I happened to be visiting UBC when this was going on, and my roommate in the residence had a robot in the competition... so I went to go check it out.
Of course robotics engineering is not as difficult as it used to be, with better COTS sensors, affordable fab tools, an expanding open source robotics community, and of course Moore's Law...
Regardless, it was really incredible to see what _second_ year students are capable of these days. Also, lots of credit should go to the ambitious profs who have been organizing the course for the past few years.
How about all those folks that "Run for the Cure" every year? They've been quite good at raising money for cancer treatments.
There is a lot of people out their with cancer. A lot of them have money. I am sure that given sufficient evidence and a means to provide that money to the proper source, (as the original article linked to) the money will be fourth coming.
Big-Pharma is a dinosaur that deserves whats coming to them.
The future is of this kind of funding is in better organization of charitable donations and social lending.
However, the danger is that a devide is being created between those who have access to massive amounts of personal information, and those who do not.
This creates an enormous political, financial, and fundementaly social advantage for those who have this access. Corporations with this kind of access, can easilty spy on other corprations, steal there intellectual assets. A quick example: the stock market. By google or whoever, could very easily modify there investmetn stratagies by data mining for buseness realted discusions in personal gmails of there most successful clients.
Unless of course, people just shared all there information openly, the, the situation would be equalized.
Some guy named David Brin wrote about something this in a book "The Tranparent Society" But I haven't read it yet, so Im not sure how good it is. Fantastic topic though. http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html
The 64K row limit is still the case. Same for OpenOffice calc. We do haev gigabyte datasets that do not at all port to excel. For that we write C++ apps, and use ArcGIS for displaying the data.
However, there are still allot of datasets that are under the 64k limit.
If calc really wanted to kick excel's ass though, one thing they could do is try and break this 64k limit. I don't really se why they cant. The only limit should be RAM. And then they could always make cluster calc, to get even more data.
hmmm, just thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could zoom out, and when you did, rows would merg together and become averages or totals or whatever.
bah, I think spreadshets are great, And think there is allot of potential for those thingies.
What I am really waiting for is a p2p wiki spreadsheet. hehehe. Im kinda working on one, but Im so busy with other stuff, there rarly a chance to make progress.
I do work for some University Profesors in the Forestry department. For this work, excel is often the best tool for the job.
The main reasons being: 1. All there colleges/clients already have it. 2. Most applications involve applying arbitrary sets of data generated by clients to a model generated by us. By packaging our models in excel, users can simply copy/past there data into the input form and hit go. 3. All of our clients have there own data, and don't want anyone else but them to see it. So we can just give them the model, and let them input the data themselves.
(Note, that the datasets we work with are often tens of thousands of rows, and anywhere from 10 to 100+ paramaters)
I just wish everyone would start using open office, cause VBA is a chore.
I see this comment allot and I don't understand it. I have Mandrake 10.1 running on a K6-266 with 256 megs of ram, 60 gig HD, and a full KDE and Gnome install. It runs fine! quite zippy actually.
indeed. this could be very cool. So I can only play metal gear for three hours. Which sucks. But, I can play pac man and tetris for 30 hours. And that, would be very cool indeed.
sorry about the drama, Im not really a doomsayer myself. But I do think this is a very serious threat. I agree with Robert Carlson, in his The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies.
We should deal with nao-tech threats in the same way as biological ones. By sharing reasurch, and not hiding it. By hiding it, I really do think, we are sentencing our spcies to death. (oops there goes the drama again)
Plot those dates on a graph, against, say, how many people you could kill with them in a single day. Then look at it for a few minutes. Look real hard.
here's how: We need to set up some kind of open source org for generating and funding silly patent applications. With some sympathetic venture capital, we may be able to clog the patent system for the next 50 years!
Not that im gonna do it. Just think it would be neet if someone tried. Of course, the org would have to have protections from not actually inforcing the patents.
The goal here isn't to make good patents. Just to clog the system, so we need not think to hard about them.
I believe this is the slashdot post to which you are refering.
here is another article. Relivant quote: "Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20% efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60% efficiency."
Apparently, you have to be a little more createive.
Supossidly it uses a technique called, Mel-Filtered Cepstral Coefficients to look for patterns in the audio output of the file. that is they dont check-sum the file, they play the file, and use there fingerprint technology on the way the file sounds when it is played.
This still has many problems. As other posters already pointed out, encrypting, archiveing, or simply renaming the extension of the content, would make it difficult to find. Unless of course, they plane on playing all the data on people PC's via every known music codec in existance.
Im assuming they actually look at peoples PC's as the problem of reasembling the packets would require identifyingm, emulating, and extending every p2p protocall known to man.
Of course, they probably figure they can find most stuff by focasing on kazaa and mp3's.
As another poster said. this might work. for about 10 whole seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
I happened to be visiting UBC when this was going on, and my roommate in the residence had a robot in the competition... so I went to go check it out.
Of course robotics engineering is not as difficult as it used to be, with better COTS sensors, affordable fab tools, an expanding open source robotics community, and of course Moore's Law...
Regardless, it was really incredible to see what _second_ year students are capable of these days. Also, lots of credit should go to the ambitious profs who have been organizing the course for the past few years.
They should put stuff like this on Mars:
t s
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/350/
( Saw them on digg:
http://digg.com/gadgets/Amazing_wind_powered_robo
)
How about all those folks that "Run for the Cure" every year? They've been quite good at raising money for cancer treatments.
