exhaustion of fossil fuel will automatically drive greater use of water wind and wave power but only policy will drive the use of technologically sophisticated power sources like fusion and nuclear power.
rv data lost at this point - just after mach 5 reported
Wow this is fun... lvl to internal
Viral-glass seems to be lingo from old weapons programs in the 60's and earlier.
Google has more than enough information on bio weapons.
It is the fount of all knowledge and sometimes you rather wish it wasnt.
Sorry, I meant to say something more like
Market distortion which could continue indefinitely because it is not imediately recognisable as a market distortion, will when recognised, be prevented by pre-existing anti-competitive legislation such as that set up to prevent monopoly market manipulation.
And yes what I did write deserves some mockery for lack of sense... I just have this problem with long sentences... maybe I need to change the default background colour on my screen or something...
Sorry cant resist this...
...the numbers all go to eleven. Look...right across the ..and most of these amps go up to ten.... ...all the way up. You're on ten on your guitar...where
"Nigel:
board.
Marty: Ahh...oh, I see....
Nigel: Eleven...eleven...eleven....
Marty:
Nigel: Exactly.
Marty: Does that mean it's...louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see,
most...most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten.
You're on ten here...all the way up...all the way up....
Marty: Yeah....
Nigel:
can you go from there? Where?
Marty: I don't know....
Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra..
push over the cliff...you know what we do?
Marty: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the
top... number... and make that a little louder?
Nigel: These go to eleven".
credit to http://www.spinaltapfan.com/
I find it interesting that in general people do not have the same fear of pathogens that they have for radioactivity. We agonise about chucking truckloads of radioactive waste several kilometers underground but biohazard is an unheard word. Considering that a pinhead of plutonium ground up fine enough could kill a small village and a pinhead of the wrong bug could kill 90% of humanity it seems a little odd. We must have a great deal of faith that someone somewhere isnt trying to load Ebola into a common cold virus.
Meanwhile there are plenty of natural biohazards to research and control. If you think Foot and Mouth disease couldnt happen in the States then you are probably wrong. Huge numbers of farm animals in the UK were slaughtered and burnt because of this disease as recently as 2001.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/footandmouth/
The final toll was 582,000 cattle, 3,487,000 sheep, 146,000 pigs, 3,000 goats, 1,000 deer, 1,000 other animals
It is particularly worrying that the entire outbreak was thought to have ocurred because illegaly imported meat from a far eastern source was fed to pigs on one farm. Vaccination is a strategy which will be used at the next outbreak and is expected to prevent a similar catastrophy.
So it is very worrying that this facility broke down. Particularly as the kind of work done there is absolutely necessary to defend against bio terrorism. All it would take one assumes to cause a foot and mouth epedemic would be a suitcase full of infected meat thrown over the wall of a pig farm.
The court could sequestrate all assets of Microsoft in the EU. Dont worry it would never get that far, Microsoft will pay if required to.
Anti-American sentiment is putting it too strongly, its more a competetive spirit for ideas amongst team players. The anti sentiment only comes into play when it is felt that European ideas are being rejected by ideological fiat.
It is not clear whether or not the effective monopoly of Microsoft has benefited the world. Quite possibly the standards setting effect of the monopoly has done more good than bad in the long term. However perpetual market distortion cannot be tolerated indefinitely.
Part of the problem is determining exactly what should be done to remove distortions from the market whilst not throwing away global standards. It is not clear that the proposed fines and unbundling will do anything more than split the market up into different competing standards - all owned by American companies incidentally.
This is not a religious war. But this is a religious and philosphical conflict that has been hijacked by clever manipulative fanatics. The Base is only interested in killing "Westerners" because it increases their support amongst disafected Muslim youth.
The end game of the terrorist is probably the overthrow of current governments in Muslim countries. Killing Westerners is their Walt Disney propaganda channel. So it is absolutely true to say that negociating with Al Quaida is pointless, they dont want anything from us. Except to draw out bad behavior on our part.
So this does not give us carte blanch to throw away our own civilisation and start behaving as they do. Absolutely we should not kill people indiscriminately. But we should also not be imprisoning people without trial and we should not be destroying belief in the United Nations. The new Spanish administration has taken this stance.
All actions which demonstrate a lack of ethical or moral standards will be siezed upon by the population of Muslim countries as evidence that Al Quaida might be right. On the other hand demonstrating our standards and our good will go a long way towards freezing the terrorists out.
