"If not for WHOIS, we could not have sued as many people as we did!" -- Stevan D. Mitchell Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy Interactive Digital Software Association, paraphrased. This is a good thing for who?
Next step, flying bots...
on
BYO Battlebot
·
· Score: 2
I don't know why someone hasn't come up with a flying bot yet? It would not be too hard to strip an RC helicopter for parts and put a powerdrill pointed down right under the rotors (or two power drills of you have to balance the torque). You just zip around the ring, line up the drills right over the power source of your enemy bot and just bore into them while they flail wildly trying to poke you with thier little ineffectual weapons...
...Man, I wish I had either money or free time to play with battlebots!
How do the kids do it? Common sense and freedom..
on
IANAL
·
· Score: 1
It isn't that "you needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority" like it says in the article. Kids aren't magical, they don't have some kind of super creative power that adults lose, it isn't like that at all. What they do have is a completely anarchic and egalitarian information infrastructure where ideas can be passed easily and freely.
Information, ideas, theories, all the things that we refer to as "IP" in the adult world are unrestricted in the child world. There is no "approval" proccess, noone in particular is accountable for a good or bad idea. I can't tell you the number of incredibly good ideas that get summarily flushed down the toilet becuase they don't fit the personal vision of one particular manager or one particular corperate philosophy, or else they require IP from another company to implement and leverage fully. And I know each and every one of you have seen the same thing happen.
You have to realize in the childhood world, there is no IP, no atrificial rules that have to be followed in the free exchange of ideas. If a child thinks technology A can be used with technology B, she'll just go and blurt it out, but won't be concerned with how patents will get in the way or how technology B has been aquired by a rival company. If a child thinks idea C is a good one, he'll tell his friends, and the group as a whole will decide what is good and what is crap.
I know I am dangerously close to "information wants to be free" propaganda, but the truth of the matter is, when you have free exchange of information and open communication of ideas, you get amazing results, every time. This isn't something new. Open source projects have been using variations on this theme for years, and every time the brilliance and insight that this kind of proccess promotes is undeniable...
Well, if you consider stories like the boy who built his own breeder reactor, you really have to ask yourself if worrying about plutonium is really an issue these days? If somone like that can at least begin to make uranium and plutonium in his back yard, I have a feeling that all the scary terrorists out there already have a nice litle stockpile already...
I am always amazed at what a far cry from our founding fathers these little tiny, narrow-sighted minds of our legislators are. Which is going to bring more money into L.A.:
a) Satellite taxes which will only be effective ONCE becuase the next all of the companies that have satellites will be moving out (costing jobs, housing, industries that support such companies)
b) Lowering taxes for aerospace companies and encouraging thier growth (and thus building new jobs, raising property values, creating entire enconomies based on the needs of those high-tech companies)
I see quotes in the article like "Worth as much as $100 million each to Hughes Electronics in El Segundo, the satellites could bring in millions of dollars a year in taxes to schools and government." But that is an amazingly childish way of thinking. Sure you will get one round of taxes out of them, and you will look all smart and suave to your voters (Taxes are FOR THE CHILDREN! Think of the schools!), but next year when your high-tech companies have left and you have soaring unemployment and now are getting no revenue from your stupid taxes, then you'll have to ask yourself what good you actually did.
I was downloading something (I think it was IE 5.5), and when it came around to showing me the liscense, all it said was something like "Cannot find blahblah.txt" or something like that. So I hit agree. Now, does this mean I am free to use and redistribute IE 5.5 however I wish just as long as I don't go and "find blahblah.txt"? How can you prove that the liscence you clicked on said the same things that whoever wrote the liscence thinks it does? Without taking a jpeg snapshot of the screen (just copying the text won't do, the text might be rendered wrong) and time-stamping it and encrypting it, how can any big company ever come and try to prove that thier individual liscense to you said "such and such"? Any lawyers out there have thoughts on this?
"How to make money by telling people how they can make money by telling people how to make money!" is my new paperback book, out in stores this August. By youself an advance copy today, becuase they are going so fast that I'm already running out of people who want an advanced copy... heh.
You make some good points, and things ARE getting better in Japan, but there are still a lot of obstacles in the way to getting the near ubiquitous net access that you see in the US.
