Once we figure out that whole "gravity" thing, it should make things that much easier when we finally start having real-world katamari-rolling contests. Not only could the goggles tell you what your katamari consists of, they could also tell you how big the thing is relative to any objects contained within it... just like the game versions do now.
Of course, I expect the first person to do it right will be a mad scientist type with a god complex. (Though, I have to admit, launching a ball of screaming brats the size of Texas would be something I'd probably pay to see, even if it wasn't coerced...)
I seem to recall Atari dabbling with this kind of brain interface junk back in the days of the 2600. I can't recall the name or if it ever made it past the mock-up stage, but if it had been released, it'd probably have gone the way of the U-Force.
Most likely though, this thing will probably fail just as miserably as the Virtual Boy. People simply don't like uncomfortable, ugly-looking gadgets attached to their heads. (Especially stuff requiring frequent, repetative head movement.)
On the other hand, fans of the movie, "Strange Days" will probably eat it up.
"Imagine if the makers of the other products out there followed suit. You would not be able to purchase second hand goods. Only directly from the original outlet. Kinda stifles the economy since the majority of vehicles out there are purchased as used items. Just one example but it would have a very bad impact if this method of controlling profit spreads."
Which is what makes the creation of such a program so foolish on eBay's part. At some point, enough companies could do just that... up to the point that it prevents eBay itself from being able to function at all. eBay's entire business model is making commission on sales of after market items. If all these after market items sold through eBay everyday simply vanished, eBay would be screwed.
And, even if they corrected the problem by removing the VeRO program from their service, eBay would just end up back where they started, ielding every auction complaint on a case by case basis. By then though, buyer and seller confidence in eBay's services will have dropped so far that eBay might not even be able to convince sellers to use their site even by making all listings free globally.
eBay, say hello to the breaking point of your dot com bubble.
The main reason linux and other open-source software like blender, gimp and openoffice never really "took off" with consumers has little to do with this idea that the "free" nature of these items makes them irrelevent to the end user. (Actually, it sounds a lot like an excuse open source developers came up with to justify all the wasted time and effort they put into a product they'll never truly get any actual recognition out of.)
The real reason they don't overtake their commercial counterparts is primarily due to a lack of proper quality assurance testing and oversight. Instead, these items are developed by hardcore computer programmers who are only subject to ridicule from other programmers working on the same project with practically zero consequences for not complying with the ideas of others whom they really don't care about. (It's not like you can get "fired" from an open source project when you created it or can just branch it off.) In short, the price of entry (in terms of effort) involved with learning how to use an open source software package is just too high to justify the immediate monetary savings when most commercial software can actually be learned to a usable state in only a few hours even without the manual in hand. (Hell, even a monkey could stumble their way through most of the commercial apps out there simply by pounding on the keys and chewing the mouse.) These applications generally aren't better than their open source counterparts in their capabilities, but the bulk of their capabilities are generally much more accessible right from the start.
To counter this, it's going to take an entirely new mindset from the open source community to bring in the consumer crowds. This means giving up your l33t-ness in favor of humility. You'll need to learn how to compromise with real-world people besides the ones in your project trees. Prepare yourself to pander to the least common denominator instead of worshipping efficiency. Be ready to plagerize your ass off. If a commercial app's interface works for the consumer, use it in your software instead of going all Blender on it. Finally, create clear, easy to read documentation using short words and lots of examples for everything. If it takes more intelligence than your average 8-year old can muster to learn your software's basic features within a day, then you've failed the test.
Would it be illegal to own and operate a device designed to seek out the exact location of such annoyance devices as a counter-measure. Once you know where the things are located, you could either disable/destroy the thing discreetly (as the owner probably can't *hear* it working or isn't generally close enough to observe the results), or find someone in law enforcement that can clearly hear it and see the amplifier itself as grounds enough for issuing a charge for disturbing the piece. (A follow-up check for compliance could result in specific harassment charges and even arrests.)
After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
While this sounds like a good thing for attracting gamers to the U.S. military while staving off the fears of entering into boot-camp hell or getting shipped off to Iraq, there is certainly much to be disturbed by with such a program. Think of it more as a military version of "no child left behind" approach to recruitment rather than a job opening within some air-conditioned day camp.
