You are correct that "one is left with the problem of incentive." Even if I were given free access to all the world's IP, I still wouldn't have the physical resources necessary to create a work like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If I were Bill Gates, I would have enough resources, but no incentive to spend them on such a project knowing there would be no return on the investment.
So for the forseeable future, we still need IP laws to protect the incentive for creating works on this grand scale.
Imagine building a massive Ringworld-type habitat with a surface area of, say, 10^13 square kilometers. Every individual that chooses to could have a half-dozen secluded islands all to themselves.
According to your link, a typical Earth TV transmitter has an EIRP of 10^6 watts, and an EIRP of 10^6 watts is the limit of what SKA will be able to detect at a distance of four light years.
Well guess what: there is only one star within four light years of us -- Alpha Centauri.
If the Centaurians aren't sitting around watching their version of Jerry Springer, looks like we're back to only being able to detect directed beacons.
If Apple has to pay this fee on the SuperDrive, don't manufacturers of third-party DVD-Rs also have to pay this fee? And if they have paid their fees, just like Apple has, what's the problem with using iDVD with the third-party drives?
Also, if Apple was able to avoid paying the fee on iDVD because it pays the fee on the SuperDrive instead, why does it have to pay the fee for DVD Studio Pro? If I purchase a Mac w/SuperDrive, plus a copy of DVD Studio Pro, Apple has paid the fee for me twice; but if I purchase a Mac w/SuperDrive plus iDVD, Apple has paid the fee for me once.
Microsoft has become one of the richest companies in the world due in large part to their OS sales; they sell very little hardware.
Actually, Microsoft makes a very slight profit from selling copies of Windows -- because the development costs of making sure Windows can run on such a wide variety of hardware are enormous.
The majority of M$'s profits come from sales of Office. (Another area where M$ has a near-monopoly. Apple's office suite, AppleWorks, generates very little revenue. The bottom line is that if Apple became a pure software company, it would be nothing like the cash-generating monster that M$ is.)
Check out a shareware control panel for OS 9 called PowerSwitch. It allows your Mac to run circles around Windows' alt-tab feature. You can hide or quit apps with it; you can easily go backwards through the list of apps (unlike Windows which requires you to press three keys, alt-shift-tab); and you can select an app from the list with your mouse.
This first space elevator could be built for between $7-$10 billion
People, put things in perspective. Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space. The space elevator will change everything. Especially considering the fact that you can use it to lift materials for additional space elevators -- making the construction cost for subsequent space elevators lower than for the first one.
$10 billion for our first space elevator would be the bargain of the millenium.
Lots of species became extinct about 10,000yrs ago
on
How To Clone A Mammoth
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· Score: 1
[Mammoths] inhabited Europe, Northern Asia and Northern America and became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
Next time you're in LA, check out the La Brea tar pits museum. It's quite amazing to learn about dozens of species that became extinct only 10,000 years ago (which is diddly squat on geologic time scales).
Best example: the American Lion, much larger than any lion you can currently find in Africa. Some weird camels also recently roamed in California. So many skeletons of the fearsome Dire Wolf were pulled from the pits, that the museum's designers were able to cover one wall of the museum with 400 of their skulls -- and still have plenty left over for research!
"Betamax doctrine" -- the legal principle that a media technology is legal, even if it can be used to infringe copyright, provided that it has substantial non-infringing uses.
That means that even though a VCR can be used to duplicate and resell commercial video cassettes illegally, it's still legal to manufacture VCRs, because you can also use them to time-shift your favorite programs, a use that is legal. That's why the iPod exists: You can create MP3s legally by ripping your lawfully acquired CDs with iTunes. That you can also illegally download MP3s from file-sharing networks is irrelevant: the iPod has a substantial, non-infringing use.
That's also why Napster should still exist. It had many non-infringing uses, such as all the musicians who released free MP3s of their performances and encouraged trading in order to gain exposure.
How did the courts get away with ignoring this legal precedent when they banned Napster? Is there anything that can be done to appeal and shore up the "Betamax doctrine"?
$10 billion is *nothing*!
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
This first space elevator could be built for between $7-$10 billion
People, put things in perspective. Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space. The space elevator will change everything. Especially considering the fact that you can use it to lift materials for additional space elevators -- making the construction cost for subsequent space elevators lower than for the first one.
$10 billion for our first space elevator would be the bargain of the millenium.