Telehodai is a great example. Sure you can make unlimited calls from 10pm-8am, but you are still paying $20 a month on top of your ISP charges, and it is a terrible roadblock to people who want to put up servers in thier homes or to those who really want to participate in the net community.
As far as computers themselves are concerned, yes Japan makes some really incredible laptops, and there is a growing community of users, but because of the increased performance requirements (Japanese machines usually need to be faster and need more memory than thier American counterparts, if for no other reason than being able to display the language itself) they become cost prohibitive for many consumers.
And finally, the language barrier I was referring to was the fact that computers (and computer languages) are almost universally refered to by thier English terms. Sure the Japanese can figure out the Japanese terms for Mhz, GB, RAM or whatever (terms even ENGLISH speaks sometimes have trouble dealing with), but there still is a fundamental divide that occours when you foce people to use another language to understand your products. It isn't insurmountable, but it is just one more thing that must be overcome to participate.
Here in San Francisco, I have my machine up almost 24/7, and I am constantly writing email, checking out slashdot, K5, cnn and the like, all during the day, writing emails every so often, and generally squeezing every last bit of usefulness I can out of the internet round the clock. Without things like unlimited local calls, broad-band available across the board, and cheaper PCs Japan will always lag behind.
...and I was amazed by two things. First, by thier technology. They have a great deal of what we would call "gagetry", lots of things will bells and whistles, cell phones with GPS and a range finder for the nearest train station, web browsers, voice recognition. And second, by thier LACK of computers. When it comes to computers, they were suprisingly behind the times. Computers were amazingly expensive (compared to the US at the time. I think what would have cost $500 in the US then would have cost over $2,000 in Japan), they were hard to use. Setting up an ISP account could take you a month or more and cost you a great deal of money. And since all calls cost per minute (this includes local calls) the internet is only for the rich or the incredibly geeky (and due to the language barrier, there are few resources for the "geeks" in Japan). What's more, people in Japan have no fear of thier gagets at all, but when it comes to computers they become as pertified as your grandmother setting up AOL for the first time. Things are going to eventually have to change in Japan, but they are still a long way off...
So I guess instead of paying a PR firm to promote your product, just sue somone famous. It won't cost you much if you are prepared to lose, and you get all sorts of publicity for free!
Wow, it looks like another scripting language is coming out every couple of months, I'm amazed! I wonder just how long it will be before they run out of compiled languages to mimic and they start making hybrid scripting languages. I can see the articles headlines now: "Visual Pyavel Basic++ combines the flexibility of Perl, the power of Python, the simplicity of Java, the comment syntax of Visual Basic, and a few operator overloading doohickeys from c++ (just for good measure) to make the world's ultimate scripting language! Get your copy today (Warning, a source code download is only available through CPAN#...)"
You are missing a critical piece. Yes you need food, but WHICH food do you need? You bon't doesn't care as long as it have all the nutrients it needs, so it's you mind that makes the choice between tacos and pizza. And THAT is what ads target...
Has anyone thought what a great hack it would be to use this system to add a lojack into your machine? Just overwrite the ip of pheonix.net and put in you custom lojack server ip and now, whenever the machine is used, you get reports from where it is coming from. And since it's in BIOS, they can't just wipe the hard drive, scratch your name off the cover, and pretend it's just a "used" machine.
Um, I don't know if you are thinking what I'm thinking, but that cube looks like it would fit perfetly inside a hollowed out "square" melon. Add a mic and little wireless modem and your "gift melon" becomes the super-cool "spy melon".
Is it just me, or do the pictures of Tito (especially this one: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/06/01/tito.repo rt/vert.tito.son.jpg) look a lot like Lex Luthor? Now I'm beginning to wonder what exactly he was doing up there...:) heh
Genetically engineer nuerons to produce light like these "carbon-based compounds" and you end up with a monitor that can think! Forget CPUs, I want my brain-screen!
Slashdot Mirror
"16K ought to be enough for anybody."
:)
What they don't tell you is that the star wars test was successfull in shoting down Helios... doh!
"If not for WHOIS, we could not have sued as many people as we did!" -- Stevan D. Mitchell Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy Interactive Digital Software Association, paraphrased. This is a good thing for who?
