I think the record companies like selling albums because they only have to come up with one catchy (not good, just stick in your head, catchy) song and then promote the heck out of that song to get you to part with your $12.99 or $18.99. The rest of the album on many of these CD's are filler. So some bands work for a year or two to produce one decent song. That song will now sell for $0.99 instead of $18.99. They are out $18.00 for each CD/year.
The parasites that hang onto the bands, record producers, cd-label artists, guys who bribe Clear Channel to put the songs on their playlists, Clear Channel, MTV, guys who write second rate songs for people who can't sing but look good, the bimbos in the background of the music video, All these people cannot be supported on the $0.99/Year/Sale instead of the $18.99/Year/Sale that they used to get. These people are going to be out of work.
The Artists who could make a full albums worth of good music will still make loads of money. (Tastes vary but you know which ones they are. Moby's Play is a full Album, Nirvanna's albums were mostly all great songs, Beck's Odelay etc. I bought the Beatles CD's full of stuff that was thrown out for not being good enough for an album).
Bands that are one hit wonders or manufactured bands will probably still make money but the profit margins will be non-existant and the hangers on will have to be cut out. That's too bad because some the the old album covers and CD designs were clever. I guess they will all have to go to designing websites and concert posters.
The good thing is that the small, self contained, groups (write, sing,play their own songs e.g. U2), who consistently make one good song after another will be the ones that are profitable. They manufactured monstrosities like the boy bands which rely on image consultants, songwriters, production magic and lipsyncing may still be around but will be less profitable.
I agree with you that it is a bad long term strategy. I also do not agree with it as a strategy. I was just trying to understand the thinking that may be going on at the government level. (if any thinking is going on:)
It is similiar to the RIAA. They know their current model is in danger but they try to use the legal system to protect themselves. In the long term they are doomed no matter what.
In a similiar way the current governments have to let their companies ship jobs and factories overseas in order to compete with other countries that are doing so.
How can I complain? Before this sort of thing was done most consumers goods were expensive and badly made, not so much because they were made in America but because there was no competition between manufacturers and no interest in making better goods (e.g. Detroit cars). Imagine what a DVD player would look like and cost if it was developed, designed, and manufactured in the US by one or two companies. It would probably weigh a half ton, cost a half million and only be sold to TV studios.
But by letting companies get away with this sort of thing the governments are undermining themselves. Eventually the whole planet will be an EU type free trade zone and there will be groups of individuals that have no national or territorial allegience that control all the wealth and move it from place to place in order to avoid local gov from using it. Those not in the group will suffer from crumbling infrastructure , low government investment and declining standards of living. Wait did I say this would be in the future? It is happening right now in a lot of places.
I do not have the answers to make it right. We can only hope the worldwide quality of life evens out as companies move manufacturing from place to place looking for cheaper countries. Eventually we will all be equal at a lower standard of living (except for the oligarchy). Our best hope is that the future worldwide base standard of living will be an enjoyable one. (e.g. I wouldn't mind if we all had to give up having two cars or even any cars. Maybe telecommute or bicycle to work, worldwide, as long as we have work.
This is a general statement about IP Laws and IP protection.
The highly developed, rich, nations (G7 - US, Europe, Japan) are moving away from manufacturing physical products. The companies in these countries will design a product and then contract a non-G7 country to do the actual manufacturing. You get parts made in China, assembled in Malaysia etc.
In reality any country can provide the design and the factories will make it. If the designs came from the countries that now have the factories then there would be no reason to involve the G7 countries except as markets. The value added provided by the G7 countries are the financing, original designs, and then the sales and marketing. The finacial, legal, design and marketing crap is all Intellectual Property.
If there were no Intellectual Property Laws the "rich" countries would end up just being investors and markets into which the goods are shipped. After some years all the money would flow out of these "rich" countries to the countries that actually made stuff and there would be no more money to finance third world factories. But that would be OK the third world would finance it themselves, now being rich.
So it is in a non-manufacturing country's best interest to accumulate as much IP as possible. Since IP is really a legal fiction (physical property can be fenced and protected) The more IP laws you have the more IP you have (in theory, in reality as you choke off the sharing of intellectual property less and less is created).
It is in the US interest to have as many bogus patents and restrictive copyrights as possible. Any country that does not recognize US patents and
copyright are denied access to our markets (the only leverage besides military action we have). If a company patents the "method of living by breathing oxygen" it is in the US interest to push that claim and help the company collect money from all the other people on Earth. The US gov. can then tax that income. If all the IP went away the US gov could only live on sales taxes for a few decades as Americans bought cheap DVD players made on the Pacific rim and then revenue would dry up.
By then maybe we could become a source of cheap labor and a peaceful, rich, formerly third world country might locate a few factories here so we common people could actually make a living.
If the US wants to prevent that they need to back up stupid evil companies like Microsoft as they steal money from anyone who wants to use a computer worldwide. If MS Windows went away, the US would get no revenue from a computer sale since it would probably be manufactured in a Chinese Army Prison camp using slave labor and run English Language Linux software written in India. The only income the gov would get would be from the income tax being paid by a minimum wage sales clerk at CompUSA.
Repeat this scenario for all the other highly developed, post-industrial countries and you get the reason for all these stupid IP laws getting passed. They are frightened for their future existence.