...It wasn't remastered or anything; it was just a standard 35 mm print projected onto the large IMAX screen. I thought it was a pretty good experience. As others have pointed out, "remastering" is not going to add any information content to the film. Who cares whether a 35 mm image is projected directly onto an IMAX-sized screen, or the same 35 mm image is first blown up to 70 mm and then projected onto an IMAX-sized screen?
If they want to say that the process aviods image degradation by skipping a few generations of copies, fine, but this "remastering for a better image" is a bunch of hooey. Give us some technical details!
...which can still be economically viable due to subsidies.
If it has to be subsidized, it's only "viable" for the farmer being subsidized. For the economy as a whole, it's a net drag.
Living in Alaska in a house with no insulation is a "viable" option if my heating bill is subsidized enough. Does that make it a good idea? Didn't think so...
Read what an earlier poster said about "improving the carbon equation."
Instead of pumping up 50 million year old carbon that has been sequestered all this time, using ethanol helps make it more of a zero sum game. Ideally, you're growing (removing) the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that you're burning as EtOH.
Now you're talking about taking carbon that's trapped in rocks and releasing it into the atmosphere (when the ethanol is burned)? What a bad plan, if you believe the global warming crowd at all.
If you're worried that workers in the third world are underpaid (and they are), you should wholeheartedly support globalization of markets. The places where people are suffering are the places where capitalism has not yet worked its mojo.
Take this hard drive industry example. Moving production overseas boosts the standard of living for those workers who now have high-tech jobs. Back in the states, the manufacturers pass along a portion of the labor savings to consumers, which makes computers more affordable. 99.99% of Americans never worked in the hard drive industry, and their standard of living increases in a noticible way by the reduced cost of hard drives and assembled computers. The only people who don't benefit are the 0.01% of Americans who worked as laborers in the hard drive industry. Sorry, but the benefits for the rest of the world far outweigh their loss. The net benefit to the human race is substantial. Moving these types of jobs overseas is the Right Thing To Do.
You are right about one thing: when the American standard of living goes down, it has a deleterious ripple effect on the standard of living in every country.
That is exactly why we should outsource these types of jobs to the third world. Doing so increases the standard of living of the average American.
Here's an excellent analogy. It's possible to grow oranges in Maine. Really, it is. You can build big expensive greenhouses for the orange trees, and heat them in the winter.
Does it make sense to forbid the good people of Maine from outsourcing their orange production to Florida? Well, the Maine agriculture lobby and greenhouse builders in Maine would love it -- they would make a lot of money. But that represents less than 1% of Maine's population. The standard of living of the other 99% would suffer. For them, the price of a glass of orange juice would probably increase by 1500%. And what about the poor orange farmers in Florida whose business would suffer? I'm sure you can see that it makes no sense to cater to small special interest groups (in this case, Maine orange growers).
So, unrestricted free trade is a good thing within these 50 states, and it's no different when you talk about international trade. For some strange reason (perhaps misplaced patriotism), many people can't seem to grok that. But it doesn't matter whether you're talking about oranges or hard drive labor, Florida or Indonesia. Let the money flow where it will, and the human race will soar.
Think about how the cost of a whole computing system could be reduced.
A PC that is designed to be permanently connected to a UPS that provides DC power would need no power supply. Not only would this this probably shave $40 off the retail cost of the PC; lack of a power supply would make the PC smaller, lighter, and more electrically efficient, and reduce thermal output.
The problem is that your monitor, modem, etc. all expect AC power.
Just as the PC would have to be redesigned to use DC-only power, peripherals would too. But it's doable. My external modem and printer use AC-to-DC adapters, and both CRT and LCD monitors can easily be designed to run off of DC (as Apple has done -- its "ADC" series monitors all run off of 28 volts DC). Once all your peripherals no longer use AC-to-DC converters, then the UPS no longer has to contain a DC-to-AC inverter. Major cost and efficiency savings all around!
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct that "one is left with the problem of incentive." Even if I were given free access to all the world's IP, I still wouldn't have the physical resources necessary to create a work like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If I were Bill Gates, I would have enough resources, but no incentive to spend them on such a project knowing there would be no return on the investment.
So for the forseeable future, we still need IP laws to protect the incentive for creating works on this grand scale.
Imagine building a massive Ringworld-type habitat with a surface area of, say, 10^13 square kilometers. Every individual that chooses to could have a half-dozen secluded islands all to themselves.