Eventually, this excuse to "lower the bar" on the recruitment standards could become a way to justify drafting *anyone* for combat, not just those with optimal health conditions. What better way to conserve your best troops for a major crisis than by simply replacing them all with four or five times as many people with substandard health and arm them all with guns. Anyone whose ever toyed with swarm theory can see the incentive of such an approach. In some sense this could even be considered a form of genocide as those in power send the less desireable of us to fight on their behalf, knowing that our lack of training and good health will probably result massive death counts, while at the same time freeing up resources previously used for these people to be consumed by the higher quality troops and desireables within our population.
But be prepared for sub-par goods in exchange for your ill-gotten gains. (Especially you megadouches out there who routinely order 10 or more such mispriced items hoping to scalp them onto some other jerk as a huge profit... you know who you are.)
That's right... places like amazon plan for exactly this kind of scenario long before you ever see a new price on anything... and the trade for a discount coupon option is probably the preferred option on both ends. However, many places will honor such mistakes by sending out the damaged or dented inventory to those who buy at such obviously ridiculous prices hoping to defraud the "man".
Typically the quality is so bad that only about 50% of the total damaged goods can be reassembled into something resembling a like-new product... at least by enough to resell the working units at a price high enough to break even.
And beware to those who stupidly reject such a gracious offer by trying to RMA it. After you send it back, you might get an option for refund at the sale price or a store credit toward a future purchase, but you'll never see a true replacement for the items you tried to bilk out of them.
The success of the Wii in Japan isn't necessarily the cause of arcade closures, but an effect of the costs involved in going to an arcade over owning a similarly abled console. The Wii is not alone in this aspect, the Playstation 2/3 and the XBox 360 are also gaining from their lower overall costs vs arcades with products like Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Singstar.
Unfortunately, this does not bode well for arcades in any light. As it is, asking people to pay 50 cents to over a dollar per game on a regular basis just isn't practical for the long term with teens and young adults who will soon face additional expenses in life as their gain more responsibilities later on. Getting a console with games that pay for themselves after 50-100 sessions is just common sense.
In the meanwhile, this means arcades either need to raise prices further to stay afloat or sell gaming sessions to a lot more people than they do now.
Of course, there are steps arcades could take to make costs more reasonable to those who aren't comfortable with per-sesson pricing. One option would be to do away with per session pricing and start issuing unlimited usage cards for a monthly fee. This means even if the user isn't actively at the arcade some of the time, the arcade still gets some cash for it just from the dues.
In addition, the arcades could add value-added features such as modifying some of the games to output to really large displays, or to offer special discounts to star players of certain games that generate crowds of spectators. Game consoles don't generally have the visual stage appeal of arcade machines of similar power, outside of costly modifications.
Japan is a very social country and the teens are going to be around *somewhere*, it's just a matter of making your place seem like a more enjoyable hang-out than the other nearby places catering to them.
As a patient currently on a combination of oxycontin and percocet for pain following a disabling hip fracture, I've learned from experience that trying to time the dosages at set intervals isn't remotely as effective for pain management as an uneven, targeted dosing based on the degree of pain involved. What this means, is that instead of one dose every 4-6 hours for every single day, I take the degree of pain as a factor in deciding how much of a med I need to take and when in order to get the most optimal results. So, on some days, I may need to take twice as much in a 3 hour period one day and skip a dosage later on when conditions become more favorable. So long as I reach the end of the month without coming up short, the day to day dispersal takes a back seat to the larger time period.
So far I have had no ill effects in doing so over maintaining a daily schedule and the net effect on my liver and such remains the same in the long term picture. The only difference is that I have control over my own level of suffering vs some hack who doesn't allow any deviation from what the book says.
A smart dispenser that would prevent access to meds when I need them and report schedule deviations to those who could later cut off my access citing misuse would prove frustrating and extremely disturbing to the point that I'd be too tied to watching a clock instead of ever getting anything done reliably. It'd be even worse later on once my body has become significantly desensitized to the medication.
With the exception of helping senile old blue-hairs this could only have nasty consequences for those of us just trying to get by the best way we know how.
If it's anything like the crap we're seeing now that prevents video content at resolutions beyond a certain threshold from playing at its native size unless it's source is verified, we could be in for a world of hurt. For example, how about suddenly having that fancy, all-digital 7.1 surround sound system decide it's only going to play "privileged" sounds normally while reducing all unverifiable audio playback to the quality of AM radio at random? (After all, if it goes from digital to analogue at some point, it could be intercepted by a third party device for making "unauthorized" copies...)