How about getting WalMart or other national chains to put a couple of parking spaces reserved for high-efficiency cars or ultra small cars near the entrance?
It would be advertising for the cars even if no-one in the area had a such a car. It would give WalMart street cred with the enviromentalists. It would cost them nothing but a few square meters of parking space.
WalMart does not gain from people buying SUV's. Small cars such as this are usually targeted for shopping trips and the like.
People would see the parking spots right outside the door and think to themselves while they are searching for a spot that they're going to get themselves one of those things someday.
It they are subcompact spots for cars like this then they could put them in some spot that would not even fit a normal car.
If electric cars evetually took off Walmart could even put in metered plugs that would be charged to your Walmart account. Pull in to Walmart. Plug your car in for 10 or 20 minutes or however long it takes to shop and you don't have to worry about topping off your tank.
Don't feel so bad about being called an inaccurate name by foreigners.
The Welsh in Wales are the remaining Celtic inhabitants of Britain before the Anglo-Saxons (and then Normans) came over and invaded. The Welsh name means "foreigners". The Anglo-Saxons thought the Welesh were foreigners when the Anglo Saxons were the ones who were foreigners.
Ireland across the water is really Eire but was called Hibernia in Latin. Hibernia means wintery weather because it rains all the time there. In Italy the winters are the rainy season. Ironically, Ireland is hit by the remainders of the Gulf Stream and it rarely gets as cold as say, New England in the winter and heavy snow is rare there. Palm trees grow outdoors in the southern part of the country. Meanwhile Greenland is covered in an ice sheet and is not called wintery.
After Ireland was called Hibernia is was called Scotia, land of the Scots. A Scot was an Irish person originaly. About the same time the Anglo-Saxons were invading the South of the Island of Britain the Irish were invading the North which was inhabited by Picts.
The Irish set up kingdoms and people started to call the Northern part Scotia Minor or "Little Ireland". Ireland itself was Scotia Major "Greater Ireland".
For some reason Ireland started to call itself Eire and Scots and Scotland came to mean Scotland.
I still don't know if Nova Scotia in Canada is New Scotland or New Ireland.
I am sure there are other examples of bad foreign names for groups of people being used as the official name of a people but I don't know them.
The perception of them was that they were violent, even if there were only one or two news shots showing violent people (probably unaffiliated with the actual protestors, e.g. looters who tried to take advantage of the police being occupied elsewhere).
The perception is such because the news organizations showed the pictures. They showed the pictures because that's what they think is newsworthy. The peaceful protestors were not focused on. The peaceful protestors therefore did not attain their goals.
News organiztions and average joes do not think protests are interesting unless there is violence by the police in trying to clear the protestors out, or violence by protestors gone bad, or there is a major problem with traffic because of the protest. Otherwise no one pays attention. That is my whole point. Protests no longer are effective. They are passe. Boring. Do not get the message across. Are often ignored or treated as an inconvenience.
Vietnam and Civil Rights marches in the 60's are legitimate examples of success.
However, "recent" is a relative term. The Ice sheets from the last Ice Age have "recently" retreated according to geological time.
By recent I mean in the current political/ media climate. Say since the widespread popularity of CNN and newsbite media.
Most protests that make the news are, as I've said before, ones that turn violent, or ones that the local government cracks down on violently. To CNN that sort of thing makes good pictures.
The only protests that come to my mind recently are:
Tianimin Square, WTO protests, Million Man March on Washington, various anti-war in Iraq protests.
Tianimin Square did not bring democracy to China, The WTO protests turned violent, and the as far as I know (and I could be wrong) the Million Man March achieved nothing and there was a war in Iraq as if all those thousands (millions?) of people who marched didn't even exist.
I really do believe protests are just a nostalgia trip for those who wished they were at Woodstock and missed out.
Whether or not there was violence committed by every single protestor or just one passerby, the only part of the protest that was focused on was the violence. The peaceful, non-disruptive protestors are ignored by the media and by the people they are protesting. 60 style sit-ins and protests are no longer effective politically. They make the people participating in them feel good but they accomplish little. They are a nostalgia trip. Old hat. They might as well be going to s square dance.
You need novelty and creativity to attract attention.
That is what attracts attention to these flash crowds. They are not protestors, that is a novelty. People are trying to figure out why they are there, what is the meaning, what is the purpose. Since there is no meaning, purpose or reason, people have to expend a lot of brain power figuring it out. If it becomes a major trend then they will be ignored unless there is a lot of creativity involved in each individual "event" (and no violence)
I think that the WTO protests are a bad example. People had to resort to violence to get attention. The majority of the people were peaceful, but media felt the story was in the violence and focused on that.
A good example of peaceful protests that worked were the civil rights marches in the 60's. But that was a relatively new thing in people's minds. I think protests have become such cliche's no-one pays them any mind any more.
It's like one of the Lego built CD Changer Hacks, the MIT Practical Joke Hacks or Doom in Text Mode Hacks.
There is a mental challenge also: It is mildly complicated to plan and organize. There is an element of imagination involved in coming up with a surreal situation to use the crowd in.
It is also like art using people.
If there was an actual practical purpose to the afore-mentioned Hacks then that would detract from the fun and Hack value of it.