There is a lot of people out their with cancer. A lot of them have money. I am sure that given sufficient evidence and a means to provide that money to the proper source, (as the original article linked to) the money will be fourth coming.
Big-Pharma is a dinosaur that deserves whats coming to them.
The future is of this kind of funding is in better organization of charitable donations and social lending.
just dont f*ck with my intelectual property.
because i can
This was mentioned in the book Fab by Neil Gershenfeld.5 027458/104-9198080-3099155?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/046
Since the cell processor will be available commercially off the shelf, perhaps we will see PS3 clones, the way we used to see PC clones?
If Xbox 360 has a game like guild wars and or world of warcraft at launch, I think it could do allot of damage.
interesting point.
t ack
However, the danger is that a devide is being created between those who have access to massive amounts of personal information, and those who do not.
This creates an enormous political, financial, and fundementaly social advantage for those who have this access. Corporations with this kind of access, can easilty spy on other corprations, steal there intellectual assets. A quick example: the stock market. By google or whoever, could very easily modify there investmetn stratagies by data mining for buseness realted discusions in personal gmails of there most successful clients.
With this web accelorator, google is putting themself in a prime position for all sorts of juicy man in the middle attacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_middle_at
Unless of course, people just shared all there information openly, the, the situation would be equalized.
Some guy named David Brin wrote about something this in a book "The Tranparent Society" But I haven't read it yet, so Im not sure how good it is. Fantastic topic though.
http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html
my thoughts exactly
The 64K row limit is still the case. Same for OpenOffice calc.
We do haev gigabyte datasets that do not at all port to excel. For that we write C++ apps, and use ArcGIS for displaying the data.
However, there are still allot of datasets that are under the 64k limit.
If calc really wanted to kick excel's ass though, one thing they could do is try and break this 64k limit. I don't really se why they cant. The only limit should be RAM. And then they could always make cluster calc, to get even more data.
hmmm, just thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could zoom out, and when you did, rows would merg together and become averages or totals or whatever.
bah,
I think spreadshets are great, And think there is allot of potential for those thingies.
What I am really waiting for is a p2p wiki spreadsheet. hehehe. Im kinda working on one, but Im so busy with other stuff, there rarly a chance to make progress.
I do work for some University Profesors in the Forestry department. For this work, excel is often the best tool for the job.
The main reasons being:
1. All there colleges/clients already have it.
2. Most applications involve applying arbitrary sets of data generated by clients to a model generated by us. By packaging our models in excel, users can simply copy/past there data into the input form and hit go.
3. All of our clients have there own data, and don't want anyone else but them to see it. So we can just give them the model, and let them input the data themselves.
(Note, that the datasets we work with are often tens of thousands of rows, and anywhere from 10 to 100+ paramaters)
I just wish everyone would start using open office, cause VBA is a chore.
koders.com attempts to be exactly what you describe.
I see this comment allot and I don't understand it. I have Mandrake 10.1 running on a K6-266 with 256 megs of ram, 60 gig HD, and a full KDE and Gnome install. It runs fine! quite zippy actually.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
or at least, a holodeck, and a cheep environmental source of energy would be a good start
let users have names if they want.
This way authors can gain or loose reputation based on the articles they update.
Of course anonymous authoring and editing should still be allowed.
This could help the reliability problem as well as the editing problem.
If an AC edits a highly reputable contributor, then that edit should be high on the list of things to review.
Also, the author system could let authors know when there contibutions were updated, and what those updates were. That is, if they wanted to be.
that is all.
indeed. this could be very cool. So I can only play metal gear for three hours. Which sucks. But, I can play pac man and tetris for 30 hours. And that, would be very cool indeed.
sorry about the drama, Im not really a doomsayer myself. But I do think this is a very serious threat. I agree with Robert Carlson, in his The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies.
We should deal with nao-tech threats in the same way as biological ones. By sharing reasurch, and not hiding it. By hiding it, I really do think, we are sentencing our spcies to death. (oops there goes the drama again)
think so? Exponential feedback is a bitch.
Plot those dates on a graph, against, say, how many people you could kill with them in a single day. Then look at it for a few minutes. Look real hard.
and I imagine they'l look as good as Unreal does on the Xbox.
here's how:
We need to set up some kind of open source org for generating and funding silly patent applications. With some sympathetic venture capital, we may be able to clog the patent system for the next 50 years!
Not that im gonna do it. Just think it would be neet if someone tried. Of course, the org would have to have protections from not actually inforcing the patents.
The goal here isn't to make good patents. Just to clog the system, so we need not think to hard about them.
just an idea,.
"If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"
People who want to play Half-Life 2 and Doom 3.
I believe this is the slashdot post to which you are refering. here is another article. Relivant quote: "Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20% efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60% efficiency."
Apparently, you have to be a little more createive.
Supossidly it uses a technique called, Mel-Filtered Cepstral Coefficients to look for patterns in the audio output of the file. that is they dont check-sum the file, they play the file, and use there fingerprint technology on the way the file sounds when it is played.
This still has many problems. As other posters already pointed out, encrypting, archiveing, or simply renaming the extension of the content, would make it difficult to find. Unless of course, they plane on playing all the data on people PC's via every known music codec in existance.
Im assuming they actually look at peoples PC's as the problem of reasembling the packets would require identifyingm, emulating, and extending every p2p protocall known to man.
Of course, they probably figure they can find most stuff by focasing on kazaa and mp3's.
As another poster said. this might work. for about 10 whole seconds.