Just as certain printers, scanners and graphics software won't function on images that contain any image that could pass as currency, newer computers could soon have these RIAA "filters" embedded into the audio system via hardware. All those fancy off the shelf audio devices will then suddenly need to comply with the filter protocols or else the system will go mute on you at the point of the audio output hardware itself.
Consumers really need to start wising up on this stuff before it reaches a point of no return. Once that happens, you better be handy with a soldering iron and a wiz at deciphering and juggling hardware code running straight off the metal itself to get around it.
Instead of doing this just for the internet, why not just do this for everything, and return the desktop computer to the days of dumb terminals. The only difference is that each terminal acts as a mere fraction of the mainframe's total processing power. As far as consumer class users go, a system like this could host the OS with a local copy to fall back on when the network isn't available. It could also host mainstream apps like photoshop, designed specifically to run across a dynamic distributed computing system, allowing highly complex operations to be carried out instantly. Users would merely obtain a license to launch the apps from any connected terminal they're logged in with, and the system would simple maintain a constant cache of save states in the event of an interruption. If you somehow fry your computer in mid-task, you simply log back in from another terminal and continue on as though you never left.
Security updates and bug fixes would finally work uniformily across all systems and would only need to be issued once. Moving an app from beta to final release would even be as simple as toggling an on/off switch, since any development/test versions would already be running on the target system. The only change is the list of users with access privileges.
This could be a really handy way of doing a lot of stuff and would significantly reduce unnecessary overhead as well as development cycles... and not in the cheesy manner in which the "cell" processing setup was presented to us.
I think we will eventually see something like this come into being in about a decade or so, but likely done as a combination of homeland security (make everyone trackable to those holding the keys) and as a last ditch effort to get past moore's law until our understanding of physics at a quantum level vastly improves. (Kinda makes you wonder what a fully-realized quantum computing process would be like structured within such a massive distributed processing network...)
Considering just how adamant Microsoft has been about killing off XP, it makes one wonder if the "high quality" label used here may allow the guy to become a practical scapegoat for Microsoft, should they attempt some underhanded tactic like setting their authentication system to automatically flag all future XP serial numbers it encounters as pirated, regardless of the product's legitimacy. By claiming all currently unsold retail and system builder versions of XP are pirate copies, it wouldn't take much to bury the OS beyond a mass recall of all unsold discs to be used as "evidence".
Of course, this couldn't ever really happen, but it does make you think...
Can you imagine a collision in one of these things? Say you're about to plow into a wall at 60mph, only just before it happens, the car suddenly goes liquid around you and creates a jelly-like crumple zone at the front, while the rest of the car reconfigures itself to push your body as far to the back as it can possibly go, before finally encasing you in a solid immobilization shell that self repairs any damage it takes until the energy of the impact has dispersed.
Kinda makes the foam filling car from Demolition Man seem childish by comparison...
So, does a smoke detector qualify as an air-monitoring device? If so, this would be huge cash cow. First require them by law, next charge for the privilege of using the required devices, finally... profit!
This sounds like the perfect setup for a Wallace and Gromit "The Wrong Trousers" type situation. Last I heard, Bluetooth wasn't exactly known for its security. (Hence all the proprietary "wireless" devices with their own specific dongles.) Not really something you want in control of your body.
God forbid the day comes when Tux decides a rubber glove makes a nice substitute for a red hat.
... copyright your name and contact info? Anyone you don't want contacting you would then be subject to legal action if they don't destroy their unauthorized copies. Their ability to continue further contact could be enough to prove they have not complied.
Well, guess what... your kids aren't *you*. They're individuals complete with their own interests and ideas. While you can introduce them to the things that interest you, you can't force them to take interest in those items the same way you do. Just because you might want a doctor or lawyer in the family does mean your kids have the same idea in mind.
The best thing you can do for your kids is to learn what interests them, and do what you can to get them interested in learning more about how their favorite things work. If they like video games, encourage them to learn about programming and animation. Eventually, they'll come to understand why all that previously boring stuff they learned earlier in school is now so important. Whenever your kids have a direct, personal stake in the things that interest them, they will want to learn as a means of improving upon their abilities.