In the same way, if these crowds met to protest something then people wouldn't even pay attention to them. They would see the protest signs and say - oh, more protesters.I live in NY and there are picket lines and protests everyday and they are all ignored. The way it is now people notice the flash crowds BECAUSE there is no purpose to them.
The only time protestors are noticed is when they become violent like in Seattle, disrupt traffic or otherwise do things that are probably counter-productive to the cause they wish to promote. It might feel cool to participate in such mass protests, but I think they have little effect on policy e.g. the protests did nothing to stop the war from taking place in Iraq or in bringing home the troops.
I would actually appreciate a recent example where protests accomplished something in the US except increase security at WTO meetings.
Modern Democracy seems to me, not to let the common people make decisions about how they are to be governed. It is more a system to prevent violent changes in government.
Under, say the Roman Empire or even the late Roman Republic, you had a current leader and a rival or rivals. When the rival got enough support in the form of high public opinion from winning battles in the provinces, money from spoils won in the provinces or from old money (Crassus) or support from the Army or the Praetorian Guard he would take out the current leader (violently) and replace him.
If no-one had a clear cut advantage you would have a civil war, and there were a lot of them.
Democracy, not true Democracy but what passes for it these days, formalizes this system and removes the violence. If a rival for leadership is very organized and has a lot of connections, or a lot of money, or a lot of public support they decide to compete in an election.
If there were no elections the rival would use the money, connections or public support to stage a violent removal of whoever is currently in charge.In a violent coup, like in an election, whoever has the most money or was hooked up with the most powerful faction would win. Also like in an election, if a person can mobilize a huge number of people to his side he could also win, even if he is not aligned with the other centers of power. The winners are the same. The process is just less violent.
Modern Democracy is just a way to let the more powerful, rich, organized factions of society take power from those less rich, organized or powerful without a lot of killing and turmoil. It is not about actually letting the average man in street run things.
I think the rod logic in Diamond Age is more a mechanical thing. It is a Babbage Engine at the atomic scale with little gears and rods. This is talked about in K Eric Drexler's book that started the nanotechnology craze Engines of Creation.
We need an Internet2 (wait... already taken -- Internet3!) that only allows individuals and well-behaved companies onto it
I know this was meant to be humorous, but couldn't a low bandwith, mostly text parallel net be formed?
I would like a Fidonet type system. A lot of wireless where possible, piggy back on existing Internet via VPN otherwise. Encrypted traffic. New extended SMTP mail system that authenticates sender and recipient (No SPAM). No graphics necessary, saves bandwidth, keeps out advertisers and porn.
Keep usenet(without spam), irc,google, slashdot, email and maillists, simple web pages(stuff that show up in links or lynx or emacs) . Ditch the rest. If you want large file tranfers use the regular Internet. Or broadcast it on radio (Debian diustribution on certain frequency, continuously)
Just leave the existing Internet to AOL, MS and RealMedia et al. Take our ball and go home.
It seems to me that this is a defense department end run around an incompetent NASA.
For a while, the Space Shuttle was the only government sanctioned method of putting anything in orbit, then the first shuttle disaster happened and the military insisted on redeveloping non-reusable boosters.
Now the second disaster. The military might just think that they need their own space plane. This can put small satellites into orbit. It carries a payload to the edge of space. That payload is bombs but could be other items. It can survive the worst part of re-entry.
In the US, sadly, it is much easier to spend billions on a weapon then on a NASA budget item, especially given NASA's track record.
If this thing gets off the ground, with a few changes, after 10 or 20 years as a weapon the tech transfers into a cheap launch vehicle, and/or a hypersonic commercial airliner. DARPA does have a track record of sponsoring projects others cannot do that turn out to have non-military applications (the Internet is just one). The military purpose is just a way to get money into the research.
According to the article, the quoted scientist merely says that the permutations possible in a quipu weaving might indicate a septary (not, by any means, a binary) code. He also says he's looking for a Rosetta stone equivalent.
I am not sure this is septary or binary. The seven things refered to were 7 decision points. A decision point was something like: 1. Use wool, use cotton.2. Tie knot, don't.3.Branch to new string, don't. Each is a binary decision.
And this is not just about math as some people seem to have written. If it was binary it could be just like ASCII (Pure ASCII is 7bit). Each of the decision points could correspond to a position of the digits in a binary representation of an ASCII character (I am not saying they used ASCII, this is just an example).
In 7 bit ASCII we could label the positions as: (7654321). The bit at position 4 could be 0 or 1. If instead of a position we had decision points then item 4 could be that there was a branch there . No branch would be 0. A branch would be 1.
You could just have one kind of decision point, knot, no knot, but you would have to have a standard length of string that must contain a knot. If I wished to send you a series of null characters I couldn't just send you a foot long string with no knots in it unless we both had rulers marked in inches and each binary digit was assigned to an inch of string, then I would know that the foot long string was 12 zeroes in a row. This would not be very space efficient and it would be hard to read by people.
The Inca system probably evolved slowly and was added to piece by piece. It was not designed by Claude Shannon. They might have been able to simplify it to 1 or two changing symbols corresponding to 1's and 0's but I could believe it was a binary system still.
