They're not clear about it, but I suspect that "proprietary technology" means that they own a bunch of patents that are realized in this device. Which means that if you make a major step, they don't own it, but if you include their device in your setup you're going to have to buy it from them or license their technology.
That's actually roughly the way the patent system is supposed to work: you invent something, then you make it public in return for a guarantee that nobody else will make the same thing. The next guy improves on it, but has to pay you part of what he sells it for. It makes more sense with big, heavy, manufactured things than with software, where the "advances" are usually fairly simple and readily reproducible.
Both Agent and XNews do that job better than Outlook. I use XNews, personally. Not perfect, and as far as I can tell it's not getting any better, but it does the things I need it to do and it isn't Outlook.
The SPYBLOCK bill hasn't passed yet; as far as I can tell it hasn't passed the Senate and there is no corresponding House bill at all.
And it doesn't precisely make spyware illegal. It forces spyware makers to make clearer that you're installing spyware. In particular, it makes it illegal to bury the spyware deep in the EULA; you have to state it clearly.
The article suggests that it won't help; people are installing spyware consciously. It doesn't force them to say, "The Google toolbar does the same thing without the massive privacy violations and performance hits of this piece of crap."
No it's not, at least not in my experience. Polygraphs that I've seen measure respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, and sweat. The goal is to measure your physical tension, with the idea that you tense up when you lie. I won't vouch for its accuracy (in my experience, pretty low), but I've never seen one which measures anything about the brain directly.
You're right: it's a boring strategy. I'm afraid science is boring. You've never seen bored until you've seen armies of grad students moving mountains with a toothbrush or performing assays of thousands of experiments to find a gene. Slow and careful is dull, but it's how you avoid missing things. Especially when your experimental subject is irreplaceable.
But your opinion and mine may actually be closer than it appears. I said in the grandparent post that I'm not opposed to exploration. Sending up even a few thousand people will do no noticeable damage to the planet; it's a really, really big place. Yeah, they'll screw up the local area with trash and mining it for resources, but I'm not really worried about that. I'm not even terribly worried about the microbes that'll eventually make their way out, because they'll spread very, very slowly. I hope.
What I'm opposed to is the common Slashdot attitude that the first thing we should do is to crash a few comets into the thing so that we can live there without space suits. Scientific colonies under glass? Fine with me. Wiping the thing out because it would be neat to live there? Fine also, but at least wait a few centuries first.
I disagree with your premise that we don't have that kind of time. The human race has been around for ten million years.
Sure, we've found plenty of ways to wipe it out in a few short years, but what we're mostly talking about is wiping out the culture, not the race. Global warming would radically alter our way of life, and nuclear winter would reduce our race to where we were ten thousand years ago, but neither one would wipe us out. If the planet is overpopulated, it's due to our rate of growth; we'd do exactly the same thing to a new planet, and make it useless in a few centuries, too. If we overpopulate here, billions will starve and civiliation may collapse, but the race will go on. You can't save those billions by going to another planet, unless somehow you plan to ship those billions there as well (and convince them to remain billions rather than becoming tens or hundreds of billions.)
I'm not for any of those things, of course, but if they delay our life on that rock by two hundred centuries or so, that's just fine with me. Don't mess with the thing we don't understand. I can't imagine that we'll start anything in a new place with any less stupidity, hatred, and lack of foresight than we've shown here.
I'm looking on scales of thousands of years, because Mars got where it is over billions of them, and because it will take us tens of thousands to get to anything like it. If those time scales incorporate the wiping out and rebuilding of civilization, Mars won't care. It'll wait.
When you mess with the atmosphere, you mess with every surface rock on the planet all at once. We'll never know what the old atmosphere did to the surface rocks.
If terraforming will take centuries, let's wait a few centuries before even beginning.
My favorite was a local candidate whose ad started with Bob Marley singing Get Up Stand Up. I'd let the answering machine get it and the next thing I knew, somebody had called to play some reggae at me. It was kinda cool until he came on explaining why I should vote for him.
The funny part is that my house isn't even in his district. (He won anyway.) Fortunately for me, living in a solid blue state means nobody really cared who I voted for, so I got fairly few of these calls.
