in a world without significant scarcity, an essentially communalistic system may arise as capitalistic incentives no longer have the same pull.
That's what I think will happen as well. As nanotech, AI, robotics, and other advances provide us with an economy of abundance decades down the road, a new form of "communism" (economic, not political) will probably slowly evolve. (Or maybe we'll end up with the darkside: corporate feudalism... or maybe a worldwide totalitarian state with John Ashcroft as its first Dicktator. I don't know... ask Harry Seldon)
Capitalism won't go away completely however. No matter how efficient we get, we've still got five fundamentally scarce resources to balance infinite human wants: time, energy, matter, space and intelligence.
start caping it off when there are tons of people soaking it up (ex. 5:00pm)
Just in case you missed the point though, not everyone would be capped equally. Only the "hogs" who have used more cumulative bandwidth (counting even @ 3AM) would be capped at 5PM peak.
i.e. At peak, Grandma could still download her email at a 1MB/s max, Joe the-weekend-porn-downloader might get a little less than that because of his slightly above average usage, and "Evil" P2P Mike might be throttled to 15K/s (unless he wants to pay more).
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Instead of penalizing us "Internet Hogs" for using the unlimited connection we paid for (as was and is STILL being advertised), why don't these ISPs simply throttle the "hogs" when bandwidth utilization nears 100% during peak usage hours? Isn't this the fairest solution?
It's important to note that you can't "save" bandwidth for later (unlike water or electricity), and the ISP pays for its pipe whether it's saturated or not, so wouldn't this kind of usage-based throttling of an instant resource simply make more sense? The more you use, the less you get (but only when it's scarce).
Is it really so expensive for an ISP to implement this at the headend versus the small difference it takes to account for the number of Gigs you transfer and charging obscene rates for overages, even during offpeak hours?
The RIAA can sue the tool-makers until they're blue in the face, and the MPAA can bribe congress for dinosaur-life-extention-acts until they're... extinct, but, the thing that scares me the most is the power that ISPs have that the XXAA's don't.
The best way to kill file-sharing -- along with the baby in the bathwater (i.e. VOIP, gaming, and other legit uses of broadband) -- would be if the MegaISPs (who don't have to play nice by sharing their lines) started capping and/or metering bandwidth at obscene overage rates to make serving anything extremely cost prohibitive.
For added "protection" they could also start blocking any traffic that doesn't look like "good consumer" behavior. e.g: "Dear Joe Suspect: Even though you paid our insane rates for the 1.4Gigs of bandwidth you used last week, we noticed that it was all encrypted. This simply won't do. Consider yourself on notice buster!"
I don't know about that. I think playing "God" as a city planner is much more fun than simply managing 3rd world urban sprawl. (Of course I respect the natural beauty of bottom-up design more than top-down, but that's not relevant here - fun is.)
Although... it would be fun to watch the poor SOBs getting electrocuted when they try to steal juice by patching into the powergrid. j/k:)
This is somewhat offtopic, but the govt deciding to go with Lockheed's JSF was actually great news for Boeing. Boeing's now focusing on unmanned aircraft, which will no doubt replace Lockhead's X-35 way before its expected 40 year lifespan. Much larger market.
Pilots are becoming passe.
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Re:Notes on quantum computing...
on
Future Computers
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· Score: 1
Hah, you think humans will still be writing software in a future that complex, or designing the even more complex architectures it runs on? You've got to be crazy.:)
The future belongs to various flavors of AI and evolved solutions, with the rare human playing the role of big picture conductor.
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Re:How much more can parents take?
on
XBox Live Network
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· Score: 1
...and I explain why my kids should be skeptical about anything being sold to them on TV.
How dare you! You're supposed to be raising good little consumer zombies! Don't let the terrorists win!
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4. Steep volume discounts; the more you buy, the less you pay.
Of course, a system like this will probably never see the light of day... because it's not geared towards extracting maximum pain. It makes too much sense to work.
It is an interesting question as to whether automating a search process, which is a special case of linking, would have more or less protection.
2600.com can't host DeCSS, and 2600 can't directly link to other sites hosting DeCSS, but they are allowed to list the links in plaintext. Is the next step really going to be outlawing links with search criteria embedded in them? I can't believe it.