So knot,red wool branch, knot, blue cotton branch, knot, knot would mean one letter. More likely it is one symbol. The Mayan were using symbols, as were the Egyptians and Sumerians and Chinese. Most first time writing systems used symbols.(I would say pictograms but a bunch of knotted strings aren't really pictograms)
In Cunieform writing you could have a picture of a fish. The fish could mean "fish". If it had a little star next to it it could mean something to do with the gods, so it wasn't a fish anymore it was "the god of the fishes" or maybe "the god of the sea". Or it could be the "fi" sound from "fish" like in "philip". You could have a message saying that "Philip offered 5 fish as a sacrafice to the god of the sea". It would be full of fishes.
The Inca could have a standard pattern of knots, branches, colors, textile types that meant "potato" (or if you are Dan Quayle "potatoe").
Maybe you take that pattern and add a short royal blue cord to it and it becomes "the king's potato".
Or there could be a standard pattern that means "Phillip", tie on potato, tie on a certain string that means "everything on this string is a number" with 5 knots in it and this means "Phillip has 5 potatoes". Branch off the potato or number string with a symbol that means "metric ton" or "basket" and it would mean "Phillip has 5 metric tons of potatoes".
That would work for your tax records.
Stories would come later as they added symbols for verbs and adjectives.
I think the 7 decision points are more like the strokes a pen can make in Chineses Caligraphy. The strokes do not mean anything. The combinations in certain strokes makes a symbol that means something. Neither system is binary. The binary analysis would just give you an idea of how much information the system could possibly hold. To say the Inca used binary is misleading.
It would be great if you could just fly up to the edge of space, chuck your payload up, have a tether catch it and then land. Very cheap compared to rockets.
I guess because it's just easier to hit the "Search" button on IE's toolbar than it is to go to Favorites and click on Google.
Tell her to set Google as her home page. It is small and quick loading and it is better than havin AOL, MSN, Yahoo or some other bloated thing as a default homepage. Whenever I need to do a search I hit home.
IANAB (I am not a biologist) but this sounds vaguely to me like the way the human genome was sequenced. They broke up the chromosomes into millions of short overlapping sequences, sequenced the pieces and then worked out how to put them together again. I know nothing about either process but maybe someone who knows more may make something of this connection (maybe use genome algorithms, DNA fingerprinting to check code fragments ???)
Douglas Adams said in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Seriously, studies of the Bushmen hunter/gatherers that they spend less time searching for food than agriculturists spend growing it. Small groups of hunter/gatherers have less disease and violence than settled peoples. Overall hunter/gatherers have a better quality of life than primitive farmers. Maybe our ancestors were smarter than us for 140,000 years and then suddenly got stupid recently and developed civilization.
Your comments do make sense but recent DNA studies show that Australian Aboriginies and the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea are descended from an 40,000 year old coastal migration from Africa. Europeans, Central Asians and American Indians are descended from a later migration.
Australian Aboriginies and Papua New Gunineans (sp?) have kinky hair and other features similiar to Africans.
In favor of your position, the skulls found are 110,000 years older than the migration I am talking about. That leaves a lot of time for changes to have taken place. The skulls are also mentioned to have a narrow nose while the people I refer to tend to have wide noses. They all live in warm climates and so would tend to independently develop adaptions to the climate similiar to Africans but if this last is the case then should not these skulls also have adaptions suitable to Africa?
Things like nasal openings, cheekbones shape, chin and forehead shapes can be measured directly from skulls. Lips and hair will always be speculative.
Calling Socialism is wrong, since it implies a leftist economic system is the problem.
Correcting that with fascism is wrong also since it implies a right-wing extremist form of government is the problem (and Fascist were Socialists too. They Nationalized the means of production. The Nazi party was the National Socialist party.)
Both of you were aiming at TOTALITARIANISM. Where the government (or "The State") controls all aspects of society- total control, hence the name.
You can get control directly through Nationalisation of property and media as in extreme Socialism left (USSR) and right(Nazi Germany).
You can also get total control by being more subtle say by reducing the major media outlets by rewriting FCC rules to allow more consolidation. Then consolidate industries (letting MS keep a 90% monopoly) and systems of communications (the Baby Bells and Cable Companies).
Once you have 80% of everything controlled by a few hundred people you begin gathering information on them to black mail them into implementing your decisons (NSA back doors in Windows and Exchange, News outlets not covering certain aspects of certain stories, Telecom companies implementing snooper programs ).
You could do the same thing with hundreds of small companies but it would be harder to manage and you would have more of a chance that one company would go rogue.
What if they include some kind of proximity tester in the ad? If it detects you came into range at X time and then went out of range at X+10 seconds and it is a 20 second ad, the company buying advertising will begin to see that no-one is really paying any attention to ads. This would be just like the Web Banners and other Internet Ads that no-one clicks on. Advertisers just told the product guys that Internat Ads were worthless but Magazine, TV and Radio Ads were still good. The truth is 99% of advertising is a waste of time and money. Ad companies should avoid any technology that proves that point. It will cost them in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the record companies like selling albums because they only have to come up with one catchy (not good, just stick in your head, catchy) song and then promote the heck out of that song to get you to part with your $12.99 or $18.99. The rest of the album on many of these CD's are filler. So some bands work for a year or two to produce one decent song. That song will now sell for $0.99 instead of $18.99. They are out $18.00 for each CD/year.
