Most financial responsibility laws specify a very low (say $50,000) liability coverage requirement. That is about 100 times less than what you can get if you are killed in an airline crash.
If a self-driving car kills you and you can sue Google (or whoever), your heirs will get several million dollar dollars, instead of $50,000. In other words, until a self driving car has an error-rate 100 times lower than humans, they won't be made.
Stephen Wolfram is a brilliant businessman who has made a fortune charging what the market will bear for Mathematica and Alpha. Will that model break-down with the Wolfram programming language? I think it will. PARCplace tried to sell Smalltalk for awhile and the language stagnated until Alan Kay was able to get Squeak going. I can't imagine anything becoming as popular as Python or C++ if it costs thousands of dollars to get into the game.
Perhaps Wolfram will patent some of his ideas and then they will catch on 20 years later.
A classic book on the ontology of categories by George Lakoff. The tagging problem, in a nutshell, is that different cultures (and different individuals) create different category systems. The Tower of Babel on the semantic level.
Actually you can -- even if your authoring software doesn't give you fine-grained control, you can change the mix going in to optimize what come out. That doesn't mean every label does that, just that it is possible.
... because the record company can pay a mastering engineer to do the job right, adjusting the encoding parameters in wide variety of ways on a note-by-note basis.
For an example, compare a rip of a Beatles CD to what you can buy in the iTunes store. The iTunes version sounds much, much better, exactly what Apple Records (and Apple Computer) want for you.
While record companies want your money, they also want you to get the best possible product for your money. The Moral Right of the Artist.
Prostitution was legal here in San Francisco up until the early part of the 20th Century. Then we had an earthquake. This was taken by many as a sign from God that He did not approve of what was taking place here. (Plate tectonics had not caught on at this time).
Prostitution was banned, as were eventually drugs & alcohol, creating the present balance of hypocrisy.
Attempts to repeal this recently have failed. There are 3 reasons:
1) Some people view the prohibition of commercial sex as immoral and believe that legal intervention is moral. They have no problems citing the indirect effects of their prohibition as evidence for their argument.
2) This group is joined by people for whom "prostitution is against the law" is accepted as being part of the common law tradition. "If its against the law, then its bad, so we better keep it that way." (It isn't against the law in most places now, and has only been prohibited in some places for the past 100 or so years).
3) Much larger than 1) and 2) are people who think "if we make this legal, then there will be naked women standing in dim-lit red windows, offering themselves for sale", and people who would otherwise buy my house for $500,000, will only give me $350,000 for it. (Perhaps too sophisticated) - Hookers would be standing in front of my house and the neighborhood would go to hell.
Craigslist advertising, in effect, creates a "virtual stroll" that doesn't cause a real-world neighborhood impact. It is, in effect a tentative cure to the "NIMBY problem".
So we have a law that was created from illogical reasons, justified for illogical reasons, that we are afraid to repeal for illogical reasons.
What is really weird is that since humans dread being shamed for making mistakes, it is hard to get an wrongly convicted person out of prison or to repeal a law with no sensible rationale.
Legalizing prostitution requires a lot of people to admit they are wrong.
If this law was based on sound logic, it would be easy to change. It isn't, so it won't - the only hope is to invent new forms of sex work that end-around it.
Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer, and Doug Crockford put together a company to build a "Cyberspace protocol suite" for this purpose in the mid 1990s. (These gentlemen were the behind the original Lucasfilm Habitat project, inventing the term "Avatar", among many other things). At their heyday, E/C employed just about everyone with experience in this area, and wound-up burning through several million in VC money, building a virtual world platform on top of a customized Java virtual machine. The diagram on the Linden Labs Wiki looks surprisingly familiar (although the names of things are different, reflecting "memetic drift").
It was a cat herding party of monumental proportions. The first year was the design phase - it was amazing. We found out a need to fix Java so it had distributed garbage collection, closures, and the like. We made our own VM with these add-ons, and invented a world specification language called Pluribus for knitting together object aspects which represented the multi-party nature of distributed awareness.