According to your link, a typical Earth TV transmitter has an EIRP of 10^6 watts, and an EIRP of 10^6 watts is the limit of what SKA will be able to detect at a distance of four light years.
Well guess what: there is only one star within four light years of us -- Alpha Centauri.
If the Centaurians aren't sitting around watching their version of Jerry Springer, looks like we're back to only being able to detect directed beacons.
If Apple has to pay this fee on the SuperDrive, don't manufacturers of third-party DVD-Rs also have to pay this fee? And if they have paid their fees, just like Apple has, what's the problem with using iDVD with the third-party drives?
Also, if Apple was able to avoid paying the fee on iDVD because it pays the fee on the SuperDrive instead, why does it have to pay the fee for DVD Studio Pro? If I purchase a Mac w/SuperDrive, plus a copy of DVD Studio Pro, Apple has paid the fee for me twice; but if I purchase a Mac w/SuperDrive plus iDVD, Apple has paid the fee for me once.
Sounds like handwaving.
Microsoft has become one of the richest companies in the world due in large part to their OS sales; they sell very little hardware.
Actually, Microsoft makes a very slight profit from selling copies of Windows -- because the development costs of making sure Windows can run on such a wide variety of hardware are enormous.
The majority of M$'s profits come from sales of Office. (Another area where M$ has a near-monopoly. Apple's office suite, AppleWorks, generates very little revenue. The bottom line is that if Apple became a pure software company, it would be nothing like the cash-generating monster that M$ is.)
Check out a shareware control panel for OS 9 called PowerSwitch. It allows your Mac to run circles around Windows' alt-tab feature. You can hide or quit apps with it; you can easily go backwards through the list of apps (unlike Windows which requires you to press three keys, alt-shift-tab); and you can select an app from the list with your mouse.
http://macparts.de/ibook
This first space elevator could be built for between $7-$10 billion
People, put things in perspective. Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space. The space elevator will change everything. Especially considering the fact that you can use it to lift materials for additional space elevators -- making the construction cost for subsequent space elevators lower than for the first one.
$10 billion for our first space elevator would be the bargain of the millenium.
[Mammoths] inhabited Europe, Northern Asia and Northern America and became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
Next time you're in LA, check out the La Brea tar pits museum. It's quite amazing to learn about dozens of species that became extinct only 10,000 years ago (which is diddly squat on geologic time scales).
Best example: the American Lion, much larger than any lion you can currently find in Africa. Some weird camels also recently roamed in California. So many skeletons of the fearsome Dire Wolf were pulled from the pits, that the museum's designers were able to cover one wall of the museum with 400 of their skulls -- and still have plenty left over for research!
Ah, but that "central indexing service" also has many non-infringing uses; ergo, it should be legal.
"Betamax doctrine" -- the legal principle that a media technology is legal, even if it can be used to infringe copyright, provided that it has substantial non-infringing uses.
That means that even though a VCR can be used to duplicate and resell commercial video cassettes illegally, it's still legal to manufacture VCRs, because you can also use them to time-shift your favorite programs, a use that is legal. That's why the iPod exists: You can create MP3s legally by ripping your lawfully acquired CDs with iTunes. That you can also illegally download MP3s from file-sharing networks is irrelevant: the iPod has a substantial, non-infringing use.
That's also why Napster should still exist. It had many non-infringing uses, such as all the musicians who released free MP3s of their performances and encouraged trading in order to gain exposure.
How did the courts get away with ignoring this legal precedent when they banned Napster? Is there anything that can be done to appeal and shore up the "Betamax doctrine"?
This first space elevator could be built for between $7-$10 billion
People, put things in perspective. Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space. The space elevator will change everything. Especially considering the fact that you can use it to lift materials for additional space elevators -- making the construction cost for subsequent space elevators lower than for the first one.
$10 billion for our first space elevator would be the bargain of the millenium.
Check out this article and see if you still feel that way.
...It wasn't remastered or anything; it was just a standard 35 mm print projected onto the large IMAX screen. I thought it was a pretty good experience. As others have pointed out, "remastering" is not going to add any information content to the film. Who cares whether a 35 mm image is projected directly onto an IMAX-sized screen, or the same 35 mm image is first blown up to 70 mm and then projected onto an IMAX-sized screen?