The parasites that hang onto the bands, record producers, cd-label artists, guys who bribe Clear Channel to put the songs on their playlists, Clear Channel, MTV, guys who write second rate songs for people who can't sing but look good, the bimbos in the background of the music video, All these people cannot be supported on the $0.99/Year/Sale instead of the $18.99/Year/Sale that they used to get. These people are going to be out of work.
The Artists who could make a full albums worth of good music will still make loads of money. (Tastes vary but you know which ones they are. Moby's Play is a full Album, Nirvanna's albums were mostly all great songs, Beck's Odelay etc. I bought the Beatles CD's full of stuff that was thrown out for not being good enough for an album).
Bands that are one hit wonders or manufactured bands will probably still make money but the profit margins will be non-existant and the hangers on will have to be cut out. That's too bad because some the the old album covers and CD designs were clever. I guess they will all have to go to designing websites and concert posters.
The good thing is that the small, self contained, groups (write, sing,play their own songs e.g. U2), who consistently make one good song after another will be the ones that are profitable. They manufactured monstrosities like the boy bands which rely on image consultants, songwriters, production magic and lipsyncing may still be around but will be less profitable.
I agree with you that it is a bad long term strategy. I also do not agree with it as a strategy. I was just trying to understand the thinking that may be going on at the government level. (if any thinking is going on :)
It is similiar to the RIAA. They know their current model is in danger but they try to use the legal system to protect themselves. In the long term they are doomed no matter what.
In a similiar way the current governments have to let their companies ship jobs and factories overseas in order to compete with other countries that are doing so.
How can I complain? Before this sort of thing was done most consumers goods were expensive and badly made, not so much because they were made in America but because there was no competition between manufacturers and no interest in making better goods (e.g. Detroit cars). Imagine what a DVD player would look like and cost if it was developed, designed, and manufactured in the US by one or two companies. It would probably weigh a half ton, cost a half million and only be sold to TV studios.
But by letting companies get away with this sort of thing the governments are undermining themselves. Eventually the whole planet will be an EU type free trade zone and there will be groups of individuals that have no national or territorial allegience that control all the wealth and move it from place to place in order to avoid local gov from using it. Those not in the group will suffer from crumbling infrastructure , low government investment and declining standards of living. Wait did I say this would be in the future? It is happening right now in a lot of places.
I do not have the answers to make it right. We can only hope the worldwide quality of life evens out as companies move manufacturing from place to place looking for cheaper countries. Eventually we will all be equal at a lower standard of living (except for the oligarchy). Our best hope is that the future worldwide base standard of living will be an enjoyable one. (e.g. I wouldn't mind if we all had to give up having two cars or even any cars. Maybe telecommute or bicycle to work, worldwide, as long as we have work.
NOTE: I did not RTFA.
This is a general statement about IP Laws and IP protection.
The highly developed, rich, nations (G7 - US, Europe, Japan) are moving away from manufacturing physical products. The companies in these countries will design a product and then contract a non-G7 country to do the actual manufacturing. You get parts made in China, assembled in Malaysia etc.
In reality any country can provide the design and the factories will make it. If the designs came from the countries that now have the factories then there would be no reason to involve the G7 countries except as markets. The value added provided by the G7 countries are the financing, original designs, and then the sales and marketing. The finacial, legal, design and marketing crap is all Intellectual Property.
If there were no Intellectual Property Laws the "rich" countries would end up just being investors and markets into which the goods are shipped. After some years all the money would flow out of these "rich" countries to the countries that actually made stuff and there would be no more money to finance third world factories. But that would be OK the third world would finance it themselves, now being rich.
So it is in a non-manufacturing country's best interest to accumulate as much IP as possible. Since IP is really a legal fiction (physical property can be fenced and protected) The more IP laws you have the more IP you have (in theory, in reality as you choke off the sharing of intellectual property less and less is created).
It is in the US interest to have as many bogus patents and restrictive copyrights as possible. Any country that does not recognize US patents and copyright are denied access to our markets (the only leverage besides military action we have). If a company patents the "method of living by breathing oxygen" it is in the US interest to push that claim and help the company collect money from all the other people on Earth. The US gov. can then tax that income. If all the IP went away the US gov could only live on sales taxes for a few decades as Americans bought cheap DVD players made on the Pacific rim and then revenue would dry up.
By then maybe we could become a source of cheap labor and a peaceful, rich, formerly third world country might locate a few factories here so we common people could actually make a living.
If the US wants to prevent that they need to back up stupid evil companies like Microsoft as they steal money from anyone who wants to use a computer worldwide. If MS Windows went away, the US would get no revenue from a computer sale since it would probably be manufactured in a Chinese Army Prison camp using slave labor and run English Language Linux software written in India. The only income the gov would get would be from the income tax being paid by a minimum wage sales clerk at CompUSA.
Repeat this scenario for all the other highly developed, post-industrial countries and you get the reason for all these stupid IP laws getting passed. They are frightened for their future existence.
How about getting WalMart or other national chains to put a couple of parking spaces reserved for high-efficiency cars or ultra small cars near the entrance?
It would be advertising for the cars even if no-one in the area had a such a car. It would give WalMart street cred with the enviromentalists. It would cost them nothing but a few square meters of parking space.