Like many first attempts at "ontological revolution", the performance was less than spectacular. It didn't take long to build stuff that was beyond our understanding, either. Later, when aspect-oriented programming was invented, and the rest of the world starting thinking about distributed cyberspace, it has become possible to do what we were trying to do then. Even Java has caught up, co-opting most of the add-on features we had to come up with.
My advice to those approaching the problem today:
Don't reach too far beyond what the average C++/Java programmer can understand.
Don't invent anything that you can't make-do with that is already out there.
Plan on getting stuff wrong at the beginning. (E/C released their first product without a version number in the protocol!).
The start of the art of standards specification is not good enough to deal with this problem. Your only hope lies in producing a "Literate Reference Implementation". Doing that probably requires doing a rough-pass first, then recoding it.
If you attempt to assemble a "dream team" to put something like this together - be careful about the human-relations stuff. (In our first year, one of our engineers found out he was getting less money then two others and went out on a "passive-aggressive vendetta". This dampened morale during a critical time.)
There is a lot more to say about E/C and its fate. Lets hope it isn't repeated...
Bally/Midway had a nice design for a hand-controller that was simple and comfortable. It had a "gun handle", like that on a classic Colt 45 revolver, with a trigger button, that you held in one hand. Sticking out of the top was a 8 direction joystick and a rheostat knob that you twist with the other hand. It was dramatically more comfortable than the Atari and Nintendo offerings.
Unfortunately, it was prone to failures, in particular potentiometer nonlinearities in the twist knob, and bouncing contacts on the joystick. It was a "great idea poorly executed". That, and the fact that it "looked like a gun handle", did it in.
I was given Neuromancer by Timothy Leary in 1986. At the time he was involved in trying to put together a film adaptation of Gibson's novel.
It took more than one try to get into the book, and I was likewise rewarded by a major realignment of my neural patterns. Part of the problem was that Neuromancer has a weak, bleak opening (particularly in comparison with Snow Crash).
I have always wondered what strange pathways Neuromancer took from there on its way to non-production.
Thanks for the tip, A/C. Response indeed improves after you ask Hector to "turn his back on you" (which is the visual indication that you have turned off syntax hilighting and code inspection for a particular file).
It still seems to take about 3 seconds for IDEA to react to a newline typed into a JSP file which generates Javascript. However, it definitely helps to Heckle Hector.
I have sworn by IDEA for the past three major version releases. Now I find myself swearing at it sometimes. While the feature set has continued to grow impressively, the product is started to feel slow and bloated. In particular, the editors have impressive error checking features that are always on but wind up hindering you if your files start to get big or you start to do unusual things like create a JSP page that generates Javascript (for an AJAX application).
While one can refactor for better modularity when this happens, I would rather be able to turn some of the dynamic parsing off until I get my darned edits done so the screen feedback keeps up with the keyboard. (I did try looking under all the GUI rocks for the "disable" switch and I can't find one).
Still, it is better than Eclipse for what it does and I consider it worth the money I spend (about $200-$300/year) to keep it updated.
When a patent fight turns into an actual courtroom battle, there is often real money to be made by the programmers behind the original titles.
An expert witness fee can rival a lawyers hourly rate.
I have already been involved in one lawsuit where I made more from testifying about an invention being "prior art" than I did coding it up in the first place.
Of course, by the time things get to this point, the war is already underway - creating a great risk to the challenger. Most of the time a pay-off makes more business sense.
The early Z-80 based Bally Arcade console gaming system (circa 1977) came with joystick hand controls that had a pistol grip. The grips looked like the handles on a Colt revolver with the joystick sticking out of the top. You would hold the joystick by the gun-handle with one hand, work the joystick with the other, and fire the trigger with the 'holding hand'. There was also a potentiometer so you could twist the knob on top of the joystick back and forth.
The design was very good ergonometrically. Unfortunately, it was made by an outfit in Taiwan that had poor quality control, in particular the pots became noisy very quickly.