Thanks to both broadband and freebie media servers like YouTube, the economy no longer needs a central figurehead controlling who gets to do what with who's music. Instead, consumers can simply deal directly with the performers themselves, rather than a label, since distribution is no longer tied down to a physical medium that requires specialized hardware to reproduce.
The music industry only survived as long as it has because the artists lacked the means to create vinyl records, CDs, 8-tracks and audio cassettes in the massive quantities needed to be heard across the country. That is no longer the case.
The bitter reality here is that no business model can save them, nor would have. The moment everything went digital and networked, they were screwed.
There's only been one scene with sex scenes in it that I've enjoyed in recent years, and that's 'Free Enterprise'.
Great flick, btw... They even got William Shatner to play as imaginary version of himself:
Imaginary William Shatner: What'd he say? Young Robert: You really don't want to know. Imaginary William Shatner: I really do want to know! Young Robert: He said that Han Solo was cooler than Captain Kirk. Imaginary William Shatner: Kick the little fucker's ass!
That bit of dialogue alone almost makes it worth the price of entry, but the rest of it's pretty good too.
Another issue I've attempted to figure out is how one would transmit the matter needed for reconstruction to locations lacking certain key materials. One possiblity, assuming you have alchemy like capabilities, would be to convert your materials into Bose-Einstein condesate compatible molecules and launch a matter stream alongside the data stream. However, the matter stream would be a bit trickier, since it would not move in a linear path the same way a laser would.
An alternative option was to somehow have the nanobots stack themselves into a strand only a few nanometers thick but with the structural stability to stretch out to several thousands of miles without collapsing. Using such methods, a grey goo system could literally leap from planet to planet and then piggy-back the remaining colony across the planetary bridge before undocking from the start point and being pulled in to the destination.
I have similar batteries for an old PowerBook 100 series I have. They are, by far, the most, heavy, clunky and uncomfortable laptop accessory one could carry around with them. Almost like carrying a second laptop.
In addition, these batteries connect to the laptop through the power adapter port on the machine. In the event you ever drain your internal battery before using such a beast, you risk losing all of your work if you accidentally bump the plug. (Something one could easily do in a crowded area.)
Aside from that, you'd probably have fun trying to get one of these past the TSA checkpoint at an airport. You'd have to figure out how to explain to them why you have a carry-on with wires sticking out of it with no discernible features. Even the prospect of an internal battery replacement would fail. Even if you somehow got a torx screwdriver past TSA, good luck trying to surreptitiously swap out the battery when you have to open up your computer down to its circuitry. You'd be lucky if the attempt didn't end up grounding your flight and get you flagged as a terror suspect for attempting to "construct a bomb" midflight.
Most likely, the MBA will likely go down in history as the least travel-friendly laptop ever made... at least as far as post 9/11 devices go.
I've had some ideas on this... sort of a "grey goo" teleporter system. Basically you'd inject the body with a series of nanobots to disassemble the body from the inside out, while logging their every move. Once the messy stuff has been hollowed out of the body, it'd disassemble the exterior.
Once all the data is collected and the original is recycled for later rebuiding materials, an identical system elsewhere would begin reconstruction by first constructing a pipeline rail system (sort of like a 3D outline of your body in chickenwire), followed by reconstruction of the exterior and finally refilling the casing with your innards, all from the log data collected at the starting point. Finally, before leaving the body, the nanobots would zap a few areas with enough of a charge to get things going.
The interesting part comes at just the point where the system revives you. Somewhere along the line, it'd have to verify the reconstruction was successful and that the output is identical to the initial source. Somehow, you'd have some sort of checksum value applied to your body to verify you really are you, and not a messed up, degraded version with some major flaw.
Doesn't this sound vaguely like the Cylon "detector" from Battlestar Galactica? Same crap from the sounds of it. Right up there with those E-meter things the scientologists use to evaluate your thetan levels.
I wonder if that measurement of the flow rate of ketchup we paid for ever yielded any results...
I'm sure at some point, some crazy bastard will try to use this to create animals with intelligence and motivations far closer to humans. If, at one point, such a pokemon-esque creature breaks the communication barrier with mankind, this could be the first words it utters in some form.
Slashdot Mirror
Once we figure out that whole "gravity" thing, it should make things that much easier when we finally start having real-world katamari-rolling contests. Not only could the goggles tell you what your katamari consists of, they could also tell you how big the thing is relative to any objects contained within it... just like the game versions do now.