Then here's an idea: how about we leave the entire thing off limits for another couple of centuries until we've had a chance to study it?
It's brand new. It's totally pristine. It contains applications of geology, meteorology, and maybe even biology that have never been seen before.
I'd be all for scientific expeditions to Mars, even long term ones, but I can't see the point in sending anybody there to live for any purpose other than science. Take a couple of centuries and watch the climate change without significant human interference. Humanity has waited millions of years to get there; a few centuries won't make any difference.
(Especially if you're talking about "terraforming" it. We don't have the slightest idea what's on that planet and we're already talking about making it look just like here. Please, please, please let the geophysicists and soil chemists and wind science guys have a good solid look at the place before you start changing its chemistry permanently.)
And in fact, the article credits "Rick Weiss/The Washington Post".
One doesn't ordinarily expect to see major scientific news break in the Myrtle Beach Online. I'm sure it's a fine paper, but nearly every local newspaper gets its national news from a wire service like AP, or a "national" paper (Washington Post, New York Times, occasionally the LA Times or Chicago Tribune or a handful of others).
I grew up with the Washington Post as my daily newspaper, in which local news rarely makes the front page, or even the front section. Going away to college and reading the Richmond Times-Dispatch (a fine paper, actually, which occasionally breaks national news stories itself, but basically a local newspaper) was rather disorienting.
Exactly. Why not just open a regular music store like iTMS, or just make stuff available on iTMS itself (or one of its competitors)?
Maybe they think that the thrill in P2P is the feeling like you're participating in the process, as opposed to the obvious upside of getting your music for free, and that everything ever made is available.
If they wanted to play hardball they'd stop selling CDs entirely and switch only to DRM'ed formats.
The indie labels are exactly where they always were: indepdendent. They've had the right for years to make their music available in any form they want. Put it on the existing P2P networks, make it available to download through iTMS or another service, put it on their web site.
The big record labels have always had the marketing advantage. That's what makes them the big record labels. The indies' upside is that they can make any sort of music they want; the downside is that because they're not aggressively targeting the mainstream, nobody's ever heard of them.
I don't think this changes anything. If the indies want to be noticed they need to develop their own ways. They should be more flexible than the Big Four, not just piggyback on their successes.
Clearly the poster knew that live cds were available, but he wanted a forum for which one would be best. Slashdot seems as good a place as any. There's Usenet as well, but it's not moderated, which makes it harder to find an answer and you end up reading a lot more trolls.
It's also relevant because it's kind of a neat stocking stuffer idea. Incomparably nerdy, but still neat.
Thanks; I missed that part. But without knowing how much of that is batteries I can't begin to say how much of it is structural steel.
But I admit I'm very impressed. That's heavy, and I suspect that the body required to make the thing safe would require adding only a few hundred kgs, or perhaps as much as 500 kg (since it has to stop the existing 2300 kg in a had-on collsion; that will require a substantial crumple zone.) But that's definitely a good start.
It's somewhat misleading to compare these to your car, because your car carries around a lot of extra weight for safety. The article doesn't say how much this weighs, but it wouldn't surprise me if the range were reduced by half by the time they made the thing safe enough to drive on a US road.
I'm sure I'll hear the usual arguments about how it wouldn't need all that if it didn't have to worry about splatting into a three ton SUV, but drivers (even electric car drivers) screw up and plow into things like trees. Cars have lots of extra metal to save passengers when that happens, and that metal is heavy. It's less heavy in a cleverly-designed Japanese car with crumple zones, as opposed to an American-built behemoth that depends on sheer mass to solve the problem, but it adds to the weight of every production car.
I'm not entirely certain what this car has that's new that allows it to be faster, and I hope whatever it is will scale to build a real car. Electric cars have a lot of potential to supplant gas and help break the dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But the figures can easily mislead you into believing that's closer than it is.
Paragraph 13 talks about using NOT (a IS b), and declares: "Such a language construction is ungrammatical, requires more typing and violates the philosophy on which BASIC rests. It would be helpful therefore, if a single more intuitive operator could perform the function that the combination of the two operators Is and Not typically performs."
I honestly don't get that; I don't find it any more "ungrammatical" with respect to English than, say, "DIM a AS x", and as far as I recall it's perfectly grammatical BASIC. As for the extra typing, I don't think four extra keystrokes are going to kill you.