I heard somewhere of a group that got ahold of a spam email address database and sent their stuff to everybody in the country. Since everyone gets it, there is no danger of being arrested for recieving it. The spam could even have a web bug in it that pulls over more payload.
This is sort of like the numbers stations on short wave radio - you multicast downstream and use secure in-group communications upstream.
If nothing else, maybe the government involved will finally give a darn about the spam problem!
When MacroMind moved into the SoMa district of San Francisco, a large group of "content creators" set up shop nearby giving rise to "Multimedia Gultch".
In the early 1990s, they renamed the company to Macromedia. As the world shifted from CD-ROM to web delivery, both the company and creators became the world nexus for web content production, giving rise to the "dot Com" boom and bust.
Adobe, being in San Jose, is 50 miles away from this. Having lived in both cities, I know the artists won't move South, since San Jose is BORING. At least the train has been upgraded to only take an hour.
Perhaps Adobe will retain a major presence in SoMa. I hope so, since the synergy between Macromedia and the user community was and is most important.
I would pay for a silent ringtone on my Samsung SPH-600. All of the ringtones that one can assign to an incoming SMS message make noise - and there is no silent mode that can be applied to just that eventuality.
The problem is that a lot of spammers flood Sprint's gateway and when that happens, the phone rings. This is very annoying at 4AM. Yes, I can turn the ringer off globally, but then if somebody has an emergency and has a good reason to call at that time, they don't get through.
Eventually I found the web form on Sprint's system that let me opt-out of all incoming SMS messages. I had to disable that entire capability to block the $@%!* spammers from waking me up.
I read in a forensic psychology book somewhere that most of the damage that happens to children who become sexually involved with adults has to do more with the shame of the secrecy that is induced by the adult to prevent the child from telling. There are also the wierd feelings that a child has after the relationship is discovered - typically they are treated as "damaged freight" - the grownups talk about them in a very concerned way outside of their presence which causes them to feel like they are fucked-up in some deep way.
Foucault describes a curious scene in his book "The History of Sexuality", in which the first pedaphile (a village idiot) is arrested in England perhaps two centurys ago. Before then, childhood sexuality was part of everyone's experience and was not regarded as abnormal.
So we have here a situation similar to drug addiction, in which the use of stigmatization makes matters arguably worse for those we are claiming to protect.
The stigma also discourages those from seeking treatment early - no adult wants to create a medical record labeling them as a pedaphile - particularly since the moral panic is intense enough they can imagine themselves being arrested and held in prison forever "as a hygenic measure".
So can we turn down the stigma, at least for the children who get caught up in this?
The problem with marketing systems like this is that if you save someone's life, you get a thank-you note, and if you don't succeed, you get sued for 20 million dollars.
My father-in-law invented and marketed a device that automatically deployed a parachute if a skydiver did not pull the rip-cord and the alitude is less than N feet above MSL. He got out of the business in a hurry after he was sued because the device did not work when the parachute partially deployed - which slowed the descent enough not to fire the safety mechanism, but still fast enough to kill on impact.
So while an insurance company might save money, the manufacturer has a strong disincentive to deploy imperfect mechanisms for saving lives.
Imagine a phone with a micro-power radar system that images the position of your lips, tongue, vocal cords, etc. This is built into the phone and when you make a call in a public place, you whisper inaudibly and the system converts it to full-volume speech and sends it back to your ear and off to the your listener.
wouldn't a spammer have to guess the name/email address of someone with whom you have recently sent a message to for this strategy to work?
If the C/R came from an unknown address that the user does not remember sending to, then they could suspect a spammer. The email client could help by keeping track of outgoing addresses and flagging message from "someone new".
Seeing how many dummies still open email attachments from unknown people, certainly the fake C/R would work to some extent.
Slashdot Mirror
... I doubt they care what your screen size is. If you want to upscale the SD version onto your 4K TV, no problem -- it just won't look as good.
Most financial responsibility laws specify a very low (say $50,000) liability coverage requirement. That is about 100 times less than what you can get if you are killed in an airline crash.