Of course, I expect the first person to do it right will be a mad scientist type with a god complex. (Though, I have to admit, launching a ball of screaming brats the size of Texas would be something I'd probably pay to see, even if it wasn't coerced...)
I seem to recall Atari dabbling with this kind of brain interface junk back in the days of the 2600. I can't recall the name or if it ever made it past the mock-up stage, but if it had been released, it'd probably have gone the way of the U-Force.
Most likely though, this thing will probably fail just as miserably as the Virtual Boy. People simply don't like uncomfortable, ugly-looking gadgets attached to their heads. (Especially stuff requiring frequent, repetative head movement.)
On the other hand, fans of the movie, "Strange Days" will probably eat it up.
"Imagine if the makers of the other products out there followed suit. You would not be able to purchase second hand goods. Only directly from the original outlet. Kinda stifles the economy since the majority of vehicles out there are purchased as used items. Just one example but it would have a very bad impact if this method of controlling profit spreads."
Which is what makes the creation of such a program so foolish on eBay's part. At some point, enough companies could do just that... up to the point that it prevents eBay itself from being able to function at all. eBay's entire business model is making commission on sales of after market items. If all these after market items sold through eBay everyday simply vanished, eBay would be screwed.
And, even if they corrected the problem by removing the VeRO program from their service, eBay would just end up back where they started, ielding every auction complaint on a case by case basis. By then though, buyer and seller confidence in eBay's services will have dropped so far that eBay might not even be able to convince sellers to use their site even by making all listings free globally.
eBay, say hello to the breaking point of your dot com bubble.
The main reason linux and other open-source software like blender, gimp and openoffice never really "took off" with consumers has little to do with this idea that the "free" nature of these items makes them irrelevent to the end user. (Actually, it sounds a lot like an excuse open source developers came up with to justify all the wasted time and effort they put into a product they'll never truly get any actual recognition out of.)
The real reason they don't overtake their commercial counterparts is primarily due to a lack of proper quality assurance testing and oversight. Instead, these items are developed by hardcore computer programmers who are only subject to ridicule from other programmers working on the same project with practically zero consequences for not complying with the ideas of others whom they really don't care about. (It's not like you can get "fired" from an open source project when you created it or can just branch it off.) In short, the price of entry (in terms of effort) involved with learning how to use an open source software package is just too high to justify the immediate monetary savings when most commercial software can actually be learned to a usable state in only a few hours even without the manual in hand. (Hell, even a monkey could stumble their way through most of the commercial apps out there simply by pounding on the keys and chewing the mouse.) These applications generally aren't better than their open source counterparts in their capabilities, but the bulk of their capabilities are generally much more accessible right from the start.
To counter this, it's going to take an entirely new mindset from the open source community to bring in the consumer crowds. This means giving up your l33t-ness in favor of humility. You'll need to learn how to compromise with real-world people besides the ones in your project trees. Prepare yourself to pander to the least common denominator instead of worshipping efficiency. Be ready to plagerize your ass off. If a commercial app's interface works for the consumer, use it in your software instead of going all Blender on it. Finally, create clear, easy to read documentation using short words and lots of examples for everything. If it takes more intelligence than your average 8-year old can muster to learn your software's basic features within a day, then you've failed the test.
Would it be illegal to own and operate a device designed to seek out the exact location of such annoyance devices as a counter-measure. Once you know where the things are located, you could either disable/destroy the thing discreetly (as the owner probably can't *hear* it working or isn't generally close enough to observe the results), or find someone in law enforcement that can clearly hear it and see the amplifier itself as grounds enough for issuing a charge for disturbing the piece. (A follow-up check for compliance could result in specific harassment charges and even arrests.)
After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
While this sounds like a good thing for attracting gamers to the U.S. military while staving off the fears of entering into boot-camp hell or getting shipped off to Iraq, there is certainly much to be disturbed by with such a program. Think of it more as a military version of "no child left behind" approach to recruitment rather than a job opening within some air-conditioned day camp.