Anyway, if that actually happened, and a site like ShareReactor was forced to be castrated like 2600 was, and only textlinks were allowed, I wonder how long before a convenient workaround sprang up? e.g. A browser plugin that transformed useless plaintext links like "ILLEGAL://PointerToPointerToPointerToThoughtCrime " into clickable links for external apps.
Heck, nobody should get paid anything for their work. Everything should be free, right?
Nurses and doctors can't "record" their work once and then try and profit from that past work over and over and over like programmers or artists can (or rather, could, in the past).
In order for doctors to make money they have to continue working - they can't treat a patient once and earn royalties on that treatment for life. Similarly, I'll pay a painter for an original, and I'll pay a programmer for custom work, and I'll pay to see a musician at work (in concert), but unless I'm feeling generous, why should I pay for freely available reproductions of past work? Because of outdated copyright? Is it fair that a plumber can't fix a leak once, really well, and then sell that fix multiple times?
(I would pay to fund future work, ala variations of the street performer protocol).
It's funny, but every time a NYT story comes up on/. now, the first thing I do is search for the direct link (which doesn't seem to be working right now) in the comments (since I didn't keep the cookie), then I read the replies about how posting this link is evil, a DMCA violation, it's karma whoring, and bla bla bla...:)
Well, your post prompted me to search the donkey, and I can see that 94 people are sharing the soundtrack... but since I don't even feel like previewing it, I'm not going to bother dl'ing it.:)
People spend a lot of time at work "looking busy" - its an artform which is necessary to master if you want to keep your sanity(!)
Control-freak managers (like you) who enjoy strangling any personal freedom or 'fun' in the workplace, are ultimately counter-productive. If you want to ban P2P, or music, or personal email, or smoke breaks, etc., by reasoning that it's "your stuff and your time", fine, but don't expect productivity (and your profits) to soar as a result of treating employees like robotic shit.
Years ago I used to work at Microsoft, and was free to do whatever the fuck I wanted as long as I got my work done by the (intentionally short) deadlines set. Microsoft may suck, but their workplace definately does not.
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It would be interesting to see an analysis of the current minimum costs associated with starting an adult business... I suspect the costs are quite high
Well, having worked in the adult industry during the WWW boom years (as the main dork behind a few big.com's; not the 'talent'), I can tell you that it's cheaper than ever, and you should have figured as much. The costs associated with hiring the 'talent' and filing the paperwork are the same, but every other cost has dropped through the floor.
Porn paysites aren't the growing cashcows they used to be... but 'file sharing networks' are great ads for DVD pr0n (just like mp3s are for CDs *cough*).
As to quality, you'll have to judge that for yourself - but over time we'll see a new value add service springing up reviewing and selecting texts that are available on the Web, so that you can use your chosen critic to read through texts and select for you the ones you will like to read.
I've been waiting for something like this -- in a more general "AI agent" sense -- for a long time.
Amazon.com's recommendations are a step in the right direction. That "website Thumbs-up/Thumbs-down" IE plugin is another example (can't remember its name). That failed mp3 service that recommended similar sounds you'd probably like is another (again - the name i forget). You're right that this is a value add - I'd pay for a good filter that knew me well enough (and didn't sell me out to marketing devils) to find needles in haystacks for me..... and to point me to artists willing to create new works I'm interested in...
... hypothetical: Hey, I, and 99 hardcore fans, will fund you $20 (each), if you will write a short story about for us. The condition is that once written (good or bad), you release the work into the public domain. yes/no?
What's your take on the street performer protocol?
Microprocessors are becoming so complex to design and build, that only a few companies are surviving.
7 posts preceding mine and yet no one has mentioned the inevitable solution to this [complexity] problem: evolution. There is just no way the human brain(s) can keep up, and at some point most design/engineering work will be done the emergent way... with much fewer humans specifying what to optimize for.
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No, they rely on a certain percentage of people being susceptible to ads. There's all kinds of "consumers" and I'm the cynical variety that does these companies a favor by not wasting their (and my) bandwidth, time, and aggrivation on useless ads.
Implicit in being subject to advertising is that your opinion can be engineered to favor buying Company X's product. I abhor this idea that someone (a website, whoever) gets paid to spew propaganda to mold my mind. I prefer to do my own thinking/research/price-comparison and this makes me a bad "consumer" to begin with.