If a self-driving car kills you and you can sue Google (or whoever), your heirs will get several million dollar dollars, instead of $50,000. In other words, until a self driving car has an error-rate 100 times lower than humans, they won't be made.
... both land and naval. They have become more sophisticated in that they can be triggered by target characteristics, and in the naval case, maneuver.
Stephen Wolfram is a brilliant businessman who has made a fortune charging what the market will bear for Mathematica and Alpha. Will that model break-down with the Wolfram programming language? I think it will. PARCplace tried to sell Smalltalk for awhile and the language stagnated until Alan Kay was able to get Squeak going. I can't imagine anything becoming as popular as Python or C++ if it costs thousands of dollars to get into the game.
Perhaps Wolfram will patent some of his ideas and then they will catch on 20 years later.
A classic book on the ontology of categories by George Lakoff. The tagging problem, in a nutshell, is that different cultures (and different individuals) create different category systems. The Tower of Babel on the semantic level.
Actually you can -- even if your authoring software doesn't give you fine-grained control, you can change the mix going in to optimize what come out. That doesn't mean every label does that, just that it is possible.
... because the record company can pay a mastering engineer to do the job right, adjusting the encoding parameters in wide variety of ways on a note-by-note basis.
For an example, compare a rip of a Beatles CD to what you can buy in the iTunes store. The iTunes version sounds much, much better, exactly what Apple Records (and Apple Computer) want for you.
While record companies want your money, they also want you to get the best possible product for your money. The Moral Right of the Artist.
Fix:
1) Some people view the commercial sexual economy as being immoral and believe that legal intervention is moral.
Prostitution was legal here in San Francisco up until the early part of the 20th Century. Then we had an earthquake. This was taken by many as a sign from God that He did not approve of what was taking place here. (Plate tectonics had not caught on at this time).
Prostitution was banned, as were eventually drugs & alcohol, creating the present balance of hypocrisy.
Attempts to repeal this recently have failed. There are 3 reasons:
1) Some people view the prohibition of commercial sex as immoral and believe that legal intervention is moral. They have no problems citing the indirect effects of their prohibition as evidence for their argument.
2) This group is joined by people for whom "prostitution is against the law" is accepted as being part of the common law tradition. "If its against the law, then its bad, so we better keep it that way." (It isn't against the law in most places now, and has only been prohibited in some places for the past 100 or so years).
3) Much larger than 1) and 2) are people who think "if we make this legal, then there will be naked women standing in dim-lit red windows, offering themselves for sale", and people who would otherwise buy my house for $500,000, will only give me $350,000 for it. (Perhaps too sophisticated) - Hookers would be standing in front of my house and the neighborhood would go to hell.
Craigslist advertising, in effect, creates a "virtual stroll" that doesn't cause a real-world neighborhood impact. It is, in effect a tentative cure to the "NIMBY problem".
So we have a law that was created from illogical reasons, justified for illogical reasons, that we are afraid to repeal for illogical reasons.
What is really weird is that since humans dread being shamed for making mistakes, it is hard to get an wrongly convicted person out of prison or to repeal a law with no sensible rationale.
Legalizing prostitution requires a lot of people to admit they are wrong.
If this law was based on sound logic, it would be easy to change. It isn't, so it won't - the only hope is to invent new forms of sex work that end-around it.
It was a cat herding party of monumental proportions. The first year was the design phase - it was amazing. We found out a need to fix Java so it had distributed garbage collection, closures, and the like. We made our own VM with these add-ons, and invented a world specification language called Pluribus for knitting together object aspects which represented the multi-party nature of distributed awareness.
Like many first attempts at "ontological revolution", the performance was less than spectacular. It didn't take long to build stuff that was beyond our understanding, either. Later, when aspect-oriented programming was invented, and the rest of the world starting thinking about distributed cyberspace, it has become possible to do what we were trying to do then. Even Java has caught up, co-opting most of the add-on features we had to come up with.
My advice to those approaching the problem today:
- Don't reach too far beyond what the average C++/Java programmer can understand.