Eventually, this excuse to "lower the bar" on the recruitment standards could become a way to justify drafting *anyone* for combat, not just those with optimal health conditions. What better way to conserve your best troops for a major crisis than by simply replacing them all with four or five times as many people with substandard health and arm them all with guns. Anyone whose ever toyed with swarm theory can see the incentive of such an approach. In some sense this could even be considered a form of genocide as those in power send the less desireable of us to fight on their behalf, knowing that our lack of training and good health will probably result massive death counts, while at the same time freeing up resources previously used for these people to be consumed by the higher quality troops and desireables within our population.
But be prepared for sub-par goods in exchange for your ill-gotten gains. (Especially you megadouches out there who routinely order 10 or more such mispriced items hoping to scalp them onto some other jerk as a huge profit... you know who you are.)
That's right... places like amazon plan for exactly this kind of scenario long before you ever see a new price on anything... and the trade for a discount coupon option is probably the preferred option on both ends. However, many places will honor such mistakes by sending out the damaged or dented inventory to those who buy at such obviously ridiculous prices hoping to defraud the "man".
Typically the quality is so bad that only about 50% of the total damaged goods can be reassembled into something resembling a like-new product... at least by enough to resell the working units at a price high enough to break even.
And beware to those who stupidly reject such a gracious offer by trying to RMA it. After you send it back, you might get an option for refund at the sale price or a store credit toward a future purchase, but you'll never see a true replacement for the items you tried to bilk out of them.
But good luck trying though...
The success of the Wii in Japan isn't necessarily the cause of arcade closures, but an effect of the costs involved in going to an arcade over owning a similarly abled console. The Wii is not alone in this aspect, the Playstation 2/3 and the XBox 360 are also gaining from their lower overall costs vs arcades with products like Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Singstar.
Unfortunately, this does not bode well for arcades in any light. As it is, asking people to pay 50 cents to over a dollar per game on a regular basis just isn't practical for the long term with teens and young adults who will soon face additional expenses in life as their gain more responsibilities later on. Getting a console with games that pay for themselves after 50-100 sessions is just common sense.
In the meanwhile, this means arcades either need to raise prices further to stay afloat or sell gaming sessions to a lot more people than they do now.
Of course, there are steps arcades could take to make costs more reasonable to those who aren't comfortable with per-sesson pricing. One option would be to do away with per session pricing and start issuing unlimited usage cards for a monthly fee. This means even if the user isn't actively at the arcade some of the time, the arcade still gets some cash for it just from the dues.
In addition, the arcades could add value-added features such as modifying some of the games to output to really large displays, or to offer special discounts to star players of certain games that generate crowds of spectators. Game consoles don't generally have the visual stage appeal of arcade machines of similar power, outside of costly modifications.
Japan is a very social country and the teens are going to be around *somewhere*, it's just a matter of making your place seem like a more enjoyable hang-out than the other nearby places catering to them.
As a patient currently on a combination of oxycontin and percocet for pain following a disabling hip fracture, I've learned from experience that trying to time the dosages at set intervals isn't remotely as effective for pain management as an uneven, targeted dosing based on the degree of pain involved. What this means, is that instead of one dose every 4-6 hours for every single day, I take the degree of pain as a factor in deciding how much of a med I need to take and when in order to get the most optimal results. So, on some days, I may need to take twice as much in a 3 hour period one day and skip a dosage later on when conditions become more favorable. So long as I reach the end of the month without coming up short, the day to day dispersal takes a back seat to the larger time period.
So far I have had no ill effects in doing so over maintaining a daily schedule and the net effect on my liver and such remains the same in the long term picture. The only difference is that I have control over my own level of suffering vs some hack who doesn't allow any deviation from what the book says.
A smart dispenser that would prevent access to meds when I need them and report schedule deviations to those who could later cut off my access citing misuse would prove frustrating and extremely disturbing to the point that I'd be too tied to watching a clock instead of ever getting anything done reliably. It'd be even worse later on once my body has become significantly desensitized to the medication.
With the exception of helping senile old blue-hairs this could only have nasty consequences for those of us just trying to get by the best way we know how.
If it's anything like the crap we're seeing now that prevents video content at resolutions beyond a certain threshold from playing at its native size unless it's source is verified, we could be in for a world of hurt. For example, how about suddenly having that fancy, all-digital 7.1 surround sound system decide it's only going to play "privileged" sounds normally while reducing all unverifiable audio playback to the quality of AM radio at random? (After all, if it goes from digital to analogue at some point, it could be intercepted by a third party device for making "unauthorized" copies...)