I'm usually a patent apologist around here, but I've read this one in some detail and I've got nothin'. It's just stupid. If they want it to mean that they get to own the ISNOT keyword and no other BASIC implementations can have it, I suppose that's not the worst abuse of the patent system I've ever seen, but it sure seems like a waste of their money on something that is easily worked around.
TiVo stock was up 7% yesterday on no news whatsoever and another 4% today. (Where "no news whatsoever" means "already known through back channels to everybody on the rumor boards, as well as close personal friends of the executives.)
So the people who own TiVo seem to think that this is a profitable idea. Not just "profitable" in the sense of "charging more" but profitable in the sense of "making more money total", i.e. revenue - customers lost - lawsuits.
For $19.95 you can own a copy of a movie which cost $150 million to make, and you can watch it as many times as you want, and show it to as many friends as you want (as long as you don't charge 'em for it). You can even loan it to your friends. Or wait a few months and buy the used copy at Blockbuster for $12. Just how cheap do you want it?
I know everybody's counting on exponential growth of nanotube-strength structures, but right now the longest nanotubes with the required strength are millimeters long. I once heard on Slashdot, "Once you can build a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a stream on campus, then we can start discussing a cable 40,000 kilometers long."
So I'll take that as my starting point. I'll stop laughing when I see that 40 meter horizontal bridge, that's still five orders of magnitude away. Then we can start talking about the remaining six orders of magnitude straight up.
So yeah, I'd believe it could be ten years from that point. How far are we away from that point? Well, I dunno, but I'm guessing that if it's ten years for the remaining six orders of magnitude it's probably the same 10 for the first six. In other words, I'll be laughing for another decade.
And a dollar per pound? I don't think you could ever see that. If my figures are right (.5 kg * 40,000 km * 9.8 m/s/s), that's about 10^11 joules = 30,000 kw-hours = 94 million BTUs. My last electric bill was for $.0045 per kilowatt-hour, or $135. In gasoline that's 755 gallons of gas (at 125K BTUs per gallon), or $1,500 where I live.
(As a check, that's about 1% of the current price.)
Yeah, the fuel is cheaper when you're buying it in bulk, but still, we're talking about two to three orders of magnitude more than a buck a pound. And that's just the energy cost; it doesn't amortize the cable itself, friction losses, and the other costs that always seem to add up. In other words, a buck a pound isn't going to happen without a separate revolution in energy production as well.
I like the look of the cold soldering iron. I don't do very much electronics, so I only own a cheap soldering iron, which is very inconvenient (slow to heat up, corded). This thing isn't terribly expensive ($20) and sounds useful.
I was under the impression that it was easier to collimate a laser beam than a point source which is spreading in all directions. You do that with a plain-old parabolic mirror, but I gather it's difficult to get a really tight focus that way.
You can throw a cheapo laser pointer beam into a tiny point hundreds of feet away, and I've never seen a comparable effect with a flashlight, even an LED.
I know the difference between collimation and coherence, but not being a physicist I'm not sure why (or if) lasers collimate better.
The advantage is that lasers are collimated, which means that the light doesn't spread out in a cone. Since you're concentrating the energy on a few hundred square miles rather than a few million square miles, you can broadcast with a lot less power. You can also make much more reliable communications, which means your bandwidth is higher.
In theory you can do this with any wavelength of light; if you do it with microwaves it's called a maser rather than a laser. Higher frequencies mean more bits, which is a good reason to choose light over microwaves, but the light is absorbed by clouds. I'm not sure about microwave frequencies, and I'm not sure if anybody's ever built a laser-type thing for radio frequencies (raser? I find people joking about it on the Internet but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me).
Eventually you might want a relay system: Mars to earth-orbiting satellite via laser, which then amplifies it and relays it to the earth on a frequency which cuts through coulds better, or just saves it up for a time when it can get through. But the first step is to see if you can get light accurately aimed at the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not clear about it, but I suspect that "proprietary technology" means that they own a bunch of patents that are realized in this device. Which means that if you make a major step, they don't own it, but if you include their device in your setup you're going to have to buy it from them or license their technology.