- Don't invent anything that you can't make-do with that is already out there.
- Plan on getting stuff wrong at the beginning. (E/C released their first product without a version number in the protocol!).
- The start of the art of standards specification is not good enough to deal with this problem. Your only hope lies in producing a "Literate Reference Implementation". Doing that probably requires doing a rough-pass first, then recoding it.
- If you attempt to assemble a "dream team" to put something like this together - be careful about the human-relations stuff. (In our first year, one of our engineers found out he was getting less money then two others and went out on a "passive-aggressive vendetta". This dampened morale during a critical time.)
There is a lot more to say about E/C and its fate. Lets hope it isn't repeated...Bally/Midway had a nice design for a hand-controller that was simple and comfortable. It had a "gun handle", like that on a classic Colt 45 revolver, with a trigger button, that you held in one hand. Sticking out of the top was a 8 direction joystick and a rheostat knob that you twist with the other hand. It was dramatically more comfortable than the Atari and Nintendo offerings.
Unfortunately, it was prone to failures, in particular potentiometer nonlinearities in the twist knob, and bouncing contacts on the joystick. It was a "great idea poorly executed". That, and the fact that it "looked like a gun handle", did it in.
I was given Neuromancer by Timothy Leary in 1986. At the time he was involved in trying to put together a film adaptation of Gibson's novel.
It took more than one try to get into the book, and I was likewise rewarded by a major realignment of my neural patterns. Part of the problem was that Neuromancer has a weak, bleak opening (particularly in comparison with Snow Crash).
I have always wondered what strange pathways Neuromancer took from there on its way to non-production.
Thanks for the tip, A/C. Response indeed improves after you ask Hector to "turn his back on you" (which is the visual indication that you have turned off syntax hilighting and code inspection for a particular file).
It still seems to take about 3 seconds for IDEA to react to a newline typed into a JSP file which generates Javascript. However, it definitely helps to Heckle Hector.
I have sworn by IDEA for the past three major version releases. Now I find myself swearing at it sometimes. While the feature set has continued to grow impressively, the product is started to feel slow and bloated. In particular, the editors have impressive error checking features that are always on but wind up hindering you if your files start to get big or you start to do unusual things like create a JSP page that generates Javascript (for an AJAX application).
While one can refactor for better modularity when this happens, I would rather be able to turn some of the dynamic parsing off until I get my darned edits done so the screen feedback keeps up with the keyboard. (I did try looking under all the GUI rocks for the "disable" switch and I can't find one).
Still, it is better than Eclipse for what it does and I consider it worth the money I spend (about $200-$300/year) to keep it updated.
hydrocodone is Schedule II.
Vicodin, etc., adds acetaminophen (APAP), which dilutes the hydrocodone, and this formulation is on Schedule III.
It is much harder to sell Schedule II stuff on the Net - the law requires handwritten prescriptions in triplicate.
Of course, the druggies have figured out how to get rid of the APAP with kitchen chemistry.
Back in the late 1970s, we used to take the Polapulse batteries out of used Polaroid SX-70 film packs and used them to power LED jewelry.
t ml
One woman wore a 2732 as a pendant and claimed the title EPROM Queen.
Lately, I have been teaching middle school girls how to make LED jewelry out of lithium batteries. This is all explained at:
http://members.tgforum.com/jamie/Articles/gnerd.h
When a patent fight turns into an actual courtroom battle, there is often real money to be made by the programmers behind the original titles.
An expert witness fee can rival a lawyers hourly rate.
I have already been involved in one lawsuit where I made more from testifying about an invention being "prior art" than I did coding it up in the first place.
Of course, by the time things get to this point, the war is already underway - creating a great risk to the challenger. Most of the time a pay-off makes more business sense.
The early Z-80 based Bally Arcade console gaming system (circa 1977) came with joystick hand controls that had a pistol grip. The grips looked like the handles on a Colt revolver with the joystick sticking out of the top. You would hold the joystick by the gun-handle with one hand, work the joystick with the other, and fire the trigger with the 'holding hand'. There was also a potentiometer so you could twist the knob on top of the joystick back and forth.