THIS is science! Damn, I love it!
I don't know why someone hasn't come up with a flying bot yet? It would not be too hard to strip an RC helicopter for parts and put a powerdrill pointed down right under the rotors (or two power drills of you have to balance the torque). You just zip around the ring, line up the drills right over the power source of your enemy bot and just bore into them while they flail wildly trying to poke you with thier little ineffectual weapons...
...Man, I wish I had either money or free time to play with battlebots!
It isn't that "you needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority" like it says in the article. Kids aren't magical, they don't have some kind of super creative power that adults lose, it isn't like that at all. What they do have is a completely anarchic and egalitarian information infrastructure where ideas can be passed easily and freely.
Information, ideas, theories, all the things that we refer to as "IP" in the adult world are unrestricted in the child world. There is no "approval" proccess, noone in particular is accountable for a good or bad idea. I can't tell you the number of incredibly good ideas that get summarily flushed down the toilet becuase they don't fit the personal vision of one particular manager or one particular corperate philosophy, or else they require IP from another company to implement and leverage fully. And I know each and every one of you have seen the same thing happen.
You have to realize in the childhood world, there is no IP, no atrificial rules that have to be followed in the free exchange of ideas. If a child thinks technology A can be used with technology B, she'll just go and blurt it out, but won't be concerned with how patents will get in the way or how technology B has been aquired by a rival company. If a child thinks idea C is a good one, he'll tell his friends, and the group as a whole will decide what is good and what is crap.
I know I am dangerously close to "information wants to be free" propaganda, but the truth of the matter is, when you have free exchange of information and open communication of ideas, you get amazing results, every time. This isn't something new. Open source projects have been using variations on this theme for years, and every time the brilliance and insight that this kind of proccess promotes is undeniable...
... for defcon 9!
Well, if you consider stories like the boy who built his own breeder reactor, you really have to ask yourself if worrying about plutonium is really an issue these days? If somone like that can at least begin to make uranium and plutonium in his back yard, I have a feeling that all the scary terrorists out there already have a nice litle stockpile already...
I am always amazed at what a far cry from our founding fathers these little tiny, narrow-sighted minds of our legislators are. Which is going to bring more money into L.A.:
a) Satellite taxes which will only be effective ONCE becuase the next all of the companies that have satellites will be moving out (costing jobs, housing, industries that support such companies)
b) Lowering taxes for aerospace companies and encouraging thier growth (and thus building new jobs, raising property values, creating entire enconomies based on the needs of those high-tech companies)
I see quotes in the article like "Worth as much as $100 million each to Hughes Electronics in El Segundo, the satellites could bring in millions of dollars a year in taxes to schools and government." But that is an amazingly childish way of thinking. Sure you will get one round of taxes out of them, and you will look all smart and suave to your voters (Taxes are FOR THE CHILDREN! Think of the schools!), but next year when your high-tech companies have left and you have soaring unemployment and now are getting no revenue from your stupid taxes, then you'll have to ask yourself what good you actually did.
I was downloading something (I think it was IE 5.5), and when it came around to showing me the liscense, all it said was something like "Cannot find blahblah.txt" or something like that. So I hit agree. Now, does this mean I am free to use and redistribute IE 5.5 however I wish just as long as I don't go and "find blahblah.txt"? How can you prove that the liscence you clicked on said the same things that whoever wrote the liscence thinks it does? Without taking a jpeg snapshot of the screen (just copying the text won't do, the text might be rendered wrong) and time-stamping it and encrypting it, how can any big company ever come and try to prove that thier individual liscense to you said "such and such"? Any lawyers out there have thoughts on this?
"How to make money by telling people how they can make money by telling people how to make money!" is my new paperback book, out in stores this August. By youself an advance copy today, becuase they are going so fast that I'm already running out of people who want an advanced copy... heh.
You make some good points, and things ARE getting better in Japan, but there are still a lot of obstacles in the way to getting the near ubiquitous net access that you see in the US.
Telehodai is a great example. Sure you can make unlimited calls from 10pm-8am, but you are still paying $20 a month on top of your ISP charges, and it is a terrible roadblock to people who want to put up servers in thier homes or to those who really want to participate in the net community.