Just as certain printers, scanners and graphics software won't function on images that contain any image that could pass as currency, newer computers could soon have these RIAA "filters" embedded into the audio system via hardware. All those fancy off the shelf audio devices will then suddenly need to comply with the filter protocols or else the system will go mute on you at the point of the audio output hardware itself.
Consumers really need to start wising up on this stuff before it reaches a point of no return. Once that happens, you better be handy with a soldering iron and a wiz at deciphering and juggling hardware code running straight off the metal itself to get around it.
In capitalist America, computer runs you!
Instead of doing this just for the internet, why not just do this for everything, and return the desktop computer to the days of dumb terminals. The only difference is that each terminal acts as a mere fraction of the mainframe's total processing power. As far as consumer class users go, a system like this could host the OS with a local copy to fall back on when the network isn't available. It could also host mainstream apps like photoshop, designed specifically to run across a dynamic distributed computing system, allowing highly complex operations to be carried out instantly. Users would merely obtain a license to launch the apps from any connected terminal they're logged in with, and the system would simple maintain a constant cache of save states in the event of an interruption. If you somehow fry your computer in mid-task, you simply log back in from another terminal and continue on as though you never left.
Security updates and bug fixes would finally work uniformily across all systems and would only need to be issued once. Moving an app from beta to final release would even be as simple as toggling an on/off switch, since any development/test versions would already be running on the target system. The only change is the list of users with access privileges.
This could be a really handy way of doing a lot of stuff and would significantly reduce unnecessary overhead as well as development cycles... and not in the cheesy manner in which the "cell" processing setup was presented to us.
I think we will eventually see something like this come into being in about a decade or so, but likely done as a combination of homeland security (make everyone trackable to those holding the keys) and as a last ditch effort to get past moore's law until our understanding of physics at a quantum level vastly improves. (Kinda makes you wonder what a fully-realized quantum computing process would be like structured within such a massive distributed processing network...)
Considering just how adamant Microsoft has been about killing off XP, it makes one wonder if the "high quality" label used here may allow the guy to become a practical scapegoat for Microsoft, should they attempt some underhanded tactic like setting their authentication system to automatically flag all future XP serial numbers it encounters as pirated, regardless of the product's legitimacy. By claiming all currently unsold retail and system builder versions of XP are pirate copies, it wouldn't take much to bury the OS beyond a mass recall of all unsold discs to be used as "evidence".
Of course, this couldn't ever really happen, but it does make you think...
Can you imagine a collision in one of these things? Say you're about to plow into a wall at 60mph, only just before it happens, the car suddenly goes liquid around you and creates a jelly-like crumple zone at the front, while the rest of the car reconfigures itself to push your body as far to the back as it can possibly go, before finally encasing you in a solid immobilization shell that self repairs any damage it takes until the energy of the impact has dispersed.
Kinda makes the foam filling car from Demolition Man seem childish by comparison...
So, does a smoke detector qualify as an air-monitoring device? If so, this would be huge cash cow. First require them by law, next charge for the privilege of using the required devices, finally... profit!
This sounds like the perfect setup for a Wallace and Gromit "The Wrong Trousers" type situation. Last I heard, Bluetooth wasn't exactly known for its security. (Hence all the proprietary "wireless" devices with their own specific dongles.) Not really something you want in control of your body.
God forbid the day comes when Tux decides a rubber glove makes a nice substitute for a red hat.
... copyright your name and contact info? Anyone you don't want contacting you would then be subject to legal action if they don't destroy their unauthorized copies. Their ability to continue further contact could be enough to prove they have not complied.
Well, guess what... your kids aren't *you*. They're individuals complete with their own interests and ideas. While you can introduce them to the things that interest you, you can't force them to take interest in those items the same way you do. Just because you might want a doctor or lawyer in the family does mean your kids have the same idea in mind.
The best thing you can do for your kids is to learn what interests them, and do what you can to get them interested in learning more about how their favorite things work. If they like video games, encourage them to learn about programming and animation. Eventually, they'll come to understand why all that previously boring stuff they learned earlier in school is now so important. Whenever your kids have a direct, personal stake in the things that interest them, they will want to learn as a means of improving upon their abilities.
The music industry is obsolete.