The design was very good ergonometrically. Unfortunately, it was made by an outfit in Taiwan that had poor quality control, in particular the pots became noisy very quickly.
I heard somewhere of a group that got ahold of a spam email address database and sent their stuff to everybody in the country. Since everyone gets it, there is no danger of being arrested for recieving it. The spam could even have a web bug in it that pulls over more payload.
This is sort of like the numbers stations on short wave radio - you multicast downstream and use secure in-group communications upstream.
If nothing else, maybe the government involved will finally give a darn about the spam problem!
When MacroMind moved into the SoMa district of San Francisco, a large group of "content creators" set up shop nearby giving rise to "Multimedia Gultch".
In the early 1990s, they renamed the company to Macromedia. As the world shifted from CD-ROM to web delivery, both the company and creators became the world nexus for web content production, giving rise to the "dot Com" boom and bust.
Adobe, being in San Jose, is 50 miles away from this. Having lived in both cities, I know the artists won't move South, since San Jose is BORING. At least the train has been upgraded to only take an hour.
Perhaps Adobe will retain a major presence in SoMa. I hope so, since the synergy between Macromedia and the user community was and is most important.
I would pay for a silent ringtone on my Samsung SPH-600. All of the ringtones that one can assign to an incoming SMS message make noise - and there is no silent mode that can be applied to just that eventuality.
The problem is that a lot of spammers flood Sprint's gateway and when that happens, the phone rings. This is very annoying at 4AM. Yes, I can turn the ringer off globally, but then if somebody has an emergency and has a good reason to call at that time, they don't get through.
Eventually I found the web form on Sprint's system that let me opt-out of all incoming SMS messages. I had to disable that entire capability to block the $@%!* spammers from waking me up.
I read in a forensic psychology book somewhere that most of the damage that happens to children who become sexually involved with adults has to do more with the shame of the secrecy that is induced by the adult to prevent the child from telling. There are also the wierd feelings that a child has after the relationship is discovered - typically they are treated as "damaged freight" - the grownups talk about them in a very concerned way outside of their presence which causes them to feel like they are fucked-up in some deep way.
Foucault describes a curious scene in his book "The History of Sexuality", in which the first pedaphile (a village idiot) is arrested in England perhaps two centurys ago. Before then, childhood sexuality was part of everyone's experience and was not regarded as abnormal.
So we have here a situation similar to drug addiction, in which the use of stigmatization makes matters arguably worse for those we are claiming to protect.
The stigma also discourages those from seeking treatment early - no adult wants to create a medical record labeling them as a pedaphile - particularly since the moral panic is intense enough they can imagine themselves being arrested and held in prison forever "as a hygenic measure".
So can we turn down the stigma, at least for the children who get caught up in this?
The problem with marketing systems like this is that if you save someone's life, you get a thank-you note, and if you don't succeed, you get sued for 20 million dollars.
My father-in-law invented and marketed a device that automatically deployed a parachute if a skydiver did not pull the rip-cord and the alitude is less than N feet above MSL. He got out of the business in a hurry after he was sued because the device did not work when the parachute partially deployed - which slowed the descent enough not to fire the safety mechanism, but still fast enough to kill on impact.
So while an insurance company might save money, the manufacturer has a strong disincentive to deploy imperfect mechanisms for saving lives.
Imagine a phone with a micro-power radar system that images the position of your lips, tongue, vocal cords, etc. This is built into the phone and when you make a call in a public place, you whisper inaudibly and the system converts it to full-volume speech and sends it back to your ear and off to the your listener.
Civil tranquility restored?
wouldn't a spammer have to guess the name/email address of someone with whom you have recently sent a message to for this strategy to work?
If the C/R came from an unknown address that the user does not remember sending to, then they could suspect a spammer. The email client could help by keeping track of outgoing addresses and flagging message from "someone new".
Seeing how many dummies still open email attachments from unknown people, certainly the fake C/R would work to some extent.