If they want to say that the process aviods image degradation by skipping a few generations of copies, fine, but this "remastering for a better image" is a bunch of hooey. Give us some technical details!
...which can still be economically viable due to subsidies.
If it has to be subsidized, it's only "viable" for the farmer being subsidized. For the economy as a whole, it's a net drag.
Living in Alaska in a house with no insulation is a "viable" option if my heating bill is subsidized enough. Does that make it a good idea? Didn't think so...
Read what an earlier poster said about "improving the carbon equation."
Instead of pumping up 50 million year old carbon that has been sequestered all this time, using ethanol helps make it more of a zero sum game. Ideally, you're growing (removing) the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that you're burning as EtOH.
Now you're talking about taking carbon that's trapped in rocks and releasing it into the atmosphere (when the ethanol is burned)? What a bad plan, if you believe the global warming crowd at all.
To expand on your ideas, check out these posts:
l d=5&commentsort=0&tid=137&mode=thread&cid=3614 776
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33419&thresho
If you're worried that workers in the third world are underpaid (and they are), you should wholeheartedly support globalization of markets. The places where people are suffering are the places where capitalism has not yet worked its mojo.
Take this hard drive industry example. Moving production overseas boosts the standard of living for those workers who now have high-tech jobs. Back in the states, the manufacturers pass along a portion of the labor savings to consumers, which makes computers more affordable. 99.99% of Americans never worked in the hard drive industry, and their standard of living increases in a noticible way by the reduced cost of hard drives and assembled computers. The only people who don't benefit are the 0.01% of Americans who worked as laborers in the hard drive industry. Sorry, but the benefits for the rest of the world far outweigh their loss. The net benefit to the human race is substantial. Moving these types of jobs overseas is the Right Thing To Do.
You are right about one thing: when the American standard of living goes down, it has a deleterious ripple effect on the standard of living in every country.
That is exactly why we should outsource these types of jobs to the third world. Doing so increases the standard of living of the average American.
Here's an excellent analogy. It's possible to grow oranges in Maine. Really, it is. You can build big expensive greenhouses for the orange trees, and heat them in the winter.
Does it make sense to forbid the good people of Maine from outsourcing their orange production to Florida? Well, the Maine agriculture lobby and greenhouse builders in Maine would love it -- they would make a lot of money. But that represents less than 1% of Maine's population. The standard of living of the other 99% would suffer. For them, the price of a glass of orange juice would probably increase by 1500%. And what about the poor orange farmers in Florida whose business would suffer? I'm sure you can see that it makes no sense to cater to small special interest groups (in this case, Maine orange growers).
So, unrestricted free trade is a good thing within these 50 states, and it's no different when you talk about international trade. For some strange reason (perhaps misplaced patriotism), many people can't seem to grok that. But it doesn't matter whether you're talking about oranges or hard drive labor, Florida or Indonesia. Let the money flow where it will, and the human race will soar.
...is where the superconductor trial was.
Don't look at it as a miniscule $3 per month -- think of it as paying $360 more over the next 10 years.
Now, is Brand X worth $360 more than Brand Y?
What do you find incorrect in the Wired article? It's author is the same as the space.com article you linked to.
See the spectra in this paper, for example:
l iu m_Heat%20PCCP%208_24_01SV.pdf
http://www.blacklightpower.com/pdf/technical/He
Do a little research before you post, meringuoid.
Think about how the cost of a whole computing system could be reduced.
A PC that is designed to be permanently connected to a UPS that provides DC power would need no power supply. Not only would this this probably shave $40 off the retail cost of the PC; lack of a power supply would make the PC smaller, lighter, and more electrically efficient, and reduce thermal output.
The problem is that your monitor, modem, etc. all expect AC power.
Just as the PC would have to be redesigned to use DC-only power, peripherals would too. But it's doable. My external modem and printer use AC-to-DC adapters, and both CRT and LCD monitors can easily be designed to run off of DC (as Apple has done -- its "ADC" series monitors all run off of 28 volts DC). Once all your peripherals no longer use AC-to-DC converters, then the UPS no longer has to contain a DC-to-AC inverter. Major cost and efficiency savings all around!
See this paper:
L C% 20Article%204_4_02.pdf
http://www.blacklightpower.com/pdf/technical/HD
for a revolutionary new way to manufacture diamond films.
My Mac communicates with AirPort networks and Bluetooth devices seamlessly, and simultaneously.