So no, we do not negociate with the terroists. But part of our defence will to be exceptionaly scrupulous about our influence and actions when dealing with Muslim countries and people.
Crossreference database technology will trap terrorists and criminals and is to be welcomed as it demonstrates belief in our society.
What would not be welcome would be holding people identified by the technology without trial or resort to our legal system. There will be false positives and it is a tenet of the basis of our whole society that we live by the rule of law and you are innocent until proven guilty. Change that and the terrorists will have definitely won.
Two hours a week of television indicates to me that you are probably not retired or stuck at home with young children. You are lucky to have the choice to avoid television. I note with interest though that more and more people indicate that they watch very little these days.
The web came into existance to share academic information when Tim Burners-Lee "wrote a program, called Enquire, which he called a "memory substitute," for his personal use to help him remember connections between various people and projects at the lab.. ~He envisioned a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere." http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.html
Economics dictates that someone has to pay for the web, academia can no longer afford to supply the bandwith. The expansion of the web has come about because of commercial usage, mostly by business communications one suspects.
A business with web presence is handicapped by the history of the web because we do not expect to pay. It is also handicapped by the simple fact that someone somewhere is going to be offering the information for free anyway. This means that it is difficult to sell information on the web unless it is extraordinarily unique and difficult to put together or is presented in such a compelling way that people pay for it.
Into this paradigm you suggest that advertising has some special right to be viewed. This is not true and is a confidence trick pushed by media organisations used to the television model. No doubt there will be businesses which suceed in using the internet to broadcast television and can use a varient of the traditional advertising model to gain income. However there are a lot of businesses which will not, particularly if the users keep up with the technology to reduce their exposure to advertising - Spybot et al.
I put it to you that user resistance to advertising is a straightforward personal preference and has no bearing on whether advertising is lucrative or not. Some advertising always gets through.
Additionaly it is always worth pointing out that we resent or are suspicious about the motives of businesses collecting private information about us. Quite possibly there is nothing to fear from businesses which know more about you than you do yourself. However if it isnt questioned then it is never going to be scrutinised or regulated until we have an "information" Three Mile Island.
If advertising has sufficient entertainment value then we will seek it out, the initiatives reported here indicate that the day when that might happen is drawing nearer.
Absolutely, if I wasnt unemployed right now I would be pleased to buy a subscription.
However more generally I think people still have a right to express a preference for the ammount and kind of advertising thrown at them. Otherwise we would all have tvs bolted to our heads with constant advertising twenty four hours a day. We have a perfect right to "circumvent the cost factor of these websites" if it involves choosing what advertising we want to see.
Also it should be possible to withold private information from businesses if we choose to. It is bad enough that the state and law enforcement agencies will eventually persuade us to log our every action with them so that we can stop terrorism. I have no intention of allowing that process to extend to businesses which will seek to control my behaviour in order to increase their profits.
It is a matter of freedom of the individual to choose without coercion. Surely you dont always sit through advertising commercials with the sound on? Or is your attention span so degraded that the only thing you can follow on tv is the advertising?
My family was involved in a business through most of the last century. Eventually it went bust handing over from one generation to the next. They all lost their jobs and the elders lost their pensions.
I kept out of it, reasoning that a business that big would end up owning you. Sadly it proved to be the case as nobody talks to each other any more. I'm not saying dont do it but be aware that relationships can come second to business. Also remember that relationships can change over time. Depends on the people involved, many cultures handle family businesses very well, but they tend to be the ones with very clearly deffined social heirarchy. The best bet would be to set out very clearly the rights and responsibilities of everybody involved - employment contracts right from the start. Then expect to adjust as time passes and the business changes.
A final suggestion is that the number one rule is dont lose a friends or family members money if they invest.
Also linked off the 300Mhz Prescott story site
8 0/ 040218-ee380-100.asx
Bill Colwells talk at Stanford tells the whole story of where clock speed and marketing is going. World class CPU design guru predicting the end of the clock wars and looking to what chips have to do next to sell.
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee3
Its a fairly long lecture but it is absolute gold dust if you want to know where the industry is heading. I knew there was some reason why I like this internet thing, you can find out what is realy going on...
Evidence for processor clock speed variability and techniques used to reduce it in production can be found in this IBM paper/ shahidi .html
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462
In particular table 2 identifies sources of variation