Those who blocks ads are most likely not their intended audience; the "idiot" who doesn't care is.
Hell, it's gotten to the point that I don't even buy my Mom the obligitory Mother's Day gift anymore BECAUSE the commercialization has pissed me off so much! The message is that I'm just EXPECTED to buy flowers or some other bullshit on this "special day" in order to prove to everyone that I care. Instead, I call her and say, "I love ya Ma"
And below are links to the full texts of Drexler's Engines of Creation, and Unbounding the Future. If you've got the time, they're both great reads, especially since it reads like scifi, but isn't.
Rent headphones? Like how the Airlines do it for in-flight movies? No thanks - I'd bring my own (assuming they used a standard jack).
For those who don't want to bring their own headphones, a better idea would be to embed those RF tags in the headset so that the schucks who try to steal 'em will get caught at the door.
Also, I went to one of those "3D" IMAX films a few years ago, and if I recall correctly, we were warned not to walk out of the theater with the headsets or an alarm would sound.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I think will happen as well. As nanotech, AI, robotics, and other advances provide us with an economy of abundance decades down the road, a new form of "communism" (economic, not political) will probably slowly evolve. (Or maybe we'll end up with the darkside: corporate feudalism... or maybe a worldwide totalitarian state with John Ashcroft as its first Dicktator. I don't know... ask Harry Seldon)
Capitalism won't go away completely however. No matter how efficient we get, we've still got five fundamentally scarce resources to balance infinite human wants: time, energy, matter, space and intelligence.
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Hey! You ripped off Andy Richter! :)
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Just in case you missed the point though, not everyone would be capped equally. Only the "hogs" who have used more cumulative bandwidth (counting even @ 3AM) would be capped at 5PM peak.
i.e. At peak, Grandma could still download her email at a 1MB/s max, Joe the-weekend-porn-downloader might get a little less than that because of his slightly above average usage, and "Evil" P2P Mike might be throttled to 15K/s (unless he wants to pay more).
--
It's important to note that you can't "save" bandwidth for later (unlike water or electricity), and the ISP pays for its pipe whether it's saturated or not, so wouldn't this kind of usage-based throttling of an instant resource simply make more sense? The more you use, the less you get (but only when it's scarce).
Is it really so expensive for an ISP to implement this at the headend versus the small difference it takes to account for the number of Gigs you transfer and charging obscene rates for overages, even during offpeak hours?
--
The best way to kill file-sharing -- along with the baby in the bathwater (i.e. VOIP, gaming, and other legit uses of broadband) -- would be if the MegaISPs (who don't have to play nice by sharing their lines) started capping and/or metering bandwidth at obscene overage rates to make serving anything extremely cost prohibitive.
For added "protection" they could also start blocking any traffic that doesn't look like "good consumer" behavior. e.g: "Dear Joe Suspect: Even though you paid our insane rates for the 1.4Gigs of bandwidth you used last week, we noticed that it was all encrypted. This simply won't do. Consider yourself on notice buster!"
Good thing wireless can't be monopolized...
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Although... it would be fun to watch the poor SOBs getting electrocuted when they try to steal juice by patching into the powergrid. j/k :)
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Pilots are becoming passe.
--
The future belongs to various flavors of AI and evolved solutions, with the rare human playing the role of big picture conductor.
--
How dare you! You're supposed to be raising good little consumer zombies! Don't let the terrorists win!
--
Of course, a system like this will probably never see the light of day... because it's not geared towards extracting maximum pain. It makes too much sense to work.
--
2600.com can't host DeCSS, and 2600 can't directly link to other sites hosting DeCSS, but they are allowed to list the links in plaintext. Is the next step really going to be outlawing links with search criteria embedded in them? I can't believe it.
Anyway, if that actually happened, and a site like ShareReactor was forced to be castrated like 2600 was, and only textlinks were allowed, I wonder how long before a convenient workaround sprang up? e.g. A browser plugin that transformed useless plaintext links like "ILLEGAL://PointerToPointerToPointerToThoughtCrime " into clickable links for external apps.