That's actually roughly the way the patent system is supposed to work: you invent something, then you make it public in return for a guarantee that nobody else will make the same thing. The next guy improves on it, but has to pay you part of what he sells it for. It makes more sense with big, heavy, manufactured things than with software, where the "advances" are usually fairly simple and readily reproducible.
Both Agent and XNews do that job better than Outlook. I use XNews, personally. Not perfect, and as far as I can tell it's not getting any better, but it does the things I need it to do and it isn't Outlook.
The SPYBLOCK bill hasn't passed yet; as far as I can tell it hasn't passed the Senate and there is no corresponding House bill at all.
And it doesn't precisely make spyware illegal. It forces spyware makers to make clearer that you're installing spyware. In particular, it makes it illegal to bury the spyware deep in the EULA; you have to state it clearly.
The article suggests that it won't help; people are installing spyware consciously. It doesn't force them to say, "The Google toolbar does the same thing without the massive privacy violations and performance hits of this piece of crap."
You end up with 100 non-holes in negative space. It must be spectacular to look at.
No it's not, at least not in my experience. Polygraphs that I've seen measure respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, and sweat. The goal is to measure your physical tension, with the idea that you tense up when you lie. I won't vouch for its accuracy (in my experience, pretty low), but I've never seen one which measures anything about the brain directly.
You're right: it's a boring strategy. I'm afraid science is boring. You've never seen bored until you've seen armies of grad students moving mountains with a toothbrush or performing assays of thousands of experiments to find a gene. Slow and careful is dull, but it's how you avoid missing things. Especially when your experimental subject is irreplaceable.
But your opinion and mine may actually be closer than it appears. I said in the grandparent post that I'm not opposed to exploration. Sending up even a few thousand people will do no noticeable damage to the planet; it's a really, really big place. Yeah, they'll screw up the local area with trash and mining it for resources, but I'm not really worried about that. I'm not even terribly worried about the microbes that'll eventually make their way out, because they'll spread very, very slowly. I hope.
What I'm opposed to is the common Slashdot attitude that the first thing we should do is to crash a few comets into the thing so that we can live there without space suits. Scientific colonies under glass? Fine with me. Wiping the thing out because it would be neat to live there? Fine also, but at least wait a few centuries first.
I disagree with your premise that we don't have that kind of time. The human race has been around for ten million years.
Sure, we've found plenty of ways to wipe it out in a few short years, but what we're mostly talking about is wiping out the culture, not the race. Global warming would radically alter our way of life, and nuclear winter would reduce our race to where we were ten thousand years ago, but neither one would wipe us out. If the planet is overpopulated, it's due to our rate of growth; we'd do exactly the same thing to a new planet, and make it useless in a few centuries, too. If we overpopulate here, billions will starve and civiliation may collapse, but the race will go on. You can't save those billions by going to another planet, unless somehow you plan to ship those billions there as well (and convince them to remain billions rather than becoming tens or hundreds of billions.)
I'm not for any of those things, of course, but if they delay our life on that rock by two hundred centuries or so, that's just fine with me. Don't mess with the thing we don't understand. I can't imagine that we'll start anything in a new place with any less stupidity, hatred, and lack of foresight than we've shown here.
I'm looking on scales of thousands of years, because Mars got where it is over billions of them, and because it will take us tens of thousands to get to anything like it. If those time scales incorporate the wiping out and rebuilding of civilization, Mars won't care. It'll wait.
When you mess with the atmosphere, you mess with every surface rock on the planet all at once. We'll never know what the old atmosphere did to the surface rocks.
If terraforming will take centuries, let's wait a few centuries before even beginning.
My favorite was a local candidate whose ad started with Bob Marley singing Get Up Stand Up. I'd let the answering machine get it and the next thing I knew, somebody had called to play some reggae at me. It was kinda cool until he came on explaining why I should vote for him.
The funny part is that my house isn't even in his district. (He won anyway.) Fortunately for me, living in a solid blue state means nobody really cared who I voted for, so I got fairly few of these calls.
Then here's an idea: how about we leave the entire thing off limits for another couple of centuries until we've had a chance to study it?
It's brand new. It's totally pristine. It contains applications of geology, meteorology, and maybe even biology that have never been seen before.