WalMart does not gain from people buying SUV's. Small cars such as this are usually targeted for shopping trips and the like.
People would see the parking spots right outside the door and think to themselves while they are searching for a spot that they're going to get themselves one of those things someday.
It they are subcompact spots for cars like this then they could put them in some spot that would not even fit a normal car.
If electric cars evetually took off Walmart could even put in metered plugs that would be charged to your Walmart account. Pull in to Walmart. Plug your car in for 10 or 20 minutes or however long it takes to shop and you don't have to worry about topping off your tank.
Don't feel so bad about being called an inaccurate name by foreigners.
The Welsh in Wales are the remaining Celtic inhabitants of Britain before the Anglo-Saxons (and then Normans) came over and invaded. The Welsh name means "foreigners". The Anglo-Saxons thought the Welesh were foreigners when the Anglo Saxons were the ones who were foreigners.
Ireland across the water is really Eire but was called Hibernia in Latin. Hibernia means wintery weather because it rains all the time there. In Italy the winters are the rainy season. Ironically, Ireland is hit by the remainders of the Gulf Stream and it rarely gets as cold as say, New England in the winter and heavy snow is rare there. Palm trees grow outdoors in the southern part of the country. Meanwhile Greenland is covered in an ice sheet and is not called wintery.
After Ireland was called Hibernia is was called Scotia, land of the Scots. A Scot was an Irish person originaly. About the same time the Anglo-Saxons were invading the South of the Island of Britain the Irish were invading the North which was inhabited by Picts.
The Irish set up kingdoms and people started to call the Northern part Scotia Minor or "Little Ireland". Ireland itself was Scotia Major "Greater Ireland".
For some reason Ireland started to call itself Eire and Scots and Scotland came to mean Scotland.
I still don't know if Nova Scotia in Canada is New Scotland or New Ireland.
I am sure there are other examples of bad foreign names for groups of people being used as the official name of a people but I don't know them.
-1 OFFTOPIC
The perception of them was that they were violent, even if there were only one or two news shots showing violent people (probably unaffiliated with the actual protestors, e.g. looters who tried to take advantage of the police being occupied elsewhere).
The perception is such because the news organizations showed the pictures. They showed the pictures because that's what they think is newsworthy. The peaceful protestors were not focused on. The peaceful protestors therefore did not attain their goals.
News organiztions and average joes do not think protests are interesting unless there is violence by the police in trying to clear the protestors out, or violence by protestors gone bad, or there is a major problem with traffic because of the protest. Otherwise no one pays attention. That is my whole point. Protests no longer are effective. They are passe. Boring. Do not get the message across. Are often ignored or treated as an inconvenience.
Vietnam and Civil Rights marches in the 60's are legitimate examples of success.
However, "recent" is a relative term. The Ice sheets from the last Ice Age have "recently" retreated according to geological time.
By recent I mean in the current political/ media climate. Say since the widespread popularity of CNN and newsbite media.
Most protests that make the news are, as I've said before, ones that turn violent, or ones that the local government cracks down on violently. To CNN that sort of thing makes good pictures.
The only protests that come to my mind recently are:
Tianimin Square, WTO protests, Million Man March on Washington, various anti-war in Iraq protests.
Tianimin Square did not bring democracy to China, The WTO protests turned violent, and the as far as I know (and I could be wrong) the Million Man March achieved nothing and there was a war in Iraq as if all those thousands (millions?) of people who marched didn't even exist.
I really do believe protests are just a nostalgia trip for those who wished they were at Woodstock and missed out.
Whether or not there was violence committed by every single protestor or just one passerby, the only part of the protest that was focused on was the violence. The peaceful, non-disruptive protestors are ignored by the media and by the people they are protesting. 60 style sit-ins and protests are no longer effective politically. They make the people participating in them feel good but they accomplish little. They are a nostalgia trip. Old hat. They might as well be going to s square dance.
You need novelty and creativity to attract attention.
That is what attracts attention to these flash crowds. They are not protestors, that is a novelty. People are trying to figure out why they are there, what is the meaning, what is the purpose. Since there is no meaning, purpose or reason, people have to expend a lot of brain power figuring it out. If it becomes a major trend then they will be ignored unless there is a lot of creativity involved in each individual "event" (and no violence)
I think that the WTO protests are a bad example. People had to resort to violence to get attention. The majority of the people were peaceful, but media felt the story was in the violence and focused on that.
A good example of peaceful protests that worked were the civil rights marches in the 60's. But that was a relatively new thing in people's minds. I think protests have become such cliche's no-one pays them any mind any more.
It's like one of the Lego built CD Changer Hacks, the MIT Practical Joke Hacks or Doom in Text Mode Hacks.
There is a mental challenge also:
It is mildly complicated to plan and organize. There is an element of imagination involved in coming up with a surreal situation to use the crowd in.
It is also like art using people.
If there was an actual practical purpose to the afore-mentioned Hacks then that would detract from the fun and Hack value of it.
In the same way, if these crowds met to protest something then people wouldn't even pay attention to them. They would see the protest signs and say - oh, more protesters.I live in NY and there are picket lines and protests everyday and they are all ignored.
The way it is now people notice the flash crowds BECAUSE there is no purpose to them.