Oh... Pssssst: DeCSS
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Nurses and doctors can't "record" their work once and then try and profit from that past work over and over and over like programmers or artists can (or rather, could, in the past).
In order for doctors to make money they have to continue working - they can't treat a patient once and earn royalties on that treatment for life. Similarly, I'll pay a painter for an original, and I'll pay a programmer for custom work, and I'll pay to see a musician at work (in concert), but unless I'm feeling generous, why should I pay for freely available reproductions of past work? Because of outdated copyright? Is it fair that a plumber can't fix a leak once, really well, and then sell that fix multiple times?
(I would pay to fund future work, ala variations of the street performer protocol).
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1mil earning a measly 5% fixed interest is more than enough to retire on... unless you're living above your means.
To oversimplify: 1mil * .05 / 1.2 = $3500/mo after taxes. And as long as you don't spend everything, it should still compound faster than inflation.
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It's funny, but every time a NYT story comes up on /. now, the first thing I do is search for the direct link (which doesn't seem to be working right now) in the comments (since I didn't keep the cookie), then I read the replies about how posting this link is evil, a DMCA violation, it's karma whoring, and bla bla bla... :)
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It's "peoples'", and p2p is not necessarily synonymous with "piracy."
You exist to benefit the company
Really? I do? Is that the meaning of life?
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Ever look at what damage a gun can do? P2P apps are only a tool.
No, it should just be given a lower priority, because bandwidth is usually already payed for.
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On an unrelated note... I wonder how you'd enforce your policy in a networked "virtual company" (from the previous /. story).
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John Williams - Star Wars Episode II Soundtrack - 192kbps.rar
Bummer, ed2k links seem to get munged by /. you'll have to do your own query.
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Years ago I used to work at Microsoft, and was free to do whatever the fuck I wanted as long as I got my work done by the (intentionally short) deadlines set. Microsoft may suck, but their workplace definately does not.
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Well, having worked in the adult industry during the WWW boom years (as the main dork behind a few big .com's; not the 'talent'), I can tell you that it's cheaper than ever, and you should have figured as much. The costs associated with hiring the 'talent' and filing the paperwork are the same, but every other cost has dropped through the floor.
Porn paysites aren't the growing cashcows they used to be... but 'file sharing networks' are great ads for DVD pr0n (just like mp3s are for CDs *cough*).
--
I've been waiting for something like this -- in a more general "AI agent" sense -- for a long time.
Amazon.com's recommendations are a step in the right direction. That "website Thumbs-up/Thumbs-down" IE plugin is another example (can't remember its name). That failed mp3 service that recommended similar sounds you'd probably like is another (again - the name i forget). You're right that this is a value add - I'd pay for a good filter that knew me well enough (and didn't sell me out to marketing devils) to find needles in haystacks for me..... and to point me to artists willing to create new works I'm interested in...
What's your take on the street performer protocol?
--
7 posts preceding mine and yet no one has mentioned the inevitable solution to this [complexity] problem: evolution. There is just no way the human brain(s) can keep up, and at some point most design/engineering work will be done the emergent way... with much fewer humans specifying what to optimize for.
--
No, they rely on a certain percentage of people being susceptible to ads. There's all kinds of "consumers" and I'm the cynical variety that does these companies a favor by not wasting their (and my) bandwidth, time, and aggrivation on useless ads.
Implicit in being subject to advertising is that your opinion can be engineered to favor buying Company X's product. I abhor this idea that someone (a website, whoever) gets paid to spew propaganda to mold my mind. I prefer to do my own thinking/research/price-comparison and this makes me a bad "consumer" to begin with.
Those who blocks ads are most likely not their intended audience; the "idiot" who doesn't care is.
Hell, it's gotten to the point that I don't even buy my Mom the obligitory Mother's Day gift anymore BECAUSE the commercialization has pissed me off so much! The message is that I'm just EXPECTED to buy flowers or some other bullshit on this "special day" in order to prove to everyone that I care. Instead, I call her and say, "I love ya Ma"
--
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For those who don't want to bring their own headphones, a better idea would be to embed those RF tags in the headset so that the schucks who try to steal 'em will get caught at the door.
Also, I went to one of those "3D" IMAX films a few years ago, and if I recall correctly, we were warned not to walk out of the theater with the headsets or an alarm would sound.
--