I'd be all for scientific expeditions to Mars, even long term ones, but I can't see the point in sending anybody there to live for any purpose other than science. Take a couple of centuries and watch the climate change without significant human interference. Humanity has waited millions of years to get there; a few centuries won't make any difference.
(Especially if you're talking about "terraforming" it. We don't have the slightest idea what's on that planet and we're already talking about making it look just like here. Please, please, please let the geophysicists and soil chemists and wind science guys have a good solid look at the place before you start changing its chemistry permanently.)
And in fact, the article credits "Rick Weiss/The Washington Post".
One doesn't ordinarily expect to see major scientific news break in the Myrtle Beach Online. I'm sure it's a fine paper, but nearly every local newspaper gets its national news from a wire service like AP, or a "national" paper (Washington Post, New York Times, occasionally the LA Times or Chicago Tribune or a handful of others).
I grew up with the Washington Post as my daily newspaper, in which local news rarely makes the front page, or even the front section. Going away to college and reading the Richmond Times-Dispatch (a fine paper, actually, which occasionally breaks national news stories itself, but basically a local newspaper) was rather disorienting.
Exactly. Why not just open a regular music store like iTMS, or just make stuff available on iTMS itself (or one of its competitors)?
Maybe they think that the thrill in P2P is the feeling like you're participating in the process, as opposed to the obvious upside of getting your music for free, and that everything ever made is available.
If they wanted to play hardball they'd stop selling CDs entirely and switch only to DRM'ed formats.
The indie labels are exactly where they always were: indepdendent. They've had the right for years to make their music available in any form they want. Put it on the existing P2P networks, make it available to download through iTMS or another service, put it on their web site.
The big record labels have always had the marketing advantage. That's what makes them the big record labels. The indies' upside is that they can make any sort of music they want; the downside is that because they're not aggressively targeting the mainstream, nobody's ever heard of them.
I don't think this changes anything. If the indies want to be noticed they need to develop their own ways. They should be more flexible than the Big Four, not just piggyback on their successes.
Clearly the poster knew that live cds were available, but he wanted a forum for which one would be best. Slashdot seems as good a place as any. There's Usenet as well, but it's not moderated, which makes it harder to find an answer and you end up reading a lot more trolls.
It's also relevant because it's kind of a neat stocking stuffer idea. Incomparably nerdy, but still neat.
Thanks; I missed that part. But without knowing how much of that is batteries I can't begin to say how much of it is structural steel.
But I admit I'm very impressed. That's heavy, and I suspect that the body required to make the thing safe would require adding only a few hundred kgs, or perhaps as much as 500 kg (since it has to stop the existing 2300 kg in a had-on collsion; that will require a substantial crumple zone.) But that's definitely a good start.
It's somewhat misleading to compare these to your car, because your car carries around a lot of extra weight for safety. The article doesn't say how much this weighs, but it wouldn't surprise me if the range were reduced by half by the time they made the thing safe enough to drive on a US road.
I'm sure I'll hear the usual arguments about how it wouldn't need all that if it didn't have to worry about splatting into a three ton SUV, but drivers (even electric car drivers) screw up and plow into things like trees. Cars have lots of extra metal to save passengers when that happens, and that metal is heavy. It's less heavy in a cleverly-designed Japanese car with crumple zones, as opposed to an American-built behemoth that depends on sheer mass to solve the problem, but it adds to the weight of every production car.
I'm not entirely certain what this car has that's new that allows it to be faster, and I hope whatever it is will scale to build a real car. Electric cars have a lot of potential to supplant gas and help break the dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But the figures can easily mislead you into believing that's closer than it is.
Paragraph 13 talks about using NOT (a IS b), and declares: "Such a language construction is ungrammatical, requires more typing and violates the philosophy on which BASIC rests. It would be helpful therefore, if a single more intuitive operator could perform the function that the combination of the two operators Is and Not typically performs."
I honestly don't get that; I don't find it any more "ungrammatical" with respect to English than, say, "DIM a AS x", and as far as I recall it's perfectly grammatical BASIC. As for the extra typing, I don't think four extra keystrokes are going to kill you.