The only time protestors are noticed is when they become violent like in Seattle, disrupt traffic or otherwise do things that are probably counter-productive to the cause they wish to promote. It might feel cool to participate in such mass protests, but I think they have little effect on policy e.g. the protests did nothing to stop the war from taking place in Iraq or in bringing home the troops.
I would actually appreciate a recent example where protests accomplished something in the US except increase security at WTO meetings.
Modern Democracy seems to me, not to let the common people make decisions about how they are to be governed. It is more a system to prevent violent changes in government.
Under, say the Roman Empire or even the late Roman Republic, you had a current leader and a rival or rivals. When the rival got enough support in the form of high public opinion from winning battles in the provinces, money from spoils won in the provinces or from old money (Crassus) or support from the Army or the Praetorian Guard he would take out the current leader (violently) and replace him.
If no-one had a clear cut advantage you would have a civil war, and there were a lot of them.
Democracy, not true Democracy but what passes for it these days, formalizes this system and removes the violence. If a rival for leadership is very organized and has a lot of connections, or a lot of money, or a lot of public support they decide to compete in an election.
If there were no elections the rival would use the money, connections or public support to stage a violent removal of whoever is currently in charge.In a violent coup, like in an election, whoever has the most money or was hooked up with the most powerful faction would win. Also like in an election, if a person can mobilize a huge number of people to his side he could also win, even if he is not aligned with the other centers of power. The winners are the same. The process is just less violent.
Modern Democracy is just a way to let the more powerful, rich, organized factions of society take power from those less rich, organized or powerful without a lot of killing and turmoil. It is not about actually letting the average man in street run things.
I think the rod logic in Diamond Age is more a mechanical thing. It is a Babbage Engine at the atomic scale with little gears and rods. This is talked about in K Eric Drexler's book that started the nanotechnology craze Engines of Creation.
The book seems to be available online.
I know this was meant to be humorous, but couldn't a low bandwith, mostly text parallel net be formed?
I would like a Fidonet type system. A lot of wireless where possible, piggy back on existing Internet via VPN otherwise. Encrypted traffic. New extended SMTP mail system that authenticates sender and recipient (No SPAM). No graphics necessary, saves bandwidth, keeps out advertisers and porn.
Keep usenet(without spam), irc,google, slashdot, email and maillists, simple web pages(stuff that show up in links or lynx or emacs) . Ditch the rest. If you want large file tranfers use the regular Internet. Or broadcast it on radio (Debian diustribution on certain frequency, continuously)
Just leave the existing Internet to AOL, MS and RealMedia et al. Take our ball and go home.
It seems to me that this is a defense department end run around an incompetent NASA.
For a while, the Space Shuttle was the only government sanctioned method of putting anything in orbit, then the first shuttle disaster happened and the military insisted on redeveloping non-reusable boosters.
Now the second disaster. The military might just think that they need their own space plane. This can put small satellites into orbit. It carries a payload to the edge of space. That payload is bombs but could be other items. It can survive the worst part of re-entry.
In the US, sadly, it is much easier to spend billions on a weapon then on a NASA budget item, especially given NASA's track record.
If this thing gets off the ground, with a few changes, after 10 or 20 years as a weapon the tech transfers into a cheap launch vehicle, and/or a hypersonic commercial airliner. DARPA does have a track record of sponsoring projects others cannot do that turn out to have non-military applications (the Internet is just one). The military purpose is just a way to get money into the research.
According to the article, the quoted scientist merely says that the permutations possible in a quipu weaving might indicate a septary (not, by any means, a binary) code. He also says he's looking for a Rosetta stone equivalent.
I am not sure this is septary or binary. The seven things refered to were 7 decision points. A decision point was something like: 1. Use wool, use cotton.2. Tie knot, don't.3.Branch to new string, don't. Each is a binary decision.
And this is not just about math as some people seem to have written. If it was binary it could be just like ASCII (Pure ASCII is 7bit). Each of the decision points could correspond to a position of the digits in a binary representation of an ASCII character (I am not saying they used ASCII, this is just an example).
In 7 bit ASCII we could label the positions as: (7654321). The bit at position 4 could be 0 or 1.
If instead of a position we had decision points then item 4 could be that there was a branch there . No branch would be 0. A branch would be 1.
You could just have one kind of decision point, knot, no knot, but you would have to have a standard length of string that must contain a knot. If I wished to send you a series of null characters I couldn't just send you a foot long string with no knots in it unless we both had rulers marked in inches and each binary digit was assigned to an inch of string, then I would know that the foot long string was 12 zeroes in a row.
This would not be very space efficient and it would be hard to read by people.
The Inca system probably evolved slowly and was added to piece by piece. It was not designed by Claude Shannon. They might have been able to simplify it to 1 or two changing symbols corresponding to 1's and 0's but I could believe it was a binary system still.
So knot,red wool branch, knot, blue cotton branch, knot, knot would mean one letter. More likely it is one symbol. The Mayan were using symbols, as were the Egyptians and Sumerians and Chinese. Most first time writing systems used symbols.(I would say pictograms but a bunch of knotted strings aren't really pictograms)
In Cunieform writing you could have a picture of a fish. The fish could mean "fish". If it had a little star next to it it could mean something to do with the gods, so it wasn't a fish anymore it was "the god of the fishes" or maybe "the god of the sea". Or it could be the "fi" sound from "fish" like in "philip". You could have a message saying that "Philip offered 5 fish as a sacrafice to the god of the sea". It would be full of fishes.