Thanks to both broadband and freebie media servers like YouTube, the economy no longer needs a central figurehead controlling who gets to do what with who's music. Instead, consumers can simply deal directly with the performers themselves, rather than a label, since distribution is no longer tied down to a physical medium that requires specialized hardware to reproduce.
The music industry only survived as long as it has because the artists lacked the means to create vinyl records, CDs, 8-tracks and audio cassettes in the massive quantities needed to be heard across the country. That is no longer the case.
The bitter reality here is that no business model can save them, nor would have. The moment everything went digital and networked, they were screwed.
There's only been one scene with sex scenes in it that I've enjoyed in recent years, and that's 'Free Enterprise'.
Great flick, btw... They even got William Shatner to play as imaginary version of himself:
Imaginary William Shatner: What'd he say?
Young Robert: You really don't want to know.
Imaginary William Shatner: I really do want to know!
Young Robert: He said that Han Solo was cooler than Captain Kirk.
Imaginary William Shatner: Kick the little fucker's ass!
That bit of dialogue alone almost makes it worth the price of entry, but the rest of it's pretty good too.
- Free Enterprise IMDb page
Oh, yeah... I forgot. Your computer can't read your lips... unless you're really bad at your craft. (At which point, don't quit your day job.)
Another issue I've attempted to figure out is how one would transmit the matter needed for reconstruction to locations lacking certain key materials. One possiblity, assuming you have alchemy like capabilities, would be to convert your materials into Bose-Einstein condesate compatible molecules and launch a matter stream alongside the data stream. However, the matter stream would be a bit trickier, since it would not move in a linear path the same way a laser would.
An alternative option was to somehow have the nanobots stack themselves into a strand only a few nanometers thick but with the structural stability to stretch out to several thousands of miles without collapsing. Using such methods, a grey goo system could literally leap from planet to planet and then piggy-back the remaining colony across the planetary bridge before undocking from the start point and being pulled in to the destination.
I have similar batteries for an old PowerBook 100 series I have. They are, by far, the most, heavy, clunky and uncomfortable laptop accessory one could carry around with them. Almost like carrying a second laptop.
In addition, these batteries connect to the laptop through the power adapter port on the machine. In the event you ever drain your internal battery before using such a beast, you risk losing all of your work if you accidentally bump the plug. (Something one could easily do in a crowded area.)
Aside from that, you'd probably have fun trying to get one of these past the TSA checkpoint at an airport. You'd have to figure out how to explain to them why you have a carry-on with wires sticking out of it with no discernible features. Even the prospect of an internal battery replacement would fail. Even if you somehow got a torx screwdriver past TSA, good luck trying to surreptitiously swap out the battery when you have to open up your computer down to its circuitry. You'd be lucky if the attempt didn't end up grounding your flight and get you flagged as a terror suspect for attempting to "construct a bomb" midflight.
Most likely, the MBA will likely go down in history as the least travel-friendly laptop ever made... at least as far as post 9/11 devices go.
I've had some ideas on this... sort of a "grey goo" teleporter system. Basically you'd inject the body with a series of nanobots to disassemble the body from the inside out, while logging their every move. Once the messy stuff has been hollowed out of the body, it'd disassemble the exterior.
Once all the data is collected and the original is recycled for later rebuiding materials, an identical system elsewhere would begin reconstruction by first constructing a pipeline rail system (sort of like a 3D outline of your body in chickenwire), followed by reconstruction of the exterior and finally refilling the casing with your innards, all from the log data collected at the starting point. Finally, before leaving the body, the nanobots would zap a few areas with enough of a charge to get things going.
The interesting part comes at just the point where the system revives you. Somewhere along the line, it'd have to verify the reconstruction was successful and that the output is identical to the initial source. Somehow, you'd have some sort of checksum value applied to your body to verify you really are you, and not a messed up, degraded version with some major flaw.
Doesn't this sound vaguely like the Cylon "detector" from Battlestar Galactica? Same crap from the sounds of it. Right up there with those E-meter things the scientologists use to evaluate your thetan levels.
I wonder if that measurement of the flow rate of ketchup we paid for ever yielded any results...
I'm sure at some point, some crazy bastard will try to use this to create animals with intelligence and motivations far closer to humans. If, at one point, such a pokemon-esque creature breaks the communication barrier with mankind, this could be the first words it utters in some form.