I'm usually a patent apologist around here, but I've read this one in some detail and I've got nothin'. It's just stupid. If they want it to mean that they get to own the ISNOT keyword and no other BASIC implementations can have it, I suppose that's not the worst abuse of the patent system I've ever seen, but it sure seems like a waste of their money on something that is easily worked around.
TiVo stock was up 7% yesterday on no news whatsoever and another 4% today. (Where "no news whatsoever" means "already known through back channels to everybody on the rumor boards, as well as close personal friends of the executives.)
So the people who own TiVo seem to think that this is a profitable idea. Not just "profitable" in the sense of "charging more" but profitable in the sense of "making more money total", i.e. revenue - customers lost - lawsuits.
For $19.95 you can own a copy of a movie which cost $150 million to make, and you can watch it as many times as you want, and show it to as many friends as you want (as long as you don't charge 'em for it). You can even loan it to your friends. Or wait a few months and buy the used copy at Blockbuster for $12. Just how cheap do you want it?
Sorry, I'm not sure I'm done laughing yet.
I know everybody's counting on exponential growth of nanotube-strength structures, but right now the longest nanotubes with the required strength are millimeters long. I once heard on Slashdot, "Once you can build a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a stream on campus, then we can start discussing a cable 40,000 kilometers long."
So I'll take that as my starting point. I'll stop laughing when I see that 40 meter horizontal bridge, that's still five orders of magnitude away. Then we can start talking about the remaining six orders of magnitude straight up.
So yeah, I'd believe it could be ten years from that point. How far are we away from that point? Well, I dunno, but I'm guessing that if it's ten years for the remaining six orders of magnitude it's probably the same 10 for the first six. In other words, I'll be laughing for another decade.
And a dollar per pound? I don't think you could ever see that. If my figures are right (.5 kg * 40,000 km * 9.8 m/s/s), that's about 10^11 joules = 30,000 kw-hours = 94 million BTUs. My last electric bill was for $.0045 per kilowatt-hour, or $135. In gasoline that's 755 gallons of gas (at 125K BTUs per gallon), or $1,500 where I live.
(As a check, that's about 1% of the current price.)
Yeah, the fuel is cheaper when you're buying it in bulk, but still, we're talking about two to three orders of magnitude more than a buck a pound. And that's just the energy cost; it doesn't amortize the cable itself, friction losses, and the other costs that always seem to add up. In other words, a buck a pound isn't going to happen without a separate revolution in energy production as well.
Clever. Thank you.
I like the look of the cold soldering iron. I don't do very much electronics, so I only own a cheap soldering iron, which is very inconvenient (slow to heat up, corded). This thing isn't terribly expensive ($20) and sounds useful.
Anybody ever tried it? Does it really work?
I was under the impression that it was easier to collimate a laser beam than a point source which is spreading in all directions. You do that with a plain-old parabolic mirror, but I gather it's difficult to get a really tight focus that way.
You can throw a cheapo laser pointer beam into a tiny point hundreds of feet away, and I've never seen a comparable effect with a flashlight, even an LED.
I know the difference between collimation and coherence, but not being a physicist I'm not sure why (or if) lasers collimate better.
The advantage is that lasers are collimated, which means that the light doesn't spread out in a cone. Since you're concentrating the energy on a few hundred square miles rather than a few million square miles, you can broadcast with a lot less power. You can also make much more reliable communications, which means your bandwidth is higher.
In theory you can do this with any wavelength of light; if you do it with microwaves it's called a maser rather than a laser. Higher frequencies mean more bits, which is a good reason to choose light over microwaves, but the light is absorbed by clouds. I'm not sure about microwave frequencies, and I'm not sure if anybody's ever built a laser-type thing for radio frequencies (raser? I find people joking about it on the Internet but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me).
Eventually you might want a relay system: Mars to earth-orbiting satellite via laser, which then amplifies it and relays it to the earth on a frequency which cuts through coulds better, or just saves it up for a time when it can get through. But the first step is to see if you can get light accurately aimed at the Earth.
That's it! Instead of a hard disk I'll just put a reflector on Mars. (Too bad it's only available a few hours a day.)
I guess 4.3 gigs isn't a big hard disk any more. Better build one on Saturn instead.