The Inca could have a standard pattern of knots, branches, colors, textile types that meant "potato" (or if you are Dan Quayle "potatoe").
Maybe you take that pattern and add a short royal blue cord to it and it becomes "the king's potato".
Or there could be a standard pattern that means "Phillip", tie on potato, tie on a certain string that means "everything on this string is a number" with 5 knots in it and this means "Phillip has 5 potatoes". Branch off the potato or number string with a symbol that means "metric ton" or "basket" and it would mean "Phillip has 5 metric tons of potatoes".
That would work for your tax records.
Stories would come later as they added symbols for verbs and adjectives.
I think the 7 decision points are more like the strokes a pen can make in Chineses Caligraphy. The strokes do not mean anything. The combinations in certain strokes makes a symbol that means something. Neither system is binary. The binary analysis would just give you an idea of how much information the system could possibly hold. To say the Inca used binary is misleading.
Do you think this could boost payloads delivered from small non-NASA suborbitals like Rutan's:
SpaceShipOne?
It would be great if you could just fly up to the edge of space, chuck your payload up, have a tether catch it and then land. Very cheap compared to rockets.
Also I wonder if the tether guys are working with: Carbon Fiber 60% stonger than steel
I guess that's what the big solar panels are for?
To convert solar energy into some kind of propulsion to boost the orbit when not in slingshot mode.
I guess because it's just easier to hit the "Search" button on IE's toolbar than it is to go to Favorites and click on Google.
Tell her to set Google as her home page. It is small and quick loading and it is better than havin AOL, MSN, Yahoo or some other bloated thing as a default homepage. Whenever I need to do a search I hit home.
IANAB (I am not a biologist) but this sounds vaguely to me like the way the human genome was sequenced. They broke up the chromosomes into millions of short overlapping sequences, sequenced the pieces and then worked out how to put them together again. I know nothing about either process but maybe someone who knows more may make something of this connection (maybe use genome algorithms, DNA fingerprinting to check code fragments ???)
Douglas Adams said in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Seriously, studies of the Bushmen hunter/gatherers that they spend less time searching for food than agriculturists spend growing it. Small groups of hunter/gatherers have less disease and violence than settled peoples. Overall hunter/gatherers have a better quality of life than primitive farmers. Maybe our ancestors were smarter than us for 140,000 years and then suddenly got stupid recently and developed civilization.
I think you are right.
I heard that they dug up a visor next to one 70,000 year old body and another had an adamantine reinforced skeleton and extra retractable claws.
Your comments do make sense but recent DNA studies show that Australian Aboriginies and the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea are descended from an 40,000 year old coastal migration from Africa. Europeans, Central Asians and American Indians are descended from a later migration.
Australian Aboriginies and Papua New Gunineans (sp?) have kinky hair and other features similiar to Africans.
In favor of your position, the skulls found are 110,000 years older than the migration I am talking about. That leaves a lot of time for changes to have taken place. The skulls are also mentioned to have a narrow nose while the people I refer to tend to have wide noses. They all live in warm climates and so would tend to independently develop adaptions to the climate similiar to Africans but if this last is the case then should not these skulls also have adaptions suitable to Africa?
Things like nasal openings, cheekbones shape, chin and forehead shapes can be measured directly from skulls. Lips and hair will always be speculative.
OK, No free long distance (problems crossing empty spaces).
OK, we need backbones.
I have very little problem with those guys. I have a big problem with the last mile companies, cable and telephone (esp. Verizon).
Is there a way to just bypass them?
Calling Socialism is wrong, since it implies a leftist economic system is the problem.
Correcting that with fascism is wrong also since it implies a right-wing extremist form of government is the problem (and Fascist were Socialists too. They Nationalized the means of production. The Nazi party was the National Socialist party.)
Both of you were aiming at TOTALITARIANISM. Where the government (or "The State") controls all aspects of society- total control, hence the name.
You can get control directly through Nationalisation of property and media as in extreme Socialism left (USSR) and right(Nazi Germany).
You can also get total control by being more subtle say by reducing the major media outlets by rewriting FCC rules to allow more consolidation.
Then consolidate industries (letting MS keep a 90% monopoly) and systems of communications (the Baby Bells and Cable Companies).
Once you have 80% of everything controlled by a few hundred people you begin gathering information on them to black mail them into implementing your decisons (NSA back doors in Windows and Exchange, News outlets not covering certain aspects of certain stories, Telecom companies implementing snooper programs ).
You could do the same thing with hundreds of small companies but it would be harder to manage and you would have more of a chance that one company would go rogue.
That is all just tinfoil hat stuff though.
What if they include some kind of proximity tester in the ad? If it detects you came into range at X time and then went out of range at X+10 seconds and it is a 20 second ad, the company buying advertising will begin to see that no-one is really paying any attention to ads. This would be just like the Web Banners and other Internet Ads that no-one clicks on. Advertisers just told the product guys that Internat Ads were worthless but Magazine, TV and Radio Ads were still good. The truth is 99% of advertising is a waste of time and money. Ad companies should avoid any technology that proves that point. It will cost them in the long run.