As far as computers themselves are concerned, yes Japan makes some really incredible laptops, and there is a growing community of users, but because of the increased performance requirements (Japanese machines usually need to be faster and need more memory than thier American counterparts, if for no other reason than being able to display the language itself) they become cost prohibitive for many consumers.
And finally, the language barrier I was referring to was the fact that computers (and computer languages) are almost universally refered to by thier English terms. Sure the Japanese can figure out the Japanese terms for Mhz, GB, RAM or whatever (terms even ENGLISH speaks sometimes have trouble dealing with), but there still is a fundamental divide that occours when you foce people to use another language to understand your products. It isn't insurmountable, but it is just one more thing that must be overcome to participate.
Here in San Francisco, I have my machine up almost 24/7, and I am constantly writing email, checking out slashdot, K5, cnn and the like, all during the day, writing emails every so often, and generally squeezing every last bit of usefulness I can out of the internet round the clock. Without things like unlimited local calls, broad-band available across the board, and cheaper PCs Japan will always lag behind.
...and I was amazed by two things. First, by thier technology. They have a great deal of what we would call "gagetry", lots of things will bells and whistles, cell phones with GPS and a range finder for the nearest train station, web browsers, voice recognition. And second, by thier LACK of computers. When it comes to computers, they were suprisingly behind the times. Computers were amazingly expensive (compared to the US at the time. I think what would have cost $500 in the US then would have cost over $2,000 in Japan), they were hard to use. Setting up an ISP account could take you a month or more and cost you a great deal of money. And since all calls cost per minute (this includes local calls) the internet is only for the rich or the incredibly geeky (and due to the language barrier, there are few resources for the "geeks" in Japan). What's more, people in Japan have no fear of thier gagets at all, but when it comes to computers they become as pertified as your grandmother setting up AOL for the first time. Things are going to eventually have to change in Japan, but they are still a long way off...
I think the answer to: Computers, such as GAC, will someday conquer the world and enslave the human race. is:
TRUE
"Ai" in Japanese means "love". I wonder if this was an intentional thing? If it was, it was really clever...
So I guess instead of paying a PR firm to promote your product, just sue somone famous. It won't cost you much if you are prepared to lose, and you get all sorts of publicity for free!
Wow, it looks like another scripting language is coming out every couple of months, I'm amazed! I wonder just how long it will be before they run out of compiled languages to mimic and they start making hybrid scripting languages. I can see the articles headlines now: "Visual Pyavel Basic++ combines the flexibility of Perl, the power of Python, the simplicity of Java, the comment syntax of Visual Basic, and a few operator overloading doohickeys from c++ (just for good measure) to make the world's ultimate scripting language! Get your copy today (Warning, a source code download is only available through CPAN#...)"
You are missing a critical piece. Yes you need food, but WHICH food do you need? You bon't doesn't care as long as it have all the nutrients it needs, so it's you mind that makes the choice between tacos and pizza. And THAT is what ads target...
Has anyone thought what a great hack it would be to use this system to add a lojack into your machine? Just overwrite the ip of pheonix.net and put in you custom lojack server ip and now, whenever the machine is used, you get reports from where it is coming from. And since it's in BIOS, they can't just wipe the hard drive, scratch your name off the cover, and pretend it's just a "used" machine.
Microsoft had NO problems buying into pac-man a few years ago:
a sp
http://www.microsoft.com/Games/Arcade2/pac_man.
If it hasn't been said yet, Coke Karma (http://www.guerrillanews.com/cocakarma/) wasn't too bad. Long, though.
Hmmmm. Bit of a catch-22, though. "Geez, if only we could get to Mars we could have all the information that we need to learn how to get to Mars."
Um, I don't know if you are thinking what I'm thinking, but that cube looks like it would fit perfetly inside a hollowed out "square" melon. Add a mic and little wireless modem and your "gift melon" becomes the super-cool "spy melon".
Is it just me, or do the pictures of Tito (especially this one: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/06/01/tito.repo rt/vert.tito.son.jpg) look a lot like Lex Luthor? Now I'm beginning to wonder what exactly he was doing up there... :) heh
Genetically engineer nuerons to produce light like these "carbon-based compounds" and you end up with a monitor that can think! Forget CPUs, I want my brain-screen!